Exile From Main Street

As downtown L.A. embarks on re-invention, those who already call it home wonder if plans provide enough room for them.
by Aubrey White
photos by Simon Bowler

Al Sabo, 61, visited Los Angeles for the first time 25 years ago. Needing a cheap place to stay, he checked into the Frontier Hotel downtown. After a month of sleeping in the rodent-infested, crumbling hotel, Sabo vowed to never return. And he didn’t. Until two decades later when a serious illness landed him in a six-month coma, during which he lost his job, his house, his wife and kids. With no other options, Sabo found himself on the streets, so he checked back into the Frontier-a residential hotel, and one of a shrinking number of options for those seeking low-income housing in the City of Los Angeles. For Sabo and nearly 8,000 other hotel residents, it is the only thing between them and the sidewalk.

Yet, even those like Sabo who can scrape together rent are slowly being evicted or shuffled as the Frontier is emptied for loft-style apartment conversions. Sabo was one of many hotel residents at a recent City Planning hearing supporting a temporary moratorium on the redevelopment and demolition of these properties.

Such properties represent a considerable number in L.A. According to a recent citywide Housing Department survey, there are 13,513 residential hotel units in Los Angeles. Three-quarters of these units are downtown. Some of them provide much more than just a roof to the under-privileged, while others barely have a roof intact. The crumbling construction and poor living conditions have long blighted Central City East-a 50-block area of downtown L.A. that houses nearly 8,000 of these units-and as the area continues a so-called “renaissance,” high-income livability has become a priority to developers and lawmakers alike. With efforts to beautify and commercialize downtown’s core, many Angelenos have fallen in love with the idea of a cleaner city center and a shrinking skid row, but numerous downtown residents say their needs are being cast aside for the sake of the market. Residents of downtown and organizations concerned with the accessibility of downtown are pressing the city to protect and improve what affordable housing currently exists within this small corridor.

The Los Angeles City Council is slated to vote this week on an Interim Control Ordinance (ICO)-a moratorium on the development of residential hotels for the next year-that could be extended an additional six months once passed. Originally introduced by the city’s Planning Department in October of last year, the ICO has slowly snaked its way through City Hall offices for months, picking up a variety of backers, including the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, as well as City Council Members Eric Garcetti, Jan Perry, Jose Huizar and Ed Reyes. Perhaps most important of all is the support the ICO receives from downtown’s at-risk residents themselves. They packed the room of the ICO’s most recent hearing, sporting stickers that read, “Save L.A.’s downtown hotels, they are our homes.”

If passed, the ICO will place the rush for development on the back burner. Supporters say the year moratorium would offer city officials, community organizers, downtown residents and business developers an opportunity to assess the future of downtown. Opponents say it may doom downtown to never bloom from its skid row skeleton.

The city center is poised to become livable for a new wave of Angelenos. The question is: what will happen to those that already call downtown home, and is the new, lofty downtown dream big enough for the both of them?

RENAISSANCE FAIR

In the last 10 years, the residents of downtown have nervously watched the same snowballing gentrification that has been lauded as a renaissance by the rest of the city. In that time, Bunker Hill has seen the construction of Frank Gehry’s Disney Music Hall, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Colburn School of Performing Arts. So many art galleries have emerged that their five-block radius has been declared ‘Gallery Row.’ Dozens of restaurants have opened downtown and dozens more storefronts are under construction. Whereas the area has always been a wholesale hub-home to the garment district, toy district, and flower market-it is now offering a plethora of new retail options.

This is partly because of an Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO) passed in 1999 that encouraged development downtown by lightening parking requirements, fire codes, and other hurdles to renovating old or abandoned buildings. Nearly 6,000 market-rate residential units were put on the rental market in these 10 years, and an additional 1,100 have been placed on the market for sale recently.

The ARO was developed, in part, by the Central City Association (CCA), a member-oriented group serving the interests of the downtown business community. It is the organization that effectively brought the Staples Center to downtown, and is the self-declared “leading architect of the downtown renaissance.”

The CCA is the parent organization to the Downtown Center Business Improvement District (DCBID)-a group created from business owners’ taxes with the specific intention of cleaning up downtown through sanitation services, private security and business promotion. Together, these organizations promote the influx of developers into the area.

