Four days a week, Leticia Ortega de Ceballos sleeps in her car so she can pay for a house more than 100 miles away.
Her workweek begins with the Sunday night shift at Loews Hollywood Hotel, where she cleans the hallways and lobby. When she finishes, exhausted, there’s just an hour until she starts her second job cleaning hotel rooms at the Hilton in Glendale.
Then she has six hours to shower, eat and sleep before she starts all over again. Loews, Hilton, shower, eat, sleep. The 56-year-old sees the house in California City and the family within it on weekends.
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Gladis Ávila, 39, can spend more than two hours in traffic commuting to her job at the W Hollywood Hotel from her new house in Victorville, a 90-mile drive away. Some nights she gets home just as her youngest children are getting ready for bed.
“At the end of the day, when I’m heading home,” Ávila said, “I wonder if it’s worth it.”
The women, both hotel workers, grapple with all the difficulties of the housing market in California today, the high prices that push first-time buyers increasingly far from work, the scarcity of anything they can actually afford.
Housing concerns have been at the forefront of contract negotiations for hotel workers. Thousands of workers recently went on a three-day strike, demanding higher pay and better benefits. It was the first wave of walkouts anticipated this summer after contracts expired.
But Ortega de Ceballos and Ávila are looking for more than just shelter.
Sure, they want a home to live in now. But they also want to one day give their children the financial footing they themselves never had. The key is more than just hard work and a savings account with a laughably low interest rate. The key is a house, the kind of investment that can grow over time.
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Investing in a house is their way of building the kind of generational wealth that has long been out of reach for Black and brown families in the United States. The typical white family in the 21st century has five times the wealth of the typical Latino family and eight times the wealth of the typical Black family, according to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance.
And while homeownership represents an important component of wealth, there is a significant divide in who is able to achieve it. In California, in 2021, the Latino homeownership rate stood at 45.6%, compared to 64.5% for white families. The Black homeownership rate stood at 35.5%, according to census data analyzed by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The typical route to owning a home is to rent first and eventually save enough for a down payment. But with rising rents and wages that aren’t commensurate, that dream has become increasingly out of reach.
“Traditionally, owning a home has been the way that most families accumulate wealth,” said Marisol Cuellar Mejia, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “That has happened for many years, and that was in some ways a manifestation of the American dream.”
Ortega de Ceballos, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1980s, started working two jobs, in part so she could help her sister back home study at a university. The two were orphans. Ortega de Ceballos wanted her sister to follow her dream.
She started a family while living in North Hollywood, but as it grew she moved to Sun Valley to find a larger place. Then she moved even farther away, to Lancaster, where she rented a house for a decade and raised her three children. That’s when she started sleeping in her car to save time and money on gas.
Ortega de Ceballos has juggled both jobs for more than 20 years. At the Hilton, rooms can go for more than $200 a night. At Loews, they go for around $300. Ortega de Ceballos earns $22 an hour.
It wasn’t until four years ago that she was able to finally accomplish her dream of buying her own home. The only catch — this time the house was even farther north, in California City, about 105 miles from her jobs in Hollywood and Glendale. Although it has a population of around 15,000, to Ortega de Ceballos it’s a “pueblito,” a small town. The typical home price is less than $300,000, compared to nearly a million in L.A.
She shares the three-bedroom home with her husband, who is disabled, and her youngest son, who is 29 and studying nursing. The home, severely damaged when the couple bought it, has now been renovated. When Ortega de Ceballos is home, she tends to her trees in a garden out back.
Owning her own home helped Ortega de Ceballos secure a better future for herself in addition to her children. She knows whatever retirement income she receives won’t be enough to pay rent in L.A.
“When I retire, I’m not going to be worried about all of these costs. I’m not going to be worried that I’m going to have to rent and I’ll be without money to eat or anything to live,” Ortega de Ceballos said.
The trade-off to accomplish her dreams has been brutal. The grueling, almost three-hour commute back home would be impossible, so she doesn’t return from Sunday until Friday. She sleeps in her red Kia more often than she does in her own house. She’s endured heat waves and at times feels as if she’s homeless.
Sometimes she goes out to eat, but often she relies on food she can get from the hotel, where she also showers. She drinks hotel coffee morning and night to keep her going.
On Fridays, her husband drives to Lancaster and then takes the train to his wife so he can to drive her home and prevent her from falling asleep at the wheel.
“It’s cost me a lot of sweat and tears,” Ortega de Ceballos said, her voice choked with tears. “Everything requires sacrifice. I’ve had to make sacrifices to get to where I am.”
“The most important thing is that my kids feel secure that they’ll have something one day,” she added. “For their future.”
Ortega de Ceballos has thought about finding work closer to home, but it’d be much less pay. It’s a cruel irony, where the income is better in L.A. — just not enough to live there without throwing the bulk of her paychecks at the rent.
That fact has become a major focus as the hotel workers’ union Unite Here Local 11 tries to negotiate new contracts for its members. Thousands of workers at hotels across Southern California walked off the job over the busy Fourth of July weekend.
In a Unite Here Local 11 survey, 53% of workers said they had either moved in the past five years or will move in the near future because of housing costs. Hotel workers reported commuting hours from Apple Valley, Palmdale, California City and Victorville.
In contract negotiations, the union has proposed creating a hospitality workforce housing fund, in addition to better wages, healthcare benefits, pensions and safer workloads. The hope is that an additional tax on hotel bills could go toward the construction of workforce housing for hospitality workers, said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11.
“I think every working person in Los Angeles is struggling to afford to live in Los Angeles,” Petersen said. “Our position is that those who work in the region’s most important and prosperous industry — tourism — need to have the ability to live in Los Angeles.”
On the Fourth of July, around 30 people, including housekeepers and cooks, picketed outside of the W Hollywood Hotel, where rooms go for more than $300 a night. They twirled noisemakers, banged on pots and pans and used megaphones to amplify their chants. At times, onlookers threw eggs at them.
Ávila was among those picketing. She usually commutes from Victorville to Hollywood from Sunday to Thursday. She has been a housekeeper at the W for 11 years, but she hasn’t worked at the hotel for the last few months as she helps organize her colleagues in her capacity as a union steward.
