One street in the fancy Hollywood Bowl-adjacent Whitley Heights has become a highly-contested front in the Parking Wars—the trouble started years back, according to a resident writing about all the drama at Zócalo Public Square (via LA Observed), when neighbors started whispering that valets from nearby restaurants were using the streets for parking, then coming by in the cover of night with kidnapper-style vans, "releasing teams of tuxedo-clad valets into the darkness." These rumors divided the neighborhood, pitting neighbor against neighbor, homeowners against renters, and eventually the whole neighborhood—excluding the author's block on Las Palmas, which is home to a lot of apartment buildings—became a permit-parking-only zone. Now people are going to great, some might say completely insane, lengths to fight for their right to park. (It should be noted that the author of the article firmly believes the street is public and does not engage in any of these shenanigans.) Here are a few completely real parking tips from the battlefield that you can apply to your own parking battles, assuming you are a huge asshole. People did all of this stuff:
-- Offer your neighbors $50,000 to make an underground garage under their front lawn.
-- Channel your inner Bob Vila and shave down the curb so you can turn the sidewalk into your own personal parking spot. Seal the deal by buying a sign that lets everyone know it's your spot. Get the city to tow anyone parking there who isn't you. Public right-of-way be damned!
-- Get some paint and change your own destiny: Make the curbs red where you'd like to preserve some parking for yourself. Don't worry about it being a felony. "I'm not saying I've done this myself, but I can tell you that the Emergency Curb red paint at Home Depot works for this purpose," the author writes.
-- Pissed that someone painted all the curbs red? Paint them all gray, so fire trucks can never have any place to park and you and everyone on the windy, narrow street where you live are gambling with your lives every time you smoke a cigarette or play with illegal fireworks.
-- Having reclaimed all the parking spaces by painting them gray, you should probably leave a super-weird, self-righteous manifesto and poster depicting yourself as a superhero fighting for the rights of the poor renters, just so people have a common enemy to unite against. Post it on a lamppost.
-- Write an angry response to your neighbor on the same lamppost; argue back and forth all the way down the lamppost.
-- Do not think for one minute that you are acting like an entitled whiner by using any of the aforementioned suggestions.
· Parking wars on one street in the Hollywood Hills [LAO]
· My Neighborhood Parking Wars [Zócalo]
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