Los Angeles has managed to squeeze three more plot twists into the Venice Dell saga in a single week.
On Thursday, the Board of Transportation Commissioners will once again be asked to undo its illegal vote blocking the affordable housing project. Two days before the hearing, the City and the Board asked the court to set aside the judgment against them and grant a new trial. Meanwhile, state lawmakers are advancing a last-minute change to California law to protect Venice Dell from the consequences of the delays Los Angeles officials created.
If that sounds less like housing policy and more like a roller coaster built entirely from procedural loopholes, welcome back to Venice Dell.
The project would replace a city-owned surface parking lot near the Venice Canals with 120 affordable and supportive homes, including 68 apartments reserved for people experiencing homelessness. The City selected Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corporation to develop the site in 2016. The City Council approved the project and authorized a development agreement. The California Coastal Commission unanimously approved it. State and county agencies conditionally committed roughly $45 million.
Yet nearly a decade after the City invited developers to build affordable housing on the site, not a single home has been constructed. That is not because Venice Dell failed to survive the approval process. It is because every approval has been followed by another attempt to reopen, delay or reverse it. Councilmember Traci Park entered office after promising to “squash” the project. City departments were told to hold off. The City Attorney’s office routed communications through lawyers and repeatedly sought more taxpayer money for outside counsel. Park pushed an unfunded plan to move the housing across the street and another proposal to study a “mobility hub” on the site. The City’s outside-counsel contract for Venice Dell litigation grew to $1.27 million.
The Board of Transportation Commissioners supplied one of the most consequential obstacles in December 2024, when it held a special meeting and refused to authorize the use of Municipal Parking Lot 731 for Venice Dell. Park celebrated the decision and declared the project dead.
Judge Curtis Kin later ruled that the commissioners never had the authority to kill it. On May 26, Kin granted the developers’ petition for a writ of mandate and ordered the Board to vacate its December vote. The court entered judgment on August 10. Three days later, the commissioners met to consider doing what the court had ordered.
They delayed Venice Dell again. John Heath of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office told the commissioners that he had “important legal advice” about the judgment that could only be delivered in closed session. Because no closed session had been listed on the August 13 agenda, the commissioners had a choice. They could vacate their vote, as LADOT staff and Mayor Karen Bass’s representative urged them to do, or they could postpone the matter until another special meeting.
They chose yet another meeting. That meeting will take place today at 9am at City Hall. Venice Dell is the only substantive action item, with little ambiguity about what commissioners are being asked to do: “Vacate Board’s December 10, 2024 Decision on Proposed Redevelopment of Municipal Parking Lot No. 731 in Venice for Affordable Housing.”
This time, however, the agenda permits the commissioners to retreat into closed session to discuss five Venice Dell cases with the City Attorney’s office. And the City Attorney has supplied something new for them to discuss. On August 25, the City and the Board of Transportation Commissioners filed notice that they intend to seek a new trial in the case they just lost. The filing asks Kin to set aside the August 10 judgment and grant the City another chance to argue that commissioners had the power to block the project.
The City claims that irregularities in the court proceedings, improper court orders, insufficient evidence and legal errors “prevented a fair trial.” But its four-page notice does not identify a single irregularity, improper order, evidentiary problem or legal error. The City says those arguments and supporting declarations will come in later filings.
The notice also does not ask the court to stay its judgment or identify anything preventing commissioners from vacating their vote on Thursday. Still, its timing guarantees that the new-trial request will hover over a closed-session briefing already created at the City Attorney’s insistence.
This is how the Venice Dell roller coaster keeps running. When one obstacle is removed, City officials build another section of track.
At the same time, state lawmakers are taking an extraordinary step to keep Los Angeles’s delays from destroying the project altogether. On August 21, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks amended Assembly Bill 2051 to allow the Coastal Commission, for good cause, to retroactively extend for up to five years the deadline for a local government to accept modifications to a land-use-plan amendment authorizing a 100-percent affordable housing development. The provision applies narrowly to approvals that expired between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2026.
In practical terms, the amendment would allow the Coastal Commission to preserve the land-use approval Venice Dell needs after Los Angeles failed to act before the clock ran out.
Wicks presented the amendment at a special Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee hearing on Tuesday, describing it as an attempt to address “one of the many hurdles” confronting Venice Dell. She warned that the project’s $42.4 million conditional state housing award is now in danger because of the delays.
The bill does not resolve the remaining litigation or automatically clear the project for construction. It keeps another approval from expiring while those fights continue.
“It shouldn’t be so hard to build housing in California, especially a 100% affordable,” Wicks told the committee.
Republican Senator Kelly Seyarto made the absurdity even more explicit. Venice Dell, he said, shows that “you actually have to create legislation to allow a project to get built or it won’t.” The committee voted 7-0 to return AB 2051 to the Senate floor.
That Sacramento is considering changing state law to rescue Venice Dell should clarify what is happening in Los Angeles. This is a 100-percent affordable project the City solicited, approved and agreed to help build on its own land. It survived lawsuits. It survived years of administrative obstruction. It secured Coastal Commission approval and tens of millions of dollars in public funding. When transportation commissioners attempted an end-run around those approvals, a judge ordered them to reverse course.
Now the City is asking that judge for a do-over.
At this point, the lesson is difficult to miss. When Los Angeles officials do not want affordable housing in a wealthy coastal neighborhood, no approval, funding award or court judgment is treated as final. There is always another study, another meeting, another legal theory and another closed door.
Venice Dell supporters will gather at City Hall at 9 a.m. Thursday to demand that the Transportation Commission finally vacate its illegal vote. The agenda warns that live audio will not be available, making in-person attendance especially important. Anyone wishing to speak must submit a speaker card before commissioners consider the item.