Sunland-Tujunga following Hollywood's lead on transient housing

In 1988, Father Bruce Ritter's Covenant House, which had been described as a "shelter empire" for runaway teens, began servicing Hollywood as a street outreach program. Hollywood, both a company town and also a bedroom community but with a very high rental rate, had become saturated with teenage runaways, and the Covenant House ministry was one that serviced the young homeless population.

Ritter wanted to develop the Hollywood Covenant House ministry into a full facility. He schmoozed Councilman Michael Woo, himself very ambitious, who was there to help the project at every step of the way.

Along the way, Ritter's heavy handed formulas for developing teen shelters had attracted considerable attention; this LA Times news analysis piece from 1989 delineates most of the arguments for and against.

Covenant House opened its 100+ facility in Hollywood in 1996. Of course, it still operates today. By then, Woo had run for mayor--and lost, badly, the only Mayoral candidate since the Yorty days to lose an open race to a Republican. The memorable ads that Woo faced in the runoff at the hands of Richard Riordan included shots of shuttered, slummy Hollywood Boulevard. The ads demonstrated that there was no magic bullet cure for blight.

Twenty-four years after the first street services were launched in Hollywood, the neighborhood remains a haven for the homeless, even known as a destination for the homeless now. It is attracting still more runaway teens, some years in increasing numbers.

Ritter died in 1999, accused of inappropriate relations with some of the teens he serviced. His Times obituary included these lines:

One newspaper dubbed his program "McRunaway," and critics said Ritter merely gave homeless kids the food and bed rest they needed to go on living their dangerous lives. Even Ritter conceded that two-thirds of "his kids" wound up back on the streets.

Along the way also, the CRA and some noted land use consultants have also redeveloped Hollywood Boulevard. The redevelopment has come at a tremendous cost to the local residential community, which now encounters the added problems of density-driven congestion, and higher rents than ever before--and also has still not even begun to solve the problems of the community remaining a teen runaway magnet, even while facing ever-increasing stigma as such.

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According to census calculations, the bedroom community of Sunland-Tujunga, now facing its own surging homeless population, would ordinarily stand to add (by natural increase) about 90 housing units by 2015.

Its Councilman, Paul Krekorian, has quietly backed two projects that devote far more than that many housing units there--well over 100--to homeless and indigent populations alone.

In short, Sunland-Tujunga is being planned by the Council office as a way-station for the City's new increasing homeless and indigent populations, even as Krekorian, like Woo before him, nurtures his own ambitions for higher office, hoping to please the right people downtown before a prospective run for a citywide slot.

The Samoa Avenue Housing complex would bring 64 units of Section 8 affordable housing to Sunland-Tujunga. The Day Street Apartments, a 46-unit homeless outreach and living center to be developed by L.A. Family Housing, has been pitching to the community their center as a prospective panacea for homeless housing for nearly a year.

The latter organization has been pitching itself as a partial solution to homelessness in the community ever since Wendy Greuel's notorious former planning deputy Dale Thrush joined the august board of LA Family Housing, in December 2010.

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Dale Thrush during Greuel's time had also been interested to develop the Day Street site--as pricey condos. That was in the heady time before the economy went south.  More lately, he is rumored to have already orchestrated the sale of the parcel to L.A. Family Housing with Krekorian's office's help and blessing, and even before a single plan had been drawn up.

Thrush has a mixed reputation in the community, and not much of it is favorable: one resident tells me he perpetually "represented downtown interests", often even playing bad cop to Wendy Greuel's too infrequent good cop; another appreciated the fact that he came to Neighborhood Council Land Use Committee meetings at all, as in the past year "we've had maybe one visit every quarter from one of the councilman's [Krekorian's] staff."

A third resident tells me that Thrush was polarizing not just in Sunland-Tujunga, but throughout Greuel's district. "In Sherman Oaks, Studio City they will tell you the same thing. Always the number one issue was, Dale Thrush needs to be removed from staff. I've seen him hurt so many people. Always standing there like a statue, saying, 'No, you're wrong.'"

Thrush came along with the Day Street parcel to L.A. Family Services. He represents precisely the kind of big-picture player with lots of citywide development ties that Krekorian will have to please to make a good run at a citywide office.

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Dale Thrush cut his teeth in the 1970's in land use issues with Victor Gruen Associates--the fabled shopping mall developer. He became an attorney by studying at Loyola Law and he worked for both Councilmembers Joel Wachs and Greuel in the 1990s.

He also supported the Home Depot plans for the community until Councilmember Greuel felt too much heat from the community and was obliged to reverse her own stance on it.

Thrush is believed to be one of Paul Krekorian's top sub rosa resources on planning issues. Like Greuel and Eric Garcetti, he is a "smart growth" proponent and remains one long after the strategy has been dismissed in many academic urban planning circles as a failure because of implementation problems and because it brings choking density to suburban neighborhoods without reducing either consumption or car trips.

The two new affordable housing projects in Sunland-Tujunga, Day Street and Samoa Avenue, both of which Krekorian's office has served as handmaiden to throughout their waltzes through city land use corridors, figure to stigmatize the community as a new center for transient populations the way Covenant House did for Hollywood 24 years ago.

Thrush in fact has gone so far as to express hopes that the former Home Depot site become a public transit hub, making Sunland-Tujunga a friendlier destination for the carless and jobless; significantly, coming changes to Sunland-Tujunga's controversial revision of its Foothill Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan will even especially limit auto repair shops, which sell the occasional vehicle or two, and certainly reduce the opportunities for Sunland-Tujunga's transient population to buy used cars anyplace nearby.

The campaign to make Sunland-Tujunga the city's new homeless destination, pleasing Hollywood and downtown, is already under way. Television reports such as this one, broadcasted to the whole region--and more are certain to come--help promote Sunland-Tujunga as a homeless and indigent haven and already have launched the homeless "boostering" of Sunland-Tujunga. Sunland-Tujunga's anti-gentrification plan has wholeheartedly begun.