Рут Галантер: Политик, Эколог и Жизненный Путь

American politician

Ruth Galanter (born c. 1941) is an American politician, environmentalist and consultant with a background in urban planning. She served on the Los Angeles City Council from 1987 to 2003. She is known for supporting "slow growth" policies on the city's Westside and elsewhere. She was the victim of a knife attack in an attempted home robbery that left her severely wounded. She now has her own consulting business.

Galanter was born about 1941 in New York City, the only child of a teacher and an advertising salesman. She grew up in the Bronx, New York, "dreaming of becoming an artist, or maybe an investigative reporter." Ruth's father died when she was age 6. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her master's degree in planning from Yale. She moved to Los Angeles in 1970.

On May 6, 1987, Galanter was "brutally assaulted" in her Venice home in the 2200 block of Louella Avenue by an intruder who left her in critical condition with stab wounds in her neck. The intruder entered through a screen window at the back of the house. Neighbors heard screaming and the sound of a burglar alarm that Galanter was able to trigger after the attack. Police soon tabbed Mark Allen Olds, who lived in a rooming house across the street from Galanter, as a suspect. Police Chief Daryl Gates said Olds was "a former gang member with an extensive record of arrests, including two for a 1979 gang murder and others for drug use." A reporter wrote sixteen years later that the attack had left Galanter's "New York accented voice with a slight croak." Galanter made a study trip to Antarctica in January 1989 as an "exotic vacation" she had promised herself as she lay in bed bleeding from the knife attack.

While a Yale student, Galanter and "scores of others" opposed a New Haven urban renewal program that would have bulldozed buildings and cut streets through poor and working class neighborhoods. In 1973, she was the first California resident to file an appeal under the state's Coastal Preservation Act against an approved project—a Santa Monica plan "first proposed as 1,480 luxury residential units [that in the end] wound up as 340 condos and 160 units for seniors." Living in Santa Monica at the time, Galanter was active in opposition to a 1976 plan to move two decrepit frame Carpenter Gothic houses from their Ocean Avenue addresses north of Wilshire Boulevard to a city owned lot in Ocean Park, turning one into an upscale restaurant and the other into a historic museum. Both were built around the start of the 20th century, one of them by Roy Jones, son of Senator John P. Jones, founder of Santa Monica. The opposition was enough to kill the project, dubbed Heritage Square,

Galanter was appointed to the South Coast Regional Coastal Commission by Governor Jerry Brown in January 1977. She was elected chairman in 1980. Decisions on affordable housing, she said, were "probably the most controversial facing the commission." After leaving the commission, she started her own planning consulting firm. "an agency charged with restoring damaged coastal lands." As such, she "worked to preserve wetlands threatened by development in Long Beach and Huntington Beach."

In 2005 06, Galanter occupied the Bellarmine College Visiting Chair in Los Angeles Urban Research at Loyola Marymount University. At that time she was the principal of Galanter and Company, a consulting firm specializing in "land use, urban infrastructure, environmental policy and political strategy."

Galanter said when she left office she believed her "most lasting legacy" would be a law requiring low flush toilets in homes.