SB79, BRT, and NIMBY's, Oh My!
Hello dears, so good to be here, it's been a minute, hasn't it? So grateful to my boys and toys for carrying the load while I was out jaunting. However, there is business. Let's cut to it.
This Monday August 17 and Tuesday, August 18 are community meetings about the upcoming BRT line that will connect east of Pasadena through to Burbank and NOHO, similar to the 92 and 180 parenting a prodigy child.
The BRT has potential to affect SB79, and as a power couple that could be a great asset for any community, including Glendale: abundant and affordable housing in proximity to public transportation is a win-win. Less cars, less snarls, easier commutes, walkable communities, and, with the correct city planners, all strategized to effectively curate underutilized parcels of development while protecting the histories and neighborhoods that are the core of Glendale. Many are looking forward to this not only for the stated reasons but also for the help it will lend to our stalled city budget.
There is a small group of people, approximately 6 it would appear, who nonetheless are so chronically verbal (retirement for the unremarkable is a curse, lovelies, don't do it in this way; get out there and be remarkable now while you still have time!) it could lead the casual observer to think theirs a mountain of a movement. Sadly, 'tis barely a mohill. The delusion of otherwise led Councilmember Gharpetian to nix adding the tax initiative to the ballot - saying several times "the people are saying they don't want it" - and then preventing finding out by nullifying the democratic process.
The Delusional Six have a
whole narrative around their paranoia! Menacing skyscrapers looming over the charming shops on Honolulu Ave., the never waning "existential threat" to their houses, teeming homelessness and scourge and drugs and mental illness and icky ugly things. The women and children will be pillaged, frightened homeowners will be prisoners in their houses, traffic will be so gridlocked they will all starve to death, they just couldn't get to the store.
There is a pattern to the NIMBY's: choosing populations of Other, building fantastic and terrifying narratives around them, and then hammering those narratives relentlessly to procure desired response: votes and donations. Thus the concentration camps and deportations of Latinx people, thus the suspended health care and legislated bodies of trans people, thus the continued criminalization of the homeless population. They are tired memes, people are catching on and MAGA NIMBY's are losing with greater frequency.
Glendale's Delusional 6 are hanging on for dear life and they will lose. Not because of their point of view; because they can't sell it, because it's a tactic not a belief. They can't see it failing, they can't pivot the message, they are fighting the wrong fight.
Girls, listen. I could tell you how to win your game, it's too easy. But this girl has a price. Call me.
Why should all us glamorous queers care about this sort of thing? Because we are part of the NIMBY scourge. Because we live here. Because this is our city too. At a population of just under 200,000, there could be upwards of 20,000 LGBTQIA+ residents. Do not ever forget: you are beautiful, you are fierce, you belong here, this is YOUR city as much as anyone else's, and this town needs more gay. Bring it!