When Ávila first arrived in L.A. in 2009, she squeezed into a studio apartment with her parents, sister and her young son. After she started her own family, she rented a one-bedroom in Hollywood for $1,700. She, her husband, Armando Guzmán, and their three kids shared the room, splitting up among bunk beds.
A year and a half ago, she and Guzmán found a five-bedroom house in Victorville where her children — ages 17, 9 and 7 — could each have their own room. They pay $2,000 a month toward something of their own.
The two-story house has a pool, where the family spends weekends. She has space for exercise equipment, which saves her money on a gym. Although her oldest son had been reluctant to leave L.A., she said, he was happy to have a room of his own.
To stay awake on drives that can sometimes last three hours, Ávila keeps candy and gum in her car. She rolls down the windows and calls other hotel workers throughout the commute.
Guzmán, a construction worker in L.A., will sometimes stay the night with his mother or sister on days where the sun has beaten down and left him too drained to drive home.
Ávila thinks about how much she struggled in life and how she wants to ensure a better future for her children.
“I know that one day, when I’m not here,” Ávila said, “my children can have this home and know, ‘my mother made a sacrifice for us.’”
As the pandemic shut down office life in Los Angeles’ downtown financial district, Claude Cognian tried to keep his gastropub Public School 213 open. But the evacuation of white-collar workers made way for an influx of homeless people and drug users — and more than a few troublemakers striding in the front door.
“It was hard to keep hostesses at the door, because they got scared,” said Cognian, chief executive of the restaurant’s parent company, Grill Concepts Inc.
Three break-ins cost as much as $12,000 each time just to repair the windows, all while the bottom line was cratering in the absence of the office employees who used to gather for lunch and after-work drinks. With sales down 75% from pre-pandemic days, his company closed the downtown gastropub in August and is not planning to return.
“Our bet was that downtown was going to come back, and it hasn’t,” Cognian said.
For decades the Los Angeles financial district was the beating heart of downtown, the corporate muscle that gave the city of sprawl a soaring glass skyline. But the pandemic and the wave of remote work hollowed out its skyscrapers and helped shut many restaurants and businesses that relied on crowds of workers. Though the neighborhood shows signs of recovery, few expect it to return to being the bustling hive of suits and ties that it was.
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To many insiders — the urban planners, real estate developers and business owners with interests in it — the area will recover only if its identity grows more textured than a zone of white-collar office space.
Desirable office addresses were already spreading beyond the financial district before the pandemic, as downtown experienced a renaissance in housing, art and entertainment on blocks previously shunned by investors and residents.
To the south, billions of dollars were spent improving the blocks around Crypto.com Arena with hotels, housing and entertainment venues. Obsolete century-old commercial and industrial buildings to the east were renovated into desirable housing and fashionably unconventional offices. Billions more were spent north on Bunker Hill where the Music Center including Walt Disney Concert Hall and office skyscrapers have been joined by museums, apartments and a high-rise hotel.
The housing boom drew residents to the financial district as well, and that has kept it from turning into a ghost town.
But for the area to truly come back to life, many say it will need to follow the path of Lower Manhattan. The financial capital of New York faced an exodus after 9/11, but city officials and investors staved it off by making it a place of more diverse uses. It is still an office district but is far more lively than it used to be since it also became a residential neighborhood with more shops, restaurants, parks and hotels than it had before the attacks. A performing arts center will open in September.
“Cities evolve. That’s what they do,” said downtown L.A. business representative Nick Griffin. “From natural disasters, wars and pandemics. They evolve with market changes, customer preferences and cultural shifts. Downtown has evolved pretty dramatically over the last 20 years and the next five or so are going to be very interesting.”
Many companies have returned to their offices, but on a limited basis as their employees work some days from home. “For Lease” signs clutter building fronts, tacked over restaurants and bars that once served lively hordes of office workers. Graffiti marks windows.
At Public School 213, the chairs are stacked neatly on tables as if it just closed for the night. Other former restaurants have been gutted by their landlords. Sidewalks are quiet, sometimes eerily so.
Downtown’s centers of gravity have shifted numerous times since its days as a remote Spanish pueblo.
The plaza by Olvera Street near the Los Angeles River was el centro until the late 19th century. When the railroads arrived in the American era, the business elite shifted the commercial district south from the plaza toward 1st Street in the Anglo section of the racially divided city, said Greg Fischer, an expert on the history of downtown who worked on planning matters for former City Councilwoman Jan Perry. Main, Spring, Broadway and Hill streets became the business hub.
In the early 20th century, elite social clubs such as the Jonathan Club, the California Club and the Los Angeles Athletic Club erected new buildings on the west side of downtown where property was relatively cheap. Soon the rooming houses, small apartment buildings and ramshackle Victorian homes there gave way. Richfield and other oil companies headquartered there, the seeds of today’s financial district.
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In “the Jetsons era,” as Fischer described the 1960s, corporate leaders viewed the Spring Street-centered office district as increasingly obsolete and passé and moved to newer buildings in the financial district. Downtown lost a lot of itslifeblood during that time, he said.
“In the years after World War II, downtown was a shopping, office and entertainment area,” Fischer said. “By the 1960s the office component had shifted west, most entertainment went to suburbs and housing just evaporated.”
Among the big businesses with offices in the west were the Richfield, Union, Signal, National and Superior oil companies. Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. was headquartered there and Bank of America had a big presence.
The boundaries of the financial district are not officially outlined, but property brokerage CBRE defines it as the office center south of Bunker Hill and 4th Street, flanked on the west by the 110 Freeway and on the east by Hill Street and extending south to 8th Street.
By the 1980s, much of downtown was moribund; buildings that once thrummed with commerce were dilapidated and vacant or underused. There were pockets of vibrancy, notably the Jewelry District and a Latino-centric shopping zone that emerged among aging buildings along Broadway in the Historic Core. The Civic Center around City Hallremained one of the largest concentrations of public administrative buildings in the country, employing thousands of workers.
But the financial district was the shinythriving part of the city, a high-rise office park for lawyers, bankers and accountants who piled into their cars for a mass exodus at the end of each workday.
To many, the neighborhood felt like a corporate fortress, invisibly walled off from the rest of downtown. Business leaders were painfully aware that downtown L.A. lacked the vibrancy of other big cities because it had so few residents, but was stuck in a chicken-and-egg dilemma: People didn’t want to live there because it lacked restaurants, grocery stores and other typical city-life amenities, but merchants didn’t want to set up shop because few lived there.
