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AMERICANALMANAC (Sadie Smith) - Venice tenants face eviction from their own homes to clear way for $133 million housing project backed by Nithya Raman Thu Aug 13 18:04:13 2026

Nonprofit developers are hauling longtime low-income renters into court to kick them out of a city-owned Venice fourplex, all to build a $133 million affordable housing project that the city's own attorney has called "infeasible and unauthorized." Mary Alice Crowe moved into her apartment near the Venice Canals forty-three years ago. She was twenty-nine. She […] The post Venice tenants face eviction from their own homes to clear way for $133 million housing project backed by Nithya Raman appeared first on American Almanac .

Nonprofit developers are hauling longtime low-income renters into court to kick them out of a city-owned Venice fourplex, all to build a $133 million affordable housing project that the city's own attorney has called "infeasible and unauthorized." Mary Alice Crowe moved into her apartment near the Venice Canals forty-three years ago. She was twenty-nine. She raised her son there, built a life there, and at seventy-one she assumed she would stay. Allan Phillips, her neighbor in the same small building, has lived there for thirty-five years. Both pay below-market rent on city-owned land. Both now face a legal action filed by nonprofit developers who want them gone, and who argue they cannot afford to wait for the tenants' own lawsuit against the project to play out in court. The project at the center of the fight is Venice Dell, a proposed 120-unit affordable and supportive housing development. Sixty-eight of those apartments would go to formerly homeless residents. Forty-nine would house low-income tenants. Three units would be set aside for onsite managers. Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman backs the plan. The city attorney who reviewed it does not. A project the city's own lawyer rejected keeps moving forward In February, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto issued a report concluding that Venice Dell was "infeasible and unauthorized." Her office put the price tag at roughly $133 million, up from about $86.9 million under an earlier agreement. That is an increase of more than $46 million. At the same time, the unit count dropped from 140 to 120. Simple math puts the cost at roughly $1.1 million per apartment, The California Post reported . Those numbers alone should have stopped the project cold. A city attorney does not call a development "infeasible and unauthorized" as a formality. Yet the nonprofit developers behind Venice Dell pressed ahead, and escalated. They filed a separate legal action to remove the existing tenants from the fourplex before the tenants' own challenge to the project could even be heard by a judge. A court hearing on the developers' eviction action was scheduled for Wednesday. Developers claim $42.5 million in taxpayer money hangs in the balance The developers argue that $42.5 million in taxpayer funding is at risk if the eviction action is delayed. They say the project must secure its full financing package by September 2027. That deadline, in their telling, justifies racing past the tenants' legal objections and clearing the site now. Councilwoman Traci Park, who represents Venice, framed the situation in blunter terms. "The same people who claim to champion tenants and low-income families are now asking a court to evict them from their homes." Park described the lawsuit against the tenants as exposing "a truth the public deserves to see." She is right to press the contradiction. The affordable-housing movement in Los Angeles has long positioned itself as the defender of vulnerable renters. Here, that movement is using the courts to displace the very people it claims to protect, a seventy-one-year-old woman and a man who has called the same building home for three and a half decades. The broader political dysfunction in Los Angeles has driven voters to look for alternatives. The city's ongoing police staffing crisis and persistent failures of local leadership have made accountability a central issue in the mayoral race. Crowe and Phillips built their lives on this block Crowe does not speak like someone reading talking points. She speaks like a person watching her home disappear. "I'm 71. It's been my whole life in Venice, pretty much. I've raised my son here, lots of friends, family. Everything familiar comes from here." She understands the stated purpose of Venice Dell, housing for low-income families and formerly homeless residents. She does not dispute the goal. She disputes the method. "They want people that live here, work here, raise their families here, exactly what we have done this whole time. But now they want new families." Phillips put it more simply. He knows his neighbors. They know him. He has no interest in leaving. "I love it here. I don't want to go anywhere else. Why should I?" That question deserves an honest answer from the