Will Meeting Needs Create Problems?

After spirited debate between homeowners and city officials, city planning commissioners on July 23 approved a proposal for an 85-unit, low-cost senior housing complex in Sherman Oaks.

The proposal required the granting of a density bonus allowing the developer, Menorah Housing Foundation, to build more than the 39 units permitted under the city code for the southwest corner of Noble Avenue and Moorpark Street, now a vacant lot. Area residents immediately promised to appeal.

MICHAEL BAKER asked a homeowner who lives about four blocks away and the manager of another Menorah affordable senior housing complex about the proposal and its impacts.

LUDMILA JUHAS

Resident manager, Sherman Oaks Senior Housing

I think people that are against the senior housing project just don’t want to face change. It’s fear of change. But once they find out that this change makes things better than what they had before, they will be happy with it.

Every day I’m here, five, six, seven people come in to ask for housing.

There’s a great need for affordable housing. We had a waiting list three months before this building was complete. If we took all our applications we would have between 500 and 525 people in line for housing, and we have only 82 apartments and they’re all occupied. People have to wait a long time, sometimes until someone dies.

Others say resident senior housing will have an impact on the traffic and the parking, but it’s not true.

First of all, most residents are retired, so they don’t go anywhere in the early morning or late afternoon traffic. You’re also dealing with elderly people that don’t have many visitors. Out of 100% of our residents, only 10% receive visitors yearly.

We have 41 parking spaces, with nine of those [for the] handicapped, and 92 residents, and we still have one parking space left over. Most of the residents don’t have cars, and most of the residents never will have cars because they don’t drive and have low incomes.

Our building is almost like what the new building will be. The positive side for the neighborhood is when we build beautiful buildings that are clean, it’s certainly better than a vacant lot.

The new building will not harm the value of people’s property. As a matter of fact, our visitors say this is the nicest building on the block. A lot of younger people come off the street and want to know how much the rent is because they think these are condominiums.

I think the neighborhood around Noble and Moorpark will not have any reason to worry. I think they will be very happy when they have a building there and not a hole with very high weeds.

EVAN LEVY

Management consultant and member of Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

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This is not an issue of senior housing. This is strictly an issue of how much they are going to build on a piece of property and how many people are going to live there and how that affects the neighborhood.

I don’t want to see the site a vacant lot, and I would be thrilled with a complex within city code guidelines.

The issue is parking places and traffic. The additional burden isn’t as obvious to someone who doesn’t live in this area, like it is for someone such as me who watches as many as 800 cars pass by my house at 8 a.m.--I sat and I counted them.

There have been three other pieces of construction in this area where people took home sites and built multifamily dwellings, and the impact has been obvious in the number of cars, parking and the number of people. The point becomes, when is too much, too much?

Now suddenly, we’re told the city code is not appropriate because there is a special circumstance and that special circumstance exceeds what’s been planned for the site by 175% to 200%. If the fact is that the quantity of traffic and density won’t impact the neighborhood, then that would have really been nice to hear about before the planning commission voted. But nobody said it.

There is not a defined plan on square footage per unit and how many people are going to be living there. It’s not a matter of units, it’s a matter of density. Units don’t drive cars, people do.

I would rather see something within standards than something that establishes a precedent where developers can change the law and ask for variances to their convenience, rather than consider the needs of the neighborhood and Sherman Oaks.