The Land Use Element, in our part of town, has been seen as a carefully considered effort to ruin our life. Step 1: Tear down all houses of worship and erect Section 8 housing for people with methamphetamine problems. Step 2: Raze our beloved Kmart and replace it with more Section 8 housing for beatniks and porch pirates. The LUE’s steps continue until we lose the last of our freedoms and are forced to provide shelter for undocumented immigrants and suspicious-looking people in general.

By Thursday, all should be groovy, though, at least for the unbearably squeaky wheels on the eastern flanks of the 4th and 5th districts who have been hijacking community meetings on the LUE and scaring away people who are legitimately concerned about housing for themselves and their families. (We have just opened the door to a NextDoor attack: “If you’re so concerned about the homeless, let them stay at your house,” because that’s the sole solution to homelessness.)

We haven’t seen the re-jiggered LUE maps, redrawn after a series of community meetings, all with more or less the same people in attendance, which are due out this week, but we’ve talked to people who have and have been assured that they will make a lot of people happy. “Even the 4th and 5th districts?” you’re asking. Well, no, there are people in this world who will never be happy, but at least the eastern part of the 4th will likely get its way, but not the western part, and that’s probably true of the 5th District as well.

What’s funny (if you have a certain kind of sense of humor) is the fact that Long Beach’s Department of Planning and Building Services, as it was called, released a Land Use Element for the General Plan in 1977 which came under attack not by residents, but by builders, developers and the Long Beach Board of Realtors who claimed that the plan would limit growth by decreasing density in many residential sections and rezoning some commercial areas to residential on parts of Fourth Street and Redondo Avenue. The Board of Realtors’ president direly predicted that Fourth Street “could become a virtual ghetto,” while an attorney for the Builders’ Exchange said developers feared that the LUE represents a “no growth” policy.

But, then, no growth was what many civic leaders anticipated in the early and mid-1970s, when they thought the city was full to capacity with a population of about 350,000.

General plans are always put together with the distant future in mind, no matter how gauzy that can be. The 1961 General Plan, just like the current one, wondered what would the city do with all these cars in terms of parking and traffic, and it tried to envision a future (one that we’ve already passed) when alternative forms of transportation would be in use. But, then, the 1961 plan also projected a future in which more than a million people would reside in Long Beach well before the 21st century.

Which shows that any attempt to anticipate a future, such as the current plan which is to take us to the year 2040, is bound to, if not fail, go wide of the mark one way or another.