Richard Grenell, President Donald Trump’s envoy for special missions, called out Gavin Newsom on social media, slamming the California governor for lying to residents about his administration’s intentions for their properties, which were devastated by the Palisades and Eaton wildfires earlier this year.
“@GavinNewsom lied,” Grenell wrote Wednesday night on X. “He said he wouldn’t grab the land where homes burned down in the Palisades to build low-income housing facilities – but he and Karen Bass just did.
“They are changing the character of the Palisades and Malibu to fit their woke agenda,” he continued. “They don’t care what residents want. They can’t even deliver building permits properly.”
Newsom announced last week that he has allocated $101 million in funding for “multifamily low-income housing development” that he says will “contribute to a more equitable and resilient Los Angeles.” The Center Square reported that the priority is for “geographic proximity to the fire perimeters of the Eaton, Hughes, and Palisades fires.”
The appointment of developer and civic leader Steve Soboroff as the city’s chief recovery officer by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — without a public process — led some community residents to suspect that his main role would be to push for low-income housing, according to Breitbart News.
These residents told the outlet that the area already had “affordable” housing and pointed to the mobile home park near the Pacific Coast Highway or postwar bungalows as examples.
Shortly after the fires, developer Rick Caruso formed a non-profit organization to rebuild the Pacific Palisades as it was before the neighborhood was largely consumed by the wind-driven infernos. Caruso, who ran against Bass for mayor in 2022, argued that the community should be rebuilt in a manner that retains its original character, Breitbart reported.
Soboroff, however, has reportedly indicated that he is open to including affordable housing in the Palisades.
Earlier this month, Newsom signed legislation that rolled back the California Environmental Quality Act to allow for more urban residential development in the Golden State. Although the measure has been celebrated by housing advocates as a step toward solving California’s housing shortage, it also has paved the way for low-income housing to be built in the fire-impacted areas.
According to The Center Square, California state law and a local Los Angeles ordinance mandate that fire-destroyed rent-protected housing be replaced with low-income housing. This includes all Palisades apartments built prior to October 1978. Affordability requirements reportedly use city-level income data, instead of more local incomes, which causes the definitions for “low” and “very low” income housing to reflect much lower incomes than are typical for the affluent Palisades neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Grenell promised that the issue was far from settled in his post on social media.
“But this fight is not over,” he said. “Stay tuned…”
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