Support needed for new apartments
Our city needs builders to construct more units of housing, at all price levels, throughout the city, but especially units that are more affordable as well as units in buildings that provide continuing supportive services for residents who formerly may have experienced homelessness.
As our local community has seen in the case of Pio Franco Iervolino (formerly called “Giorgio” during his decade of street living on and around Larchmont Boulevard), supportive services are key to returning individuals experiencing homelessness to what society views as normalcy. With such support, Franco, once a hard-working waiter at prestigious restaurants in our community, no longer lives on the streets and now has housing and meals and is obtaining services and income to which he is entitled. Housing is the first step.
Beginning nearly 50 years ago, this newspaper has supported the drafting, adoption and implementation of zoning rules that ultimately became the Park Mile Specific Plan. Our late co-publisher, Dawne Goodwin, was a member of the city committee that first looked at rezoning parts of Wilshire Boulevard during the creation of the original Wilshire Community Plan in the mid-1970s. In the late 1970s, local residents (this writer included) worked closely with the staff of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, with Wilshire Boulevard commercial property owners, with Fourth District City Councilman (and Council President) John Ferraro and, ultimately, with the full City Council in preparing the Park Mile Specific Plan that initially was adopted unanimously by the City Council in June 1979.
During the intervening 45 years, and as noted by John Gresham of the Wilshire Homeowners’ Alliance in our story on Page 1, nearly 85 percent of the approximately 35 parcels that were vacant at the time of the Park Mile Specific Plan’s adoption in 1979 have now been developed with new buildings that conform to the rules of the Specific Plan. About half of those new buildings are residential.
The Larchmont Chronicle encourages Metro to make its vacant parcels on Wilshire Boulevard, between Crenshaw and Lorraine boulevards, available to a qualified developer at the lowest possible land cost so that needed affordable housing can be constructed there — in conformance with the rules of the Park Mile Specific Plan — as soon as possible.
Category: News