More worse demo?

The Garment & Citizen, a downtown free newspaper that lands in Echo Park driveways and increasingly has been relevant to the neighborhood at large, published a story March 2 about the woes of two would-be service providers in Echo Park. The story is sub-headlined "Parking, Grocery on Hold in Echo Park." One of the providers is the Foursquare Church at Angelus Temple, which the story says is being hobbled in its efforts clear away apartment rental units it owns to create parking for its congregants. The story's implication is that efforts to expand an HPOZ in the vicinity of Echo Park Lake have not only hog-tied the church, but have stopped a Tennessee grocery store chain from providing food to the neighborhood -- alarmist and almost certainly untrue.

Before we assemble an angry mob against preservation folks (who include myself, though I speak ONLY for myself here), let me point out: Foursquare's tear-down dreams mean the eviction -- already achieved in some cases -- of lower-income tenants, who probably will have to leave the neighborhood, if they want to live indoors. The tear-downs would be followed by a tall parking structure to uglify the vicinity and blot out a sense of history that is so valuable to the well-being of any community.

Nonetheless, Council President Garcetti has supported the Temple's project.

An Interim Control Ordinance does delay or prevent property owners, including churches, from tearing down buildings. To forestall the ill-advised destruction of homes and history before the matter has been studied is precisely what such an ordinance is for.

Still, there is no reason why the grocery store can't move in and do business.

The whole mess sent Curbed LA, which reported it on Friday, to the bar for a drink. It'll send me there, too.

In the meantime, tenants have been evicted from units on Lemoyne Street. Tenants also are being kicked out of apartments on Echo Park Avenue just north of a vacant lot where an apartment building collapsed in 2000, killing a 30-year-old man. The church previously had offered assurances these units would be restored and preserved. The properties in question are protected for the moment by the aforementioned Interim Control Ordinance, so it appears the church is following the LAUSD's 9A strategy: evictions first, permissions later -- let the empty buildings rot. Now there's a moral approach to a parking dilemma.