Nearly 30 percent of Culver City apartment dwellers pay more than 50 percent of their income in rent, according to a 2013 study by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Discussions about rent increases and what can be done about them have intensified in the last 18 months, and emerged as a minor topic of discussion during Culver City’s municipal election in 2014. While some Culver City residents have advocated for some form of rent control or rent stabilization, city leaders have been less enthusiastic about pursuing either option.
Escalating residential rents around Los Angeles have long been associated with Venice, Santa Monica, Westchester and Beverly Hills, but now Culver City has joined its Westside colleagues. The city’s median rate is now approximately $1,600 while the average for Los Angeles County is approximately $1,200.
Lawmakers in many cities point to the loss of state redevelopment agencies that helped shoulder a great deal of the funding for affordable housing. The Legislature closed California’s nearly 300 redevelopment agencies in 2010.
“I understand the need to encourage the creation of more affordable housing. I am proud to be part of a City Council that has actually created affordable housing in Culver City. Unfortunately, that was then, and this is now,” said Councilman Andrew Weismann. “We no longer have the ability today to do what we were able to do as recently as two years ago with redevelopment. Unless the Legislature and the governor act to re-institute a low- and moderate-income housing, such as existed under their now repudiated redevelopment law, creating affordable housing will likely be sporadic at best.”
While the city has recently built a few new multi-housing developments with affordable housing units, Culver City’s history with moderate to low income housing is another story. A 2010 state Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes investigation into redevelopment agencies that had not followed the proper procedures regarding the affordable housing funding and the manner in which these funds are spent named Culver City as one of a dozen municipalities.
In 2008, the Culver City Redevelopment Agency’s low to moderate income housing fund collected nearly $5 million in property tax money, the highest of any of the 12 agencies selected at random. The fund held $22.1 million that year. During the 13-year period, Culver City reported only four new units of affordable housing. It did report the substantial rehabilitation of 31 other units and the agency acquired the covenants of 12 housing units that are set aside for low to moderate income tenants. In neighboring Santa Monica, nearly 750 units of affordable housing were built within the same sample period. Santa Monica redevelopment officials also substantially rehabilitated 100 units and acquired 165 units covenants of low or moderate-income households.
“I’m dismayed, but not surprised,” Culver City Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells said when asked about the census numbers. “I’ve been hearing about drastic, sudden rent increases for a while.”
A neighbor of Sahli-Wells’ recently was forced to move due to one of the rent hikes that the mayor mentioned. “When almost 30 percent of the residents are paying that much of their incomes in rent, that can be very destabilizing for a community,” she said.
Weismann said city leaders are limited to some extent in creating more housing due to prior years when there was a high level of commercial construction. “We are site constrained in Culver City. Most of Culver City is built out. Mixed use projects generally offer the best opportunity to create affordable housing. But most of this type of development occurs along our commercial corridors, nearly all of which are residential,” the councilman noted. “The project’s proposed location, neighbor concerns, the cost of land, considerations of traffic, congestion and noise, just to name some issues, must always to be confronted and considered whenever a mixed use project is proposed.”
But communities such as Santa Monica and Pasadena have cre-ated much more affordable housing than Culver City. Sahli-Wells thinks the soon-to-be completed community of Playa Vista could make rents soar.
“I remember hearing during the dot .com era in the San Fran-cisco are that housing prices went up when all of the highly-paid software employees moved in,” the mayor said. “I feel that this could happen in Culver City if some of the people working in Playa Vista’s high tech offices might want to live in Culver City because we are less expensive than Playa Vista and Santa Monica.”
Weismann considers there are other solutions to the problem. “We may be able to encourage the creation of affordable housing through increased density and taller buildings. But it remains uncertain how much of either Culver City is willing to accept,” he said. “Other jurisdictions have inclusionary housing programs, in effect requiring a developer to include a certain number or percentage of affordable units in a development. I am not convinced that an inclusionary housing ordinance is the best way to achieve that.’
“I’m not looking to bemoan economic development, But because we decided to focus on economic development almost exclusively, we’ve left behind some of what I think many of our community’s core, the people that helped to make this city what it is today,” Sahli-Wells said.
