Tenants Lose Round in Fight to Save Venice Units

For more than a decade, tenants of the Lincoln Place Apartments in Venice have fought the owner’s plans to replace the 795 units with more upscale apartments that would be unaffordable for many low-income families now living there.

The residents’ latest tactic failed Wednesday, when the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission refused to designate the 1950 complex as a cultural historic monument. Such a designation could have delayed renovation or demolition plans for at least a year, under city rules.

But the panel, in a 4-1 vote, decided the garden apartments’ design and cultural significance were not important enough to merit the landmark status.

Tenant leader Sheila Bernard said the fight is far from over.

“We want to preserve it as affordable housing,” Bernard said. “We don’t want it gentrified, and we don’t want it destroyed. . . . A lot of these people have no place else to go.”

Wednesday’s hearing came two months after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted the owner, TransAction Financial Corp., the right to demolish the aging complex. The city had sought to block redevelopment because too many poor families would be displaced.

The property owners have tabled the demolition plans and instead are updating the infrastructure, expanding units and adding hundreds of trees to the 33-acre property, according to TransAction executive Bob Bisno. That would still require tenants to move and pay higher rents.

The project has a tangled history of other lawsuits, including one in which the ACLU is defending tenants facing evictions for what they contend were legal protests. The owner says the tenants vandalized property.

An attorney for TransAction, Allan Abshez, said he considered the board’s vote Wednesday good news, but downplayed the importance of the decision.

“This decision merely eliminates unnecessary interference” from the city or the tenants, he said.

Tenants had hoped to repeat the success of residents at the 260-unit Chase Knolls apartments in Sherman Oaks. While the Cultural Heritage Commission had deadlocked on the significance of that San Fernando Valley complex, the Los Angeles City Council declared it a landmark in July and temporarily saved it from threatened demolition.

Commissioners said the Lincoln Place complex of 52 two-story buildings does not have the architectural quality of Chase Knolls.

“I would hope the integrity of the community would be preserved,” Commissioner Mary Klaus-Martin said. But, she said, Lincoln Place is not “a significant piece of architecture.” Commissioner Michael A. Cornwell cast the sole dissenting vote.

The newly renovated units will lease for as much as $2,000 a month, about twice the current rents. Tenants who cannot afford the higher rents will be offered $2,000 to $4,000 to relocate, Bisno said.

Lincoln Place was designed by Los Angeles architect and house builder Heth Wharton as affordable housing for working-class families and marketed as “low budget luxury.”

It is the state’s largest example of post-World War II housing financed by a federal program promoting private production of affordable shelter, Gail Sansbury, Cal Poly Pomona assistant professor of urban and regional planning, testified Wednesday.

Tenants on Wednesday told commissioners the design of the complex cultivated interaction between neighbors.

“It is the best community I’ve ever lived in,” said tenant Michael Palumbo, who is also the chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy committee that seeks to preserve modern architecture. “Heth Wharton understood what community was about.”

But the property owners’ architect, Robert Chattel, argued that Lincoln Place is an example of uninspired “mass-produced housing.”

“It’s a nice place to live,” Chattel said. “But what does this educate us about? That Heth Wharton . . . was not a creative thinker.”

Bernard did not specify the tenants’ next possible step.

“When the city is facing a crisis in housing as it is now, extraordinary measures are sometimes required,” Bernard said. “You’ve got to build diversity into the city and the only way to do that is to preserve affordable housing in every section of the city.”