General Discussion

Liberal_in_LA

(44,397 posts) Sat Jul 14, 2012, 08:47 PM Jul 2012

Developer wants to close Santa Monica trailer park, home to elderly, to build tiny condos

A Santa Monica Trailer Park — and Its Senior Residents — Face Off With Fancy New Development

The eviction notices kept coming, one after another. Mary Herring, who will turn 79 in August, says she received six in all — "They just wanted to make sure we got it."

The first notice that Village Trailer Park would be closing went out to its mostly elderly residents on July 10, 2006. On Aug. 5, less than a month later, 80-year-old John Stiles put a gun in his mouth. The night before he took his life, neighbors say he was agitated about the park closing and anxious that he had nowhere else to go.

The notices, it turned out, had been issued erroneously. The owners had not secured from the city of Santa Monica's Rent Control Board the permits necessary to close the park.

Six years later, they still don't have the permits. But the battle over the once-lush 3.5-acre parcel at Colorado Avenue and Stanford Street — and the meaning of "affordable housing" in a city that pioneered rent control — has only escalated since.

In that time, developer Marc Luzzatto, one of the park's owners, has pushed a plan to replace the trailers with a dense cluster of tiny, high-end condominiums and apartments for young singles who are eager to live close to the planned light rail station.

The trailer park's occupancy has dwindled by half as residents have moved or passed away. (The Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which is fighting on the residents' behalf, claims there have been four suicides since the eviction effort started, although the Weekly was only able to confirm one officially.) Luzzatto and his co-owners have refused to fill the park's vacancies, choosing instead to wait out six years of fundraising efforts, lawsuits and petitions for historical status

http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/1767342/