A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled this week that the city’s Board of Transportation Commissioners exceeded its legal authority when it voted to block the Venice Dell affordable housing project at Lot 731 in Venice. Judge Curtis Kin ordered the board to vacate its December 10, 2024 vote, clearing the way for construction to finally begin on one of the Westside’s only 100% affordable housing developments in a generation. That BOTC vote had been widely understood as the move that could finally kill the project. Judge Kin disagreed.
The ruling lands one week before the June 2 election, and its political weight is hard to overstate. Councilmember Traci Park has built much of her political identity around killing Venice Dell. She vowed to “squash this on day one” during her 2022 campaign to replace Mike Bonin, and she has spent most of her tenure trying to make good on that promise. Her challenger, Faizah Malik, worked as a public interest lawyer at Public Counsel representing LA Forward and taxpayers in litigation arguing that city officials had unlawfully obstructed the project. Malik has said Venice Dell’s years of manufactured delay were among the primary reasons she decided to run.
Venice Dell has been in the pipeline since 2016, when the city identified the parking lot at 200 N. Venice Boulevard as a potential housing site. After a competitive selection process, Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corp. were chosen as developers. The project would provide 120 units of affordable and supportive housing, including homes for formerly unhoused residents, replacement public parking, community space, and public access improvements along the Venice canals. It secured City Council approval in 2021 and a signed development agreement in 2022.
What followed was something supporters described, and litigation later detailed, as a coordinated obstruction campaign. After Park took office and Hydee Feldstein Soto became City Attorney, city departments went quiet, internal approvals stalled, and required contracts went unsigned. City officials asked the Coastal Commission to delay its review and in mid-2023 withdrew and resubmitted the City’s Local Coastal Program amendment, pushing the timeline back even further.
In July 2024, LA Forward Institute and several Venice residents sued the city for discriminatory obstruction of fair housing law. The city hired Nossaman LLP, an outside corporate law firm paid with public funds, and in September moved to have the case thrown out under the anti-SLAPP statute. The court ultimately denied that motion in February 2025, finding the lawsuit was enforcing “an important right affecting the public interest” and would “confer a significant benefit on the general public in preventing discriminatory housing practices by a public entity.” By January 2026, the city’s Nossaman contract would balloon to $1,270,000.
On December 10, 2024, the day before the California Coastal Commission unanimously approved Venice Dell, the Board of Transportation Commissioners convened a last-minute special meeting and voted to block use of Lot 731 for housing, a sequence housing advocates called a deliberate ambush. Commissioners did so despite having received a formal legal warning four days earlier that the vote would exceed their authority and expose the city to additional liability. Park celebrated the decision, declaring the project dead. Mayor Karen Bass, who had made ending homelessness the centerpiece of her administration, said nothing.
In February 2025, Park introduced a motion to study turning Lot 731 into a ‘mobility hub‘ for car share, bike share, micro-mobility, and shuttle services. She framed it as an Olympic legacy project for 2028. The proposal was immediately greeted with skepticism, coming from a notoriously anti-bike lane councilmember, and applied to the very lot where she had spent years blocking housing. It also had a more basic problem. Metro’s own transportation plan for the games showed no mobility hub planned for Lot 731–nor could it. LADOT’s definition of “mobility hub” requires proximity to major transit stations. Lot 731 has none. The motion prompted a second warning letter from Malik and co-counsel that the BOTC vote could not simply override the City Council’s prior approvals, and that proceeding would expose the city to further liability.
Malik declared her candidacy for CD11 in May, 2025. That summer and fall, the Venice Dell project secured nearly $45 million in state and county funding, including a competitive Multifamily Housing Program super NOFA award, a clear signal that the state considered Venice Dell not just viable but shovel-ready. Park had another move ready to derail the project. In October, she introduced a motion to move affordable housing from Lot 731 to Lot 701, framing relocation to a site that had never been part of the original approvals as a practical alternative. Critics quickly pointed out that the move would require restarting years of environmental review and financing from scratch. Days later, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development issued a blistering Letter of Inquiry accusing the City of “significant delay and effective denial” and warning that Los Angeles risked losing its Prohousing designation and future access to state housing funds.
The new year brought more of the same. In January 2026, at the request of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, the City Council authorized an additional $650,000 in taxpayer-funded outside counsel fees to continue fighting the project, bringing the total billed to $1,270,000. A city transportation report released in February confirmed what critics had long argued: the mobility hub alternative had no funding, no design, and no regulatory approvals, and would set the timeline back by years. In March, Park introduced a $175,000 feasibility study directing LADOT to spend nearly a year studying the concept anyway.
In February, Park traveled to the Coastal Commission to personally support the Baywatch reboot’s permit to film at Lot 731. “Underutilized? Me thinks not!” she declared on Instagram, as she walked through the lot with production staging in the background, as if to suggest that a surface lot briefly occupied by a film crew proved it was too busy to become housing. The Baywatch production, backed by a $21 million state tax credit, struggled to comply with Coastal Commission permit conditions from day one and was gone within a week. This was the same lot Park had spent years insisting could never be spared for housing.
Apparently, the court agreed that was enough.
“This is a critical victory for affordable housing, the rule of law, and people who urgently need homes,” said Allison Riley, co-executive director of Venice Community Housing. “The Venice Dell project has been approved, funded, and supported for years. Yesterday’s decision confirms that it must be allowed to move forward.”
Victoria Senna, CEO of Hollywood Community Housing, called the ruling a repudiation of years of delay. Kevin Mitchell, managing attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which represented the developers, said the decision “reaffirms that cities must honor their commitments to affordable housing.”
Venice Community Housing is now calling on Mayor Karen Bass and city leadership to take the remaining steps required under the existing development agreement without further delay.
“This ruling clears the way for the City to take its next required steps,” said co-executive director Erika Lee. “We urge Mayor Bass and other city leaders to take swift action and bring the Venice Dell affordable housing project over the finish line.”
Park once compared Venice Dell to a bad boyfriend who won’t go away. After years of watching her abuse the power of her office to block, stall, and maneuver against a fully approved housing project, Judge Kin appears to have handed her the restraining order. On Tuesday, voters will have a chance to end the relationship for good.