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The stalemate began to break around 2000 with an ordinance that made it easier to redevelop obsolete office buildings into housing. The relocation of the Lakers, Clippers and Kings pro sports teams to the new downtown arena then known as Staples Center brought thousands of sports and music fans and led a wave of development south of the financial district.
Decades of efforts to add rail service and thousands of apartments and condominiums helped create a more vibrant downtown that was taking on the flavor of other big cities before the pandemic.
“All of a sudden people were walking dogs and pushing baby carriages,” architect Martha Welborne said. “New restaurants came in, even destination restaurants that weren’t just for the people who worked downtown or lived there.”
Fortunately for downtown’s future prospects, its apartment towers remain nearly fully occupied. More than 35,000 units were built after 1999, when so few people lived there that downtown didn’t even have a big-chain grocery store.
Three new hotels have recently opened and a 42-story apartment tower will start leasing later this year. Bottega Louie, one of the region’s top-grossing restaurants before it shut down during the pandemic, reopened in 2021. A few blocks away, legendary Beverly Hills steakhouse Mastro’s also opened a seafood restaurant last year near Crypto.com Arena.
And last week, Metro opened its new Regional Connector, a 1.9-mile underground downtown track adding three stations and linking different lines to make travel more seamless.
Though some business owners have abandoned the financial district, others see an opportunity to get in at an affordable price during what they hope is a temporary economic dip.
Restaurateur Prince Riley recently leased a spot on Grand Avenue that was last home to the Red Herring restaurant. He grabbed it because he liked the location and it was already built-out for upscale dining.
“You can see all the love and care that went into this space,” he said. “They were a casualty of COVID.”
Riley and his wife plan to open their restaurant, named Joyce, in July, featuring a raw bar and Southern-style seafood such as crudo and ceviche. They moved into the apartment building upstairs to be close to it.
The couple like being near Bottega Louie, a popular Whole Foods grocery store and the recently opened Hotel Per La, which took over a lavishly refurbished 1920s building last occupied by another hotel that closed early in the pandemic.
“I can see business picking up,” Riley said. “This is an opportunity from a terrible tragedy like COVID. We wouldn’t have had this otherwise.”
A key factor keeping downtown teetering between recovery and a further downward slide appears to be discomfort with the streets and the sense that they are not as safe as they were before the pandemic.
The blocks close to Metro’s underground 7th Street/Metro Center station, where multiple light and heavy rail train lines meet, are among those that have changed the most since the pandemic as the Metro system struggles to combat rampant drug use and serious crimes such as robbery, rape and aggravated assault on its lines.
Thegrowing number of homeless people on the streets has been an issue in other cities too, said Cognian of Public School 213. His company also closed restaurants in Seattle and San Francisco because customers at their urban locations trickled away as unhoused people commandeered the sidewalks.
“Hopefully, we as a city, as a state, find a solution for the homeless,” he said. “If the homeless situation doesn’t get solved in some fashion that allows tourists, office workers and businesses to operate, it’s just going to bring down the area.”
Real estate broker Derrick Moore of CBRE, who specializes in matching restaurant and shop operators with landlords, said leasing of retail space downtown has improved in recent months, especially compared to the dark days of the 2020pandemic shutdown when downtown fell silent.
“It seems like ancient history,” Moore said, “but it was very devastating to one’s psyche.” And to downtown businesses.
In the wake of the COVID shutdown, downtown overall lost more than 100 food and beverage establishments with a combined footprint of more than 1 million square feet, Moore said.
“That’s restaurants, bars and lounges, juice bars, boutique coffee operators and even national brands,” Moore said. “A good portion of those remain vacant.”
Replacement tenants like Joyce restaurant are starting to come in, he said, with leasing and property showings picking up in the first quarter at a “resoundingly” busier pace than early 2022. Moore has taken potential tenants to the empty Public School space, where across the street the failed Standard Hotel just reopened under new management as the Delphi.
Faced with a challenging market, retail landlords have cut their asking rents as much as 50% from pre-COVID prices, Moore said, and more than doubled the amount they are willing to spend on tenant upgrades such as installing restaurant kitchens and restrooms, and providing periods of free rent.
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The financial district also faces a struggle of changing tastes, with many firms bypassing the gleaming skyscrapers that were the height of prestige in the late 20th century in favor of campus-style offices anda more laid-back vibe.
Even legal firms, long a stalwart in the financial district, are turning elsewhere in some cases. One firm established in February recently opted out of putting its office there.
“When we started to look at space it became very clear to us that locating in the financial district was a very different proposition than it used to be,” said Matt Umhofer, a partner at Umhofer, Mitchell & King. “Downtown has changed dramatically, and we wanted to rethink what it means to be a law firm in Los Angeles and let go of preconceived notions of needing to be in the financial district in order to be relevant.”
The fledgling firm opted instead for an office in Row DTLA, a campus of shops, restaurants and offices created out of century-old warehouses near the Arts District, east of the financial center, even though office rents in the Arts District are often higher than they are in the glitzy skyscrapers.
“The short version is, being in the financial district isn’t as cool as maybe it was in the past,” Umhofer said.
The spotty attendance of office workers has changed the character of business centers across the country, said Mark Grinis, leader of consulting firm EY‘s real estate, hospitality and construction practice.
An analysis by EY found that offices are being used at only 25% to 50% of the level they were before the pandemic.
“In some locations, three-quarters of the people that normally would have gone in, didn’t,” Grinis said. “People are not on the subway, ordering sandwiches at lunch or having a drink after work.”
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Vacant offices and storefronts can hinder recovery, he said, because people shy away from empty spaces.
“Three blocks of vacant houses in a residential neighborhood ultimately becomes a negative,” he said. “An office center is not that different.”
The physical appearance of vacancy becomes more alarming when graffiti, litter and grime follow and create a bad “multiplier effect,” Grinis said.
Stopping the spiral starts with making the streets safe and getting homeless residents into better housing, but there are also public policy decisions that could help landlords convert office buildings to housing if they are no longer competitive on the office leasing market.
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And the market has been brutal. Owners of some of downtown’s office high-rises have faced defaults, foreclosures and rushed sales in the face of falling demand, real estate data provider CoStar said.
