Planners OK 6-Month Moratorium on Demolition, Building North of Wilshire

A hotly contested moratorium aimed at preserving older apartment buildings north of Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile was given partial approval Thursday by the city Planning Commission, which voted for a six-month ban on demolition and building permits.

But because the tentative moratorium is less than half the 18-month period proposed by Councilman John Ferraro and would not save the buildings already slated for demolition, the commission’s decision was a partial setback to residents.

The vote was a setback as well for apartment owners, among them Homestead Group Associates, who opposed the ban as an infringement on their property rights. Homestead’s recent purchase of 12 buildings and its plans to redevelop them into 298 luxury apartments prompted the preservation battle.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Homestead general partner Ronnie Schwartz said after the vote, adding that he had hoped for a “majority vote against the moratorium.”

“It’s a start. We still have a chance,” Marsha Mann, a founder of the tenants’ group, the Detroit Street Coalition, said.

The proposed moratorium now goes before the City Council’s Planning and Environment Committee and then the full council.

The area involved covers 16 blocks west of La Brea Avenue between Detroit Street and Hauser Boulevard north of Wilshire Boulevard, a neighborhood with an estimated population of 3,000, mostly elderly and young professionals, paying an average rent, according to city officials, of $350 a month. Most of the apartments are rent-controlled.

Most of the buildings are Spanish Colonial, Tudor or Mediterranean in style and were built from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Although 10 years ago the area was zoned to allow about double the present density, it has recently become attractive to investors, city officials say, because it abuts Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile. The area has been undergoing a revitalization and is approved by the city for intense commercial development.

Residents had hoped to use the moratorium to gain time to seek both a reduction in the area’s zoning and a “historic preservation overlay zone”--a special status that would protect the buildings.

The fight over the moratorium, which was proposed by Ferraro in December, was marked by an intense campaign to rally property owners and local business people behind Homestead.

Planning Commission President Daniel P. Garcia questioned whether there was “sufficient evidence . . . to warrant an interruption of continuing patterns of development that are expressly contemplated in the (city’s) plan.”

“This case evolves from a common situation,” Garcia said: “Change in a neighborhood and fear produced by change.”

The commission approved a 90-day moratorium, with a potential 90-day extension, which Planning Department staff members said allowed little time for the research and surveying necessary to support proposals for zoning changes.

The commission also decided that the moratorium, if it is approved by the council, would be effective as of Jan. 8, with any projects that already had demolition permits or projects under review by the Planning Department being allowed to continue.

The tenants had hoped to make the moratorium retroactive, but with this vote, all of Homestead’s projects would be able to move forward.