Where Has All the (Affordable) Housing Gone? A Venice Exhibition
By Tom Laichas
I’m grateful this year to have worked with “Where Has All the (Affordable) Housing Gone?” an ongoing project that explores how Venice lost over 1,500 affordable rent controlled units over the past twenty years. Conceived and facilitated by urban scholar, activist artist and social critic Judy Branfman, the project opened with weekly workshops this past February, and culminates in an exhibition at Beyond Baroque’s Mike Kelley Gallery (October 8 through November 4). Participants include current renters, unhoused veterans, tenants organized to stop the Lincoln Place evictions, longtime activists in the First Baptist Church of Venice fight, as well as teachers, journalists, retirees, and longtime homeowners.
During the workshops, we toured Venice neighborhoods, examined the city’s unenforced tenant protection ordinances (which we transformed into often satirical poems), photographed 279 Venice rental properties removed from the market by the Ellis Act, and spoke to journalists, historians, and Venice activists.
So: where has all the affordable housing gone? Tune into mainstream news (and most elected officials), and you’ll be told that this loss is somehow natural. From this perspective, Los Angeles turned its back on development through rent control, density limits, zoning, and NIMBYism. As a result, demand outstripped supply, leading to higher costs for both homebuyers and renters.
In this version of events, Venice isn’t overpriced—it’s recovering from decades in which it was underpriced. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “There Is No Alternative”—higher rents were inevitable.
The truth is very different. As the Beachhead has reported for many years, Venice’s housing crisis is the legacy of political decisions reached by L.A. officials, often corrupt, who either looked the other way or actively abetted developers, unscrupulous landlords, and real estate investors. The city failed to enforce its own tenant protections but selectively enforced building, health, and safety codes against homeowners who couldn’t afford repairs and weren’t offered grants or loans to address alleged code violations: all the easier to push out less affluent homeowners, bulldoze their small homes, and build a gentrified Venice. Gang injunctions—later found to be unconstitutional—also accelerated gentrification.
In short, we live in a future that didn’t have to happen.
The exhibition graphically illustrates some of these government failures. Specifically:
• Failure to enforce tenant protections in California’s Ellis Act. The 1985 Ellis Act gave landlords the right to withdraw housing units from the rental market. The idea was to ensure, for instance, that mom ’n’ pop landlords could evict a tenant in order to downsize into a smaller retirement residence, or could sell the complex for another use, or could open the unit to an on-site apartment manager. To evict a tenant underthe Ellis Act, landlords must give that tenant six months’ notice (a full year, if a longtime tenant is disabled or over 62). A landlord who returns a unit to the rental market must give the former tenant the opportunity to move back in at the old rent. In other words, a landlord can’t legally use the Ellis Act to take a rent-controlled unit off the market and then, six months later, re-rent that unit at a substantially higher rate. But this is exactly what has happened again and again. In Los Angeles, the Department of Housing has neither monitored nor enforced the law.
• Failure to enforce the city’s Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO). Unscrupulous landlords often harass rent-protected tenants, including the disabled and elderly, with threats and daily harassment. Documents revealed through public record requests show that the Department of Housing forwarded none of the 6,000 TAHO complaints to the City Attorney.
• Weak regulation of short-term vacation rental properties. Every apartment unit and house listed on Air BNB, VRBO, and similar services reduces the housing available for long-term residents. While one map in the exhibit locates 330 short term rental properties registered with the city, InsideAirBNB.com lists over 1,600 such properties. Despite enacting a Home Sharing Ordinance, the city has failed to address illegal rentals and their contribution to our housing and homeless crises.
• Failure to press for public and tenant-owned housing. Workshop participants heard from veteran activists about the tenant fight against ruthless developers to save affordable housing in Lincoln Place. It was a hard-fought battle (well documented over the years in the Beachhead), and its victories achieved some limited victories. All those evictions might have been avoided altogether if the City or a nonprofit housing developer had bought the property and preserved its affordability. At the time, many officials claimed to be sympathetic to such plans. But ultimately, they failed to act.
Here’s some of what’s in the show:
• A sixty-year time line of Venice housing activism;
• A wall-size annotation of the Ellis Act and TAHO, highlighting tenant protection provisions that the City has failed to enforce;
• Personal stories of eviction—each story keyed to a Venice location where tenants were forced out of their homes;
• Wall art enumerating the reasons people have given for not sharing their stories, reasons which reflect the ongoing fear and trauma that has resulted from landlord intimidation of tenants;
• Sumaya Evans’ paintings, hand-crafted dolls and writings, which have been her anchor as she has transitioned into one of the few affordable housing units created in Venice;
• A map of 279 units withdrawn from the rental market thanks to the Ellis Act. Workshop participants took photos of all these units, which are displayed on a 10’x10’ map of Venice.
Given the number of people harmed by official dereliction, it would be easy to give up the fight. However, the workshops gave me an opportunity to meet some of the many people organizing to save our neighborhood and our city. Their work gives me hope.
![Venetian Carol Wells with a catalogue from an exhibit she curated [as Executive Director of the Center For The Study of Political Graphics], “Reclaim! Remain! Rebuild! Posters on Affordable Housing, Gentrification, & Resistance”](https://i0.wp.com/venicebeachhead.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IMG_1070.jpg?w=163&h=218&ssl=1 "IMG_1070")
Their approaches are many. Venice Community Housing, founded by local activists, has built low-income housing since 1988. The Westside local of the L.A. Tenants Union helps renters learn to organize so they can remain in their homes. Land Trusts, such as the Liberty Community Land Trust, buy real estate that remains affordable in perpetuity. The United to House L.A. Coalition successfully campaigned to enact Measure ULA, which imposes a “mansion tax” (5% of real estate sales over $5 million)—the funds are earmarked for programs that will keep seniors and low income tenants in their apartments, provide legal and other tenant services, and build new affordable housing. Justice for Renters is now at work to win voter approval for the 2024 Justice for Renters initiative. That proposal will reverse the Costa-Hawkins Act which has returned rents to the market rate every time a tenant has left a rent-controlled unit, accelerating gentrification. And the Community Corporation of Santa Monica is partnering with long-time residents to build affordable housing adjacent to the First Baptist Church of Venice.
Given L.A.’s history of politically powerful and deep-pocketed developers, NIMBYism, and City Council corruption, significant change will require considerable struggle. These groups show how that struggle can succeed. “Where Has All the (Affordable) Housing Gone?” explains why their fight matters for Venice and for Los Angeles.
Useful Links Inside Air BNB (http://insideairbnb.com/los-angeles/)
Justice for Renters (https://justiceforrenters.org/)
United to House L.A. (https://unitedtohousela.com/)
Venice Community Housing (https://vchcorp.org/)
If you’re facing landlord harassment or are threatened with eviction, please contact Stay Housed
L.A. (https://www.stayhousedla.org/).
wherehasallthehousinggone@gmail.com
Categories: Development/Gentrification, Housing, Tenants/Lincoln Place
