Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered metropolis officers on Friday to organize a listing of the town’s surplus and unused properties over the subsequent three weeks, the primary main step in figuring out which of them will likely be used for constructing homeless housing.
Bass, in her third govt directive on homelessness since taking workplace in December, stated she desires metropolis officers to vet every of these websites by March 31 to find out which might work greatest for momentary or everlasting housing — an aggressive timetable for a metropolis that has been struggling for years to answer the disaster.
The mayor intends to hunt comparable data over the approaching months from the town’s three proprietary companies — the Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles World Airports and the Division of Water and Energy — which can face some restrictions on how their property is used. She additionally will search to construct on websites owned by the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the place she controls 4 of 13 board seats.
“We’ve already had important and really promising discussions with Metro about setting sizable quantities of land apart to be used of everlasting housing, for interim housing and reasonably priced housing typically,” stated Mercedes Marquez, the mayor’s chief of housing and homelessness options. “These discussions are already commenced and transferring ahead in a really constructive method.”
The mayor, who has promised to convey 17,000 individuals indoors in her first 12 months, issued her order one week after the Metropolis Council voted to permit a brand new 168-room lodge to go up on a longtime redevelopment web site close to USC — one whose growth was negotiated by the town.
Opponents of the lodge, which is deliberate on land as soon as occupied by a metropolis library, stated such publicly owned property ought to have been reserved for reasonably priced housing. They’re nonetheless hoping Bass will intervene.
“We expect the mayor ought to do all the pieces she will be able to to uphold the spirit of her directive and be sure that reasonably priced housing is constructed at this location,” stated Maria Patiño Gutierrez, director of equitable growth for land use on the nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Simply Financial system.
Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl stated the mayor doesn’t at the moment have a place on the lodge.
Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents the realm the place that web site is situated, spoke in favor of that mission final month, telling his colleagues it has been within the works for a number of years — and would supply his South L.A. district with its first unionized lodge and different group advantages.
“[This is] the very uncommon event that I’ll get up in protection of a personal developer, a personal industrial developer, over reasonably priced housing,” he stated on the time.
Friday’s order is the most recent in a sequence of efforts by the mayor to confront homelessness shortly and aggressively. Since mid-December, her Inside Protected initiative has moved greater than 200 individuals dwelling on the streets of Venice, Del Rey, Hollywood and elements of South Los Angeles into momentary housing. She is just the most recent elected official at Metropolis Corridor to scope out publicly owned land for homeless housing.
Final 12 months, former Metropolis Controller Ron Galperin launched a report figuring out 26 vacant metropolis properties as potential websites for shelters or reasonably priced housing, together with public parking heaps in Lincoln Heights, Leimert Park and Reseda.
Galperin’s checklist additionally included the Parker Middle web site, which as soon as served because the LAPD’s headquarters, in addition to the property often known as Marlton Sq. close to Crenshaw Boulevard in South L.A., which has lengthy been eyed for personal industrial growth.
Aides to Bass say the upcoming evaluation will likely be extra complete than the one carried out final 12 months, providing a “deeper look” on the metropolis’s vacant or surplus land.
Bass has spent a number of weeks visiting publicly owned homeless housing developments, often with federal officers in tow. On Wednesday, she and Jeff Olivet, govt director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, visited Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, a homeless housing complicated constructed on county-owned land as soon as reserved for a jail facility.
A day later, officers within the San Fernando Valley celebrated the completion of the town’s eleventh “tiny house” facility, which occupies public right-of-way that runs alongside Metrolink railroad tracks.
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Marquez, the mayor’s homelessness czar, stated the deliberate initiatives could possibly be constructed utilizing modular parts. She dismissed the thought of placing tiny houses on these metropolis properties, saying she is targeted on building of long-term items with their very own kitchens and loos.
“I’m not constructing shelters,” she added.
In recent times, a few of the metropolis’s efforts to discover publicly owned land for homeless services have been met with a backlash.
Two years in the past, then-Councilmember Mike Bonin requested metropolis coverage analysts to look at whether or not momentary homeless services could possibly be constructed on or subsequent to park and recreation services in his district, together with Dockweiler Seaside in Playa del Rey and Will Rogers State Seaside in Pacific Palisades. That request drew opposition from an array of neighborhood leaders.
Metropolis officers ultimately issued a four-page report labeling a majority of these places as infeasible, largely as a result of they lacked enough infrastructure or had been already closely utilized by households for park and recreation actions.
Marquez stated Bass has no intention of placing homeless services on parks or recreation websites.