[Image AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]
We're a little slow these days going through our inbox, but we did get two emails recently that together, make us one post for us. Because we're efficient that way. If you define efficient as taking two weeks to go through your email. But we digress. The Hot Property column in BusinessWeek used the opening of the movie Quinceanera to ask "Who Loses in the Real Estate Boom?" and Salon looks at the darker side of gentrification at the Frontier Hotel, where nowhere is the polarity between the "Haves" and "Have-nots" more apparent than in a building with two separate entrances. One is for the loft dwellers paying $1,100 a month to $3,900 a month, the other is for the SRO residents paying $100 a week. Salon takes a look at the fate of Skid Row's poor through the prism of downtown's SRO conversions and the utter failure of Bratton's "broken windows" theory in that neighborhood. So the newest proposal: "Plans for cracking down on skid row criminals include a legislative proposal that would add up to two years to the usual state sentence for selling drugs if the person convicted was caught on certain blocks of skid row" and Salon isn't hopeful that Villaraigosa's $1 billion housing bond will be approved come November.
· Who Loses in the Real Estate Boom?
· Skid row makeover [Salon]