An affordable housing development opened in 2023 at 2451 E. Colorado Blvd. According to LA Housing Department Communications Director Sharon Sandow, the development was opened to combat housing insecurity and homelessness.
Jane Demian, a member of the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council (ERNC) Housing and Homelessness Committee, said she worked with residents from the Union Station Tiny Homes, a temporary housing development in Eagle Rock, to transition them into being permanent residents at 2541 E. Colorado. She said six residents were given tours of the development and were assigned units, with two — a mother and son — successfully moving into the development.
Demian said the remaining four residents were denied housing at the development without warning.
“[The Tiny Homes residents] were given the room number where they were going to be staying, ready to go, and then they got the news that they couldn’t go in,” Demian said. “They weren’t given much information why.”
Sandow said via email that the property management company evaluates possible tenants, so that she could not speculate why they were denied housing. The development houses tenants aged 55 and older who make 30% or less of the area median income, according to Sandow. The building, Sandow said via email, is a mix of one-bedroom and two-bedroom housing with 41 total units. Five units are accessible to people with mobility disabilities and two units are accessible to people with hearing or vision disabilities, according to Sandow.
According to Sandow, the process of approving an applicant must be complete before move-in.
“Potential applicants work with case managers to make sure they have the required documentation to verify they meet the project tenant requirements, including income limits,” Sandow said via email.
There are still many challenges involving housing access as a whole, according to Anne Shapiro, a former member of the ERNC Housing and Homelessness Committee. Shapiro said the issue of limited temporary and permanent housing for low-income earners is partly because resources such as mental health support, police buildings and social workers are in short supply.
“There is not one resource that is needed to solve the problem [of limited housing] where there isn’t acute scarcity,” Shapiro said.
Demian said this scarcity of resources is the biggest issue in addressing the LA housing shortage.
“There’s a dire scarcity of resources [for] interim and permanent housing and case managers and anything you can think of,” Demian said. “And yet, billions of dollars are being spent. So we don’t really know the accountability aspect of this situation.”
Demian said she is concerned that a misallocation of funds is putting people at risk of homelessness.
“People are waiting for interim housing, and people who are already living in interim housing — maybe they’ve been waiting […] for permanent housing for almost three years,” Demian said. “Other people are just waiting on the street.”
According to Sandow, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS) and the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA) all contributed to the project.
Shapiro said bureaucracy can also present a barrier to housing people, such as the myriad documents required to move an individual into housing.
“The obstacles are enormous to be able to get people into interim housing,” Shapiro said. “And then from interim housing into permanent housing, it takes months and months.”
Demian said that through her volunteer work, she and her teammates have assisted with tasks that should have been the work of case managers, who she said also have scarce resources.
“We would help [housing applicants] get their birth certificates for other states,” Demian said. “For example, the case manager wouldn’t be able to pay for it.”
Demian said she sees many opportunities for housing expansion in the city, but they are not being capitalized on.
“We don’t know why a lot more interim housing is not being created when we have vacant buildings,” Demian said. “Maybe it’s because it’s difficult to get developers to do the transition. There’s a lot of permitting involved, there’s a lot of money involved.”
Demian said she does not blame the workers themselves, but rather the structure of the system and those in positions of power.
“It’s really the people who are managing them and the people who are funding the case managers, who are not giving the money to the people,” Demian said. “It’s not trickling down.”
Contact Diana Trutia at trutia@oxy.edu