The last time we reported on rapper and mega-celebrity Kanye West, he had jumped back on board the Trump Train after taking a break from politics.
Now, West’s latest project, Star Wars style domes designed to use as homeless shelters, has met the Dark Side of the California permitting process.
The simple, domed structures — evocative of the desert aesthetic of Tatooine in the film franchise — came to public attention in early July when they were mentioned in a Forbes story about West. The rapper-entrepreneur and his team had been working on the prefabricated prototypes for a year, the magazine said, with an eye on solutions for L.A.’s affordable-housing crisis….The first inspector deemed the structures to be temporary, but the second noticed concrete pads under the buildings and declared them permanent.West now has to deal with a citation issued at the end of July ordering him to present plans for approval, or tear the huts down, the sites said. He has 45 days to comply, which puts D-day (that’s “D” for deliver or destroy) at the middle of September.
Kanye chose to construct the project on the Hidden Hills property that he and wife Kim Kardashian first purchased back in 2014.
Sources familiar with the project previously said it will ‘break barriers that separate classes… namely, the rich, the middle class and the poor.’In an earlier interview with Forbes, West told a reporter that the domes could ‘hopefully be used to house the homeless, having them live in spaces said to be sunk into the ground’….’There, with the hazy heft of something enormous and far away, stand a trio of structures that look like the skeletons of wooden spaceships,’ Zack O’Malley Greenburg wrote of the project in Forbes cover piece on Kanye.’They’re the physical prototypes of his concept, each oblong and dozens of feet tall, and West leads me inside each one. He tells me they could be used as living spaces for the homeless, perhaps sunk into the ground with light filtering in through the top. We stand there in silence for several minutes considering the structures before walking back down to his lurking Lamborghini and zooming off into the night.’
The people living around the 300 acres of aren’t too happy about all the commotion these futuristic domes are causing.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles residents are angry with officials and are demanding change after a homeless crisis spirals in the city.
…Failed liberal policies coupled with decades of neglect and mismanagement have turned an old problem into a modern-day nightmare. Some fear the City of Angels is at the point of no return and are angry at elected officials who talk a big game but rarely deliver.”I don’t want to see them on camera anymore,” Marquesha Babers, who lived on Skid Row as a teenager, told Fox News. “I don’t want them to write any more articles about how much they care or how much they’re trying to change things. I want to see them do it.”Across the state, officials have long lamented the horrors of homelessness while failing to pass any meaningful legislation. Homeless advocates accuse those in charge of using the crisis to further their own political aspirations and manipulating an environment that allows them to dodge accountability.”The best we get out of those elected to deal with problems are soundbites,” Pete White, the founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, told Fox News. “Soundbites that say ‘it’s a humanitarian crisis’ and that ‘we have to do something’ only to see that something be either nothing or pathways to criminalization.”
So, the politicians and bureaucrats are acting to stop a Trump-supporter from doing more than generating soundbites. I do not think this approach is going to work out as well as the #Resistance in California is hoping.
As Yoda would say: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
[Featured image via YouTube]
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