Executive-level members include residential real estate giants Cushman and Wakefield, The Lee Group, and millionaire Eli Broad of KB Homes. Broad has been the main supporter of the Bunker Hill/Grand Avenue redevelopment over the past decade.

The goal for downtown, according to the CCA, is for it to become a 24/7 civic center for the City of Los Angeles-a commercial and residential hub that counteracts the sprawling development patterns of its past.

“I think the current development boom downtown is really kind of a refocusing to the core of Los Angeles,” says Jonathan Lonner, vice president of development at the Lee Group, which has a number of current loft projects downtown. “In the last five or 10 years, people have realized they don’t want to spend half their day in a car commuting-they find that they have much more disposable time, their quality of life increases, they are able to enhance the way they live and work.”

Developers are eager to make downtown a ‘livable’ and ‘lively’ urban stretch. Urban pioneers have discovered it as an up-and-coming creative hub packed with artists’ lofts and galleries. For some, the current downtown represents L.A.’s closest resemblance to an actual metropolis.

WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING HERE?

For many, downtown has long been a booming metropolis and a place to call home.

“People think that anyone who lives in a residential hotel is living in a hotel,” says Barbara Planek, a three-year resident of the Frontier. “The concept is that it must be more expensive than getting your own apartment, or that you’re just transient, and they don’t really realize that we actually live here.”

Contrary to the oft-misconception that downtown is empty after business hours, the skyscraper-heavy city center is no blank canvas. Concurrent with much of the recent development downtown, an estimated 1,200 affordable residential hotel units were closed down for loft or commercial-use conversions.

Many of these units were entirely occupied by people of extremely low income and emptied to take part in the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance. Of the 8,000 affordable units downtown, 5,000 are operated by for-profit property owners who are often eager to profit off of the interest being shown to the area.

Because the maintenance of such hotels is entirely up to property managers, many of the units that remain affordable are of the lowest standard in the city-they are often plagued with roaches, rats and other vermin. Elevators break down on a regular basis, while hot water and electricity are not dependable amenities.

Some residents move frequently through hotels, able to pay only a night or a week at a time. For most, though, the hotel is their primary residence-providing shelter for months, years, even decades. The ICO, then, serves as a reminder that downtown revitalization is not just a matter of redevelopment, but also of recovery.

The only opposition to the ICO at the hearing came from a representative of the CCA. Their concern is that the ICO will preserve an eyesore-saving condemned ruins instead of making way for new life-and ultimately scare developers away from the downtown area.

“It doesn’t necessarily preserve affordable housing, it preserves blight,” says CCA Vice President Victor Franco.

While the ICO is a preventative measure, it does take specific precautions not to allow this moratorium on conversion to become a no-exception freeze on development. Clauses in the ICO state that hotels may be considered exceptions if they are converted into non-profit affordable housing or are renovated for the sake of elevating them from unsafe or substandard conditions.

As Franco says, these residential hotels “are not affordable housing units, they’re actually market-rate units.” For the most part, this is the case. Affordable housing downtown is, by and large, nothing more than de facto affordable housing. There has never been a plan to increase its presence downtown, and these hotels have simply come to take up the slack.

Three thousand downtown units have been taken up by non-profit developers. Ballington plaza, the Brownstone and Courtland hotels, among others, have been renovated and are protected as Single Room Occupancy hotels (SROs). Residents can establish tenancy and secure their rents at affordable levels.

For hotels that are not protected through such means, the security of a room rests on shaky foundation. Residents are often plagued by what has come to be referred to as the 28-day shuffle. After a month of living in a residential hotel, tenants are supposed to gain residency and the rights and privileges that accompany it. Some landlords shuffle tenants from room to room every 28 days, or force them to leave the hotel and check back in-anything to prevent them from establishing themselves as tenants.

City attorney Rocky Delgadillo has recently taken notice of this prevalent problem and is filing suit against Robert Frontiera, the owner of the Frontier and Rossyln Hotels-two of downtown’s largest and most infamously substandard residential hotels.

As Frontier rooms were being emptied to clear the way for lofts, Barbara Planek was given two months free rent for moving down from the 7th to the 5th floor. Two months free rent totals approximately $800. Legally, this type of relocation requires at least $3,300 in relocation money and 120 days notice to move.

