Mired in the Bureaucrats’ Professional ‘No’ : Permits: In this time of dire need, let’s get rid of some roadblocks to new housing.

I believe that our city and county agencies are staffed, by and large, by intelligent professionals. I doubt that any one of them has ever consciously decided to barricade the progress of affordable housing. But the effect of decades worth of controls, ordinances and studies (most of them well-intentioned) has been to create an almost impenetrable wall of No . Permit departments and inspection teams, each with their own agenda, often present a cumulative No . Entire projects can be mired for months in a quagmire of No . Huddled masses wait in doubled-up garage apartments because of No .

Granted, affordable housing should adhere to standards of planning and permitting. But the delays and hurdles should at least have decreased as the housing industry slowed to crawl through the tunnel of our current hard times. Why, then, does a routine inspection now take longer than it did a few years ago?

If you work with those striving to develop affordable housing, imagine that you will have to justify each one of your actions in front of the 47,000 thousand new residents in the Harbor Freeway corridor who found not one new housing unit in their district during the last 10 years. Picture yourself on the mound at Dodger Stadium, explaining your No to the hard-working, double- and triple-job wage-earners who commute farther to work than we used to drive in a day of vacation.

This is the Sun Belt. People are moving here. Accept that. They expect certain creature comforts. A roof is one of them. In the last decade, the city of Cleveland moved here: almost 500,000 people, and that’s just the documented newcomers. They are likely to stay. Accept that, too. While you are accepting, pretend that the vast majority of them want to work, want to progress and want a decent standard of living. Not a mansionette in Beverly Hills, but at least a kitchenette in Carson.

At City Hall, the mayor’s task force labors to cut through enough of the ties that strangle to keep builders from deserting the field before they ever sink a shovel. Help them. It is our duty to streamline the process of providing affordable housing before the cumulative No rises up to engulf us.

Here is my plea to the agencies at city, county and state levels: If business is slow, use this time to streamline and coordinate. Make your computer databases talk to each other so the delays can be minimized.

We in the business community have the interest, the resources and, especially in these hard times, the work force ready to do the job. We need your help to change No to “Yes.” There are thousands of residents who will rejoice when that task is done.