SOS For SRO’s
The Downtown News titled their article appropriately, “SOS For SRO’s: City Seeks Ordinance To Protect Housing For the Needy.” Here's the article.
The Los Angeles Housing Department reported that 982 SRO (Single Room Occupancy) units have been lost between 2002 and 2003. In a city that desperately needs more affordable housing, this statistic is disturbing. We should not be losing affordable housing units, but increasing them.
Without affordable housing, homelessness will increase. As it has happened for the last two decades. I have the 1985 L.A. County Task Force on Homelessness study when they reported that there were 25,000 homeless in Los Angeles. A decade ago it was 84,000. And today, the number is 91,000 homeless people. Lack of affordable housing is one of the reasons for this increase.
The renovation of these old SRO buildings into upscale lofts is part of the reason for the reduction of SRO units. I am not against redevelopment. We need to continually make our city better. But let’s not forget the poor and homeless when we are fixing up our community.
Thankfully, the Los Angeles City Council is pushing for an interim ordinance to stop developers from converting low-income housing units into market-rate units.
posted by LA's Homeless Blog at
6:54 AM
1 Comments:
Let me explain how this works. The City must preserve SRO"s why? The goodness of thier hearts.
They must account for the creation of certain amount of afordable housing every year , if not there is a moratorium placed on the city in the creation of market rate housing. If they preserve the SRO"s that have not been converted as of yet , although these are not new units , they can quantify them as being new units so as to account for the creation of low income affordable hosuing units.
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