LOS ANGELES (2UG) – Developers began work on a new modular housing project at the intersection of Imperial and Broadway in August 2020. The $22 million project was slated to take 30 days to assemble the units, and a year to complete the entire project in order to house homeless persons earning at or below 30 and 40 percent of the area median income upon completion. Two years later the project isn’t close to being completed.
According to UrbanizeLA, the project is a joint venture between Clifford Beers Housing and American Family Housing, and is located at 283 W. Imperial Highway – a short distance northeast of Metro’s Harbor Freeway Station. Plans call for the construction of a five-story structure – composed of prefabricated modular units – featuring 53 studio apartments with 900 square feet of ground-floor commercial uses.
Links to the staff report on the Housing and Community Investment Department website are disabled.
The last update on the project provided on the UrbanizeLA website was in March, seven months after the project started.
Now we’re in October, seven months later and the project is NOWHERE near completion and the modules are visibly rusting. Did they run out of money? Is this why there’s a new push for Measure ULA, by United Way, to “finish the work”?
The project began in Aug. 2020 and was supposed to be finished in a year and here we are two years later and it looks like this? And they want more money?
The housing crisis and the number of homeless living on the street continues to increase despite annual homeless counts that are being called into question and hundreds of millions of dollars pledged by taxpayers under Proposition HHH.
The City has requested a third-party audit of the homeless count numbers because according to the city council, in simple terms, “the math ain’t mathin'”.
This year’s count, released last month, showed a 4.1% increase in the number of unhoused people in Los Angeles County since 2020.
The city saw a 1.7% increase in homelessness since 2020, but Council President Nury Martinez’s office noted that the trends were not consistent across council districts.
The motion calling for the audit was made by the embattled Nury Martinez and seconded by Councilmen Kevin de León and Paul Krekorian.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has been plagued with scandals of mismanagement of funds and an expose by CBS2 David Goldstein who followed employees throwing away food that was supposed to go to the city’s homeless.
The corruption plaguing Los Angeles (city and county) is devastating and is costing the most vulnerable their lives.
Why did this project cost $22 million when they aren’t building anything?
They are stacking storage containers on top of each other and walking away while elected officials continue pushing an agenda that “housing the homeless” is their priority.