The owner of two of the financial district’s premier office towers, 777 Tower and Gas Company Tower, said in February that it defaulted on loans tied to the buildings. Other high-rise owners are in similar straits.
In the face of rising vacancy rates, “those defaults could signal pain to come for the 69-million-square-foot downtown L.A. office market,” CoStar said.
Owners of buildings facing foreclosure sometimes don’t have enough money to build out new tenants’ offices, as is customary, which hinders strapped landlords from recovering financially.
Commercial landlords are getting hit on multiple fronts, said Jessica Lall, managing director of the downtown office of CBRE.
“What we’re seeing is a perfect storm when it comes to the office distress in downtown L.A.,” she said.
Loans on large-scale properties are maturing at a time when interest rates are high, making refinancing a challenge, Lall said. There is widespread uncertainty among tenants about how much space they will need to rent in the future if employees work remotely at least some of the time.
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Those issues are compounded by “the general perception around downtown being unsafe,” she said. “All urban centers are grappling with that issue right now.”
The downtown office vacancy rate — the share of total space that is unleased — climbed to 24% in the first quarter, up from 21.1% a year ago, according to CBRE. More empty space is coming, the brokerage said, pushing estimated availability to a daunting 30% as some companies shrink their offices or move away from downtown.
Law firm Skadden, for example, a large longtime tenant in downtown’s Bunker Hill district, has decided to move its offices to Century City .
The landlord of the U.S. Bank Tower, downtown’s tallest office tower at 72 stories, remains bullish on the market in spite of its troubles and recently spent $60 million to make the building more attractive to tenants by adding hotel-like amenities.
“People need offices,” said Marty Burger, chief executive of Silverstein Properties, which owns the tower. “Not every company in every industry needs an office, but the majority of them do.”
Among the reasons for offices are collaboration and education, he said. “How do you mentor the young folks who are coming up in your industry if the older people aren’t in the office for younger people to learn from? There is a whole ecosystem where you need people in an office now.”
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Companies may end up using their offices fewer days of the week than they used to as remote work and shortened schedules grow in popularity, he acknowledged: “Fridays may never be Fridays again.”
Burger says his optimism about downtown L.A.’s potential for improvement has a foundation in New York, where Silverstein built One World Trade Center on the site of the Twin Towers.
“After 9/11, everyone said that no one would ever live there or work there again,” Burger said.
In 2001, the neighborhood had about 20,000 residents and saw little activity after office hours. Now rebuilt, the neighborhood has about 75,000 residents and a greater mix of office tenants including businesses in tech and advertising in what was mostly a banking center before, Burger said.
“It’s a vibrant 24/7 community,” he said.
Many see this as the best future for L.A.’s financial district.
The city’s tight housing market combined with the downturn in office rentals opens the possibility to convert some office buildings into housing or hotels.
More residents and visitors would make the neighborhood more dynamic and better able to support restaurants, shops and nightlife, said Griffin, executive director of the privately funded Downtown Center Business Improvement District, a nonprofit coalition of more than 2,000 property owners.
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“If we trade some office for residential, that’s a good thing.”
The pandemic’s blow to the office market “is an opportunity that none of us ever imagined happening,” Welborne said, “transforming office buildings into residential buildings and reimagining our entire downtown.”
As metropolitan areas across the nation continue to grapple with challenges related to housing their homeless populations, the White House announced on Thursday the launch of a new initiative designed to address unsheltered homelessness.
“ALL INside” is part of a larger plan introduced by the Biden administration in December 2022 called “All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness,” which has a goal of reducing homelessness in America by 25% by the year 2025. The ALL INside initiative focuses on addressing homelessness issues in both key metropolitan areas and the nation’s most populous state.
“Through the ALL INside initiative, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) and its 19 federal member agencies will partner with state and local governments to strengthen and accelerate local efforts to get unsheltered people into homes in six places: Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix Metro, Seattle, and the State of California,” the White House said in its announcement.
The White House plans to support the initiative by assigning a dedicated federal official in each community to assist in the implementation of locally-designed homelessness strategies. It will also dedicate staff across the federal government to identify areas where regulatory relief would help to spur actions for reducing unsheltered homelessness.
Such staff will also “navigate federal funding streams, and facilitate a peer learning network across the communities,” the White House said.
The White House will also work to connect a network of philanthropists and the private sector to facilitate additional support for the measures.
A number of federal agencies will also play a part in supporting the initiative. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will, for example, work in concert with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to address barriers that the unhoused population may encounter when trying to obtain government-issued identification.
HUD will also “help communities troubleshoot barriers to connecting people to rental assistance or housing programs, as well as assist communities to use regulatory flexibilities to speed up the processes enabling residents to move into properties and transition into permanent housing,” the White House said.
Other agencies committed to supporting the new initiative include AmeriCorps, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as the Departments of Energy, Treasury and Transportation. The General Services Administration is also involved, but the specific details regarding how these agencies will contribute were not specified.
Amid a housing shortage that’s pushed low-income renters onto the streets and made it difficult for moderate earners to find affordable options, California lawmakers introduced new measures this year to mitigate high costs of living and prevent evictions.
Here are two bills to help renters that cleared a major hurdle and one proposal that flopped this week as the Legislature took action before a key deadline on Friday:
Passed: Limiting security deposits
The Assembly easily approved a bill to ban landlords from charging more than one month’s rent as a security deposit.
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Assemblymember Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat who authored Assembly Bill 12, said that surging rent has made it increasingly difficult for renters to pay security deposits, which can equal up to three months worth of rent, or more than $10,000 in some cities.
“This means a security deposit can be as much as a down payment on a house in many parts of the country,” Haney said before the Assembly approved the measure. “This pushes many families, including those with individuals making minimum wage, to either forgo necessities such as food and utilities or acquire more debt in order to be approved for housing.”
Groups representing landlords opposed the measure, arguing that the lack of affordable housing units, not security deposits, is the real issue facing California renters, and that AB 12 would harm homeowners.
“Charging security deposits allows for rental property providers to balance risk associated with renting out property,” the California Rental Housing Assn. wrote in a bill analysis. “Without the ability to collect enough in security deposit to cover potential damages, rental property providers may decide to remove their homes from the rental market — further exacerbating the housing supply crisis.”
The bill will now be considered by the Senate, which has until Sept. 14 to vote on it.
