Shocking no one, Jose Huizar has finally been arrested on a federal charge of racketeering. The arrest, which took place in the Councilmember’s Boyle Heights home on June 23rd, followed a lengthy two-year investigation into corruption at City Hall. Developers would funnel bribe money — some of which was used to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit — to the Councilmember through a network of aides and lobbyists. In return, Huizar helped them gentrify Los Angeles.
Huizar’s fall is a welcome sight, but the struggle for anything resembling accountability is far from over. His corruption was not an aberration; he’s not a “bad apple.” Huizar is merely a symptom of a broader pattern of hotel and developer-related corruption in City Hall, and in the city at large. Huizar is one of the twelve councilmembers who rubberstamped the 2028 Olympic bid and the second to be indicted on developer-related corruption charges. The Huizar investigation implicates several other city officials, including two other councilmembers and Eric Garcetti’s former deputy mayor. This form of pay-to-play is not unique to this case — several other developer-driven scams have touched both the mayor and other councilmembers’ offices. Over a third of sitting LA City Council members are involved in developer-related corruption investigations, and over half of them are landlords themselves. They all take money from developers and police, whether it’s legal or not. The mayor, a product of this City Council, co-owns a hotel and openly flaunts all the developer donations he receives as behested funds.
In exchange for these bribes, our city officials give away the right to build and to raze low income housing, as well as lots of public money — one billion dollars over the course of a decade — in the form of subsidies and other tax benefits. Developers use the money to build luxury hotels and condos for the wealthy, claiming this will increase tourism and employment opportunities. Projects like Hotel Indigo and the LA Live Marriott promised to bring in revenue through mega-events at the Convention Center, but this wealth has, by design, yet to trickle down.
The development of these luxury accommodations, coupled with the recent trend of converting apartment buildings into illegal AirBNB hotels, has instead driven evictions and removed permanent, low-income housing from the market. This helps explain the recent 12.7% increase in homelessness in LA County, as well as the fact that half of LA tenants are classified as rent burdened (which means they spend 30% or more of their income on rent). The end result of corruption is an uninhabitable city and a housing shortage that has become a health crisis.
The tenants who were evicted to make way for these luxury hotels or swept away by the accelerated criminalization that accompanies gentrification are equally affected by corrupt real estate deals that fall within legally acceptable bounds. People who no longer have a place to live because of rampant hotel development and displacement don’t care whether the councilmember who made the dirty deal managed to color within the lines or not. And arresting Huizar or any other councilmember isn’t the same as providing universal access to safe, stable housing for all Angelenos. We will not let this arrest distract us from the fact that City Hall still refuses to cancel rent and provide a true eviction moratorium, while hundreds of thousands of tenants will face evictions in the coming months.
Our local government is rotten from the inside. Our city officials do not work for us. They never have. We must work to hold them accountable in the wake of these scandals and in preparation for the COVID-19 eviction crisis.
We can’t just vote our way out of this problem. We can’t rely on the judicial system to address harm years after the fact. We must organize to create a new collective future for Los Angeles.