When the City of Los Angeles acquired the Ramada Inn at 3130 Washington Boulevard in December 2020, it was billed as a straightforward pandemic-era intervention. The idea was to purchase an aging motel and transform it into temporary housing and, eventually, permanent supportive housing. For a brief period in 2021 and 2022, that plan seemed to be working.PATH ran the Ramada as interim housing, giving residents private rooms with their own bathrooms and the ability to stay around the clock. People moved in, and the site was positioned to shift into a longer-term role within the city’s housing strategy. ​​Four years later, the property remains empty, its future the subject of a political war that epitomizes the battles over housing on the Westside.

The fight over the Ramada was never just about one building. It became a stage for Venice homeowners’ anxieties, a test case for Los Angeles’ ability to execute adaptive reuse at scale, and the platform that launched Traci Park’s political career. In March 2021, Park herself signed and filed appeals to block the project’s coastal development permit. Her filings alleged that the Ramada would violate the Coastal Act, reduce visitor-serving accommodations, bring crime to the neighborhood, and waste public funds. They recycled familiar talking points from Venice anti-shelter activism, portraying supportive housing as incompatible with coastal life and dangerous for surrounding residents. The Board of Public Works denied those appeals a month later, but Park had already carved out her role as the face of resistance.

For Park, the controversy became a political opportunity. Opposition to Ramada, alongside her fight against the “A Bridge Home” site on Main Street and the Venice Dell project, gave her a base of homeowners and activists who viewed new shelters as existential threats to the neighborhood. Those fights carried her into office in 2022, and once elected, she did little to resolve the same bottlenecks she once decried.

Those bottlenecks were substantial. Building codes enforced by the Department of Building and Safety required upgrades like sprinklers in every room, a costly retrofit that effectively gutted the motel’s interior. Officials overseeing the Ramada initially demanded individual water meters for each unit, a nonsensical and legally unnecessary requirement for supportive housing where residents do not pay their own utilities. The Housing Department insisted Proposition HHH buildings include a recreation room, even though the site already had outdoor patios and case management offices. Each step delayed progress and drained resources, a frustratingly common occurrence in affordable housing development, with nonprofit builders forced to carry these costs up front while cycling through staff and consultants as months turned into years. These are exactly the kinds of bureaucratic logjams where a committed councilmember can step in, press departments to cut red tape, and get a project moving. Park has instead refused to use her power to help, allowing the delays to fester and leaving space for her political allies to turn those very delays into talking points against the project.

Conservative outlets like Circling the News and the Westside Current seized on the empty building as proof of failure. The Current, whose editor previously ran Park’s communications team, has published piece after piece portraying Ramada as a boondoggle, insinuating that nonprofits are profiting off delays and that the city has abandoned the site. What those narratives omit is Park’s own role in failing to progress the project, as well as the bureaucratic reality that slowed it down. In the Council discussion around the City budget in May, Park even suggested a Homekey in her district “on Sepulveda” should be turned back into interim–essentially forfeiting years of work and millions of dollars and tacitly admitting closing the Venice shelter was short-sighted and counterproductive.

For Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA and formerly part of the Mayor’s housing team, the story looks very different. He notes that the Ramada was purchased with city funds rather than Homekey dollars, meaning it did not benefit from the streamlined zoning exemptions that other motels enjoyed. “That unique funding structure meant it had to go through the normal process, and that made everything slower and more complicated,” he explained. He also pushed back on the idea that nonprofits are getting rich from projects like this. “No one’s getting rich off this. PATH is investing significant amounts of money up front, borrowing time and cash, to make it work. This was an empty hotel in the middle of the pandemic. The choice was between letting it sit vacant or turning it into housing. We’re talking about an investment in human life”.

Khanmalek stressed that conversions are not as simple as handing someone a motel key. Older hotels come with electrical and plumbing problems, and often lack basic fire protections like sprinklers in every room. Fixing those issues is costly and time-consuming, but necessary, because supportive housing must meet a higher standard for people who may be moving into their first stable home in years. Critics of the Ramada point to its price tag and years of delay as proof that supportive housing is unworkable, but Khanmalek argues that the focus on cost misses the point. “We actually need to get past this issue of cost. Nobody asks how much a police car costs, because we know a police car is an integral component of policing. If you want to get people off the street, permanent housing is an integral piece of infrastructure. People are dying on the streets of Los Angeles every single day.” For him, each unit is not just a one-time investment for a single resident but long-term infrastructure that will serve 20 or 30 people over decades.

The Council itself acknowledged in 2024 that the Ramada’s delays stemmed from financing and regulatory hurdles, ordering a public report on the timeline. By early 2025, new HHH allocations and legal updates were in place to ready the property for conversion. Yet in the public imagination, fueled by Park’s media allies, the Ramada is framed as a failed project rather than a policy bottleneck.

The truth is more sobering. The Ramada shows how Los Angeles’ permitting, safety codes, accessibility standards, and financing layers can stall adaptive reuse for years. It also shows how political actors can weaponize those delays, opposing projects at the start and then pointing to the resulting vacancy as proof that housing-first does not work. Park helped block the Ramada before she took office, then failed to champion it once she had the authority to make a difference. The result is a building that sits empty, a nonprofit that has been drained keeping the project alive, and a neighborhood fed a narrative that housing policy itself is broken.