Traci Park's Olympic parking lot

I never thought I'd have so much to say about a parking lot, but Lot 731, a 2.65-acre underutilized city-owned property in Venice, just one short block from the Pacific Ocean, keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

I first wrote about Lot 731 five years ago, when a plan to build 120 units of affordable housing there was making its way through the city approval process. By then, it had already been five years since the housing project, now known as the Venice Dell, had been proposed. The project was subsequently approved by the city, funded by the county, and funded by the state, and yet, somehow, has still not been built. The lawsuits, of which there have been many, keep getting settled in favor of the developer, Venice Community Housing. A very sternly worded letter from the state warned that failure to build the project could mean LA would lose its pro-housing status, meaning the city would miss out on even more funding. Pretty soon it's going to end up costing the city more to not build 120 affordable apartments.

My 2021 story for Curbed attempted to answer a question: how could Lot 731 possibly remain a parking lot in a neighborhood facing such an acute unsheltered homelessness crisis? The answer then was NIMBYs. (Although calling them NIMBYs was too nice, former Venice Community Housing executive director Becky Dennison told me; she preferred to call them segregationists.) The answer five years later, however, is slightly different.

Lot 731 looks the way it does right now because of a mayor who touts homelessness as a top priority but fails to champion permanent housing, a city attorney who spends our taxpayer dollars to actively obstruct construction, and now, a notoriously anti-bike lane councilmember who is using the "car-free" games to stop a fully approved 100 percent affordable housing development.

All three of those people are up for re-election this year, trying to court those wealthy westside votes, so you might imagine how this will all play out.

Here's what happened yesterday: Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Venice, convinced the city's transportation committee to advance a mobility hub concept in time for 2028, "inclusive of car share, bike share, micro-mobility, shuttle service, transit store, etc," as her motion reads, at the site of the housing project she's been trying to block.

Among the many issues with this proposal, here's the main one — despite Park's insistence that using the parking lot for this purpose is an absolute necessity for 2028, Metro's big plan for games-related transportation currently does not show a mobility hub planned for Lot 731.

If you look closely at where the mobility hubs are situated on Metro's map, they're located in very intentional places. These are key transition points where a lot of people are transferring from one major public transportation mode — train, bus, bike, scooter — to another. Even LADOT's own definition of a mobility hub is very specific: "supporting first-last mile solutions by providing multi-modal transportation services and activities around transit stations." There are no major transit stations at Lot 731, but if there's anywhere in Venice that could actually use a mobility hub, it's where a bunch of bus lines converge in Windward Circle, a few blocks away.

So let's recap. Park is 1) appropriating a term that Metro is using for a very specific type of games-related use that is not valid here, 2) failing to demonstrate the necessity of such a project, 3) foisting this entire process upon an already overburdened LADOT, as if they didn't have enough to do!

What makes it most egregious, for a city with no money that's 856 days out from its biggest megaevent in history, is the timeline. Yes, as Torched readers know, all sorts of city approvals are being waived for anything games-related. I'm sure Park, who introduced that motion, is planning to capitalize on that! But something built this close to the Pacific Ocean requires obtaining a permit from the exceptionally finicky California Coastal Commission. The LADOT report estimates this alone could take at least a year. You know what does have a Coastal Commission permit? Yes, you guessed correctly. The affordable housing project already approved for Lot 731!

What's wild about all of this is that, as of 2024, Park didn't have any LA28 action in Venice, something that she became very agitated about. Soon she was posting thirst traps on Instagram about how much she loved beach volleyball. Suddenly there were three events in the neighborhood — now the marathon will start here, for example, as will triathlon and road cycling — and the official 1,000-days-out event was held right there on Venice Beach. The same month, Park talked openly about how she "went to war with LA28" to get them to relocate some events to Venice. I guess it would have been hard to claim you needed a mobility hub with no official LA28 events nearby. But why not just get LA28 to say they need to use the parking lot as a staging area, like they're doing with the Expo Park pool, and give up this whole charade?

Because Park intends to keep this parking lot a parking lot forever. And if you listen to the committee meeting — sorry, no video for the committee meetings of the second-largest city in the country! — you'll hear her try to wrench this plan into some kind of permanent legacy improvement, like this lot is going to somehow become key to helping local restaurants fulfill their city requirements by allowing people to park offsite. THAT'S NOT WHAT A MOBILITY HUB IS. But here's the kicker: if more parking for cars was truly desired, it would also be achieved by building the Venice Dell project, which plans to replace all the parking in this surface lot with an underground structure. The neighborhood would have both 120 more apartments and more space for cars.

Once again, I'm begging Torched readers to pay close attention: here's an example of a project for 2028 being not just prioritized but rammed through the approvals process. There is still no citywide strategic plan in place that lets everyone in LA know what we're all trying to accomplish together by 2028. Where is the Games CIP that was promised months ago? And how would a project like this fit in, priority-wise, compared to, say, the actual protected bike network needed to access a supposed mobility hub?

As for Lot 731, perpetually ringed with tents inhabited by Angelenos who have no permanent housing options in the neighborhood, I propose a new sign: Traci Park's Olympic parking lot. Her greatest 2028 legacy. 🔥

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