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Passed: Curbing evictions
In 2019, the Legislature hashed out a deal with landlords and realtors on a bill to establish new rules against evictions and cap yearly rent increases to 5% plus inflation.
But state Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) said those protections didn’t go far enough. Durazo introduced Senate Bill 567 this year to lower the rent cap to inflation, not to exceed 5% annually, and strengthen oversight of allowable evictions to ensure landlords aren’t exploiting what she described as loopholes in the law.
Facing pressure from business groups, apartment associations and moderate Democrats, Durazo later removed the rent cap provision of the bill. But advocates pushed hard to keep in accountability measures that would ensure landlords are not using evictions to remove a lower-paying tenant to later jack up the rent.
“We are all feeling the impact of the homeless crisis in our districts,” Durazo said during a Wednesday debate over the bill. “Part of what we have to do is stop the flow of families and people into homelessness.”
The changes Durazo made to the bill did little to appease the opposition. Republicans and a handful of Democrats opposed the measure as unfair and costly to homeowners.
“This bill will affect small rental property owners the most,” said Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones of Santee. “This bill goes a little bit too far.”
The measure narrowly passed the Senate and now heads to the Assembly.
Failed: Rent control expansion
Lawmakers this week killed one proposal to give tenants more protections through a measure to expand rent control.
State Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward) introduced Senate Bill 466 to update a 1995 law that limited rent control in California and allow for some newer buildings to become eligible for the price capping.
“We allow landlords to raise rents with impunity while taxpayers foot the bill for a problem that could be mitigated if jurisdictions were allowed to enact common-sense rent regulation policies,” Wahab said during a Wednesday Senate floor debate, while holding up a sleeping bag as a prop to make a point about the worsening homelessness crisis.
California voters have rejected an expansion of rent control twice in recent elections. Landlord groups, including the California Apartment Assn., contend that rent control stymies construction and discourages homeowners from putting new units on the market.
That argument prevailed in the Senate on Wednesday, when SB 466 failed by a large margin as several Democrats either withheld their votes or joined Republicans in opposing the bill.
It’s unusual for Democrats, who control the Legislature, to bring bills to the floor knowing they will fail because it exposes divisions among the ruling party. Wahab said she anticipated her bill would fall short, but that it was important to see who would go on the record in support.
“I think it’s important for advocates and activists to understand who will go up on a tough issue and who really cares about affordable housing,” Wahab said. “I thought it really mattered.”
If P-22,the late mountain lion, was the unofficial mascot of L.A., then Pinky the papier-mâché bird was the decidedly less majestic mascot of Eagle Rock, the small, hilly neighborhood tucked on the city’s northeast boundary.
No one’s quite sure how Pinky popped up. Around 2014, the bird appeared in a nest atop “Pillarhenge,” a famous (or infamous) series of columns built as the foundation of a would-be Great Recession-era housing development on Colorado Boulevard.
The development was never finished. Abandoned since the 2008 housing crisis, the property has served at times as a homeless encampment, dumping ground and playground for graffiti artists.
The pillars became a white elephant of the recession, an eyesore that locals have come to love, hate or begrudgingly accept. While Stonehenge evokes mysticism and Wiccans, Pillarhenge evokes confusion and dysfunction, serving as a concrete reminder of L.A.’s inability to deal with its housing woes.
The bird had a deeper fan base, becoming an Eagle Rock celebrity with a line of T-shirts and tapestries. For the last eight years, Pinky watched over a city that couldn’t quite figure out how to house itself.
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Then in April, Pinky was gone, stripped from its pillar-top nest. A sign perhaps? Was Pillarhenge coming down too?
Residents wondered what would rise in its place on 1332 Colorado Blvd., a long, narrow property that has never been developed.
Before the pillars, the property was known among locals as the place where an LAPD officer shot 18-year-old Mark Moser to death in 1978 after Moser’s pickup truck collided with an undercover police car at the end of a stakeout and subsequent car chase.
Resident Kevin Grace, Moser’s classmate at Eagle Rock High School, said the property has carried a bizarre mystique since the killing.
In March 2015, Grace co-founded “Friends of Pillarhenge Park,” a Facebook group tracking the property’s development and advocating for its potential use as a park. To date, the group has 824 members.
Developers have attempted to build something on the property over the last two decades, but never a park. Jay Vanos of Vanos Architects has been involved with the site since 2003, when he worked with a developer envisioning a 17-unit live-work space there.
It didn’t come to fruition and sold to another developer, who erected the now-famous pillars before going bankrupt. The lender took control for a few years before the property was sold to Imad Boukai for $1.9 million in 2016.
Boukai, chairman of Anaheim-based company General Procurement Inc., envisioned a four-story mixed-use development with 31 apartments above two levels of parking and commercial space.
He tapped Vanos, who planned a structure that would take up the vast majority of the relatively small lot, which covers just over half an acre. The plans became public in 2017, and due to its ship-like look, residents started calling it the Love Boat, a nod to the 1970s sitcom set on a cruise.
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“Let their imaginations take them where they will,” Vanos said.
As with most small towns subsumed by a big city, Eagle Rock residents felt protective of the community and wary of potential developers. They voiced strong opinions. Months of discourse and meetings with council members ensued, with some locals jeering at the nautical design and others expressing relief that the site would finally be developed.
“I’d rather suck it up and see it developed into a functional property,” said Grace, who was born in Eagle Rock. “Right now, it looks like something from a forgotten town. That’s worst-case scenario.”
The Eagle Rock Assn., a volunteer group founded in the 1980s aiming to guide the community’s growth in a sustainable way, published a letter in 2017 pointing out the significance of the site’s location. The property parallels a freeway offramp leading into Eagle Rock, so the Love Boat would be the first thing people see when entering the neighborhood.
The letter said the board was split on the design, but members support the development because the property had been “blighted and abandoned for so many years.”
Progress stalled again, and Boukai sold the unfinished property in 2022. He declined a request for comment. A source familiar with the deal suggested that building costs became too expensive since the lot is on a steep hill that requires significant grading and maintenance.
Next up was Ara Tchaghlassian, founder of American Tire Depot, a Vernon-based retailer with more than 100 locations. Tchaghlassian sold the tire company in 2021 and bought the Pillarhenge lot from Boukai months later for $2.765 million, real estate records show.
