Dear Members of the Board of the Venice Neighborhood Council:
I would like to share some history about the area along
Lincoln that will be the focus of one of our agenda items on Thursday
evening.
I am not making
a comment about that item or how I will vote on it; I am simply
relating some history that may be of value in your decision making on
Thursday.
Eight or nine
years ago Councilman Rosendahl approached me and asked what I thought
about placing a large transitional housing facility in the building that
is now occupied by Chalk Preschool at 2201 Lincoln Boulevard.
The
Councilman was being pressured by County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and
his deputy Flora Gil Krisiloff to permit a transitional housing
facility in Venice to address our already troublesome homeless
population.
At time the
building was empty and available for lease. I drove the area and noticed
the several churches, schools and preschools that were in close
proximity to that building.
I
told a councilman that if he proposed a homeless shelter at that
location that it was likely the parents of the children who were
enrolled in those schools would come after him with pitchforks.
I
advised him to look in the then largely commercial, office, and even
light manufacturing area just south of Cosco and just east of Lincoln,
along Del Rey Avenue.
In
turn, Rosendahl asked Venice real estate broker Brad Neil to see if he
could find an appropriate building for use for the homeless shelter in
the area. Brad found and negotiated the purchase of a two story office
building on Beach Avenue, near Del Rey Avenue.
The
intent was to create a 40 bed transitional housing facility - a mini
bridge housing facility - in that existing structure. It could have
housed 40 people in cubicles, with 20 women upstairs and 20 men
downstairs. It would have been modeled on OPCC's transitional housing
facility in Santa Monica at 16th and Broadway.
Neither
Rosendahl nor his chief of staff Mr. Bonin worked very hard at finding
the funding to purchase it for use as transitional housing, i.e., for 90
to 120 day stays. Instead (and I was in the meeting), Mr. Bonin
presented the deal that Brad had negotiated to Steve Claire, executive
director of the Venice Community Housing Corporation, not for
transitional housing, but for permanent supportive housing, with only 20
beds. The existing building was bulldozed and VCHC built Gateway
Apartments on the site, at an ultimate cost of $500,000 per unit.
It was a colossal missed opportunity to:
1. Build transitional housing adjacent to Venice, and
2. Place it at some remove from schools and residents.
