Faced with a housing shortage exacerbated by recent wildfires, landlords in downtown Los Angeles are reaching out to displaced residents with an appealing offer: affordable apartments in historic buildings.
With thousands of houses and apartments lost to wildfires in an already tight housing market, landlords in downtown Los Angeles are attempting to attract displaced fire victims to a more urban setting far from the burn zones. A social media campaign has been launched by members of the Historic Core Business Improvement District to encourage people searching for housing to consider moving into one of L.A.'s oldest neighborhoods.
This area, south of City Hall, features century-old office and retail buildings that have been converted into apartments. Downtown is outside the familiar haunts of most displaced people, district Executive Director Blair Besten acknowledged, but she believes the availability and price of apartments there might entice them. 'The Westside and the Pasadena area might be saturated with people wanting to move in proximity to where they lived before,' Besten said. 'That might not be possible.'Quite a few displaced people were already apartment renters. Real estate data provider CoStar said 480 multifamily buildings with 9,500 rental units were potentially damaged or destroyed within the fire zones. The affected properties are overwhelmingly older, small-scale apartment buildings owned by mom-and-pop landlords. Nearly 75% of the buildings contain fewer than 15 units, CoStar said, and have an average age of 71 years. Many of them lack common modern amenities such as central air conditioning, fitness centers or pools. The cost to rebuild such modest housing 'poses a nearly insurmountable challenge,' CoStar said. 'New apartment construction in Los Angeles has skewed toward luxury, with units completed last year averaging $3,300 in rent, a stark contrast to the rates associated with the rental properties in the fire zones' where the average asking rate was $2,640 per month. Modern seismic building codes and inflation-driven construction costs further compound the difficulty of redevelopment, making it financially prohibitive for many property owners, CoStar said.The Historic Core program has about 500 units available at an average of $2,046 per month, Besten said. To increase the appeal to fire refugees, landlords are offering leases as short as three months and will arrange with furniture rental businesses to furnish units for new tenants. 'We've tried to very quickly furnish some homes, including kitchen essentials and bath essentials,' said Laurie Miskuski of landlord ICO Group. 'There are many people who have lost everything, and the last thing they need to be worrying about is a toaster or a coffee maker.' Among ICO Group's properties is the Mercantile Lofts, which opened as a department store in 1907 and was turned into housing more than a decade ago. ICO also owns the Broadway Lofts, a 1907 Renaissance Revival-style building also dating to 1907. The fires that turned people out of their homes have been 'an incredibly traumatic event,' Miskuski said. 'We're trying to extend a hand and say, 'Hey, we may not be the neighborhood you're used to, but we are a vibrant neighborhood with many things to offer where more people are welcome.'
Disaster Relief WILDFIRES HOUSING CRISIS LOS ANGELES DOWNTOWN APARTMENTS HISTORIC CORE DISPLACED RESIDENTS LANDLORDS AFFORDABILITY
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