The proposed Westside affordable housing project known as Venice Dell has seen it all: neighborhood uproar, lawsuits, clashing city directives to alternatively approve and deny.
Now, in a battle that has spanned a decade, a major hurdle has been lifted, potentially opening a path to building more than 100 affordable homes for homeless and low-income households on what’s now a city-owned parking lot.
Late last month, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled the city’s Board of Transportation Commissioners, which oversees city-owned parking lots, wrongly denied the project in 2024 and ordered the government body to reverse its decision.
City authorities have cited the obscure commission’s denial as reason for not moving forward even though the City Council voted in favor of the project.
Allison Riley, an executive with one of the project’s developers, said if the city chooses not to appeal the judge’s ruling and stops fighting the project, groundbreaking could occur late next year, with the development finished by 2030.
“We hope they stop fighting the project,” Riley, co-executive director of Venice Community Housing, said of the city. “The housing is needed. There is a real human suffering cost tied to endless delays.”
In all, current plans for Venice Dell include 120 units , commercial space and parking garages to replace beach parking and provide spots for residents, all bisected by a canal.
Whether the project gets built on the developer’s timeline, or at all, is another question.
A spokesperson for City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, a longtime critic of Venice Dell who lost her bid for reelection last week, did not return an email asking if the city would appeal.
Paige Sterling, a spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass, said the mayor has worked hard to build affordable housing in the city and supports the construction of more, including in Venice. But Sterling added that “there are multiple lawsuits regarding Venice Dell, and those still need to be dealt with.”
The process to build Venice Dell has been extraordinarily contentious — even in a state where development is often time-consuming and litigious.
In 2016, the city asked developers to propose building affordable housing on the city-owned parking lot in Venice, a once-working class community now home to multimillion-dollar homes and upscale restaurants.
In June 2022, the City Council voted to advance a project put forth by the Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corp. and the city’s housing department signed a development agreement with those developers.
Some Venice residents loudly objected to building what they labeled the “monster on the median,” criticizing the project’s scale, cost and potential negative effects on traffic and safety. But on development matters, council members typically defer to the wishes of the council person representing the community where a development is proposed. In this case that was Councilman Mike Bonin, who supported Venice Dell.
That changed when 2022 elections replaced Bonin with current Councilmember Traci Park. Feldstein Soto also won her first race to become city attorney.
Both came out against Venice Dell during the campaign, with Park vowing to “squash this on day one.”
Project opponents also filed multiple lawsuits seeking to kill the project, alleging faulty environmental reviews and improper city approval.
Those lawsuits failed, but Venice Dell proponents alleged in a July 2024 lawsuit that Park and Feldstein Soto took up where neighborhood critics failed in court and worked behind the scenes to thwart the project.
The ongoing lawsuit, which also criticized Bass for deferring to the councilmember’s wishes, alleged city staff at one point stopped responding to developer emails and were instructed to not sign off on additional approvals needed before the project could break ground.
Then in December 2024, one day before the California Coastal Commission gave its own blessing to the project, the city’s Board of Transportation Commissioners voted to deny transferring the city-owned parking lot to the developers.
Instead, the board called for expanded parking options on the lot and studies to explore affordable housing on a different city-owned parcel nearby. The developers called the possibility of switching sites a “red herring” because it would require them to restart a multi-year entitlement process.
A Park spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But after the vote, Park said the commission’s decision effectively killed the Venice Dell development, which during the campaign she had called a “waste of money.”
But it didn’t kill it. In 2025, the Venice and Hollywood housing corporations sued the city for breach of contract and separately asked a judge to throw out the transportation commission’s decision, saying the government body did not have the authority to deny the transfer of land.
In court, Feldstein Soto, who has also criticized the project’s cost at around $1 million a unit, argued the commission had that power and the act became final when the City Council declined to veto the decision.
The $1-million figure includes the cost of the housing, commercial space and a public parking garage required to replace current spots on site.
Riley said delays caused by the city and neighbor lawsuits have helped spiral costs upwards, because construction costs have climbed in recent years and interest on a pre-development loan has piled up.
How the city will react to losing in court could as be impacted by last week’s elections.
Though Park is poised to win her race against Venice Dell supporter Faizah Malik, Feldstein Soto didn’t make the November runoff.
In a statement, Marissa Roy, who is currently in the lead, criticized Feldstein Soto for her actions against Venice Dell and said as city attorney she would “course correct, respect the court’s ruling, and ensure that this duly approved project gets back on track.”
John McKinney, currently in second in the race, said in a statement that he supports “projects that promote affordable housing” but declined to comment further, because he wasn’t familiar with the arguments Feldstein Soto has made regarding Venice Dell.
There’s also implications beyond Venice.
The state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, which has awarded Venice Dell $42.5 million, warned the city in October that its efforts to delay and block Venice Dell put the city at risk of penalties that could leave it with less state money for affordable housing and less control over its zoning.
In response, the city said it was committed to expanding affordable housing and has plans in place to do so. But it said Venice Dell could not be built, because the Board of Transportation Commissioners rejected it.
“They need to … let the project move forward,” said Kevin Mitchell, managing attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which represented developers in its case against the commission. “This is a city with an affordable housing crisis.”
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