American politician
Zev Yaroslavsky (born December 21, 1948) is a politician from Los Angeles County, California. He was a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from District 3, an affluent district which includes the San Fernando Valley, the Westside of Los Angeles and coastal areas between Venice and the Ventura County line. He was first elected to the board in 1994. Yaroslavsky served on the Los Angeles City Council from 1975 to 1994.
During his tenure in Los Angeles politics, Yaroslavsky played an influential role in limiting housing construction and development in the city, leading a "slow-growth movement." Yaroslavsky argued in 1987 that Los Angeles had "filled up." He authored Proposition U, a successful 1986 ballot initiative, that the "Los Angeles Times" called "the largest one-shot effort to limit development in the city's history."
In the 1990s, he blocked expansion of light rail into Santa Monica and authored Proposition A, a successful 1998 ballot initiative which prevented new expansions of the Los Angeles Metro Rail.
Early life and education.
Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of David and Minna Yaroslavsky, was born on December 21, 1948, in Los Angeles. He and his older sister, Shimona (married name: Kushner), were the children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and grew up in a Zionist household in Boyle Heights. His father was a founder of the Hebrew Teachers Union in Los Angeles, and both parents, who were born in Ukraine, were founders of North American Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth movement. Yaroslavsky recalled that his parents spoke to their children only in Hebrew to prepare them for emigrating to Israel. Yaroslavsky's visited Israel when Shimona was thirteen and Zev was five. Shimona later emigrated permanently.
Yaroslavsky attended Melrose Avenue Elementary School, Bancroft Junior High School and Fairfax High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and economics from UCLA in 1971 and a Master of Arts in history, specializing in the British Empire, from the same school in 1972. Afterward, he taught Hebrew at temples in Pasadena and Bel Air.
Political activism.
Yaroslavsky first gained public notice as a UCLA student who had begun orchestrating high-profile protests in Los Angeles against oppressive treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. After a revelatory trip to visit relatives in Russia, he formed the California Students for Soviet Jews, which, as its first major action, picketed Soviet athletes in town for a track and field event at the Coliseum. Although a self-described "flaming liberal" at the time, Yaroslavsky recruited conservative TV newsman and commentator George Putnam, who, Yaroslavsky said, "was anti-Soviet and very favorable to Soviet Jews." In December, 1969, they organized a candlelight protest march that would attract more than 5,000 people, including then-Mayor Sam Yorty and television performer Steve Allen.
In 1971, as executive director of the Southern California Council on Soviet Jewry, Yaroslavsky made news again when he led protests against the Bolshoi Ballet and boated into Los Angeles Harbor to paint "Let My People Go" on the side of a Soviet freighter. He was arrested during one Bolshoi protest but no charges were filed. He also was "deeply involved" in a campaign to burn Standard Oil credit cards after the company sent a letter to 300,000 stockholders that appeared to support a pro-Arab Middle East policy. He resigned from that $150-a-week job to campaign for the City Council.
City Council.
Elections.
Yaroslavsky's 1975 election to the City Council's 5th District on Los Angeles' Westside stunned the city's political establishment, which had supported his opponent, Frances M. Savitch, a former aide to then-Mayor Tom Bradley. Savitch had secured endorsements from, among others, California's two U.S. senators, members of Congress and an assortment of state office holders—"some of the strongest political muscle ever assembled in a City Council race," as the Los Angeles Times put it in a post-election analysis. In the primary, Yaroslavsky ran second to Savitch, eliminating from the race Rosalind Wiener Wyman, who was seeking to retake the seat she held from 1953 to 1965. Wyman endorsed Yaroslavsky in his grass-roots general election campaign. When Yaroslavsky was sworn in as the council's then-youngest member at age 26, Mayor Bradley quipped: "Congratulations. Now you're part of the establishment." "Yes," Yaroslavsky recalled retorting, "but the establishment is not part of me."
During his tenure, Yaroslavsky served as chairman of two of the council's most powerful committees—one that oversaw the city's budget and finances, the other that oversaw the Los Angeles Police Department. He had a reputation among his colleagues as driven, ambitious and bright, someone who "knows the value of…good box office issues." Yaroslavsky vacated his seat early after his successful election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In a 1994 story marking his first day as a supervisor, the "Los Angeles Times" noted that "Yaroslavsky was more often than not a dominant player in virtually every municipal initiative of note since he joined the City Council in 1975."
Tenure.
Yaroslavsky was on the city council from 1975 to 1994. When he opted not to run for re-election in 1994 and instead ran for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Yaroslavsky's wife Barbara unsuccessfully ran to replace him on the city council.
Opposition to housing and development.
Yaroslavsky successfully obtained ordinances that reduced neighborhood building heights and imposed severe restrictions on hillside development. Yaroslavsky also led an effort to substantially limit the scale of development in Century City. Yaroslavsky was credited with orchestrating the negotiations concerning the use, for the first time, of potential traffic congestion measurements to help determine the scope of a project.
In 1984, Yaroslavsky suffered a stinging setback when the Los Angeles City Council voted 8–7 to reject his proposed moratorium on high-rises along Wilshire Boulevard, a proposal that had turned the heavily-traveled thoroughfare into a "political battleground." He said the defeat—which he blamed on council colleagues who reneged on promises to vote for the measure—left him angry and committed to taking his "slow-growth" message to voters. In 1986, Yaroslavsky and Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude authored a ballot initiative, Proposition U, that the Los Angeles Times called "the largest one-shot effort to limit development in the city's history." The measure proposed to cut in half the size of new buildings allowed on more than 70% of the city's commercial and industrial property. Critics, including labor and business leaders, predicted that Prop. U would discourage investment in L.A. and reduce jobs, particularly in economically-depressed minority neighborhoods. But the measure passed by a margin of more than 2-to-1 and was hailed by supporters as representing the "dawn of a new era" in managing Los Angeles' growth.
