MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — It’s taken six years, but a new 98-unit permanent affordable and supportive housing community in Marina Del Rey broke ground Thursday. After protracted negotiations with neighborhood members about the development’s overall design, the building’s height and the number of units, Thatcher Yard is on track to open in about two years.
“I don’t think there’s anybody on the mayor’s staff, anybody on my staff, anybody in the various city agencies who are still around from when this project was first mentioned,” outgoing City Council member Mike Bonin said at the groundbreaking. “This is the best in the middle of some of the worst dynamics.”
What makes the project the best, he said, is developer Thomas Safran & Associates, which Bonin called “the gold standard” for affordable housing projects in the city because of their high quality.
What makes it the worst: “The process. I first mentioned this property as a solution for homelessness and affordable housing in 2016,” Bonin said of the site, which was previously a maintenance yard for the city. “Eight years from conception to providing a roof over someone’s head doesn’t work. That’s why we are in this crisis.”
Almost 42,000 people in the city of Los Angeles experienced homelessness during the last point-in-time count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in February. Of those, more than 2,000 lived in Bonin’s 11th City Council district.
When completed, Thatcher Yard will offer a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom units in a series of seven, two-story townhouses and an additional two-story apartment building. Each of the 98 units will have access to a community room, fitness center, outdoor patio, landscaped garden and parking garage with space for 82 vehicles and 58 bicycles.
About two-thirds of the units will be available for seniors. The remaining third will be for low-income families. Fifty percent of the residents will be formerly homeless and will receive wraparound services, such as mental health care and substance use counseling.
The original design for Thatcher Yard called for 160 units and a five-story design that matched the buildings on the opposite site of Thatcher Avenue, where the complex is being built just a short walk away from the marina. Responding to neighbors’ concerns, developer Thomas Safran scaled the project back to two stories and also reduced the number of units.
“It’s sad to me, because of the great need for housing, that we ended up with 98 units. That was our compromise and settlement with the neighbors. I understand they live across the street. This is their neighborhood. They don’t want it to change and be harmed,” said Safran, who praised the neighbors for working with him to find a solution and assured, “You are not going to be disappointed in what we’re going to deliver.”
Thatcher Yard will provide just a tiny fraction of the affordable housing that is needed in Council District 11, which includes Venice, Mar Vista, Playa del Rey, Westchester, Brentwood, West Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades. The area needs tens of thousands more units of workforce, affordable and homeless housing, Bonin said.
The city of Los Angeles as a whole needs to build over 500,000 housing units over the next eight years, according to the most recent Regional Housing Needs Assessment.
“When it comes to homelessness, whatever we think is bold, the next year, it’s absolutely insufficient,” LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said at what is one of his last public events representing the city.
“At the beginning of this administration, we saw that everything was too slow: too slow to get approvals, too low of numbers,” said Garcetti, who, when he took office in 2013, estimated the city needed to build 15,000 units of affordable housing during his two terms as mayor.
Los Angeles has built 23,000 units of affordable housing over the last 9 1/2 years and increased the number of people that have been moved out of homelessness into housing from 5,000 people annually to 21,000 last year, he said.
“We have built more affordable housing and homeless housing in the last five years than we did in the previous 30 years,” said Garcetti, who attributed much of that success to Proposition HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure LA voters approved in 2016 to fund 10,000 units of affordable housing for homeless individuals.
Garcetti is hopeful that voters’ approval of Measure ULA last month will also accelerate the pace of affordable housing development. The so-called mansion tax is expected to provide as much as $1 billion annually for homeless housing over the next ten years.
“We have the space, we have the land and now we have the funding,” Garcetti said.
With three days left as mayor, he praised state Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) for legislation that removed the need to abide by the California Environmental Quality Act in order to speed up the building of homeless and affordable housing projects like Thatcher Yard, which was funded with city, county, state and federal monies.
Allen is working to get a measure on the ballot in 2024 that would give local governments greater power to build affordable housing using public funds. SCA2 proposes removing Article 34 from the California constitution. The article currently prohibits the development of low-income affordable housing with state or local public financing unless a majority of voters approve.