A Terrific Boost for Local Housing
The clerks, the waitresses, the janitors and other working people just got another step closer to home ownership in a market where the median cost of a house is about 10 times their average salary. The Los Angeles City Council has approved selling city-owned land at below the market price to two community groups intent on building very affordable houses.
The council approved the sale of 12 acres in an industrial neighborhood just south of downtown for a bargain $6.6 million. The city had purchased the site near 41st Street and Long Beach Avenue several years ago for $7 million, and spent more to clear it for a huge trash-burning incinerator. The controversial LANCER project was halted, however, by community and environmental opposition.
There was no opposition in City Hall to the sale of the land at an attractive price. Mayor Tom Bradley and the entire council back the Nehemiah West housing project sponsored by the Southern California Organizing Committee and United Neighborhoods Organization, politically potent church-based community groups that claim 180,000 families as members.
Union workers, however, resisted cutting their wages to make the project feasible. Councilman Richard Alatorre worked out a compromise that will provide prevailing wages and cover the additional cost with either more money from the Century Freeway Housing Project, a fund set up to replace housing destroyed by the new freeway, or other sources.
The $34-million project will be funded by $11 million in Century Freeway money, $4 million in government bonds, an $8 million interest-free construction loan from religious denominations, led by Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, Episcopal Bishop Frederick Borsch and Christian Methodist Episcopal Bishop E. Lynn Brown, and mortgage financing provided by Great Western Bank and the federal Housing Department.
UNO and SCOC will also use the expertise of a church-based group that has built 1,800 affordable homes in what had been a crime-ridden section of New York City.
In Los Angeles, the nonprofit developers plan to build 300 townhouse-style homes, which range in size from two to four bedrooms, and 1,000 to 1,400 square feet.
In exchange for the bargain on the public land, 40 homes will be set aside for families who can only afford to pay $47,000. The other 260 houses will cost an average of $66,000. At that price, people who earn between $18,000 and $26,000 will qualify.
Nehemiah West deserves strong public and private support because it will offer 300 working-class families their best chance to own a house in Los Angeles. The need, sadly, is a thousand times greater.
