Mark Weinstein can barely contain his excitement. Standing on the roof of a historic downtown building in the heart of the Fashion District, the boyish-looking developer points to a group of surrounding structures, his voice rising with excitement.
My family and I are eager to move to Los Angeles from Seattle, but I\’ve got a problem: We are Orthodox and we like trees.
The protracted court case, which is now awaiting an environmental impact report (EIR) from the school, shows how badly a school building project can go when met with fiery opposition by the surrounding community.
Local schools are anything but a deterrent for those interested in the community, said Meredith Michen of Landmark Realtors, which services the Pico-Robertson area. \”Most of the people who move to that area think it\’s a good thing to have the schools there,\” said Michen, adding that Pico-Robertson real estate prices are affected by demand, not by the schools in the area.
Any experienced law-enforcement professional knows that coordination and communication make all the difference in a complex case or threat situation.
Not long ago, we were invited to friends for Shabbat lunch. They\’d recently moved into a new apartment, in more or less the same neighborhood, and over the course of conversation, someone asked them how they liked the new location. Our hostess, a refined and relatively private person, said that she liked the new location much better. She mentioned a number of reasons, following which she added that from the new apartment, they didn\’t hear as much of the shooting at Gilo during the night. \”And in the old place,\” she added as a kind of afterthought, \”I just couldn\’t stand making love to the sound of gunfire.\”
A proposed busway continued to spark fierce debate during two public hearings held in the San Fernando Valley during the last weeks of June.
Four years ago, when Robyn Ritter Simon\’s eldest son was ready to start kindergarten, she looked at her local public school and found it lacking. It was not that Canfield Elementary School fell short academically. The Simons live in a West Los Angeles neighborhood that is heavily Jewish and her son would have been one of the few white children — and perhaps the only Jewish child — in his class.
Among those who care about public education, \”multiculturalism\” is one of today\’s favorite buzzwords. But at the Community School, a magnet campus that falls under the auspices of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the concept of multicultural education has been in place for 25 years.
While many note the westward journey of Jews into areas such as Calabasas, West Hills and Agoura, few realize there\’s a small renaissance going on in the East Valley.
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