In Venice Beach, it’s taken nearly a decade to not build low-income housing

I’m not sure we‘ve ever witnessed as weird a standoff as the one playing out in Venice Beach, where a proposal to replace a parking lot with 120 units of housing for low-income and homeless people has been:

• Approved unanimously twice, in 2021 and 2022, by the Los Angeles City Council.
  
• Approved unanimously in 2024 by the notoriously censorious California Coastal Commission.
  
• Rejected unanimously in 2024 by an obscure city board that oversees parking lot operations.
  
• Declared, therefore, dead by the local council member, Traci Park, who vowed during her campaign to kill it, even though she was elected after the project was approved.
  
• Declared, to the contrary, quite alive by the local county supervisor, Lindsay Horvath, who recently earmarked $3 million for it.
  
• Given $42.5 million by the state, which has threatened Los Angeles with the possibility of sanctions, including the dreaded “builder’s remedy” if the city does not allow the project to move forward.

“I don’t think there is any precedent of a project being so far along, then being undone by the city,” said Becky Dennison, former executive director of Venice Community Housing, developer of the Venice Dell project along with the Hollywood Community Housing Corp. Dennison now works as housing justice policy manager at the Legal Aid Foundation.

For nearly a decade, residents have chewed over the project in at least 18 community meetings. Opponents have filed a handful of lawsuits, all of which have been decided in favor of the development.

Currently, Venice Dell is at the center of three court cases. One, filed by Public Counsel and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, alleges that Park and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto have violated state fair housing laws by “covertly thwarting” the project. Another, filed by the developers, asks the city to pay $10 million for breaching its contract because, of course, the city has breached the contract. The absurd third suit, filed by the city attorney, accuses the nonprofit developers of failing to build the project. (!)

“This project needs to move forward,” Horvath told me. “The litigation needs to stop. We have to create housing, no two ways about it. And the state is making clear that if we don’t, they will pass legislation that will take away local control. At some point you have to call the question, and actually solve the problem.”

Park has proposed instead using the Venice Dell site as a transportation hub, and moving the affordable housing project one block east to a lot near the Venice Library that’s now home to a weekly farmers market. Frankly, I find it hard to believe this suggestion is made in good faith; the people who vehemently oppose Venice Dell are not going to embrace a slightly scaled down project one block over.

Park’s hostility to the project is actually kind of epic. She has called it “a hideous, massive prison structure” that “looks like a damn cruise ship crashed into the neighborhood.” She has likened the saga to a bad boyfriend who won’t go away.

She has also, bizarrely, accused the developers of running a scam. “This was never about homelessness or creating truly affordable housing,” Park said in October. “It was about a developer who didn’t think the rules should apply to them, one who will literally stop at nothing to get their hands on our land.” (I requested an interview with Park through her spokesman, but was rebuffed.)

The northern end of Venice Beach’s Grand Canal, with the public boat launch on the right. The proposed Venice Dell low-income housing project would straddle this part of the waterway, which bisects a city parking lot two blocks from the beach.

(Robin Abcarian/ Los Angeles Times)

It’s a shame that Mayor Karen Bass, whose signature cause is ending homelessness, has refused to take any leadership here, instead allowing Park and Feldstein-Soto to impede the much-approved project.

As a neighbor, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Venice Dell. The site is a drab city parking lot bisected by the northern end of Venice’s famous Grand Canal, with a sloping “public” boat launch that is currently inaccessible. (With the exception of an annual Christmas parade, few people “boat” in the canals, which are very shallow at low tide.)

On one hand, our city desperately needs housing and the kinds of supportive services that Venice Dell envisions. Though the beachside encampments that sprouted during the pandemic are long gone, Venice Beach still has one of the largest homeless populations in the city. On the other hand, putting a couple of bulky buildings designed by a famous architect known for his brutalist aesthetic in the middle of funky Venice Beach feels, I don’t know, off.

Also — and this is the NIMBY in me talking — who wants to contend with construction traffic and noise for the two to three years it could take to complete the project, and then, of course, the increased neighborhood density it would create? In addition to housing, the plan includes a new parking structure, plus studio space for artists, room for social service providers and a community room. And yet we have a moral obligation to help end a scourge that has an outsized effect on this beachside neighborhood.

Critics, who have dubbed Venice Dell the “Monster on the Median,” say the cost, estimated at about $1 million per unit, is absurdly high. That it would diminish much-needed parking for beachgoers (only during construction) and that it is located in a potentially deadly tsunami zone (well, yes, but so is the whole neighborhood and that hasn’t stopped anyone from buying or building).

Others carp that low-income and homeless people have no right to subsidized housing in one of the most expensive parts of the city, an argument as specious as it is elitist.

“The cost of keeping people unhoused in this city is more expensive,” said Allison Riley, Venice Community Housing co-executive director. “The cost per unit is not outside the realm of projects being built in this city, and the fact that we have had so many years of legal fights only increases the cost. Every day the cost of construction is going up.”

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