GWNC Land Use Committee Recommends Support for Condo Conversion; Discusses City’s Zoning Recommendations to Meet Housing Element Targets

At the October 25 meeting of the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council’s Land Use committee, there was only one specific item up for a vote, which left committee members time for a brief introduction to the city’s efforts to find places for new housing to meet its new state-mandated housing production targets, which require almost half a million new homes to be built here in the next eight years.

124 N. Manhattan Pl.

Currently, there are two duplexes under construction at this address, but the developer, Thomas James Homes (which has several similar projects underway in other parts of the Greater Wilshire area), has now applied for a parcel map that would divide the lot and turn the four new rental units into four individually sold and owned condominiums.  Committee discussion on this item was brief, with several members agreeing with project representative Nick Leathers that owner-occupied units will likely be good for the neighborhood, and at least one other member praising the fact that – unlike at one of the developer’s other sites – they did preserve the existing street trees at this location. The committee voted unanimously to recommend that the GWNC board support the parcel map application.

Housing Element Zoning Recommendations

Earlier this year, the LA City Council adopted a set of “targeted amendments” to the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan.  The amendments are designed to outline where and how the city can create 456,643 new housing units over the next eight years, including 184,721 units that “must be affordable to lower income households (Very Low and Low).”  The next step is for the Department of City Planning to create a strategy for which kinds of housing would fit best in which parts of the city.

Catching up with this process for the first time at their October meeting, Land Use Committee members took their first look at a series of interactive maps created by the Planning Department to identify “Adequate Sites” for new housing – places that are both suitable and available for housing construction – as well as a breakdown of which kinds of housing could potentially be built on which of the adequate sites. (In other words, the maps show sites where new housing could potentially be built…not sites where it definitely would be built.)

The map of all the potential “adequate sites” identified so far is shown above.  Further maps in the sequence, below, color code each type of potential development that might be allowed on the different parcels.

Land Use Committee members at this month’s meeting took their first look at these maps, but did not yet discuss them in depth.  They did, however, agree to agendize – at a future meeting – the appointment of a subcommittee to learn more about the city’s rezoning process to meet its housing targets, and to figure out how the GWNC might best get involved in the discussions.

The next meeting of the GWNC Land Use Committee will be held, via Zoom, on Tuesday, November 22, at 6:30 p.m., and the next meeting of the GWNC board will be held on Wednesday, November 9, also at 6:30 p.m. and also via Zoom.