Lawsuit alleges that an affordable housing project in Venice Beach is being unlawfully blocked by city officials

 A lawsuit filed on July 10, 2024 against the City of Los Angeles alleges closed-door sabotaging and unlawful blocking of Venice Dell, a fully-approved supportive and affordable housing project in Venice, California. 

Once completed, the project would provide 140 affordable apartments, 68 apartments for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, 34 apartments for low-income households and 34 apartments for low-income artists. In addition, the project would also have eight on-site trained professional staff, three community rooms for tenant services and recreational activities and 246 public parking spaces.

Other than stable, affordable homes, residents will have access to employment and education services, physical and mental health services and one-on-one case management. 

But the building of the housing facility, along with the services it promised its future residents, have all come to a stop for nearly a year. The lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include the LA Forward Institute (LA Foward); Sylvia Aroth, a Venice resident; Gary Williams, a local professor and Kathy Coates, who is currently homeless, alleges that since taking office in 2023, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park (District 11) and city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto have pursued several backdoor strategies to thwart and obstruct Venice Dell. 

The plaintiffs are represented by Public Counsel, the Western Center for Law and Poverty, and Strumwasser and Woocher (LLP).

“We want to get the project built. We want these delays to stop. And then secondarily, I think our case is also highlighting a culture of backroom dealing that happens outside of the public eye. These backroom delay tactics and these strategies are part of the reason why it's so hard to build affordable housing in places like the West Side, in wealthier, segregated communities,“ Faizah Malik, managing attorney in the Community Development Project at Public Counsel, told CALÒ News. 

Apart from trying to shed light on Park's and Soto’s obstruction practices, which allegedly consist of not answering emails and stalling on city approval contracts which are needed for the finalization of the housing project, the lawsuit claims the delay of Venice Dell violates state law.

The lawsuit states the holdup on the project discriminates in both intent and impact against minorities, persons of color and persons with disabilities by violating state equal protection and fair housing laws, such as FEHA and the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

“Venice Dell will provide much-needed housing on the Westside for individuals considered ‘chronically homeless’ under federal law—meaning those who have a disability and have been homeless for more than 12 months. The California Legislature has made it unlawful for cities to impose more obstacles on the construction of affordable and permanent supportive housing than other types of housing, especially when doing so disparately impacts Black, brown and disabled populations,” Caroline Chiappetti, an attorney at Strumwasser and Woocher LLP, said. “The city’s actions towards Venice Dell not only undermine its commitment to solving our housing crisis, but plainly violate our fair housing laws.”

Park and Soto have both previously opposed the project. “The proposed mixed-use development does little or nothing to address either the homelessness or affordability crisis in our city or the Westside of L.A.,” Park wrote in a 2022 letter to then-L.A. City Councilmember Joe Buscaino. “This project will forever change the character of the historic Venice Canal community

In the same email, Park asked Buscaino to “defer any further action on this project” until a new council member for District 11 took office in January 2023, an election Park won. 

Venice Dwell, the 2.7-acre site at 200 N. Venice Blvd., one block from Venice Beach and a couple of blocks from the Venice canals, has been in the works since 2016, when the city first identified the parking lot as a potential site for housing as part of a policy to prioritize the development of affordable housing on city-owned land. 

The land was approved by the city council in 2021. But today, the project is so far behind its official completion date that it has not broken ground. 

After a bid process five years earlier for affordable housing proposals on city-owned properties, the city approved a recommendation to select Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing as co-developers for the site. 

To move the project forward and finalize the housing facility, Malik told CALÒ News that there is a list of contracts and permits that the city needs to sign off on and approve, many of which the lawsuit claims have been stonewalled by Park and Soto.

One of the applications that the city needs to process is the Ellis Act Application, which is an application to initiate relocation assistance for four existing families that are living on the project site as of today. The application, which would remove the units from the rental market and help the four families relocate, was first submitted to the city in January 2023 by the Venice Dell developers.

“The property has a small building [with] four rental units. Those tenants under the Ellis Act have gotten significant notice, of course, and then they will be getting relocation assistance,” Malik said. 

