1216 Menlo Burned for No Reason

Did you know, dear readers, that historic districts aren’t just for wealthy homeowners? It’s true. There are some wonderful historic districts focused on multifamily housing, and many are in less-wealthy neighborhoods.

The Menlo Avenue-Westmoreland Avenue Multi-Family Residential Historic District is a particularly lovely section of Pico-Union, boasting stately older multifamily buildings and mature foliage.

Oh, and it had a nasty knockdown fire yesterday. (The address tagged in the Citizen post, 1209 Menlo, is across the street, where the person filming must have been standing. The fire was at 1216-1218.)

When 1216 Menlo was listed for sale, it was marketed as a TOC development opportunity. The land is almost a full acre, so it’s not hard to understand why.

I do question how the seller got away with calling it “adjacent to the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station” when the Metro station is in fact ALMOST A MILE AND A HALF AWAY. It is close to several bus stops, but not the Metro.

See, here’s what gets me: the seller included plans for 128 units of infill TOC housing to be built AROUND the 1911 Craftsman house, and the buyer filed plans with the city to repurpose the house and only remove two non-historic buildings that had eight apartments. The plan was to keep and repurpose the historic house, once used as the headquarters for the Red Cross and for the Japanese Language School Unified System. But the house is gone now.

The property, which is subject to RSO, was delivered to the buyer fully vacant. I question whether one or two of the displaced households could have perhaps temporarily rented the 1911 house while the TOC development was under construction. Perhaps the fire wouldn’t have happened. According to LADBS, the property really didn’t have any code enforcement issues.

Weirdly, the last permit application was dated a year ago, and construction seems to have stalled after that.

To the buyer’s credit, at least they weren’t planning on playing any dirty tricks with the property’s RSO status. The planned project was to be a 100-percent-affordable mix of studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom apartments. The FOUR (!) planned automobile parking spaces seem rather unrealistic, but at least there would have been a mix of apartment sizes for different types of households, which is too often not the case with apartments.

We didn’t have to lose 1216 Menlo Avenue. But we did.

1216 Menlo Avenue, Pico-Union.