Paint your store, get two years in jail
August 13, 2008 by elcap
From the annals of absurd city bureaucracy: A mom-and-pop grocery store in Los Angeles has a problem with kids spraying graffiti on their building. The owners, the Antonio family, noticed that buildings with murals don’t get tagged, so they paid local artists $3,000 to paint a mural. For three months their building was free of graffiti.
Then the Antonio’s received a letter from the city telling them that their mural is “excessive signage,” threatening two years in jail and thousands of dollars in fines. The government sends out a crew to paint over the mural. Taggers treat the repainted walls like blank canvas and now the building is covered with graffiti again.
LOSERS: Store owners, local artists, community, taxpayers, freedom, logic
WINNER: Government contractors. Los Angeles spends $7 million in taxpayer money every year on contracts for graffiti removal.
Full story here.
We can’t call the murals “individual expressionism”? If anonymous gangsters can get away with tagging, surely a company could use some bonus signage.
[...] to Liberty is For Me for pointing out this story: Los Angeles thwarts family in fight over graffiti. Early this year, [...]