Another obstruction that has delayed the building of the Venice Dell is a project labor agreement for the development of public parking that will be part of the affordable housing. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) is overseeing this agreement but according to Public Counsel, LADOT has refused to move forward on this contract and has yet to provide the developers with the legal basis for its refusal to finalize the labor agreement document. 

According to Public Counsel, the city has also interfered with the California Coastal Commission’s development permit, which is needed because of how close Venice Dell would be to the beach. 

“The [housing] project needs to sign off on these things so that it can get funding so that it can get state tax credit funding, which is really important,” Malik said. “There's also local funding that the city has already granted to the project. All of that funding is in jeopardy by the city not signing off on these approvals. They're jeopardizing the whole project.“

David Levitus, Executive Director of LA Forward, said he lives in Venice, District 11 and was happy to hear that the Venice Dell was being built there. According to Levitus, many people in Venice also approve of the project and are in huge need of affordable housing in places like West L.A.

“There's like no bigger issue in this city than affordable housing and homelessness,” he told CALÒ News. 

In 2024, there were 75,312 homeless people across L.A. County and 45,252 in the city of L.A., according to the most recent homeless count by the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority. According to LAHSA’s report, Latinos made up the largest percentage of homeless individuals (43%). They were followed by Blacks (31%) and whites (29%). 

Venice is considered one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country. As of July 2024, the average rent in Venice is $2,708 per month, which is 76% higher than the national average rent price, according to Apartments.com. A studio apartment can go for about $1,988 per month, $2,708 for a one-bedroom apartment, and around $3,569 for a two-bedroom apartment. 

Coates, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, currently lives in a motorhome, which she often parks in and around Venice. She became homeless in 2023 after she and her partner were unable to continue to pay the high rent in Mar Vista, a community less than a ten-minute drive from Venice Beach. “I couldn't keep up with the rent at my apartment in Mar Vista and made the difficult decision to move into a motorhome over a year ago,“ she said. “Since my partner and I have been living in our vehicle, we've got first-hand experience with how the city and some of its residents treat people like us. We just want a stable, safe, affordable home in our own community, but we need support to make ends meet.”

L.A.’s 11th City Council District, where the Venice Dell will be built, is comprised of a 60% white population, followed by Latinos (18.7%) and (5.2%) Black residents. 

Malik said she hopes the outcome of the lawsuit also helps to move future affordable housing projects that support people of color trying to live in places like Venice. “It's especially important that we fight for this kind of housing in wealthy areas like the West Side,” she said. “We have a very segregated city and it's incredibly difficult to bring affordable housing to wealthier areas.” 

Another plaintiff, Aroth, has lived in Venice for over 50 years and is a current homeowner there. She decided to be part of the lawsuit because she did not want to continue seeing her neighborhood and neighbors being displaced. “Affordable housing is becoming increasingly rare in coastal communities like Venice, forcing out my longtime neighbors and allowing only the wealthy to move in,” Aroth said. “I want to see my unhoused neighbors find homes in the community. We needed [the] Venice Dell built yesterday. We need dozens more Venice Dells built across the city.”

The lawsuit also blames Mayor Karen Bass for not helping advance the project, arguing that it could not advance in its current form without the support of Park. The lawsuit references two instances where Bass has been publicly asked about the project.

One of the most recent times happened in May, when Bass stated that, because the project is located in Council District 11, the project’s future is outside her control in her capacity as mayor. “With the above comments, Mayor Bass not only admits that the city has delayed and obstructed the project at the behest of Park, but she also abdicates her own responsibilities and undermines her commitments to expedite affordable housing…,” stated the lawsuit. 

“[The lawsuit] is not an attack on the city. This is a legal mechanism to get the project moving and to show any illegal behavior that's been happening behind the scenes by a couple of elected officials, maybe a few people working for them,” Levitus told CALÒ News. 

The offices of Soto told CALÒ News they do not comment on pending litigation. Park and her team did not respond to media requests at the time of this publication.