Re : “Rising up to Strenuously Object to Proposed 3-Story ‘Tilden Terrace’ Building”
If leaders of the nonprofit Los Angeles Housing Partnership had occupied a chair in Desmond Burns’s living room, down the street from Tellefson Park, the other night, they might have asked for a time-out to re-connoiter their new project in Culver City.
They would have met a collective bulldog that growls ferociously about a largely faceless group that the nearly two dozen aroused neighbors regard as a strongly unwelcome intruder. From couch to easy chair to straight-backed chair on Tuesday evening, they were well-informed, united and teeth-grittingly determined to at least alter — if not revamp — City Hall’s proposed addition to a fairly segmented, geographically zig-zagging neighborhood fraught in recent years with almost interminable traffic and parking complications.
Speaking with united voices, they complained that the present “messiness” needs to be sharply corrected before another cluster of residents is introduced.
Their headche-inducing present troubles, they said, have been sparked by a crazy-quilt patchwork of not necessarily coherent businesses, ringed by choppily short streets, some without lighting. Those mismatching parts have been unhappily compounded by a recent influx of drive-through cars and pass-through persons.
Some long established residents feel like a jigsaw puzzle with several crucial pieces missing.
Formed 21 years ago “to produce and preserve affordable housing for low-income individuals and families in Los Angeles County” the Housing Partnership is proposing to build a three-story, 33-apartment mixed-use complex on the south side of Washington Boulevard, just west of the King Fahad mosque.
Not long ago ago, the pushback by Tellefson neighbors probably would have been viewed by City Hall as fairly pointless expectorating into the teeth of a hurricane. In a populist movement started by former City Councilman Gary Silbiger, neighborhood activists have became more empowered, more influential than previous generations would have dreamed possible.
Neighbors’ pushback against the original plans for 44043 Irving Pl. forced developers to reconfigure, and Tellefson neighbors are hoping to repeat.
(To be continued)
