t0llyb0ng says:

Somebody can live off the grid & grow their own food for 20 years?  Wow!  I admire that.  & this is their reward.  BFD goon squads show up & push them around.

Can I ask some naive questions?  Isn’t LA County too big?  Should it not encompass generally the city & surrounding environs, within reason?  Why do they have authority over remote areas with no connection to LA proper?

Here is a transcription of a portion of the narrative.  Sounds like a spokesman for the powers that be speaking:

“Anything not covered in the Area Plan is covered by the county-wide General Plan.  If the General Plan is like a house with all the basic rooms, an Area Plan is like an addition to a house.”

Does that make any sense?

They can call their “plans” anything they want, but it’s all lawyered-up bullshit & they’ll keep throwing their weight around as long as they can get away with it.

John E. Quantum says:

“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”

I was issued a parking ticket for parking off of my driveway at 2:15 AM by the local county revenue authority- it was left on my windshield sealed in a plastic bag during a night of monsoon like rain. I took it to court to find out why the county would be out at that hour issuing parking tickets. Lucky for me the judge agreed that it was nonsense and dismissed the $100.00 fine although I was forced to miss a couple of hours of work. Sometimes it does make a difference to stand up for your rights, but if the gov’t has you in their sights it might already be a lost cause.

Yankinwaoz says:

The Antelope Valley, and its sister the Lucerne Valley to the east, are a mess. It used to be a nice places to live. Not any more.

Both are high desert, 1-2 hours drive out of the LA metroplex. The only jobs up there were government (Andrews AFB, George AFB, prisons) or ag (lots of dairy and alfalfa). In the 1980′s during there was a huge building boom. Thousands and thousands of cookie cutter homes were built for the families of LA based aerospace workers. People were commuting 3 hours to their jobs in El Segundo and the SFV. Palmdale, Victorville, and Lancaster become booming bedroom communities, filled with middle class aerospace workers who wanted a home out of the jurisdiction of the screwed up LA Unified School District.

Then after 1987 it all blew up. The aerospace jobs dried up. George AFB closed. The home values plummeted. By the later 1990′s it was becoming a ghost town. Hundreds and hundreds of abandoned or foreclosed suburban houses. People were upside down so they simply mailed the keys to the mortgage company and walked away.

Then speculators came in and started paying cash for the homes. $30k for a 4 bedroom house. They were absentee landlords. They rented the homes to section 8 families. Yep, welfare queens. Government guaranteed rent.

South Central LA used to be the heart of black SoCal. That is where the Bloods and Crips and West Coast Rap came from. No more. They all moved into these abandoned homes up the high desert. It made sense. If you live in welfare, and you don’t have a job to commute to, then why not move out of the urban ghetto and into your own home? It is still LA County, so you still get LA County welfare rates. A bedroom for each of your kids. Perhaps even a pool, if you know how to maintain it.

Sure enough, all of the social problems that hey had in south central LA followed them up to the Antelope Valley. Their gang banger kids. The drugs. The violence. The crime. The houses started falling apart, and the property values keep falling. The schools became prisons for troubled kids. It became a vicious cycle.

It is true. No one wants to live there any more. It has become a rural ghetto. Who wants to commute 5 hours a day to live in a shit hole?

South Central LA is now very hispanic, filled with new immigrants from Mexico and Central America looking for a cheaper or safer place to live than east LA. When I drive though Watts, Carson, Compton now, all the signs are in Spanish.

Now back to why the harassment. The short video mentioned a highway. True, the Pearblossom Highway that connects 14 to I-15 has always been a mess. It is far better than it used to be. You can cross the valley is less than 1 hour now. Back in the 80′s traffic used to back up 5 miles where Pearblossom and 395 met. I really don’t think that is the reason.

It think it is simply a matter of money. LA County wants to wrest control of the Antelope Valley back from the slumlords in order to make it a desirable place to live again. That in turn will raise property values, which will mean more property taxes. It is going to take a long time to do this, 20 years or more. So how do they do that? They start cleaning it up. And this is how they do it.

Zybch says:

At 5:48 that must be the most unconvincing toupee I’ve ever seen.

BTW, those homes ARE unsightly, but for the NATs to stick their noses in is totally unconscionable.

Glenn E. says:

Right after the NAT moves everyone out of the deserts. The people should post signs saying, “The area will be designated Ground Zero, when the civil revolution begins.” And put up some standard radiation symbol signs, to drive home the point.

ramuno says:

Los Angeles County is controled ($) by housing developers. They have the politicians force sewers and other utilties in the rural areas so that it can be overbuilt, like the rest of the county.