“Where are you going to send me to live?”
That’s what Columba Torralba, 85, asked the East Los Angeles Area Planning Commission at a public hearing on Wednesday, just before they approved a plan to build a six-story, mixed-use development on East Cesar Chavez Avenue – a project that will demolish the building she lives in.
The endorsement is a reversal from the commission’s veto last March, when it blocked the development over concerns it could lead to gentrification that would be harmful to the public health of residents.
The backtracking comes after an L.A. County Superior Court judge issued a judgment in January stating that the city “acted in bad faith … in connection with its disapproval of the project.” The judge ordered the commission to reverse its decision and approve the proposed housing development.
At Wednesday’s meeting, held at Ramona Hall Community Center, the commission voted 4-0 in favor of the project. About 20 people attended the meeting, including residential and commercial tenants who occupy the building that will be razed to make way for the housing development. “Sell-outs!” one person yelled after the vote.
Planning commissioner Gloria Gutierrez acknowledged that “Boyle Heights is undergoing immense pressures of gentrification,” but, she said, the judge’s order is “really taking the power outside of our hands.”
Proposed by L.A.-based real estate company Tiao Properties, the project includes five stories of apartment units, a ground floor for retail use and an underground parking garage. Five of the 50 apartment units are designated as affordable housing, with the rest set at market-rate.
While eviction notices have been sent to the three residential tenants, Tiao Properties representatives have made assurances that the property’s residential tenants have a right to return and occupy an affordable unit if they qualify as “very low or extremely low-income households.”
Torralba and other tenants, however, remain skeptical.
“They want to throw me out and it’s unjust,” said Torralba, who’s been living there for three decades.
She told Boyle Heights Beat that she received an eviction notice stating she must vacate the building by next February. “I don’t have anywhere else to live,” she said during the public hearing.
Torralba – whose source of income is a Social Security check – lives with her daughter Rosa Garcia, who is the owner of the Mexican restaurant El Apetito, one of the businesses slated to be razed. They live in the building’s residential units.
“The problem here is, what are we going to do with all our investment tied up in a place that doesn’t belong to us, and that they’re taking away from us?” said Garcia, who spoke during the public hearing on Wednesday.
Her niece, Vanessa Garcia, who also addressed the commission, grew up in that building and will soon move out of Boyle Heights after she received a 120-day eviction notice. “My aunt knows the entire community,” she told the Beat.
“I am fortunate to say that I can move somewhere else, but it sucks because it’s not voluntary,” she said. “I was born and raised there. How do you leave a place that you grew to love?”
“I’m no longer going to be able to go across the street and buy bread, or go to the little restaurants. It’s not the same. I’m being forced to leave,” she added. “It’s sad because they don’t think about the people there. They don’t think about who really lives in Boyle Heights.”
Alberto Santillan, who runs a vintage shop at the building, said moving elsewhere would be tough. “I’ve invested a lot of my life and time and finances and resources into making this a reality,” Santillan told the commission.
To Santillan, inequalities in Boyle Heights will only be “exacerbated by this building.”
“Nothing good will come from it,” he said.
This ruling comes nearly a year after Tiao Properties sued the city of L.A. in June, arguing that blocking the project based on a perceived threat of gentrification doesn’t meet the legal standards under the Housing Accountability Act, a California law that aims to addres the state’s housing shortfall by limiting local governments’ ability to deny housing proposals.
Attorney Sheri L. Bonstelle, who represented Tiao in court proceedings, said that the law only allows denials based on “specific adverse impacts to public health and safety,” such as hazardous material or bad air quality, not gentrification concerns.
At the public hearing, Bonstelle told the commission it could not “deny the project in response to public comment.” Doing so, she said, would result in mandatory fines by the court.
“The owner hopes that the tenants return,” Bonstelle said. “The intent isn’t to destroy a community, it’s to add housing to a community by allowing the residents to come back.”
Bonstelle recognized it’s not a perfect scenario, “especially if you’re elderly.”
“You don’t want to have to move out during construction and move back, and potentially, you don’t want to move back into a modern structure …,” she said during the hearing. “It’s a different type of building, and it’s a different type of community, but that’s what state law says, and that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to build enough new housing and affordable housing.”
Gutierrez, the planning commissioner, said the Housing Accountability Act fails to protect people affected by the housing crisis. “I understand that the state is under pressure to build more housing, but it doesn’t ask the important question of who the housing is for,” she said.
Viva Padilla, a former tenant who appealed Tiao’s proposal – prompting the commission to block the project – vowed to keep fighting.
“This isn’t the end for us. We’re not going to stop,” she told the commission. “We will undermine the project every step of the way.”