Yaroslavsky argued in 1987 that "This city, which for 100 years grew out, has filled up... We always had more room. But now there is no more margin." In defending Proposition U, Yaroslavsky argued that down-zoning Los Angeles had no adverse economic effects, "There is no down-zoning in this city that ever negatively affected the economics of the city. … We cut density by one-third on Melrose Avenue. The only thing that happened is rents continued to skyrocket." Critics say that skyrocketing rents were an adverse effect of Proposition U.
The following year, Yaroslavsky and Braude teamed up again, this time to gather signatures for a ballot initiative that would block Occidental Petroleum Corp.'s decades-long effort to drill for oil in the Pacific Palisades along the city's shoreline. The controversial Proposition O would ban future drilling 1,000 yards inland of the mean high tide line. While environmentalists lined up behind the measure, opponents derided it as "an elitist cause" that would deprive the city of between $100 million and $200 million in taxes, royalties and license fees. Mayor Tom Bradley said the measure was unnecessary given safety precautions Occidental had proposed to prevent an accident. In November 1988, voters narrowly approved Proposition O, bringing to a close what was then the most expensive electoral campaign in the city's history.
These back-to-back victories heightened Yaroslavsky's profile and positioned him as the top challenger to Bradley, whose popularity had begun to erode. In early 1988, as the councilman was preparing a potential mayoral bid, his "slow-growth" credentials came under harsh scrutiny in a lengthy "Los Angeles Times" story headlined, "The Two Sides of Zev Yaroslavsky." While the piece praised Yaroslavsky's growth-control record in Century City and elsewhere, it accused him of quietly taking actions on behalf of some projects that he had publicly criticized, including the Westside Pavilion mall and two buildings that would have been blocked under his ill-fated Wilshire Boulevard construction moratorium. The story also noted that Yaroslavsky received strong financial support from major developers. In January, 1989, Yaroslavsky announced that he would not challenge Bradley, calling the four-term mayor a "very popular and entrenched incumbent" who would be "virtually impossible" to beat.
In 1993, Yaroslavsky sought to block or limit expansion plans for 20th Century Fox in his Westside district. Homeowner groups in his district opposed the expansion.
Role in limiting rail expansion.
Yaroslavsky played an important role in blocking the Expo line expansion to Santa Monica in his Westside district in 1993. Homeowners in the district had complained that the proposed route would cause crime and noise.
Los Angeles Police Department.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Yaroslavsky emerged as the leading critic of the Los Angeles Police Department's controversial intelligence-gathering practices. In an open challenge to then-Chief Daryl F. Gates, Yaroslavsky accused the department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division of spying on some 200 law-abiding individuals and groups. The unit was disbanded in early 1983 amid mounting disclosures that the department had not only been spying on critics and left-leaning groups, but also had been secretly storing intelligence files in the home and garage of a detective. Those documents included files on Yaroslavsky and then-Mayor Tom Bradley. A confidential report by three top Los Angeles police officials concluded, among other things, that the unit was riddled with management problems and was plagued by attitudes rooted in the past. The ensuing outcry set the stage for Yaroslavsky to prevail in his five-year effort to win passage of a local freedom of information act, which was strongly opposed by police officials who argued that it would be "stupid" to tell a potential "terrorist" whether the department had a file on him. One assistant chief accused the councilman of a "lack of integrity." Although the council majority weakened the final ordinance under pressure from the department, Yaroslavsky and the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the LAPD, proclaimed victory nonetheless. "It's not as strong as I wanted it to be," Yaroslavsky said, "but it could have been a lot weaker." The ACLU suit was settled in 1984, with the City of Los Angeles agreeing to pay $1.8 million to 131 plaintiffs and to establish more rigorous controls over future intelligence-gathering activities.
As chairman of the council's powerful Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee, Yaroslavsky criticized the LAPD's use of choke holds, which had been linked to more than a dozen deaths of suspects in Los Angeles police custody during a three-year period in the early 1980s. Yaroslavsky and his committee initially negotiated new guidelines for use of the technique, aimed at subduing suspects by either choking off air supply or blocking the flow of blood to the brain, causing unconsciousness. But by the end of 1982, with controversy continuing, Yaroslavsky argued that a moratorium on chokeholds imposed by the civilian Police Commission should be made permanent.
Conflicts of interest.
In 1990, Yaroslavsky authorized a nonprofit group, Jewish Federation Council, which was run by the husband of Yaroslavsky's long-time top aide to build housing on a lot without taking part in competitive bidding procedures.
Other.
RFK assassination, 1975. Yaroslavsky submitted a successful resolution to the council creating an ad hoc investigative group that was to review the police and other official investigations into the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
Bakery prices, 1977. He offered a resolution that would have required bakeries to post the prices of their goods.
Olympics, 1978. Yaroslavsky and Councilman Bob Ronka were known as the "most active . . . skeptics" in working to protect the city from potentially incurring "massive security costs" that the two believed should be shouldered by the private Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in staging the 1984 Olympic Games.
Skokie. As a councilman, Yaroslavsky announced that he would go to Skokie, Illinois, in June 1978 to attend a rally protesting a planned march by American