Editorials

AHF has used its vast resources to campaign against zoning reform legislation. This included particularly sleazy mailers attacking zoning reform as racist. “Urban renewal means Negro removal,” their mailers declared, quoting James Baldwin. The group also launched a ballot measure in Los Angeles in 2017 seeking to impose a two-year housing construction moratorium on developments seeking variances from zoning codes. That initiative was spiked by 70% of voters.

Is there a way for voters to prevent these groups from abusing the initiative system with further attacks on the state’s housing stock? Yes, another initiative, Proposition 34.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has spent more than $100 million on ballot measures, candidate campaigns and political committees in the past 20 years. The foundation has also bought apartment complexes, including more than a dozen in Los Angeles, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation. The newspaper found squalid conditions in the foundation’s buildings.

With Prop. 34, the apartment owners’ association seeks to cut off Weinstein’s political money supply, targeting the foundation’s reselling of medications, the primary source of its $2.5 billion in annual income. Prop. 34 would apply only to health care providers that meet two conditions: They have spent over $100 million in any 10-year period on anything other than direct patient care, and they have operated multifamily housing reported to have at least 500 high-severity health-and-safety violations.