It's a long night when workers' fate is pitted against tourism in one vote
About three Cokes into Tuesday night's Anaheim City Council meeting, I had a strong desire to time-travel forward. I was thinking maybe 10, 15 years. And no, it had nothing to do with the session trudging toward the midnight hour and the speakers' remarks tending toward, shall we say, some redundancies.
My sole reason for wanting immediate transport to 2020 was to find out who was right and who was wrong: Has the city's resort district around Disneyland suffered with the infusion of some 1,500 residential units, including 225 for low-income residents? Were tourist-related features, like hotels and restaurants and shops, what were needed to keep the district vibrant and competitive with other resort towns?
Or has the housing come to be seen as no big deal? And, in fact, as a good and sensible thing for the city to have done on behalf of people looking for housing?
In so many words, those seemed to be the questions Tuesday night as a parade of some 50 speakers squared off on the housing proposal for more than five hours. Along about midnight, the council voted 3 to 2 to set the wheels in motion for the project.
But if those were the questions, nobody in 2007 knows the answers.
Not that there wasn't plenty of certainty on both sides. But the twain didn't meet because of a large language gap.
It wasn't the gap between English and Spanish. Only one speaker used Spanish.
Rather, it's the gap that opens wide when one side argues public policy and the other argues for its sense of self.
Both arguments can be made forcefully and with passion, as they were Tuesday night. But when one side says that a policy makes sense and the other says that adequate housing is a basic human need, you have trains moving on parallel tracks.
The policy people can support housing (as many of the speakers emphasized), but they can't fully grasp how crucial it is to people who have trouble affording it. The other side can support economic health for Anaheim but can't fully grasp why that would ever trump building homes for people.
A couple of conversations I had at opposite ends of the evening -- bookends to the remarks from council members and the public -- clarified that for me.
Before the meeting began and when daylight still reigned, Miguel Hernandez was standing outside the council chamber with a small group of hotel workers who had come to support the housing proposal. He's a 35-year-old member of the cleaning crew at the Disneyland Hotel.