It appears the Love Boat will set sail after all,as Tchaghlassian is picking up where Boukai left off. He declined a request for comment, but a construction permit posted at the site shows the same plans mapped out by Boukai: a four-story development with 31 apartments, including three extremely low-income units, above two levels of parking and commercial space.
Grading began late last year, and Pinky was removed in the spring. The source said the complex will probably be completed in roughly two years.
“I’m sick of looking at it,” said Diane Lopez, who walks past Pillarhenge on her daily stroll. “Just build something. Anything.”
The pillars will remain, though they won’t be visible once the structure is completed, Vanos said.
As for why a developer would take on the headache of Pillarhenge, the answer is simple: the Transit-Oriented Communities Incentive Program.
L.A. has a housing shortage, and it needs a multifaceted approach to address it. As part of its housing element plan, the city is required to zone for a quarter-million homes by 2024.
To reach that goal, the city has introduced various incentives to encourage multifamily development as part of its Housing Element Rezoning Program, and the Transit-Oriented Communities incentive has been one its most successful tools.
The program encourages the development of affordable housing near bus and train stations by offering developers more density and less parking requirements for their projects if they build near transit centers.
According to the city’s planning department, over the last six years, 36% of new multifamily developments have taken advantage of the incentives, and the Pillarhenge project is one of them. It qualifies for the second tier of incentives, meaning it gets a 60% increase in the maximum number of units, an increase in floor-area ratio and a reduction in the number of required parking spaces.
“We need responsible, robust development that’s affordable and successful for Angelenos. Right now, we don’t have enough,” said Greg Good, a senior advisor on policy and external affairs for the Los Angeles Housing Department. “The Housing Department and the rest of the city are working relentlessly to facilitate and expedite that process, and we do that by creating programs that work.”
There are myriad reasons why developers abandon a project: running out of money, permitting problems, pandemics. During a housing crisis, it’s the city’s job to make multifamily housing a viable option for developers.
For Pillarhenge’s latest developer, the incentives may be enough to bring housing to the long-abandoned lot. For now, residents wait to see whether a Love Boat will be better than a Pillarhenge.
A bipartisan group of legislators from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have introduced a new bill, the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act (AHCIA), which could help spur the construction of two million affordable housing units over the next 10 years.
The bill has been introduced in both chambers and seeks to expand the low-income housing tax credit.
If passed, the bill would accomplish these goals through three primary methods: by increasing the number of credits allowed to each state by 50% over the next two years; by increasing the number of affordable housing projects that can be built using private activity bonds; and improving the Housing Credit program to better serve at-risk and underserved communities.
Communities that could qualify as “at-risk” or “underserved” include veterans, domestic violence victims, formerly homeless students, certain Native American communities and rural residents.
The effort is being led by House members Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), Don Beyer (D-Va.), Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.). In the House, the bill has more than 60 bipartisan co-sponsors. Taking point on the measure in the Senate is Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
In the House, the bill is designated as H.R. 3238 while the Senate version is S. 1557.
“Affordable housing is vital for families throughout Illinois and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit continues to be an important tool to drive investment in the affordable rental housing market,” said Rep. LaHood in a statement. “This bipartisan bill will modernize the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and help expand our housing supply, strengthening communities and supporting economic development in Illinois and across the county.”
Sen. Cantwell — whose state recently took action on its housing priorities through state-level legislation — added that the core priority is to address housing costs.
“This legislation would increase the federal resources allocated to each state, cut the red tape that hinders financing for workforce housing, better serve people most in need, and ultimately add more than 64,000 affordable units to Washington’s housing stock over the next decade,” she said.
According to a brief by the ACTION Campaign, the AHCIA has been introduced in each of the previous four U.S. Congresses and earned bipartisan support each time. Portions of the bill have been enacted over the years, but it has not made it into law in a comprehensive fashion.
Both the Senate and House versions were introduced into their respective chambers on May 11.
By Soko Directory Team / Published July 6, 2023 | 8:32 am
KEY POINTS
NCBA mortgages offer home loans in Kenya of up to 105 percent of the value of the property for persons seeking to acquire, construct, and finance property in major urban and rural areas within major towns.
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It’s where the cozy warmth of a well-loved couch embraces you like a comforting hug, and the walls listen to your secrets without judgment. Your home is the fortress where you battle the chaos of the outside world, armed with blankets and remote controls, and emerge victorious as the reigning champion of relaxation.
Related Content: Dear Entrepreneur, Here Are Reasons Why NCBA Is The Bank To Go To For Your Financial Needs
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Related Content: Is Loop By NCBA Bank Kenya Worth The Hype?
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The Steps
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Related Content: NCBA Bank Kenya’s Citizenship Program: Branching Out For A Greener Future
What are the key features that make them tick?
Mortgage loan facilities of the loan amount in local currency, 1.5 percent of the loan amount in foreign currency.
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Related Content: Valine Akoth Crowned Overall Winner Of The NCBA Sponsored Mug Golf Tournament At Thika Barracks Golf Club
About Soko Directory Team
Soko Directory is a Financial and Markets digital portal that tracks brands, listed firms on the NSE, SMEs and trend setters in the markets eco-system.Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/SokoDirectory
and on Twitter: twitter.com/SokoDirectory
A slew of ambitious housing legislation has emerged recently in states as varied as Maine, Utah and Washington. Many of the proposals aim to loosen zoning restrictions with the goal of addressing housing shortages. Perhaps not surprisingly, California is mentioned in many of the resulting conversations and debates, and not in a positive light.
Policymakers and advocates elsewhere have invoked the Golden State as a warning: We must pass pro-housing policies to avoid ending up like California. One think tank in Montana went so far as to advocate repealing “California-style zoning” to make starter homes more feasible.
At the same time, however, California has become a national model among many of the same housing advocates for its recent efforts to fix past mistakes. Since 2016, state legislators have passed more than 100 housing-related laws with the intent of encouraging the construction of more affordable and market-rate homes. These laws have fundamentally changed the landscape of housing rules and regulations throughout the state and helped inspire similar reforms in other places.
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A new law to allow accessory dwelling units in Maine draws on California’s example, and pending legislation in Oregon would create local housing targets similar to California’s goals for regions and cities. But even as advocates and lawmakers around the country echo our reforms, a key question remains: Are California’s new laws actually producing more housing here?
