Trying to Regain Paradise in Lalaland

All paradises seem doomed sadly to be lost,
but LA may be of this rule a great exception.
once based on single dwellings whose steep climbing cost
is largely caused by deconstructive contraception
of buildings where a lot of people co-exist,
its urban rules insisted every home be built
for single families with private gardens and
a pool, and not become a multicolored quilt.

Such regulations were the law in Lalaland,
whose single-dwelling structures separated all
its population from each other. Very soon
this paradise will be replaced by urban sprawl
just as the sun is after sunset by the moon,
and it is doomed at freeway speed to fade away.

Accessory dwelling units, known as ADUs,
will supplement the single ones now in LA;
white genteel gentiles will live not just next to Jews
but people of all races,  which is surely how
God planned His paradise in Eden. Though a fall
brought it to a most tragic end, in LA now
we’re hoping to create another one for all
its citizens, whatever color, race or in-
come group.  Though still connected by its famous freeways,
this paradise won’t suffer from the primal sin
that it committed with its former he- and she-ways,
architecturally correct, as PC hit
a paradise regained, with a far larger crowd,
than Eden in which our two parents did not fit,
because, un-PC, they did what was not allowed.

Bravely willing in the New World now to grapple
with urban problems that its ancestors ignored,
Big Orange is now finding ways to ensure its apple
is one that all good citizens can then afford.

Michael Kimmelman writes in “Los Angeles Has a Housing Crisis,”” NYT, 6/23/21:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/arts/design/los-angeles-housing-crisis.html
Can California’s biggest city — and possibly America’s least affordable one — redesign its way out of the housing crisis?…. In 2017 California legislators took a step in the right direction, streamlining the approval process for the construction of accessory dwelling units — ADUs or granny flats, as they’re also called: garage apartments, backyard cottages and studios added to existing houses. ADUs are less expensive to build and to rent than most other housing types, so they’re an obvious and relatively simple way to increase housing stock. They have come to account for more than 20 percent of new housing in Los Angeles.

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976.  Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.