Photos: Cities give short shrift to affordable housing
Fred Reyes and his children Natalie, 4, and Nicholas, 7, stand in the vacant lot where his mother’s home of nearly 40 years had stood before the city of Santa Ana acquired it and knocked it down. “You’d think by now something would have been done” with the land, Reyes said. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
In housing-poor, golf cart-rich Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, a half-block parcel of property targeted for more homes has sat, sun-baked and undeveloped, for 15 years. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
This house on Minter Street is in an area full of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. The project east of downtown has taken a decade. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
About $11 million of Irwindale’s redevelopment money was used to buy a 23-acre industrial parcel across the street from a gravel pit. It turned out that people didn’t want to live there because it was too far from the municipal swimming pool and other amenities, a city official said. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
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The San Gabriel Valley city of Irwindale spent $87 million from 2000 to 2008 but produced only 42 homes and 62 rehabilitated units. Some of the money was spent on this industrial land next to a gravel pit and warehouses, a site that officials now acknowledge was unsuitable for housing. New plans call for a hot-sauce factory. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Ana officials spent the last decade buying and bulldozing single-family homes and apartments east of downtown, uprooting homeowners and low-income renters. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
A property partly cleared for redevelopment in Lynwood sits fenced and vacant. Officials testified in depositions that they could not fully account for how they had spent millions in affordable housing funds. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
