On the same day his own newspaper reported poor residents will be evicted from the Costa Mesa Motor Inn, many becoming homeless, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez celebrated, “Bulldozers went up against burrowing owls in Newport Beach on Wednesday. The owls won.”
He was referring to the Banning Ranch decision by the Soviet Coastal Commission, which I wrote about yesterday. The SCC prevented the construction of 895 homes along the Newport Coast, just a couple of miles from the Motor Inn, along with the conservation of most of the space and cleaning up old oil wells. So the owls still would have been saved.
Lopez: “But the bid to build a massive development on a critical coastal ecosystem in Orange County — one of the last of its kind in California — got crushed in a 9-1 vote by the California [Soviet] Coastal Commission.
“It was a victory for conservationists who have fought the proposal for years, and cheers erupted when the vote came in around 10:30 p.m. after an all-day hearing in which an overflow crowd of hundreds spoke up for and against the project.”
But: Where will people live, especially the poor and homeless? Sure, only the wealthy would have lived in Banning Ranch. But they would vacate smaller houses to do so. And others then would move up the housing food chain. Overall, housing would be cheaper in Orange County. Some homeless people finally could afford to rent an apartment, getting off the streets.
I’m sure Lopez would have some other government-mandated “solution,” such as vastly raising taxes to pay for more housing for the poor. But the results of his hyper-government-interventionism can be seen on our streets: vast armies of homeless.
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