Floor by floor, Frontiera has cleared the way for loft conversions. There are currently four tenants left on the 6th floor of the building, waiting to receive a notice of eviction or an offer of relocation from management. Some, however, are exercising their legal right to stay in the building and urging others to do the same.

Planek says residents are often too intimidated by management to voice their woes. “I know there are a lot of paranoid people and I know that we do have some people with maybe not complete mental capacity,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t listen to them and that they can’t see the evidence of things.”

With the approval of the ICO, loft conversions at the Frontier would no longer be allowed, and residents could not be evicted from their rooms to make way for market rate housing.

GIMMIE SHELTER

Those refusing to leave the Frontier are representative of a downtown push among residents to organize themselves. The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) is the only community-organizing group in Central City East, and is focused on the preservation of residential hotels and the creation of affordable housing. Rather than a service provider such as the Midnight Mission or Union Rescue mission (both of which are also members of the CCA), LACAN is focused on permanent housing and long-term solutions to the housing crisis.

LACAN is an organization maintained by residents of the downtown community who work to organize their fellow community members. Pete White, co-director of LACAN, says its members are “not willing to overlook something because it isn’t the right time to address it to City Council or the planning committee. We think pragmatically, not politically.” Becky Dennison, his fellow director, says, “We frustrate people because it makes us less likely to compromise on things that have always been compromised.”

For a part of town commonly assumed to be empty and uninhabitable, an organization establishing the voice of the people that does, in fact, live downtown can pose a strong threat to those with business interests in the area.

The organization is often plagued with questions over their non-profit status and Dennison and White were recently falsely-charged with the battery of a DCBID security officer. The charges were ultimately dropped.

Despite setbacks, LACAN has helped mount an effective push against downtown development interests. “Once signs of gentrification are visible, you’re too late,” says Dennison. However, while 558 units have been lost to market rate developers since 2003, the organization has successfully held onto 8,000 units downtown.

But everyday seems to be a scramble to solve the day’s quandary. With different cases arising daily and the number of threats increasing, groups like LACAN find themselves playing defense.

The ultimate benefit of the ICO, according to LACAN and similar groups, would be the opportunity for downtown residents to truly organize themselves and establish a plan for what the development of the community should look like, and a chance to be proactive rather than reactionary.

“You don’t even have to be innovative to come up with a workable solution for downtown homeless and housing issues,” says White.

Their view-along with organizations such as Livable Places and the Skid Row Housing Trust-is looking toward a downtown development plan that preserves and upgrades all affordable housing while creating a true mixed-income community. “Everyone can benefit from the amenities that wealth brings in,” says Dennison.

Such amenities include something as a simple as a grocery store in the area, one kind of development that both sides of the ordinance divide can agree on. Franco refers to the supermarket as “the great equalizer.” Plans to bring one to the area will not only increase its livability, it will help to create a mixed-income community that interacts within that mix.

What that mix will actually look like remains in question. Recently, LACAN, non-profit developer Livable Places, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and other organizations endorsed a proposal for future development paths. They recommend a 10-year goal of constructing 50,000 new units-half of which should be affordable.

10,000 of the units would be for those below 30 percent of the area median income (AMI), or approximately $13,000 per year. An affordable rent for a person with such an income is considered $300, or just over 25 percent of monthly earnings.

Sabo chuckles when he hears the numbers. “I pay closer to 40 percent,” he says.

Because of recent market rate development, housing in downtown is approximately half affordable and half market rate. But according to CCA projections, development projects on the horizon will eventually result in 35 percent of units downtown available at affordable rates. While Franco, like some developers, agrees that new development must focus on affordable housing, his recommendation for affordable housing rests at 60 percent AMI.

Housing Department numbers show “the average household income of residents of residential hotels is approximately 10 percent of area median income.” The rents for market-rate units in residential hotels range from $280 to $350 a month. To establish these units as affordable housing at 60 percent AMI would effectively raise rents to over $500 a month.

Referring to the demand for a 30 percent AMI agenda, Franco questions, “Nobody does that unless you’re totally doing non-profit or getting a lot of subsidies. How can a developer sustain that without basically going bankrupt?”

Essentially, they would need the help of the city.

