By Maria Patiño Gutierrez, Deputy Director, Policy and Advocacy

October 23, 2025

The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles will hear this item on Friday, October 24, beginning at 9:30 a.m. To tune in and give public comment, click here. 

On Friday, October 24, the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA) will hear a resolution to declare the vacant site of the former Bethune Library in South L.A. as surplus land pursuant to California’s Surplus Land Act. If approved, it will open a process for this publicly owned land to be developed into affordable housing. 

We are hopeful the CRA/LA resolution will move forward. Over the past five years, SAJE has been advocating Los Angeles prioritize the sale or lease of surplus land for affordable housing development. The Bethune site is no exception—especially because, for a decade, the city seemed to be moving forward to do just that. In 2011, T.R.U.S.T. South LA and Abode Communities successfully submitted a proposal for affordable housing. The process of community engagement and outreach resulted in meetings to ensure the proposal was what the community wanted. But in 2019, another RFP for Bethune was suddenly issued for a commercial development, with no mention of affordable housing. Just four months later, a proposal for a Marriott hotel was selected. Now the option agreement for that project has expired, and CRA/LA must decide what to do. 

We aren’t opposed to hotels in principle, but we are opposed to building them on valuable, publicly owned land that should be prioritized for much-needed affordable housing. A Marriott would have served tourists who need short-term accommodations and not the tens of thousands of Angelenos who need a permanent, affordable place to live. There is no local entrepreneurial wealth to be built by a Bethesda, Maryland–based hotel chain, and there was no project labor agreement in place to guarantee that any of the construction jobs would be good jobs or go to people in the community.

Public land is a limited resource that we should not be squandering on corporate projects that mostly benefit people who don’t live here. We hope the CRA/LA’s decision will lead to Bethune being used for affordable housing—as it was always intended to be—instead of being sold off to a private actor for private gain.

To read more about our fight to ensure Bethune is used for the public good, click here.