developers, from the city, and from Nithya Raman. None of them provided one. The California Post sought comment from Venice Community Housing, Hollywood Community Housing Corporation, LAFLA, Public Counsel, and Raman. No responses were reported. Raman's silence is worth noting. She is running for mayor of Los Angeles on a platform that emphasizes housing justice. The mayoral race has already drawn national scrutiny over election integrity concerns, and voters are paying close attention to what candidates actually do, not just what they promise. $1.1 million per unit, and fewer of them Set aside the human cost for a moment and look at the dollars. Under the earlier agreement, Venice Dell was supposed to deliver 140 units for about $86.9 million. The current proposal delivers 120 units for roughly $133 million. Twenty fewer apartments. Forty-six million more dollars. The per-unit cost landed at approximately $1.1 million. For context, that figure does not buy a unit. It builds one, in a city where the affordable-housing pipeline is already notorious for cost overruns, bureaucratic delays, and projects that never break ground. Taxpayers are being asked to fund a development that the city's own legal authority has flagged as unauthorized, at a cost that ballooned by more than fifty percent, while the people who already live on the site are dragged into court. Los Angeles has no shortage of political leaders willing to spend other people's money on programs that sound compassionate. It has a severe shortage of leaders willing to ask whether those programs actually work, or whether they just move the suffering around. The pattern of political accountability failures in the city runs deep. Two lawsuits, one set of losers The legal picture is tangled. The tenants filed their own action to stop Venice Dell. The developers, rather than waiting for that case to resolve, filed a separate action to evict the tenants first. The effect is to put the residents on defense in two proceedings at once, one where they challenge the project's legality, and another where they fight to keep their homes long enough for the first case to matter. The California Post asked whether the Ellis Act process, a California law that allows landlords to remove tenants when withdrawing rental units from the market, should begin before the larger lawsuit is resolved. The article did not report whether the Ellis Act has been formally invoked or by whom. What is clear is the sequence. The city attorney said the project was infeasible. The developers sued the tenants anyway. And the candidate who backs the plan has said nothing publicly in the tenants' defense. Questions about governance in Los Angeles extend well beyond housing. Federal investigators have opened probes into voter fraud on Skid Row , adding another layer to the city's credibility problems. Raman's housing vision has a human price tag Nithya Raman wants to be mayor of Los Angeles. She has positioned herself as a progressive champion of housing and homelessness policy. Venice Dell is the kind of project her platform was built to support, affordable units, supportive housing for the formerly homeless, nonprofit developers, public land. But the project's own numbers undermine the case. A cost increase of more than fifty percent. A unit count that went down, not up. A city attorney who called it unauthorized. And at the bottom of the pile, two longtime tenants who already live the kind of modest, rooted, community-connected lives that affordable-housing advocates say they want to create. Crowe and Phillips are not wealthy homeowners fighting a shelter in their backyard. They are low-income renters on city-owned land who did exactly what the system asked of them, stayed, paid rent, raised families, built ties. Now the system wants to replace them with a project that costs more, delivers less, and has already been flagged as legally defective. When the people who claim to fight for affordable housing start evicting affordable tenants to build expensive units, the contradiction is not subtle. It is the whole story. The post Venice tenants face eviction from their own homes to clear way for $133 million housing project backed by Nithya Raman appeared first on American Almanac .

AI:In another crushing blow to the working class, Los Angeles officials and nonprofit developers are weaponizing the legal system to steamroll longtime low-income tenants in Venice. These residents, some having occupied their homes for over four decades, are being dragged into court to make room for a massive $133 million "affordable housing" project backed by Nithya Raman. Even more egregious is that the city's own attorney has flagged this entire endeavor as unauthorized and infeasible, yet the bureaucratic machine pushes forward regardless of the human cost. This isn't about helping people; it is a coordinated displacement effort where existing residents are treated like obstacles in a high-stakes real estate game orchestrated by radical politicians and their developer allies.