Tonight’s meeting at the Vera Davis McClendon Center made plain that the City’s process for determining the building’s future has unraveled. What surfaced in the room was not just frustration about a proposed youth arts center. It was the accumulated grief of a community that has endured displacement, the loss of anti-poverty resources, and a public process that has repeatedly excluded the people who built the center and depended on it for generations.
For decades, Vera Davis was the cultural and social anchor of Oakwood. It was one of the few stable places where Venice’s Black and Brown families could gather, organize, and find support. The center housed gang intervention programs, youth activities, immigration assistance, recovery meetings, cultural events, food distribution, and daily services for low-income residents. Much of this work was sustained by federal Community Development Block Grants that flowed through the Latino Resource Organization’s FamilySource Center. Those grants brought roughly eight hundred thousand dollars a year into the building and kept the services alive.
Gentrification changed that. Community Development Block Grants are tied partly to poverty levels and household income. As higher-income households replaced low-income families in Oakwood, the census data shifted. The federal dollars diminished. The same displacement that strained the lives of long-standing residents also steadily eroded the funding that had allowed Vera Davis to function as a community hub. The fate of the center was shaped as much by demographic change as by any City policy decision.
By 2018, the City was reconsidering how to manage the building. A briefing from that year shows that when Councilmember Mike Bonin met with Stan Muhammad of the HELPER Foundation, Bonin intended for the Latino Resource Organization to continue running the FamilySource Center at Vera Davis. HELPER requested space as well, and Bonin agreed to rent them a portion of the building. LRO later moved the Westside FamilySource Center to the West LA Municipal Building in 2019, where it continued serving families across the Westside, including Oaxacan immigrants and residents of Mar Vista Gardens.
The breaking point came in 2023, when the Community Investment for Families Department issued a new Request for Proposals and removed the Westside as an eligible service area. LRO warned Councilmember Traci Park’s office eight months before the deadline that they were on track to lose nearly one million dollars in funding. Staff confirmed Park was informed. She took no action to protect the funding or advocate for a revised service area. The Westside FamilySource Center closed, taking with it the last remaining stream of anti-poverty funds connected to Vera Davis. Only after the closure did Park publicly criticize CIFD, despite having had advance notice and an opportunity to intervene. The community lost its long-standing service hub at a moment when displacement had already erased so much.
Once the FamilySource Center was gone, the City turned to Proposition K, a voter-approved program that provides capital dollars for improvements to City facilities. Prop K is not operating money. It does not fund programming, staffing, or services. Yet accepting Prop K money imposes strict programming constraints on a site. Any building that receives it must operate as a youth-focused recreation or arts center. That requirement leaves little room for the broad mix of community services that once defined Vera Davis. A 2020 Bureau of Engineering memo shows that City staff had previously recommended locating the Junior Arts Center at Old Fire Station 62 on Centinela to avoid displacing the still-active programs at Vera Davis. But with those programs already stripped away and the block-grant funding gone, the City moved to activate Prop K. Control of the building shifted to the Department of Cultural Affairs to begin planning for its required conversion into a youth arts center, even though the programming itself would need to be financed later by someone else.
What followed was a public process mired by cancellations, confusion, and a basic lack of transparency. The first meeting of the Local Volunteer Neighborhood Oversight Committee was held in October 2024. Residents immediately raised concerns that the name “Vera Davis McClendon Center” might be removed, warning that doing so would deepen the erasure already felt by the Black and Brown communities who built the center. Naming is not cosmetic. It is a link to memory, identity, and place. Those concerns should have been documented in minutes. They were not.
The City attempted to schedule two more oversight meetings, including one on August 11, 2025. Both were cancelled for procedural violations. When the City tried again on November 17, the same errors appeared. The agenda lacked public comment, included no materials for review, and was not posted with adequate notice. Many residents heard about the meeting not from the City but from Councilmember Park’s newsletter, rather than through official channels like the Venice Neighborhood Council.
Inside the meeting, the dysfunction persisted. The oversight committee had eight members even though Prop K rules allow only seven. When Park arrived, residents expressed clearly that they did not want the building converted into a children’s arts center and instead wanted it restored as a community resource hub rooted in its history. Park appeared unprepared for the level of pushback. She offered brief remarks suggesting that she herself had directed the City to form the committee, even though Prop K requires such committees by law. She left before residents could ask questions or respond. Her brief appearance only widened the gap between the community and the process.
Emails show that residents have spent months trying to obtain basic information, including minutes from the first meeting and confirmation of whether later meetings were even happening. On October 20, 2025, the day of a scheduled oversight meeting, no legally compliant agenda was posted. Residents questioned whether the City was violating the Brown Act. No clear explanation followed. Staff said flyers had been posted, which do not satisfy state law.
Additional correspondence shows the LVNOC roster was still being corrected on the afternoon of the November meeting. Names and email addresses were wrong. At least three different rosters circulated over a single year. The most recent one still listed eight members instead of seven. Residents had no way to know who was officially appointed or who had the authority to vote.
Last month, the Bureau of Engineering acknowledged that minutes from the first meeting had never been uploaded and described them as a low priority. Staff suggested the first meeting focused on naming and future operations and implied these topics were outside the committee’s scope. That is incorrect. The Department of Cultural Affairs has made clear that naming, use, character, and programming direction are exactly what the committee is meant to weigh in on. Without minutes, the earliest and most substantive community input effectively disappears from the record.
These failures matter because the building’s history matters. Vera Davis was sustained for decades by federal grants tied to the economic realities of the people who lived in Oakwood. As those families were displaced, the funding dried up. When the last stream of anti-poverty support was cut and the City moved forward with Prop K, a transparent and community-driven process should have been the bare minimum. Instead, the City delivered confusion, contradictory explanations, and limited opportunities for public input.
What is happening at Vera Davis is not just a bureaucratic breakdown. It is another chapter in a longer story of a neighborhood reshaped by gentrification and by systems that consistently push out the people who built its institutions. The transition to a new model may have become unavoidable, but doing it through a chaotic and opaque process only deepens the sense of loss and repeats the erasure that made the transition possible in the first place.