Down to the final year of available, earmarked funds for affordable-housing rental assistance programs at City Hall, what happens when the money dries up?
Can a city that externally appears to be one of the most prosperous on the thriving Westside kill off its program or hand it off to a higher, richer power?
Does the City Council possess the will to keep the rental assistance program upright in the face of an easier decision to hand it off?
“This is one of the questions we will have to answer,” said City Councilman Andy Weissman, going into this evening’s 7 o’clock meeting at the Vets Auditorium.
“Are we just going to end the project?” he asked.
“Are we going to somehow phase it out?
“Are we going to give notice to people now that it will be over in 12 months?
“The staff report says that we could give the money to Los Angeles County and say to them, ‘You guys handle it.’”
The City Council’s choice, in the Rotunda Room meeting, are few and mostly distasteful.
In the old pre-2011 days when the since-outlawed Redevelopment Agency was an anchor at City Hall, seven or eight persons staff the Housing Dept. led by Tevis Barnes.
“Now,” Mr. Weissman notes, “they are down to about two people (since 2011). There are issues about how many people we need.
“If we don’t have housing staff, we are not going to be able to have housing programs.”
Even though the staff has been shrunk to near invisibility, “there still are tasks to be done,” Mr. Weissman said. “For example, there are any number of projects that had been approved and have covenants attached to them, requiring they maintain a certain number of affordable units. We have to monitor those on an ongoing basis to make sure they still are.
“You can see there is work to be done even if there isn’t a full-on Housing Dept. anymore.”
