Editorial: Mayor Bass has no more excuses for delaying Venice Dell homeless housing - Los Angeles Times
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Opinion

Editorial: Mayor Bass has no more excuses for delaying Venice Dell homeless housing

A woman sits in a tent on a city sidewalk while another woman kneels outside the tent taking notes
Monica Quevado, 43, sitting in her tent, gives information to Rebekah Musser, a homelessness outreach worker, on Venice Boulevard in June 2023.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
By The Times Editorial Board
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Now that some of the most vocal opponents to the much-needed Venice Dell homeless and low-income housing development in Venice have lost their lawsuit to block the project, will this be the last hurdle it has to face in a long and unnecessary obstacle course set by Los Angeles city officials?

It should be.

VENICE, CA - JANUARY 4, 2023 - - A homeless man salvages items left from an abandoned encampment on Hampton Ave. in Venice on January 4, 2023. Many of the homeless, who once lived in the encampments, were given housing at the LA Inn and Suites as part of the Inside Safe initiative. Over a dozen other homeless were taken from the area and given housing at the same hotel. Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Traci Park announced that the Mayor's new Inside Safe initiative was underway in Venice. Outreach has begun to people living in encampments surrounding the A Bridge Home site at the intersection of Sunset Avenue and Pacific Avenue, and people who had accepted housing were taken by bus to a hotel in Los Angeles. Inside Safe is a new, citywide, proactive housing-led strategy to bring people inside from tents and encampments for good, and to prevent encampments from returning. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Opinion

Editorial: When will L.A leaders stop getting in the way of a Venice homeless housing project?

Venice Dell will provide much-needed homeless and affordable housing. So why isn’t Mayor Karen Bass championing this project, instead of allowing more delays?

For more than a year, the project was slowed down because city agencies stopped working with the developers, Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corp., as they tried to finish contracts and parking garage designs, obtain permission to start relocating and compensating tenants in a four-unit building on the project site, and to get the necessary development approvals from the California Coastal Commission.

The 140-unit building, with four units for staff and the other 136 divided evenly between apartments for homeless people and apartments for lower-income individuals, will sit on a city-owned parking lot near the coast. This is one of those rare open swaths of land that city officials dream of using for homeless and affordable housing. The project was approved twice by the City Council, first in 2021 then in 2022, and the two nonprofits have an official development agreement.

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Los Angeles, CA - February 16: Mayor Karen Bass, left, Councilmember Katy Young Yaroslavsky, Director of Homelessness Strategies, and Annetta Wells, the mayor's director of community engagement , visit a homeless encampment behind the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, to observe "Inside Safe" in action moving houseless to a motel on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Opinion

Editorial: Homeless people need housing everywhere. Including down the street from your house

Los Angeles City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky did the right thing when she continued to support a homeless housing project amid local opposition.

But last year, Becky Dennison, the executive director of Venice Community Housing, said that city officials in the Bureau of Engineering and the Department of Transportation told her the city attorney’s office had instructed them to stop working with her. And they did, delaying critical work needed to move the project forward.

The office of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, who was on record opposing this project before she was elected and took office in late 2022, began looking for excuses to derail it — all of which have been rebutted by the developers’ attorneys.

Now that the lawsuit against the city and developers has been rejected, it’s time for the city to stop stalling. Superior Court Judge Richard L. Fruin, Jr. ruled against the claims brought by the Coalition for Safe Coastal Development, the most substantial one being that the development shouldn’t have been granted an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act’s reporting requirements. The judge found the project properly used a state law that allows exemptions for supportive housing projects in the city of Los Angeles that get certain state or local funds.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 18: Laura Ayala, left, a tenant who lives with her four children in a two bedroom apartment, signs up for an information seminar on tenants rights with Bianca Lopez, 25, right, an outreach worker with We Are Los Angeles, a project of the Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles, on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. The Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles, a nonprofit closely associated with City Hall, shifted its focus last year to preventing homelessness through preventing evictions. Outreach workers who visit neighborhoods across Los Angeles where tenants are at risk of eviction and seek to connect those tenants with information and resources to help them keep their homes. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Opinion

Editorial: Here’s how Los Angeles can help prevent people from falling into homelessness

Rental subsidies, eviction defense and help finding new housing are prevention efforts that could help vulnerable people from falling into homelessness.

Another lawsuit that claims the city improperly transferred the land is expected to go to court soon. But it seems unlikely to go far since the land has not technically been transferred to the developers yet and that process won’t start until some time closer to construction.

City officials have finally run out of excuses to stop working with the developers on moving the project along.

This project has already spent years in development. It’s frustrating enough that building affordable housing often requires years of cobbling together financing and approvals. It’s infuriating that any official in the city of Los Angeles would add to that timeline by putting off the work they need to do so it can get built.

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A woman cycles past a homeless encampment at Venice Beach, on June 30, 2021 in Venice, California, where an initiative began this week offering people in homeless encampments a voluntary path to permanent housing. - Homeless encampments at the famed Venice Beach has grown during the coronavirus pandemic, turning into a political flashpoint, with signs posted on trees warning of a July 2 clearance of all homeless encampments ahead of the July 4th weekend. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Opinion

Opinion: A job can’t always lift someone out of homelessness. What more is needed?

One man’s experience points to an answer: He was able to rent a home not through employment alone but because he reached the age for Social Security and Medicare.

Mayor Karen Bass has said she is determined to get homeless people inside and supports the development of more affordable housing. Yet she has waffled on her commitment to this project, saying last fall that she was in favor of some kind of affordable housing there but deferred to Traci Park, the council member whose district includes Venice and has long been opposed to the current project.

She must do better than that. There is very little affordable housing in Venice, and this project is desperately needed. If Bass truly wants affordable and homeless housing built in the city — and she has made every indication that this is her goal — she will have to push back against community groups and some City Council members who simply don’t want it in certain places and will roll out endless excuses.

It’s time for Bass and other city officials to not just stop slow-walking this project. They should put it on the fast track.

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