L.A. Seniors Need Affordable Housing

Your June 7 editorial comments about what you think should be our mayor-elect’s priorities (“On Hahn’s Agenda”). You fail to mention a major problem facing our city, that of affordable housing.

This problem is especially critical for our seniors. Living on fixed incomes, seniors find that the 3% maximum increase mandated by our rent control law, building as it does on already high rents, is a drain on slim budgets.

The solution appears to be two-fold: more affordable housing units and a partial subsidy to seniors to help defray rental costs. The job of our new mayor is to develop and put such a plan in place and to find a source of income to fund it.

Marty Cantor

North Hollywood

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Midway through his campaign for mayor, James K. Hahn became “enlightened” to the flaws of the Los Angeles International Airport master plan and shifted his position, thereby assuring that thousands of votes in Westchester and other LAX-adjacent communities would not automatically go to Antonio Villaraigosa, who consistently expressed opposition to the expansion.

Given that the issue of trust was featured so prominently in his campaign--and may be the main reason that it triumphed--we now look forward to holding Hahn to a regional airport solution. Should he otherwise cave in to business interests on this matter, a large bloc of swing voters will remember four years from now.

Robin Weitz

Los Angeles

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Hahn did Los Angeles a great disservice by assuming that he couldn’t get elected on his record and his vision for our city. He saddled us with a negative smear campaign that portrayed Villaraigosa as someone who would coddle crack addicts and child molesters. In doing so, he pushed the political limbo bar even lower.

Voters claim they don’t like negative campaigns, but instead of repudiating Hahn for such a deplorable display, we catapulted him into the mayor’s seat. Any hope of future candidates taking the high road and running positive campaigns has been dashed with Tuesday’s election results because it’s just so much easier to go negative. As a voter, I feel at a loss because after this exhaustive campaign, I still don’t have any sense of who Hahn is and what he hopes to accomplish.

Clifford J. Tasner

Valley Village