LA's inner city (central/statist) economic planning: banning blight and replacing it with nothing

From Matt Welch in Reason-- who starts with his interview of the police chief in L.A....

...[his] mind was on the kinds of establishments he was sick of seeing in his neighborhoods. “Auto-related business, auto-related business, fried chicken restaurant, liquor store, fast-food restaurant”...If only those Del Tacos could be replaced by sit-down family restaurants, those used-tire lots by Whole Foods outlets, the area could finally begin making an economic comeback.

Parks' solution: Ban the “blight.” As a first step, by a unanimous vote in the summer of 2008, the L.A. City Council prohibited the construction or expansion of fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. You could still build a McDonald’s in nearby (and more prosperous) Lakewood. But creating burger-flipping opportunities near Florence and Normandie was deemed bad for the neighborhood.

It’s important to point out that the political class supporting the fast food moratorium does not, as a rule, dislike poor minorities. Parks is black, the mayor of L.A. is Latino, and community activists in favor of the ban actually used the phrase “food apartheid” to describe the state of affairs before mostly white central planners zoned away consumer choice for half a million mostly nonwhite residents. They genuinely believe that punishing some of the few businesses willing to serve troubled neighborhoods is a necessary precondition to bringing in the commercial chains they prefer, such as Trader Joe’s, Mimi’s, or Starbucks (though never Walmart).

Two pathologies stand out here. One is the belief that prosperity is sourced at the stroke of a government pen, whether it’s prohibiting one type of commerce or doling out favors to another....The second pathology is the disconnect between political in-group identity and the real-world impact of policies....