The short answer is no. In the aggregate, despite the deluge of legislation, annual building permits have remained stubbornly stagnant at just over 100,000 homes annually for the last few years — well below the 180,000 a year state officials say we need to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, homelessness has only increased statewide, and rents and home prices remain at historic highs.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. And in fact, many of the recently passed laws have had a clear, positive effect.
Reforms to ease restrictions on accessory dwelling units — so-called granny flats, backyard cottages and other secondary dwellings — have led to a significant increase in this type of housing. Just six years ago, such units made up an insignificant share of home building; today, they account for 1 in 5 building permits.
Similarly, legislation streamlining California’s notoriously lengthy approval processes has helped get more housing built faster, particularly affordable and mixed-income developments. Enhancements to the state’s density bonus programs, which allow developers to add more units to a project if some are designated as below market rate, have also helped.
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Other changes are setting the table for significant new home construction in (we hope) the near future. Specifically, technical but critical changes to the arcane California laws and regulations that govern local housing production, such as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the Housing Element Law and the Housing Accountability Act, have forced cities to plan for substantially more housing in more realistic ways. These reforms have also taken away many of the tools used to delay and block approval and construction of housing.
While not necessarily headline-grabbing, all these changes signal an important shift in the ways cities and counties do their part to plan for and actively encourage new home building — as evidenced by the Los Angeles City Council’s vote this week to zone for 135,000 more units in Hollywood and downtown. And some cities have embraced this shift, treating state-level requirements as a floor, not a ceiling. San Diego, for example, has expanded on baseline accessory dwelling unit and density bonus requirements while empowering staff to embrace a culture of “yes” when it comes to getting housing approved.
California’s housing crisis should indeed serve as a cautionary tale for other states, a warning to actively increase supply before it’s too late. Despite the recent reforms, broader challenges still threaten to stymie California’s apparent progress, among them stubbornly high construction costs and uncertain economic conditions.
But even if it takes some time to realize tangible results, the important work of creating a new housing paradigm in California should not be discounted. We are finally moving in the right direction, and policymakers in other states can learn from our successes as well as our struggles.
David Garcia is the policy director of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Bill Fulton is a Terner Center fellow and a former San Diego planning director.
Robert Lawrence woke up on May 8 and found an eviction notice plastered on the door of the rent-stabilized apartment he has lived in since 2021.
“120 DAY NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF TENANCY,” it said.
Owners of the Barrington Plaza said it would evict all residents in the 712-unit complex in West Los Angeles so that it could add fire sprinklers and safety upgrades following two significant fires in 10 years.
Lawrence and many of his neighbors in the complex jumped into organizing to stop what would be one of the largest evictions in the city in years.
On Monday, the Barrington Plaza Tenants Assn. sued the complex’s owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., accusing the company of misusing a California law that allows landlords to evict tenants if they exit the rental market. Lawyers and advocates involved in the case warn that if the owners follow through with the eviction of over 500 tenants, landlords of other affordable apartments may do the same — and have in the past.
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“It’s a devastating joke for a lot of people who have managed to strike gold with being able to get an affordable home in Los Angeles,” said Nima Farahani, a lawyer representing the Barrington Plaza Tenants Assn.
The Ellis Act was created in 1985 to enable landlords to exit the rental business, often to convert apartments into condominiums. Landlords in Los Angeles have evicted tenants using the Ellis Act from over 28,000 units since 2001, according to data gathered from the city Housing Department by the Coalition for Economic Survival, a grassroots policy organization involved in the lawsuit.
Advocates have routinely accused landlords of abusing the act to transform older buildings — including rent-controlled units — into luxury apartments.
“They don’t need to make this many people homeless for an updating project,” Farahani said, noting the building has over 150 vacant units.
Eric Rose, a public relations representative for Douglas Emmett, said Barrington Plaza’s owner is unsure how it will use the apartments after renovations.
“To the extent that the units were brought back onto the rental market, the owner would follow all obligations relative to former tenants as provided in those state and local rules,” Rose said in an email to the L.A. Times.
Landlords must compensate tenants if they rent out an apartment after two years of evicting residents with the Ellis Act, but their liability decreases with time.
Lawrence works in entertainment and described his fellow residents — including hairdressers, dog walkers, waiters and an Uber driver — as people who “work in service industries for our more affluent neighbors.”
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Advocates like Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, say that Douglas Emmett will likely reopen the units after renovation and jack up rents. Gross said this will open the “floodgates” for other landlords to follow suit.
“If we do not prevail, this literally puts a bull’s-eye on the back of every rent-controlled tenant in the city and state, who now will be vulnerable to landlords like this filing bogus Ellis evictions to get them out to raise rent,” Gross said.
Gross notes that Douglas Emmett donated $50,000 to fight Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax, which voters ultimately passed and generates funding for affordable housing and homeless prevention.
In the coming weeks, Farahani said that lawyers plan to ask the court to stop all evictions until the lawsuit is resolved.
On the day of the eviction announcement, tenants found what Lawrence called the “iconic” Barrington Plaza sign painted over in black.
On Google Earth it looks like a stunning opportunity: six acres of vacant land surrounded by single-family homes in a West Valley neighborhood.
After being abandoned to shoulder-high weeds for nearly a decade, the former elementary school site in Woodland Hills is now a target for development.
But it’s not being scoped out for million-dollar homes like those around it. Instead, a group of prominent civic leaders has identified the parcel as a prime location for shelter or housing for homeless people.
It’s on a list commissioned by the Committee for Greater L.A. to prod City Hall to use surplus government land for homeless housing.
“If you talked to people in the city … they will argue that it is a myth, that all the land that is available is really not appropriate for this use,” said Miguel Santana, chairman of the committee, which is made up of leaders in philanthropy, business and government.
In releasing a database of 126 proposed sites online, the committee sought to keep up pressure on Mayor Karen Bass to follow through on her campaign pledge to build 1,000 beds on public land in her first year in office.
The study‘s authors said they identified more than enough usable parcels to support 1,000 beds of shelter and permanent housing, and proposed a timeline to produce the housing within six months.
Bass has acknowledged the committee’s work but said she has her own list of properties and her own timeline. And the timeline is longer.
In an open letter, Bass, whose third executive order required the city administrative officer to compile an inventory of city-owned land suitable for housing, said her staff is poring over a list of more than 3,300 parcels and has had preliminary discussions with City Council members to gauge their reaction to specific sites.
