The effort to encourage dialogue between adversarial parties is no small undertaking these days, when most of us live in legislative districts considered “safe” for one side or the other of our political divide.
Add in social media’s always available digital echo chamber – which can serve to confirm our views rather than challenging them – and arguments become one-sided quickly.
Santa Monica-based ProCon.org aims to change this status quo, and is working to get well-informed folks to take up competing ideas in public debate.
The goal is to give a thesis and its antithesis room to mash into a synthesis. Who knows? The give and take might lead some better mousetraps, so to speak.
ProCon.org’s Kamy Akhavan recently brought the group’s mission to the community of business, calling on the Central City Association’s Jessica Lall, who represents some of the biggest property owners downtown, and Mott Smith of Highland Park-based development firm LA Prep and its Civic Enterprise unit, which focuses on “emerging neighborhoods.”
The two experts discussed the “Workforce Housing Crisis in Los Angeles” in a chic residential loft in South Park, where a crowd of professional types crowded around a living room couch for a discussion that took place as the Blue Line rumbled below.
Lall, Smith and inquisitive members of the audience covered a lot of ground, from government regulations to the NIMBYism that often frustrates efforts to add to the supply of housing.
The principals of the evening drew some distinctions from one another on several aspects of the subject, but the thesis-antithesis-synthesis equation didn’t fully kick in. That wasn’t because Lall and Smith were faint-hearted – more a reflection of the broad agreement to be found on concerns about the housing market in Los Angeles.
A clue to the breadth of common ground was perhaps obscured by the appellation “workforce housing” – a euphemism of sorts for middle-class housing.
There are plenty of indicators that suggest the middle-class has been under pressure and shrinking in Los Angeles, California and the U.S. for some time.
The residential real estate – the cost of housing, especially – is a symptom of the trend.
The root, however, likely lies in an economy that’s in the middle of an historic reformation that’s occurring at unprecedented speed.
Los Angeles might see a high-low split, with rich residents who can afford the market alongside working poor whose housing costs are publicly subsidized. The middle class might have to head to the exurbs of the Inland Empire to find a house in the range of the middle class.
There’s plenty to spark debate on the subject – and here’s hoping the discussion continues.
It’s a well-conceived American principle that our economy is based firmly on the middle class, which not only does most of the work but also consumes most of the gross domestic product.
What seems to be disappearing is an economy that creates the sort of jobs that pay enough for the middle class to be part of the life of our city without public subsidy.
