There are lots of reasons it’s difficult to build housing for homeless people in Los Angeles. One of them shouldn’t be city officials standing in the way of a project — especially one already approved twice by the City Council.
But that’s the outrageous situation that has trapped the Venice Dell project in pre-development hell since 2017.
After a competitive process, city housing officials chose nonprofit developers Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corps to take a 2.65-acre expanse of city parking lot in Venice just blocks from the beach and turn it into housing for homeless and low-income individuals and families. It was an ideal piece of surplus city land found at a time when city officials had begun scouring their inventory for lots that could be used for affordable housing, particularly homeless housing.
Since then the developers have done everything required: They held numerous public hearings, did environmental studies, designed and reconfigured the now-120-unit project, designed and redesigned the parking garage to accommodate city officials’ concerns and to allow plenty of room to keep a popular boat launch.
The City Council approved the project in 2021 and again in 2022 when the developers were awarded a development agreement.
Instead of being fast-tracked through the rest of the process, they’ve been slow-walked by the officials who should be helping them. Starting in the spring of 2023, at the direction of the newly elected city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who had been openly critical of the project since before she took office, city departments were told to stop working with the developers because there was pending litigation (which was resolved last year). A former official in the mayor’s office who was familiar with the project said that the order was unusual and that they had not previously seen a city attorney stop work because of a lawsuit.
Since then, the departments have worked only off and on with the developers, which has jeopardized their funding and delayed by more than a year their Coastal Commission approval.
But the project has survived, prevailed in two lawsuits from a nonprofit Venice group that opposes it, and finally got the necessary Coastal Commission permit in December that will allow them to move forward. (That was despite the city attorney trying to convince the commission not to approve the project.)
Yet city officials found more obstacles to put in the project’s way. The latest hurdle was a review by the Board of Transportation Commissioners, which the city attorney argued is a necessary stop for the project — even years after the City Council approved it. The commissioners — an advisory body to the city’s Department of Transportation — declared the project unsuitable for the lot. Instead they recommended a nearby smaller (more awkwardly configured) lot for housing and suggested the Venice Dell site be turned into a “mobility hub.”
It turns out that the city and the developers were already sued on the grounds that the city neglected to put the project before the Board of Transportation Commissioners. In that case, the city attorney along with counsel for the developers argued that the commissioners may have control over acquiring and managing city parking lots, but the City Council did not delegate its power over the use of city property — including parking lots — for housing to the transportation commissioners. The judge agreed and ruled for the city and the developers.
Now the city attorney is arguing otherwise? This is absurd — and nothing more than another ploy to kill the project.
Councilmember Traci Park, who succeeded the project’s champion, Mike Bonin, in the council district including Venice Dell, is a longtime opponent of the project. She declared it dead and introduced a motion to explore the feasibility of the smaller lot that the Transportation Commission recommended for housing. That motion has already been through one City Council committee.
Now it must go to the city’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. So far, Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs that committee, is rightly uncomfortable moving forward with a motion that she says “seems to be an implicit endorsement of a bad-faith effort to stop an affordable housing project that the city has already approved.”
Venice Dell is not a rogue project on a piece of land haphazardly turned over to the developers by the city’s Housing Department and City Council. This is a vetted, thoughtful housing project in a well-resourced area of the city where there is little permanent housing for low-income and homeless individuals and families. If Park and others believe that the nearby smaller lot would be suitable for housing, great. Build housing there, too. The Westside needs all the affordable housing it can get. And if the city wants a mobility hub, that can be set up alongside the housing on the Venice Dell site.
This is nothing more than the current City Council trying to go back in time and invalidate a decision made by a previous City Council — a decision that gave developers a contract to build Venice Dell in partnership with the city.
Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass, who has made housing homeless people a priority, says only that she supports affordable housing on the Westside and around the city. But she has otherwise been woefully silent on Venice Dell in particular and would not comment on the latest twist in the saga of this project. Distancing herself from this debate (for whatever political reasons) instead of supporting an already approved project only makes it more difficult to build homeless housing in the face of any kind of opposition that crops up.
It will be up to this City Council and the mayor to show city residents that they are serious about building affordable housing and getting homeless people off the streets. Killing the Venice Dell project says the opposite.
And the possibility of an alternative lot — which will entail feasibility studies, choosing a new developer, public hearings, Coastal Commission approval — is no substitute for a project that is through that process and now securing the rest of its financing.
City officials decry homeless people dying on the street as disgraceful. Letting a project die that would house some of them is just as disgraceful.