She said they have identified sites to accommodate 500 interim housing beds and have submitted them to the state to be part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency small-homes program. If approved, she said, they could be built by July 2024.
But Bass said she wants to rethink the city’s approach to permanent housing on its lands to develop a “bigger and bolder” program. She set a goal of January 2025 to come up with standards for identifying suitable land, community engagement strategies, provisions for infrastructure investments, new financing methods and innovative approaches to construction.
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“My focus over the remainder of my first term in office will be to make the disposition and development of City owned land faster, cheaper, and more streamlined, and to innovate in the financing and delivery of affordable housing without reliance on traditional subsidy methods,” Bass wrote.
While working primarily from the city’s own list, Bass said, she will use the committee’s study to advance her goal of incorporating surplus land owned by regional and state agencies.
The study, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Pacific Urbanism, analyzed variables including slope, zoning and proximity to utilities to winnow down 65,000 parcels owned by city, county, state, federal and other agencies such as Metro and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Dario Rodman-Alvarez, an architect whose firm Pacific Urbanism founded the nonprofit, said he and his staff then reviewed each of the nearly 2,900 survivors to verify that it would be suitable for a model development consisting of 36 units interspersed with community gardens.
From those, they hand-picked 121 to give officials “enough options to make decisions but not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options.”
A Times spot check of sites on that list, however, showed how frequently political impediments can confound even the best analysis.
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The former Oso Elementary property in the West Valley, for example, has long been a point of community contention. Residents of the area, called Carlton Terrace, said that they want something done with the eyesore — most suggested a park — but that homeless housing would be unacceptable.
“It’s never going to happen,” said Darryl Lutz, a 20-year resident across from one corner of the vacant land. “The homeowners here are heavily involved in local government.”
Joyce Norman, an emergency room physician, said she would not oppose a shelter except that she doubted it would come with adequate services, especially transportation. The nearest shopping is downhill a half-mile away.
“If I were a homeless person, I would want to live near a street with stores,” she said.
Not to mention, the Los Angeles Unified School District may have its own plans for the property. It was included in a 2020 proposal to evaluate 10 properties for development as housing for district employees.
A district spokesperson would not give an update on that proposal, instead providing a statement that the district “is currently evaluating our underutilized properties to help develop a plan that most effectively addresses the needs of our district and the communities that we serve.”
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To sidestep possible roadblocks caused by differing governmental agendas, the committee study identified 46 sites, all owned by the city, as highest priority.
But those were not free of roadblocks either.
One — 2.1 acres of vacant land in Sylmar surrounded by a neighborhood of single-family homes, condos and apartments — is already slated for affordable housing, but the first developer chosen by the city backed out, and the Los Angeles Housing Department is again preparing a request for proposals.
“We have been working urgently to ensure this property is used for housing and are exploring options for the best site use with the least amount of downtime possible,” Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez said.
That’s the bureaucratic maze that Bass must cut through.
Her program will not only identify sites but also hand them to developers ready to go, said Jenna Hornstock, Bass’ housing deputy.
“So rather than put out these sites and say, ‘Now go out and entitle them and compete for money,’ it’s, ‘Here’s the site. We either have entitlement or a path to entitlement and here is a financing plan that we will commit to,’ ” Hornstock said.
The idea of using surplus government land to speed up and lower the cost of homeless housing goes back to 2016 when committee Chairman Santana, who was then the city administrative officer, included it in an ambitious plan to address homelessness.
Santana’s office examined more than 500 city-owned properties that found 129 sites potentially large enough and in suitable zones for homeless housing. All but 10 were city-owned parking lots.
Few of them worked out.
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When then-City Controller Ron Galperin reviewed the topic in a 2022 report critical of the city’s “fragmented” management of surplus land, he found that 11 of the city’s bridge home shelters and 16 projects in development under the city’s $1.2-billion HHH housing bond were on city-owned land.
Bass, in her letter, said 14 more are in design or negotiation, but concurred that it was not enough.
Galperin highlighted 26 city-owned properties that he considered suitable for shelter projects, either bridge housing, safe parking, safe sleeping villages or tiny home villages. But like the earlier study, it was heavily weighted with parking lots.
Public parking lots, which also make up slightly more than half of the committee’s priority list, are often problematic because they serve local businesses and generate revenue for the city.
One parking lot on the list is in the business core of Leimert Park. Converting it to housing would only exacerbate a lack of adequate parking in the “Mecca of Black culture in Los Angeles,” a spokesman for Councilwoman Heather Hutt said in an email reply to The Times.
“Councilwoman Hutt cannot support homeless housing on these parking lots because the community will never support it,” the statement said. “The residents have demonstrated a strong commitment to preserving the authenticity and character of Leimert Park, and the parking lots serve that authenticity and character.”
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At the other extreme, a city parking lot on 87th Street a block east of Broadway has no current value to the depressed business district where several vacant lots and abandoned buildings are owned by an investor who has held them since the 1990s and rebuffed all suitors.
Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who said he rejected all the other sites the mayor suggested, would like to put housing on that lot, and another one west of Broadway, but only if the city would seize the adjacent privately owned properties to provide space for more units.
After years of unsuccessful overtures to the property owners, Harris-Dawson said he is ready to reconsider the city’s long-standing reluctance to use eminent domain.
“You could make a village there,” he said.
With a district dotted with privately owned vacant lots, Harris-Dawson said he thinks there are far more appropriate options than the few government parcels.
The Pacific Urbanism study acknowledged the potential of privately held land and included five examples, including the parking lot at Hebrew Union College and the expanse of parking around Dodger Stadium.
Some organizations, such as churches, may be open to using their land for purposes that align with their mission, it said, but made no mention of eminent domain.
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“For every public lot that’s vacant, I can take you to two privately held lots that are as good or better for housing,” Harris-Dawson said. “We literally have people living in the streets. Maybe after 35 years we intervene and help you find a different investment to make.”
By publishing its study, the Committee for Greater L.A. intends to force public officials to be more transparent, said committee member Sarah Dusseault, a former commissioner of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“If you want to keep this surface parking lot as a surface parking lot because it earns $20,000 a year, God bless,” Dusseault said.
“But you should be transparent about that as a policy choice instead of the policy choices being in the dark.”