A biking and housing freak (laudatory) won a city council seat in my town
This guy, Bubba Fish, ran for city council in my town, and a bunch of rich boomers tried to stop him, and he failed, and they won, and now he is going to Destroy All Cars.
I mean, sorry, he's going to be pretty normal. Bubba won in Culver City after surviving an insane negative ad campaign which I'm very sad I didn't do a better job of photographing or archiving. There was a period of about a week where I was receiving local PAC-funded attack ads every other day about him - including an ad which claimed he was a "Houston politician" who considers Houston "home" and doesn't really represent Culver City.
This is a deranged claim to make about any politician in the West LA area, where a huge percentage of the residents are "transplants" from other places who moved to LA for work. (Including me.) It was pretty transparent that the comments they were attacking are the typical things any LA resident says about the place they left in order to come work in the big city. Trying to turn that into an attack ad is such obviously slimy stuff. Nobody out here can miss the skullduggery in an ad like that, because so many of us navigate those kinds of statements in social conversations ourselves. Depending on how often they meet new people, your average transplant in LA may be having those kinds of conversations every single week of their life. You cannot move to LA without forever being someone who moved to LA.
I've seen Bubba at various pro-bike protests in town and I was planning to vote for him this entire time. He's a nice guy who shares my values pretty much completely, so it was a no-brainer.
But I was probably unusual for knowing about him in the first place. Not a lot of people in town have time to go to pro-bike protests, even if they support bike infrastructure in this city. (We are notorious for having recently lost some of that infrastructure under the knife of the previous City Council.)
So how do you learn about a guy like Bubba if you are not already super plugged in to local politics? Based on some interactions with friends, I'm pretty sure that he won his race in part because of the negative ad campaign, which drew attention to his pro-bike, pro-housing positions. I had friends who were delighted to receive flyers alerting them to the biggest bike maniac in town. The only people I was texting with about local politics before the election were Bubba fans, and we were texting about the attack ads. The attack ads generated some local press in local outlets, too, so I'm sure plenty of people had their attention drawn to the attack ads that way too.
I don't have much else to say about this except: I'm very sorry I didn't photograph the funnier attack ads, and I'm very glad this guy won, and I think it really pays to be optimistic and energetic about local politics when you can, even if it looks and feels like your guy is gonna lose. The town was absolutely draped in ads for the more "conservative" Culver City slate, grouped with ex-Mayor Albert Vera; my bike ride to work was completely lined with Vera signs, and only a couple single family homes along the way had signs for the opposing slate (which included Bubba).
But Bubba was going to apartment buildings and meeting people, and he's a renter too, and renters don't put up signs. Single family zoning and businesses in the city were covered in signs for his opponents because those people simply control more land mass and had more places to put up a sign. Renters are silent and sneaky (laudatory) and people who live in apartment buildings and condos generally don't have a place to voice our opinions in public. But we have a vote!
We spend so much SPACE in this city holding rich people. Single-family zoning is a blight on LA, and most local buiness owners are maniacs. There's something about running a physical business that turns your brain into a pulsating J6 type of thing. All the hard right guys in the city founded PACs and blew steam out their ears over Bubba, and they lost, and I'm so certain they orchestrated their own defeat. I've been avoiding every restaurant in the city with a Vera sign for months, and I'll continue doing so. The bike maniac won. All but one of his enemies lost. The city council has flipped progressive yet again.
I hope they put the bike lanes back. :)