Readers React: Housing 2024 Olympians: Some homes in Porter Ranch might be available

To the editor: There is no need to spend $2 billion cleaning up a century’s worth of toxic waste and creating an Olympic village at the L.A. River-adjacent Piggyback Yard east of downtown. By 2024, there will be thousands of beautiful homes sitting empty in the once-vibrant family enclave known as Porter Ranch. (“Park project could offer lessons for L.A. Olympic bid,” Dec. 13)

These homes will be owned by the Southern California Gas Co., which will have to purchase them in 2016 due to a stigmatization of the neighborhood as permanently undesirable because of the natural gas leak that continues to emit invisible but toxic gases into the air.

Open houses have been canceled. If you tell someone you live in Porter Ranch these days, you get a look that makes it clear that your home is as desirable as a cardboard box on skid row.

So just plan on using this soon-to-be ghost town as the Olympic village if Los Angeles hosts the 2024 Summer Games. The LA 2024 committee will be able to purchase however many homes it needs for pennies on the dollar.

Alan Aronson, Porter Ranch

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To the editor: I hope many readers notice that while the Olympic committee is seriously considering clearing a rail yard to develop housing for 17,000 Olympic athletes in 2024, absolutely no one is considering the same thing to house 17,000 homeless.

Fun and games are important to us; kindness and compassion toward homeless people are not.

John W. Conrad, Riverside

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