Who's Your Nanny?

Jan Perry is!

The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference.

"The people don't want them, but when they don't have any other options, they may gravitate to what's there," said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan.

Uh huh. They "don't want them" so bad that the market supports that many.

A Times analysis of the city's roughly 8,200 restaurants found that South Los Angeles has the highest concentration of fast-food eateries. Per capita, the area has fewer eating establishments of any kind than the Westside, downtown or Hollywood, and about the same as the Valley. But a much higher percentage of those are fast-food chains.

I am shocked--shocked!--to discover that South LA has fewer fine dining opportunites than Hollywood. That a lower-income section of a major urban metro leans more towards Hardee's than haute cuisine. That an area known for high unemployment and crime and pervasive poverty does not support at least a half-dozen three-star eateries featured in the upcoming Michelin Guide to LA.

"While limiting fast-food restaurants isn't a solution in itself, it's an important piece of the puzzle," said Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College.

This is "bringing health policy and environmental policy together with land-use planning," he said. "I think that's smart, and it's the wave of the future."

The Center for Food and Justice? Your tax dollars at work. But they have the grand unified solution to the problems of South LA. More Tante Louise, less Taco Bell!

South L.A. has lots of fast-food restaurants because these restaurants do well in areas where people might not want to spend $15 on lunch, said Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of Foodservice Strategies at WD Partners, a restaurant consulting firm that works with Red Lobster, Jamba Juice and Fatburger, among others.

...Restricting new restaurants to full-service, sit-down spots is "like saying we're not going to allow anybody to sell Chevrolets anymore because we want people to buy nothing but Mercedes-Benzes," consultant Lombardi said. "It's convoluted logic. If the objective is to get full-service, upscale casual dining restaurants in an area, I think the first step is finding out why they're not coming in an area, then start addressing those, and start by incentivizing."

This I gotta see.