LA councilwoman blasts city for letting valuable properties sit empty

A Los Angeles councilwoman is blasting City Hall for sitting on billions of dollars in property while some lots sit vacant and others remain underused.Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents parts of LA’s Westside, where city-owned land is among the most valuable in Los Angeles, wants LA to create a development agency to hunt down city-owned sites that could bring in money, jobs and housing, as the city faces financial woes.“The City of LA owns billions of dollars of real estate,” Yaroslavsky said.“Some of it sits vacant, but most is just underutilized: one-story maintenance yards, parking lots, low-slung facilities.

We should be following New York’s lead and start putting our land to work.”Her office pointed to a Westside maintenance facility staffed by roughly a dozen employees.“The prime westside land could potentially hold housing or businesses alongside the city operation,” the office said.

“It could generate a ton of revenue.”But no one at City Hall is charged with looking across LA’s sprawling property holdings for opportunities like it, Yaroslavsky told The Post.“Nobody is looking at whether that land could be put to better use,” the councilwoman said.“That’s not a criticism of those departments,” she said.“Real estate is not their job.

Economic development is not their job.But it should be someone’s job.”There is plenty of land to look at. The city owns about 7,500 properties inside city limits, according to the controller’s office.

It once put the figure at nearly 9,000. The city has never published a total value for any of it.“It’s very hard to come up with value, since value is based on how a property is zoned,” former City Controller Ron Galperin told The Real Deal in 2019.“I was stunned that the city didn’t even know what it owns.”Galperin’s office combed through properties that the city’s own database listed as vacant. It found 26 sites, together covering roughly 1.7 million square ...