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Gentrification

Rick Caruso’s Ties To The Homelessness Crisis

The mayoral candidate is promising to keep the homeless out of sight. Have his actions as a developer contributed to people being unhoused?

Carl J. Petersen
Dialogue & Discourse
4 min readOct 19, 2022

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The Americana is an environment of faux-gold sculpture, piped-in music, nostalgia architecture, and a main street named not for some hero but for a deliverer of mass consumption, billionaire developer Rick Caruso.

- LA Weekly

Where the Americana at Brand stands now, other functioning businesses once stood. Unlike the stores catering to the rich that occupy Rick Caruso’s development, many of the businesses that once existed in the area were family-owned. The City of Glendale labeled the entire area as “blighted,” condemned the properties, and took possession using eminent domain. It was “then handed…over for no charge to Caruso.

Even after the complex opened, Caruso’s cronies at Glendale City Hall were not finished looting the neighborhood. Two additional properties were threatened with foreclosure under eminent domain if they did not negotiate a sale with Caruso…

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Carl J. Petersen
Carl J. Petersen

Written by Carl J. Petersen

Parent, special education advocate and former LAUSD School Board candidate. Still fighting for the children. www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com

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