A group of neighbors is suing to block an affordable housing development slated to replace an abandoned building a few blocks south of the Traffic Circle. They allege an expedited approval process circumvented their concerns about quality-of-life issues like gridlocked traffic, a lack of parking and a loss of privacy.

Demolition is already underway at the 1.7-acre project site at the terminus of Fountain Street and Wehrle Court, but the lawsuit is now seeking a judge’s order to halt construction of the 73 apartments that will be rented out at a reduced rate to families and people with disabilities. The units will be spread across a pair of buildings — one three stories and the other four stories.

“These buildings are going to be looking down on all the tiny postage-stamp bungalow houses which characterize the neighborhood,” said Scott Pomerantz, an attorney representing about half a dozen residents and property owners who formed a group called Bryant Neighbors for Responsible Development.

“Parking is already congested in this area, especially on Fountain,” said David Lake, the president of the neighbors group. And traffic, he said, is “already a nightmare” during pick-up and drop-off at Bryant Elementary School, which is about a half a block from the project.


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Lake, who works as a firefighter, said he worries traffic will make it nearly impossible for emergency vehicles to quickly reach the apartment buildings, which will be sandwiched between two cul-de-sacs.

In an attempt to block the project, the lawsuit takes aim at the city’s approval process. The group alleges city officials improperly skipped an environmental review and didn’t give proper public notice before approving the plans — only later holding hearings to approve the needed zoning changes to allow for the increased density.

The city approved the project in 2023 under the city’s homelessness emergency declaration, which was intended to speed the production of housing and delivery of homeless services.

“The City followed all proper procedures for this project,” Community Development Director Christopher Koontz said in an email. “We won’t be litigating through the press but the City will be defending its actions in court.”

At a City Council meeting in April, officials tried to rebuff some of the criticisms of the project, emphasizing that the plans have been in the works for years.

The apartments, they said, are replacing an empty building that used to be a facility for troubled youth that closed in 2015 after complaints from neighbors. To make sure another problematic facility didn’t reopen, the city bought the property in 2018 with funds earmarked for affordable housing development.

The building, which had been sitting abandoned, became another nuisance, with people frequently trespassing. Before demolition could begin, police had to clear out homeless people who’d been living there.

Not all the feedback about the project is negative. Some speakers at the April meeting praised the idea of more affordable housing in East Long Beach. The project is one of the few affordable housing developments outside of Downtown and other more urban areas of the city where they’ve historically been concentrated.

There are currently only 76 affordable housing units in the 3rd City Council District where the Fountain Street project is planned, according to city data.

This graph, presented at a community meeting in March, shows the concentration of affordable housing in Long Beach.

Long Beach has been under pressure from the state to allow more such developments in “high-resource” parts of the city with access to high-quality parks, grocery stores and good schools. Koontz said in April that the city also has a moral obligation to break with past practices that kept affordable housing out of those neighborhoods.

Pomerantz, the plaintiffs’ attorney, argued his clients’ neighborhood is being sacrificed to protect even more well-off areas.

The city, he said, could seek to build affordable housing in richer parts of East Long Beach, instead of “ruining the quality of life for middle-class families as well as generations of school children at Bryant Elementary School.”

A trial-setting conference in the lawsuit is scheduled for June 20.

Jeremiah Dobruck is executive editor of the Long Beach Post where he oversees all day-to-day newsroom operations. In his time working as a journalist in Long Beach, he’s won numerous awards for his investigative reporting and editing. Before coming to the Post in 2018, he wrote for publications including the Press-Telegram, Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. Reach him at [email protected] or @jeremiahdobruck on Twitter.