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Preliminary plans for the 80-year-old National Guard outpost call for the existing building being converted to office space and performing arts space for neighboring St. Anthony’s High School, as well as the public.
The parking lot adjacent to the armory building could be developed into workforce housing with dozens of one bedroom or studio apartments being set aside as affordable housing.
The council voted unanimously to approve the city team’s negotiations with the potential development group, which includes St. Anthony’s, Howard CDM and Pacific 6.
Councilwoman Mary Zendejas, whose district includes the armory building, said that the project has the ability to both increase access to affordable housing in the city but also activate neighboring Gumbiner Park, which has been a gathering spot for homeless individuals and has seen some violence.
As local governments look to enact hazard pay rules for grocery workers, businesses are pushing back, saying the extra pay is too costly to sustain. Kroger on Monday blamed its decision to close a Ralphs supermarket and a Food 4 Less in Long Beach on a hazard pay measure.
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“This is not normal,” Stark said, after two shootings occurred within earshot of his apartment on two consecutive nights in December. Since then, Stark has taken up listening to a police scanner and monitoring local Facebook groups to scrape together a better sense of what’s going on in his neighborhood.
Because the Long Beach Police Department does not regularly release statistics about shootings, it’s been hard for Stark to quantify his gut feeling about a spike in shootings, but data obtained by the Long Beach Post through public records requests shows he’s right: Gun violence in the city has been surging.
The Long Beach City Council may ask the city manager to look into the possibility of acquiring open space near the Los Angeles River to create a future park, a move that comes amid opposition to a proposed RV storage facility on an open parcel of land near the Los Cerritos neighborhood.
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A memo from three members of the council Mary Zendejas, who represents the Downtown area, Roberto Uranga, who represents West Long Beach, and Al Austin in Bixby Knolls requests that the city manager identify funding opportunities at the local, county, state and federal levels to pay for potential open space they can find.
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Now, as the city faces a pending legal battle, it has become a litmus test for other cities and municipalities like Santa Monica, Los Angeles and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, which are all considering similar local laws but have yet to go as far as Long Beach.
“There are other cities looking at ‘Hero Pay’ but Long Beach as far as I know is the first to pass an ordinance,” said City Attorney Charles Parkin on Monday.
Parkin said the city anticipated legal challenges, but its City Council, which unanimously passed the ordinance last week, has indicated that it wants to push forward.