This letter was published by the Times on Thursday, March 15, 2001. Parts that were edited in the published version are enclosed in brackets; editorial additions in red.
Sunday, 11 March 2001
The Editors, Los Angeles Times
Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053
re: Opinion, The State: "A Multiracial and Multilingual Progressivism Is Born in L.A.," Peter Dreier and Robert Gottlieb, Sunday, March 11, 2001
What planet have Peter Dreier and Robert Gottlieb been living on? Can't they recognize that their "progressivism" is the same old "command" economics that condemned Russia and Eastern Europe, not to mention post-colonial Africa, to decades of poverty and misery?
If their ideal is the "progressive" movement["] in New York City, they might [take a moment to] notice that people live in the subways there, while others who are well off [indeed] live in spacious, rent-controlled apartments for a few hundred dollars a month. Indeed, there is more abandoned housing in New York City than there are homeless people who might fill it. Heaven help us if housing in Los Angeles ends up conducted, even more than it is now, on the basis of such [vicious and] a discredited ideology.
Kelley L. Ross