LA is considering fast tracking some homeless housing projects, but some community members push back

Homeless veteran Kendrick Bailey (C) has General Dogon (L) looks over some citations he recently received outside his tent on a streetcorner near Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, California on June 20, 2017.
Born and raised in the streets of Los Angeles Skid Row, General Dogon is a community organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action network (LACAN), whose mission is to help people dealing with poverty create and discover opportunities while serving to ensure the homeless have a voice, power and opinion in decisions directly affecting them. After dropping some 30 percent from 2015 to 2016, the population of homeless veterans living on Los Angeles streets increased in the official 2017 count to 4,828 from 3,071. / AFP PHOTO / FREDERIC J. BROWN / With AFP Story by Veronique DUPONT: Ranks of homeless veterans keep swelling in Los Angeles (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

Los Angeles City is considering allowing homeless housing projects to circumvent certain review processes, but some community groups don’t want to cede local control and are afraid that this might result in housing that’s too concentrated in specific geographic locations.

Los Angeles City is considering allowing homeless housing projects to circumvent certain review processes, but some community groups don’t want to cede local control and are afraid that this might result in housing that’s too concentrated in specific geographic locations.

City Council will be considering two measures Tuesday. One ordinance would help permanent supportive housing circumvent certain review processes, such as environmental review, and would allow them to bypass certain parking requirements. The other would facilitate the process of turning motels into temporary supportive housing.

Certain community groups such as Venice Vision have pushed back on the measures, saying that they take too much power away from local communities and might result in concentrated homeless housing in some neighborhoods and not others.

We discuss the measures and take you calls at 866-893-5722.

Guests:

Mark Vallianatos, co-founder and policy director of the group Abundant Housing L.A., a volunteer pro-housing organization that advocates for housing in LA County; he tweets

Tweets by markvalli

Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Association, a neighborhood organization