The CCA is moving forward with a housing bond they hope will make it onto Villaraigosa’s infrastructure bond in November. The $500 million bond would establish gap financing for developers interested in, but unable to provide the funding necessary for, building affordable units downtown. Of concern in the bond is whether affordable units quotas are too low to meet the housing needs.

Estimates suggest that there are over 10,000 people sleeping on the streets of downtown every night with no prospects of housing in their near future. Within the borders of L.A. County, it is believed that as many 80,000 people are regularly without shelter.

When asked if housing development should be pushed in a particular direction, Franco responds, “I don’t think a push in one direction, I just think housing. We just need it.” The CCA’s main concern is, of course, the success of its current and future members, and development brings business.

“The idea is that the business community needs to pitch in to help out the residential community,” says Dennison. But when it comes to alleviating the woes of downtown’s down-and-out, collaboration has proved fickle because there is no agreement on what is more important: emergency services or long-term assistance.

BEYOND HOUSING

Those hotels taken under the wings of non-profits house a fortunate few. These developers renovate buildings and establish affordable rents for those at extremely low income levels. Their tenants do not need to worry about being shuffled, harassed, or left in the dark. Their focus can shift beyond a temporary fix and onto permanent solutions.

To housing rights organizations, the preservation of these 3,000 non-profits and remaining 5,000 for-profit units is a must. That would, at the very least, keep those currently housed in homes.

But what of the 10,000-plus people living in and out of homelessness downtown?

Rather than establishing more emergency services and short-term shelters, LACAN believes the most effective route to ending homelessness is through the development of Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). The program requires a certain number of services including medical care, mental health care and substance abuse programs available at or immediately surrounding a place of residence. The St. George hotel is currently downtown’s only example of housing designed as a PSH program.

The most recent move by Los Angeles County to solve the problem of homelessness was the L.A. County Homeless Prevention Initiative, passed two weeks ago by the Board of Supervisors. The plan allocates $80 million to the construction of five shelters and service providers throughout the county. Supporters hope the proposed shelters could effectively curb future homeless from inundating downtown.

While the main public concern surrounds the suburban fear of homelessness coming to their area (seen in the Whittier Daily News recent headline, “Skid Row May Hit Suburbs”), LACAN’s concern is one of displacement. The service these shelters provide is temporary shelter. “You can spread people around all you want and they’ll still be homeless,” says Dennison. “People aren’t here just because of housing. They’re here for community.” To disperse the homeless throughout the county would neglect the idea that a community exists in such derelict conditions, residents say.

According to Franco, “Downtown has the lowest crime rate of the city, has the lowest murder rate of the city… I think for the longest time it’s because there was nothing here. That’s kind of the sad part was there was just nothing happening. We’re lucky if people stick around after 10.”

“On the weekends, downtown is packed,” says Dennison. “It’s just not packed with white people shopping at the Gap.”

“It’s on the verge of being the destination that everyone has been talking about for the better part of the last five years,” says developer Jonathan Lonner. “It’s attracting empty nesters, young families, and people who run the gamut of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. I think the track that it is on is continuing to support that broad spectrum of diversity.”

But for downtown to truly represent itself as Los Angeles, it must hold within it the complex and diverse nature of the city around it, including stakeholders like Planek who already call downtown home, albeit an endangered and sometimes dangerous one.

“I would like to see more affordable housing coming in before you do so much of this supposed beautification and development, because you’re developing our current community out. We want to take part in it. Get some housing out there and then bring the businesses and bring us some of the jobs. We want to work, we’d like to work right by where we live too.”

Planek says she doesn’t harbor resentment for loft-dwellers. “They’re looking for somewhere to live. And you know, if they can afford it and it’s available, by all means.”

But she is also not quite ready to usher them in. Planek and others with a vested interest in downtown hold their breath waiting for the ICO’s final appearance at City Council. The bill is expected to pass by most, but at nearly three weeks after the City Planning Committee passed the proposal, there is a feeling of ‘any day now’ amongst residents. Until that date, development is on a first come, first served basis. And residents are becoming less willing to let go of the little they’ve got.

Al Sabo speaks of his room fondly. An eastern window allows him a view of the sunrise over downtown. His son, recently out of foster care, has joined him to live in these small quarters. Sabo is, of course, hopeful about his situation improving. But in the meantime, he says, “We’re part of that general public and if anybody’s going to stay here, we are too.” LAA