In 2015, Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia announced a plan: bring 4,000 housing units and 10,000 new residents — including “3,000 tech jobs” — to downtown Long Beach, to transform the city into a sort of walkable, bicycle-happy Silicon Valley South — “Long Beach 3.0,” as he described it.

Two years later, some 500 new residential units are completed, according to the Downtown Long Beach Alliance’s recently-released housing data, with an additional 2,679 housing units currently under construction or approved for construction just in the Downtown area alone.

But if you’re a current Long Beach resident, don’t expect your housing needs are being addressed by these new developments. In fact, these new projects are devastating a whole segment of long-time renters: according to DTLBA data, apartment rents increased 26 percent in just the five years 2012-2016. That figure will go up even higher when 2017 numbers are announced.

The mayor and city council have done nothing to address this disaster. Of 548 new units to be built Downtown by Irvine developer Sares-Regis, for example, just 17 of them are required to be set aside at “below-market” rents, meaning the other 97 percent will be at “market” rents.

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Bad policies fuel fires: John Stossel What is a “market” rent? Well, recently-opened complexes like the Current and the Edison (223 and 156 units, respectively) offer 1-bedroom units at around $2,600 per month, and are styled toward “professionals earning about $150,000 per year” — that according to the Edison’s press release.

Is this anybody you know? (Who doesn’t work for the city government that approved these projects, I mean).

Where are the Downtown jobs to support these rents, you might ask? How has that “3,000 tech jobs” thing worked out? We’ve had some great news on the job front with Mercedes Benz and Virgin Galactic at the old Boeing facility, and the other new developments at Douglas Park (also a Sares-Regis project, by the way). But does anyone believe these employees will live Downtown in expensive new apartments and walk and bike to work in what is essentially Lakewood?

Long Beach’s Dirty Little Secret is that 77 percent of people living Downtown don’t work Downtown. Do we really believe that Pine Avenue restaurant workers and retail sales associates are able to afford one of these new $2,600 apartments? Rather, as in Los Angeles, each night now sees a steady exodus of service workers returning to their residences in some more affordable area.

This issue is critical because the whole Downtown Plan — walking, bike lanes, traffic calming, high-density housing with reduced parking — fails miserably without thousands of high-paying jobs close enough to allow workers to bike or walk to them.

Additionally, the DTLBA data is severely muddled: the January 2017 report informs us that 225 new businesses opened Downtown in 2016, yet just four months later an April 2017 press release from the same organization touts “Downtown became home to 152 net new businesses in 2016”.

So which is it, 225 or 152? A “net” of 152 mean to me that in addition to 225 new Downtown businesses, 73 businesses must have closed in 2016, right?

It gets crazier. According to their report, DTLBA got the “225 new businesses” figure from the city’s own Development Services department. A call there confirmed that number, which was simply “pulled from business licenses”, according to the analyst I spoke with. So it’s quite possible the “new businesses” data is even more flawed, based rather unscientifically on whether or not someone did or didn’t purchase a business license. And a good percentage of the “new businesses” are likely sole proprietorships, with no additional employees.

Mayor Garcia believes that transforming Downtown will attract new jobs, but remember, he wants new residents for Long Beach (10,000; remember?). If you live here now, and your rent is exploding, or you’ve been kicked out of your unit because the owner is converting to an AirBnB rental you’re not welcome in Long Beach 3.0.

For those who say Downtown Long Beach is having a Renaissance, I say: you’re wrong. Downtown Long Beach is dying.

Sorry to be selfish, but we need to take care of our own first: the artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and just plain lower- and middle-class Long Beachers who are being forced out of their longtime apartments in order to transform our beautiful city into … into what, exactly?

I think of my neighbors, the beautiful family who lived in the same apartment for 22 years, worked hard, raised their kids, looked out for the neighborhood, and who are now evicted so the new building owner (a TV producer from West Hollywood) can slap on a little paint and raise the rent to a level unaffordable for the working class. (And their building is not even officially Downtown; it’s east of Alamitos and north of 7th — that’s how far the rent devastation has spread just this year.)

I understand gentrification is unavoidable — hey, I lived in Los Feliz 20 years ago. And good grief, no one could argue Downtown wasn’t in dire need of a makeover. But our other Dirty Little Secret is this: when Wal-Mart closed their City Place location in January 2016, the positive changes would have blossomed on their own, at a more reasonable, organic, sustainable pace, without the disaster that is unfolding now.

It might already be too late, but the mayor and council need to put on the brakes, now. If that Google South campus comes to Pine next month with 5,000 Downtown jobs, then, fine; que sera, sera. But for now, it’s all tragically forced — the overbuilding of housing units unaffordable to our residents, the reliance on low-paying retail and service employment, and the displacement of our longtime arts and working-class community.

Is this the Long Beach we really want?

Nora Marks is a writer and a longtime Long Beach resident.