Tag Archives: LA City Planning

The “No-Plan” Olympics

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Forget about planning for the 2028 Olympics.

UPDATE: This post was originally written prior to the LA City Council meeting on Feburary 21. The item about expediting projects for the Olympics was continued, and will now be heard on Friday, February 28. PLEASE NOTE: This meeting will be held at Van Nuys City Hall, 14410 Sylvan St. Van Nuys. You can also call your councilmember to express your views.

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When the politicians at LA City Hall first approved hosting the 2028 Olympics, they said LA wouldn’t need to build new sports venues or new infrastructure. A post on the LA28 web site says that “The LA28 Games are designed to fit the city as-is [….]”. The talk was that this would be a “no-build” Olympics. The post goes on to say….

As a global leader in sports, entertainment and technology, LA is built to host large-scale, sustainable, global events that benefit everyone and will be the first-ever Games to not build permanent infrastructure. [Emphasis added.]

Well, anybody who believed that obviously hadn’t spent much time around City Hall. Now the LA City Council apparently wants to build a whole lot of new stuff, and they want to be able to build temporary and permanent venues, training facilities, broadcast and media centers, transit infrastructure, and other projects that could be associated with the Olympics or the Paralympics without having to receive planning approvals, obey zoning regulations, observe height restrictions or setback requirements, or any other regulations that could delay construction. You can read the language from the motion yourself. (Council File 15-0989-S47)

This is just crazy. But tomorrow, Friday, February 21, the City Council will likely approve this motion directing City departments to prepare an ordinance to make this crazy idea a reality. If the ordinance is approved, you can bet we’ll see a barrage of new projects being justified because they’re supposedly associated with the Olympics or the Paralympics. These projects will be approved with no public engagement and no environmental review. In other words, once they’re proposed, they’re approved. And don’t be surprised if they use this to greenlight Frank McCourt’s Dodger Gondola project.

In other words, this has gone from being the “no-build” Olympics to being the “no-plan” Olympics. It was pretty clear even before this that our elected officials were in over their heads. Now it seems they’re trying to dig themselves out by eliminating planning, eliminating environmental review, and cutting the public out of the process.

If you have something you’d like to say to the City Council about this, the best thing to do would be to show up at City Hall before 10:00 am tomorrow, Friday, February 21. (You can’t call in anymore, because Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson doesn’t want you to.) If you can’t make it down there, I suggest you call your council office when they open tomorrow morning and let them know how you feel.

City of LA Elected Officials

It’s been clear for a long time that the folks at LA City Hall don’t care about planning. Now they apparently aren’t even trying to pretend they care.

North Hollywood Church Wants Permits for Full Line of Alcohol and Live Entertainment

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Architectural drawing for church expansion.

It seems like the City of LA is ready to hand a liquor permit to anybody who asks for one. It used to be City Planning would just approve liquor permits for bars, restaurants and clubs. Recently they took the unusual step of granting a permit to serve alcohol in an apartment building. But now they’re going even farther. It looks like they’re ready to allow a church to serve a full line of alcohol in their new banquet facility. On top of that, the church will offer live entertainment, and they can keep the party going until 2:00 am.

Holy Trinity Armenian Church, located at 11960 Victory Blvd. in North Hollywood, has filed an application to expand their campus, adding a few new buildings. One of the new structures will be a 14,000 sq. ft. accessory use building with a sports gym/banquet hall on the second floor. The banquet hall will provide for the sale of a full-line of alcohol for on-site consumption, with live entertainment and dancing during events associated with the church.

The report prepared for the City Planning Commission recommends approval of the project. They’re claiming it will have no significant impacts on the surrounding neighborhood. This is interesting, because the church is immediately adjacent to a residential neighborhood. It’s hard to believe that a banquet hall serving a full line of alcohol and offering live entertainment, with events lasting until 2:00 am, will have no significant impacts on the folks who live a few hundred feet away. Noise is the first thing that comes to mind, but it also seems likely that people who have been consuming alcohol will be driving down residential streets in the small hours.

If you’d like to submit comments on this project, you can send them to Stephanie Escobar at LA City Planning.

stephanie.escobar@lacity.org

You should include the project address and case numbers in the subject line.

11960 Victory Boulevard, CPC-2023-891-GPA-ZC-BLCUB-CUX, ENV-2023-892-ND

You can also make comments to the City Planning Commission when they meet on December 19. Here’s the agenda.

City Planning Commission Agenda, Thursday, December 19, 8:30 AM

The City of LA Keeps Promising Affordable Housing, But Are We Getting It?

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In my last post I wrote that the City of LA was thinking about allowing the installation of alcohol vending machines at an apartment building in Hollywood.  In doing some research on the building itself, I found that the owner of 1530 Cassil has partnered with a company that offers both residential and travel lodging, effectively turning at least some of the units into extended stay hotel rooms.  While technically stays of 30 days or more would be legal, this seemed strange given that the building was approved as a housing project.  The City’s determination letter made no mention of hotel rooms.

But the determination letter does state that the project is required to provide 20 units reserved for Extremely Low Income (ELI) households.  The developer got a 70% density bonus to build way beyond what the zoning allowed in return for those 20 affordable units.  I started wondering how many of those units were actually occupied by ELI households, so I submitted a Public Records Act Request to the LA Housing Department. 

The response was disturbing.  As of the end of January, the City had only received verification that three of the 20 affordable units were occupied by ELI households.  What about the other 17 units?  Are they empty? Are they being rented as extended stay vacation lodgings?

The developer of this project received a 70% density bonus under the Transit Oriented Community (TOC) Guidelines, which were the result of the voter-approved Measure JJJ.  The idea was that project applicants would be able to build more than what was allowed under existing zoning in exchange for providing a percentage of affordable units.  They would also benefit from a streamlined approval process.  The City of LA claims that the TOC program is key to providing much needed affordable housing. But how much affordable housing are we really getting if the City isn’t enforcing the affordability covenants?  I’m not the first person to raise this issue.  Back in 2021, Capital & Main did some research and found that the City of LA wasn’t able to provide an accurate inventory of existing affordable units.  They looked at LAHD’s on-line registry of affordable housing, and found that many affordable units were not listed.  Capital & Main also reported that the City doesn’t maintain a centralized inventory of affordable units in mixed-income buildings.  So how are people in low-income households supposed to find these apartments?

LA City Planning gave a 70% density bonus to the developer of 1530 Cassil, which was worth millions of dollars.  In return, the developer agreed to provide 20 affordable units. But if the City’s records are correct, only three of them are occupied.  This is a serious problem.  City Hall likes to claim they’re creating lots of affordable units, but can we really believe their claims?  The waiting list for affordable housing is a mile long, so why aren’t all of these units occupied by low-income households?  And beyond that, why is City Planning handing out valuable density bonusses without following through with necessary oversight?

The politicians and the planners make endless promises, but time after time they’ve failed to deliver.