Los Angeles is a city with 34,000 homeless people desperate for housing. But even when there’s a developer and available land and money, getting the necessary housing built still requires wooing nervous politicians and skeptical neighbors.
The respected nonprofit developer and service provider A Community of Friends, which proposed the embattled Lorena Plaza project in Boyle Heights, knows all about that. After years of hearings and meetings, the project, which would be built on a vacant corner lot and offer two dozen of its 49 units to mentally ill homeless veterans, has won support from the local neighborhood council, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and, finally, the local City Council member, Jose Huizar.
But it continues to be opposed by its would-be neighbor, El Mercado, the popular 50-year-old restaurant and shopping center down the street. Members of the Rosado family, which owns El Mercado, have testified against bringing mentally ill people to live so close by, appealed the project’s environmental report, offered the developer another piece of land outside the city to build on, and — after all those strategies failed — have now filed a lawsuit claiming that the city of L.A. violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved an environmental report prepared for the city by consultants.