Looking Back for a New Vision of Venice
when steve clare drives around venice, his mind’s eye plays tricks on him. Along the canals where new mansions loom ostentatiously over the water, he sees ghosts of wooden working-class bungalows connected by dirt paths. On North Beach he sees shades of departed Holocaust survivors spending the last years of unimaginably darkened lives in the sun by the sea. Everywhere he sees a mixture of penniless artists, long-resident blacks and the nonconformist young in flight from mainstream American life.
What he sees is the Venice of 30 years ago, when, as a Pittsburgh doctor’s son with a seeker’s soul, he happened on the place and knew there was no other for him.
Clare is 56 now and the founder and executive director of Venice Community Housing Corp. He’s spent an adulthood working to preserve the social diversity of his Venice from the high-priced orthodontia that’s been chewing it away--with special verve in recent years.
During the year 2000, the median price of a house in Venice, traditionally a community of small dwellings, rose 21.3%, to $458,000, according to DataQuick, a research firm that analyzes county records. Despite its lingering gang problems and pockets of need, Venice now has the second-highest per-square-foot value, $457, in Los Angeles County. Only the 90402 ZIP Code in Santa Monica has a higher one.
In the face of this, Clare’s organization struggles to establish affordable housing for low-income people, arguably the greatest human problem facing Los Angeles as a whole and an especially difficult one to solve in the ever-costlier coastal communities north of the harbor.
“It goes straight to your vision of Los Angeles,” Clare says. “Los Angeles is an incredibly class- and race-segregated town. When I came to Venice, most of it was working class and low-income people. They were much more in evidence.”
His group strives to be a force for such inclusion, juggling corporate investors, private contributors, foundation grants and bureaucratic requirements from every level of government. It has had its share of success. Since its inception in 1988, it has placed 450 low-income people in 124 newly built or rehabilitated units in 11 buildings, mostly in Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood and adjacent parts of Mar Vista. For these, people pay between $298 a month for a one-bedroom unit to $819 for a four-bedroom. Unlike most housing-oriented nonprofits, the group also runs job training, day care and other human services, in its attempt, Clare says, “to nurture a low-income community in one of L.A.’s wealthiest sections.”
The organization’s efforts don’t go uncontested. Five years ago, for example, fire was set at its now-handsome Washington Courts renovation project. These days the group acquires new properties as quietly as possible to avoid hostile attention.
Its primary enemy, however, isn’t riled citizens, but rising real estate prices, which the currently hiccuping economy has yet to slow. “We’d love to see the market cool off,” Clare says, “so we can be competitive in acquiring property.”
Its buildings are uniformly clean and cheery, most of them occupied by working families. Many are accented with festive tiles made by the young unemployeds who work in the organization’s ceramics training program.
Anyone who has escaped a dump of a dwelling knows how discouraging cracked walls and wrecked plumbing are to hopefulness, and how life’s prospects automatically brighten in decent surroundings. In one way, the group’s success has become problematic for it. A recent survey of its residents showed an unsettling amount of contentment. “We’ve got to address that,” Clare says, “because we don’t want our housing to be the last stop for these people and their kids. It’s permanent housing, but we want to see new faces over the years.”
Only a couple of vacancies occur annually, which is why the organization keeps its waiting list trimmed to about 100 applicants.
Clare’s work points up one of L.A.’s great contradictions. We of the city crow about the polyglot nature of this place, its diversity of peoples and lifestyles, and proclaim it the future of the entire country. Yet diversity can be meaningfully defined only as unlike people having significant civilized contact with one another in the ordinary course of living. Every day “the market” (read, the combined effect of the wealthiest deciding how to spend their wherewithal) is hard at work subverting that diversity.
The rule of money is a great separator, inexorably quarantining like with like and sterilizing all in its wake. Even the loudest proclaimants of diversity are powerless, if not loath, to oppose it, although it augurs a future L.A. of across-the-board confinement--the well-off to the high ground and by the sea, the in-betweens scattered to the commuting hell of the periphery, the social least teeming on the inland lowlands.
Clare says, however, that scenario “doesn’t square with my vision and, I think, most people’s vision. That’s Third World stuff, and not what most people want.”
But, absent a lot more commitment like Clare’s, is that what they’re going to get?
