There are many causes it’s troublesome to construct housing for homeless individuals in Los Angeles. One in all them shouldn’t be metropolis officers standing in the best way of a mission — particularly one already permitted twice by the Metropolis Council.
However that’s the outrageous scenario that has trapped the Venice Dell mission in pre-development hell since 2017.
After a aggressive course of, metropolis housing officers selected nonprofit builders Venice Neighborhood Housing and Hollywood Neighborhood Housing Corps to take a 2.65-acre expanse of metropolis parking zone in Venice simply blocks from the seashore and switch it into housing for homeless and low-income people and households. It was a great piece of surplus metropolis land discovered at a time when metropolis officers had begun scouring their stock for heaps that could possibly be used for reasonably priced housing, notably homeless housing.
Since then the builders have accomplished every part required: They held quite a few public hearings, did environmental research, designed and reconfigured the now-120-unit mission, designed and redesigned the parking storage to accommodate metropolis officers’ issues and to permit loads of room to maintain a well-liked boat launch.
The Metropolis Council permitted the mission in 2021 and once more in 2022 when the builders have been awarded a improvement settlement.
As a substitute of being fast-tracked via the remainder of the method, they’ve been slow-walked by the officers who needs to be serving to them. Beginning within the spring of 2023, on the route of the newly elected metropolis legal professional, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who had been brazenly essential of the mission since earlier than she took workplace, metropolis departments have been informed to cease working with the builders as a result of there was pending litigation (which was resolved final yr). A former official within the mayor’s workplace who was aware of the mission stated that the order was uncommon and that they’d not beforehand seen a metropolis legal professional cease work due to a lawsuit.
Since then, the departments have labored solely on and off with the builders, which has jeopardized their funding and delayed by greater than a yr their Coastal Fee approval.
However the mission has survived, prevailed in two lawsuits from a nonprofit Venice group that opposes it, and at last bought the mandatory Coastal Fee allow in December that can enable them to maneuver ahead. (That was regardless of town legal professional making an attempt to persuade the fee to not approve the mission.)
But metropolis officers discovered extra obstacles to place within the mission’s means. The newest hurdle was a evaluation by the Board of Transportation Commissioners, which town legal professional argued is a vital cease for the mission — even years after the Metropolis Council permitted it. The commissioners — an advisory physique to town’s Division of Transportation — declared the mission unsuitable for the lot. As a substitute they beneficial a close-by smaller (extra awkwardly configured) lot for housing and advised the Venice Dell web site be changed into a “mobility hub.”
It seems that town and the builders have been already sued on the grounds that town uncared for to place the mission earlier than the Board of Transportation Commissioners. In that case, town legal professional together with counsel for the builders argued that the commissioners might have management over buying and managing metropolis parking heaps, however the Metropolis Council didn’t delegate its energy over using metropolis property — together with parking heaps — for housing to the transportation commissioners. The choose agreed and dominated for town and the builders.
Now town legal professional is arguing in any other case? That is absurd — and nothing greater than one other ploy to kill the mission.
Councilmember Traci Park, who succeeded the mission’s champion, Mike Bonin, within the council district together with Venice Dell, is a longtime opponent of the mission. She declared it useless and launched a movement to discover the feasibility of the smaller lot that the Transportation Fee beneficial for housing. That movement has already been via one Metropolis Council committee.
Now it should go to town’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. To this point, Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs that committee, is rightly uncomfortable transferring ahead with a movement that she says “appears to be an implicit endorsement of a bad-faith effort to cease an reasonably priced housing mission that town has already permitted.”
Venice Dell is just not a rogue mission on a bit of land haphazardly turned over to the builders by town’s Housing Division and Metropolis Council. This can be a vetted, considerate housing mission in a well-resourced space of town the place there may be little everlasting housing for low-income and homeless people and households. If Park and others consider that the close by smaller lot can be appropriate for housing, nice. Construct housing there, too. The Westside wants all of the reasonably priced housing it may get. And if town needs a mobility hub, that may be arrange alongside the housing on the Venice Dell web site.
That is nothing greater than the present Metropolis Council making an attempt to return in time and invalidate a choice made by a earlier Metropolis Council — a choice that gave builders a contract to construct Venice Dell in partnership with town.
In the meantime, Mayor Karen Bass, who has made housing homeless individuals a precedence, says solely that she helps reasonably priced housing on the Westside and across the metropolis. However she has in any other case been woefully silent on Venice Dell specifically and wouldn’t touch upon the newest twist within the saga of this mission. Distancing herself from this debate (for no matter political causes) as a substitute of supporting an already permitted mission solely makes it tougher to construct homeless housing within the face of any sort of opposition that crops up.
Will probably be as much as this Metropolis Council and the mayor to indicate metropolis residents that they’re severe about constructing reasonably priced housing and getting homeless individuals off the streets. Killing the Venice Dell mission says the other.
And the potential for an alternate lot — which is able to entail feasibility research, selecting a brand new developer, public hearings, Coastal Fee approval — isn’t any substitute for a mission that’s via that course of and now securing the remainder of its financing.
Metropolis officers decry homeless individuals dying on the road as disgraceful. Letting a mission die that might home a few of them is simply as disgraceful.
