Editorial: State strikes back as L.A. pols try to block housing

There’s gentrification and then there’s Venice Beach, Los Angeles County’s Exhibit No. 1 in the Cases of Formerly Funky Neighborhoods Gone Upscale.

There was never any good reason for the beachside section of the city of Los Angeles to be downscale in the first place, except to serve as a working-class alternative to (formerly) middle-class Santa Monica, as it did through the 1960s: Cool ocean breezes galore. Good architecture. The boardwalk.

But the Venice that had transformed in the 1980s to having great art galleries and restaurants but also still junkies and winos turned entirely fancy with the Silicon Beach economic boom in the 2000s, and real-estate prices soared as the tech bros moved in. Some of the very same former low-income Venice residents turned out of formerly cheap apartments make up the large homeless population of today’s Venice Beach.

So you would think that local politicians would welcome building affordable housing that would put roofs over the heads of at least some of the local homeless people and other low-income residents in place of a city-owned parking lot.

Instead, the Los Angeles City Council has blocked the building of the long-planned 120-unit Venice Dell affordable housing project at the request of City Councilmember Traci Park, because councils and mayors usually defer to colleagues on neighborhood zoning issues. It’s the latest saga for the project, which has been tied up in regulatory hurdles since 2016.

Park cites traffic and parking worries, and, get this, the dangers of building in a tsunami zone — i.e., a Southern California beach city —  a zone in which billionaires have no objections to living. Park considers the project “dead.”

The suddenly pro-housing state of California considers it alive, and state officials “are threatening to cut the city’s access to billions of dollars in housing funds and strip it of some of its zoning authority” unless it allows Venice Dell to be built.

This editorial board doesn’t much care for state funding of housing, local zoning powers or even government-owned parking lots. But the saga of the Venice Dell development is a microcosm of bad housing policies up and down the state. Projects are put through the wringer only to be denied at the arbitrary whims of politicians.

California has a housing shortage because of processes like this. If California is ever going to build its way out of its housing crisis, it needs politicians to get out of the way of projects that meet all applicable building codes. It’s not complicated unless you’re a council member who wants to play central planner.