If the Los Angeles City Council were a reality television show, picking the right title would be a challenge. "America's Silliest Local Legislators" has a nice sort of retro ring to it, but there's a certain appealing simplicity to "Empty Gestures" too.
Either way, this week's unanimous vote to prohibit the construction of fast-food restaurants in most of South Los Angeles for at least the next year would make an excellent pilot.
The ordinance's ostensible purpose is to combat the county's highest obesity and diabetes rates -- 30% of South L.A.'s adults are overweight, and 11.7% suffer from diabetes. It's also true that the roughly 32 square miles south of the Santa Monica Freeway have a higher per capita concentration of fast-food outlets than the rest of the city, but far fewer restaurants or grocery stores of any type in absolute numbers. That's all of a piece with the rest of life there, because about the only things the poor and working-class people of South L.A. have more of than the rest of the city are crime and all the things that contribute to and flow from ill health.
The notion that banning burger joints will do the slightest thing about any of that is worse than far-fetched, and the ordinance's cloying nanny-state implications already have come in for well-deserved ridicule in the foreign and national media, as well as from redoubtable local voices of reason, like long-time community activist Joe Hicks.
It's hard to know what to say when a news release from the measure's sponsor, Councilwoman Jan Perry, alleges that holding McDonald's at bay will "attract grocery stores and [sit-down] restaurants to the area by preserving existing land for these uses." Presumably that was written with a straight face, because of course everyone knows that cutthroat competition with Jack in the Box for vacant building sites is what's keeping Whole Foods and the Patina Group out of South L.A.
If all this was merely absurd, we all could have a derisive chuckle at the council's expense and then move on. The problem is that the public health situation in South Los Angeles well may be this community's worst moral and social disgrace -- and that's saying something, because the list is long. It's also a disgrace concerning which the council has done nothing but offer inconsequential, meaningless gestures masquerading as reform, like the fast-food moratorium.
