Redevelopment Project Reassessed : North Hollywood: A city agency promises to consider including owner-occupied housing in a revitalization project.
In response to residents’ criticism, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency has agreed to study the feasibility of including subsidized, owner-occupied housing in the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project.
CRA Board Chairman Jim Wood instructed agency officials to attach a high priority to preparing “at least a pilot home ownership program, perhaps townhouse-style” for the redevelopment project.
Wood’s idea surfaced during a biennial meeting Wednesday night to update the public on the progress of the 10-year-old project. About 75 people attended the meeting and they were mostly supportive of the CRA’s plan to bring a mixed-use development to a 22-acre area northeast of the intersection of Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards.
But some residents questioned the project’s lack of owner-occupied housing and its future effect on traffic in the area.
“It’s key that the CRA build affordable ownership housing as well as affordable rental housing,” said Kurt Hunter, president of the North Hollywood Residents Assn. and a member of an advisory committee for the redevelopment project. Without homeowners, he told CRA officials, “you destroy that mix that makes a community.”
The North Hollywood Redevelopment Project was launched in 1979, when the Los Angeles City Council established a 740-acre redevelopment zone. CRA officials have said the key to the project is The Academy, a residential and commercial development planned for the zone’s commercial core at Lankershim and Magnolia.
The Academy, so named because the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences will locate its headquarters there, is planned to include office towers, a 12-story, 225-room hotel and 248 apartments along with shops, restaurants and a plaza.
Construction of The Academy’s first office building, an eight-story structure, is expected to be completed early next year. A two-story building that is to house the nonprofit television academy also is expected to open next year. At present, the project does not include plans for condominiums or other owner-occupied dwellings.
Jerry Belcher, the project manager for the CRA, and agency Administrator John J. Tuite said that although the CRA has helped finance condominium projects before, such propositions are expensive and fraught with risk.
For example, Belcher said, the CRA can subsidize the construction of a home to lower the price for the person who buys it. But if that person sells the home, the CRA might have to provide another subsidy to keep down the price while allowing the seller to retain his equity in the property, Belcher said.
Moreover, subsidizing new housing so that low-income people can afford it is “extremely difficult” because “you end up financing the whole project,” Tuite said.
Despite the obstacles, the CRA successfully financed a 156-unit condominium project in the Pico-Union district of Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Tuite promised to explore whether a similar project could be successful in North Hollywood.
CRA officials also acknowledged to the residents that The Academy and other development associated with the project will generate more traffic.
“There definitely will be an increase in traffic,” Belcher said. “The point is that up to this point, the growth that we predicted . . . is within tolerable limits of the streets’ capacity to handle it.”
When the CRA undertakes a project, it borrows funds to provide subsidies and loans to improve an area. As the area’s land values increase, the resulting increase in tax revenues--known as “tax-increment funds”--is used to recoup the CRA’s start-up cost and to fund other improvements in the area.
Belcher said the CRA within the next year will ask the City Council to extend the agency’s condemnation powers for 12 years and to raise its $89-million cap on tax-increment funds, perhaps by several hundred million dollars.
