Homeowners Suffer More With Red Line

* The 60 homeowners in Terrace on the Park and Universal Park Condominium complexes wish to thank you for running Doug Smith’s insightful article “Metro Red Line Is Invading Shangri-La” (June 19).

The invasion of our “Shangri-La” hardly expresses the depth of our fears and concerns. While the article was fair and well-written, three-quarters of it focused on the plight of our neighbors, the renters, who are upset over when and how much money they will get to move. Most of us would gladly change places with them in a second! We are extremely concerned with this project because we own property.

The Universal City Metro Red Line Station and a six-lane connector road to help facilitate the great influx of traffic is being built on our street. We are being left isolated, with our entire neighborhood around us being condemned.

We will have to endure six to eight years of construction hell. We are deeply concerned about safety and security, noise and pollution, traffic and congestion, and the general disarray and impact to our lives that this Metro rail station has produced. We have families and elderly people among us, for whom this situation is simply intolerable. Our fears are not unfounded, given the incredible disruptions connected with the construction of Metro Rail.

We have homeowners with families who now wish to purchase a home who have been turned down by real estate agents who know that they cannot sell their properties. Sure, we can give our units away, but is that fair? Just as numerous businesses on Wilshire have gone bankrupt during the construction of the Red Line, we will face a sharp decrease in our property value and be hostages in our “neighborhood.”

The MTA has agreed to do a study to see if it is feasible to purchase our homes, but what do we do if they say no? This study has already been delayed by almost four months, and yet their construction continues as planned and on schedule.

Soon our neighbors the renters will be gone. With the money they receive from the MTA, some will have moved to nicer apartments, others will buy homes. Here we sit, having lost all our money in the homes that we purchased years ago, living through a virtual construction nightmare.

Please understand that we are not against mass transit, and we believe that this is a long overdue benefit for those who live in this beautiful city. We just believe that MTA has not been fair or just with us. We are tired of not knowing what our futures hold with respect to this project and our homes. We want MTA to immediately acknowledge the impossible circumstances in which they have placed us homeowners and get their study underway at once.

ARIEL NACHMAN

SUSAN ZWERMAN

The writers are the presidents of, respectively, the Terrace on the Park Homeowners Assn. and the Universal Park Homeowners Assn.