As if they were piloting bumper cars at an oldtime carnival, the City Council, the advisory Planning Commission and three leading members of the city’s Community Development staff spent several hours last evening bobbing, dodging and even speaking clunky terms favored by dusty bureaucrats before formally reaching a crystallized conclusion:
Either there is no funding or only greatly reduced amounts are available for the various – and theoretical – gradings of low-income housing.
At all levels of government, it was often restated, theory commonly is a more dominant concept than reality. Community Development director Sol Blumenfeld, Jose Mendevil and Housing coordinator Tevis Barnes earned rounds of praise for organizing a 208-page compendium of how Culver City is faring with its government-determined, rather than societally-determined obligations for providing affordable housing for the thousands of needy.
Again, though, theory was a frequent verbal companion of the professional commentators.
If You Build, They Will Come?
For example, it has been concluded by a distant agency that Culver City should produce 185 roughly affordable housing units in the coming eight years. However, logic may have taken a holiday in the long-range thinking because the reality is that City Hall only needs to show that the community has the land capacity to provide the housing. There is no obligation to actually follow through, to build the units itself.
Staffers pointed to the recently completed and now occupied Tilden Terrace project and the almost-finished Irving Place mixed-use building, across from School District headquarters, as City Hall’s latest trophies in achieving boastable affordable housing.
Upon closer inspection, such a claim may be hyperbolic. A huge proportion of the Irving Place units are being reserved for city and School District employees, as opposed to the authentically needy. This has, so far, stirred smatterings of controversy, evidently because it is not broadly known.
While Ms. Barnes noted that the Landlord Tenant Mediation Board has dealt with dozens of sky-level rent increases that lately have horrified renters, it was not known whether any of the cases was satisfactorily closed out.
Not Nearly Ready
In answer to a question, she reported that 80 percent of families (mainly single women with children under the age of 10) are unable to financially handle the most modest rental obligations when their 90-day stays on Washington Boulevard expire. They require city assistance, when funding is available.
In spite of the vast weight of clunkified language deftly employed by many of the speakers, some actually meaningful information escaped into the open air.
Culver City’s historically slow growth rate augers promisingly for the city keeping pace with its theoretical affordable housing obligations. For example, the community only is expected to add 1100 residents in the next 22 years, to the nicely rounded year of 2035. As a result, said Mr. Mendevil, the vacancy rate and loss of housing both are low.
To no one’s surprise, 35 to 64 year olds form the spine, 63 percent, of the community population.
Mr. Blumenfeld, traditionally the clearest, most direct speaker in any room he inhabits, said the purpose of the dry meeting – well, he could not use that adjective – was to gather public input, and then coordinate direction from the gathered 10 elected or appointed officials.
Community Suggestions
With few exceptions, the public avoids these meetings as if diseases were being handed out, largely because of the hours of inaccessible language and heavy reliance on theory.
Forty minutes after the start, public comments were solicited, and four persons stepped forward – not quite the throng organizers had envisioned.
Mortgage broker Christopher Patrick King wanted to know the proportion of renters vs. homeowners, and disappointingly there was no response at the time. Later, it was suggested, unofficially, that owners are dominant, 57 percent to 43.
Eleanor Osgood eloquently argued to have the affordable housing units integrated with the main body of the community so that low-income singles and families are not ghettoized.
When such persons are forcibly isolated, Ms. Osgood said, “they are stigmatized. All neighborhoods need to be economically integrated,”
Decrying what he called a regrettable recent trend, Rich Waters calculated that more than 50 percent of Culver City garages are being utilized mainly as storage areas rather than for cars. Too many garages, he said, and they should not be mandatory when building housing.
Larry Kaufman, retired from the military as a lieutenant commander, described himself as “technically homeless” since he resides in a storage room. He is at loggerheads with his landlord.
By the shank of the evening, in spite of the two-way bouquet tossing, it was evident that Culver City has a distance to go before it is sufficiently housing its needy population and would-be residents.
After a recent spike in interest, rent control made a condensed cameo appearance.
