Will Community Resistance Prevent Building the Homeless Housing Voters Have Funded?
Contested lot at Lorena and East 1st Street in Boyle Heights, proposed site of a 49 unit apartment house, half for mentally ill homeless people. El Mercado shopping center (at the right of the photo) has led the opposition to the project and been supported by Jose Huizar, chair of the Los Angeles City Council Planning and Land Use Management Committee.
Leslie Evans
Last November 76% of Los Angeles voters said yes to Proposition HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure to build 10,000 units of homeless housing over the next ten years. While the vast majority of Angelinos are ready to spend money get the homeless off the streets, it is a very different story when it comes to where to put them. It seems that most people want them somewhere else than in their neighborhood. A disturbing test case has been a proposed 49-unit apartment house at east 1st and Lorena Streets in Boyle Heights, which has been stalled for three years by community opposition and reluctance by LA City officials to confront the critics and move forward.
Dora Leong Gallo
The developer is the venerable A Community of Friends (ACOF), headed by CEO Dora Leong Gallo. ACOF is a nonprofit affordable housing developer focused on permanent supportive housing for homeless people with mental health, addiction and other special needs or disabilities. They have built or bought and rehabbed 40 properties in the LA area that house almost 1,600 formerly homeless people.
The location for their proposed Lorena Plaza is a one-acre empty lot owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. To the west is the Evergreen Cemetery, whose residents surely can’t object to who might be living next door. To the east, however, is El Mercado, a combined market, restaurant, nightclub, and craft store. The owner, Tony Rosado, has bitterly fought the homeless housing project, fearing that mentally ill residents will interfere with his business. The plan is to have 10,000 feet of commercial space on the first floor, and only half of the 49 units are to go to mentally ill homeless persons. ACOF provides case management services for its formerly homeless tenants with mental problems.
The project has been approved by Metro, the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council, and by the Los Angeles Planning Department. Rosado has appealed Planning’s decision to the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee (PLUM), chaired by Councilmember Jose Huizar. There, Huizar, generally an advocate for the homeless, has sided with El Mercado and kept the issue off the PLUM agenda for a year.
Architect’s projection for Lorena Plaza
The LA Times sharply called Huizar to task about this in an April 23 editorial, titled, “Councilman Jose Huizar should be supporting a Boyle Heights homeless housing project, not thwarting it.” The Times editors wrote:
“Frankly, none of Huizar’s issues are compelling enough to justify such stubborn opposition to the project that he won’t even try to make it better. Neighborhoods are quick to oppose projects that house homeless people. That’s why developers spend hours at community meetings trying to allay fears and soliciting input. The opposition to this project, where only a fraction of the housing would be set aside for homeless people, does not bode well for a city that is hoping to build thousands of units of desperately needed housing across the city for chronically homeless people in the next decade.”
Boyle Heights is a low-income, heavily immigrant community. It is 94% Latino. Half are immigrants, and 35% are not citizens. The median income is $33,250, compared to LA County’s median of $55,000. 76% are renters. If homeless housing won’t fly here, it will meet even more determined opposition in upper-scale and better organized parts of town.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
