Yet another abomination is planned for those Beverly Hills middle-class renters and condo owners east of Rexford Drive and South of Santa Monica Boulevard – the dumping ground, apparently, for “growth” projects which will alter not just the residential landscape but adversely affect the tenor of life in well-established and cherished middle-class neighborhoods.

By adding a smidgen of politically correct low-income housing the Beverly Hills City Council seems willing to surrender its middle-class neighborhoods to … what? Well-intended socially minded developers? Hardly, but rather to powerful commercial entities that want to make money and move on.

So rather than destroy the only neighborhood in which Beverly Hills non-millionaire citizens already reside, here’s an idea: why doesn’t the city of Beverly Hills re-zone, for mix-use, Wilshire Boulevard or the Platinum Triangle or that section of little Santa Monica abutting Century City? Let developers, with the blessings of the council, build as high as they like and include as many low-income units as state law forces them to accept. Or, conversely, Beverly Hills might re-zone the residential neighborhoods above Santa Monica, or below most of Wilshire, for multi-dwelling housing where single residences take up large, and sometimes huge, amounts of land.

I’ve been in Beverly Hills so very, very long, I can remember when it was a unique and lovely place for everyone to live. And I’ve paid a half-century’s adult attention to City Hall too and have yet to see, with the exception of John Mirisch, a council less interested in preserving what makes Beverly Hills a wonderful place for its citizens to live than the present council. One wonders if it will ever stand up to insidious “development.”

S.R Willen

Beverly Hills