It seems like yesterday when the empty lot in our photo above was Movietown Plaza, home to the Yukon Mining Company, Bombay Grill and West Hollywood’s first Trader Joe’s. Most of the tenants were told to leave in 2010 and never came back, though Trader Joe’s stayed until 2013 and returned in 2017. It would be years before the development that includes Movietown Square finally broke ground in 2014.
Tonight the City Council got an update on another dragged-out issue, the elevator and security problems plaguing Movietown Square, the six-story, 77-unit senior building at 7302 Santa Monica Blvd. Project Development Administrator Alicen Bartle presented the staff report, joined by Building and Safety staff. The cabling replacement in 2024 seems to have cut the downtime quite a bit, staff found, but it’s still one elevator for the whole building, and staff called that a vulnerability any time it’s out for maintenance.
Even if it’s out briefly, residents in wheelchairs are stuck in their apartments. That obviously raises concerns from egress to quality of life. Staff wanted the City to look at a retrofit, either a secondary lift or a platform lift, working with the West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation (WHCHC), which owns and runs the building, and to see whether City money could help.
Security comes down to the fire door between the stairwell and the Trader Joe’s parking garage. Fire code won’t let it be locked in a way that keeps anyone from getting out, and on occasion it’s let unauthorized people into the interior stairwell. WHCHC put 24\/7 monitored cameras near the door, which staff called a good temporary fix, and WHCHC is looking at a security door. The City would offer technical help finding one that’s code-compliant and handles both egress and security. Staff found nothing else in the building needing immediate City attention.
Not much help to the residents at Movietown Square now, but staff wanted the City’s affordable housing loan commitment letters and loan agreements amended so this doesn’t happen again. For all future City-assisted projects for seniors or people with disabilities they’d need to include at least two elevators, or an equivalent redundant access system. That would apply to buildings with 40 or more units or four or more stories.
Council approved staff’s recommendation tonight on a 5-0 vote, which makes the two-elevator requirement part of the loan paperwork for those projects. Councilmember Lauren Meister also asked staff and the City’s lobbyists to press Sacramento on the state rules, and that was added to the motion.
Adding a second elevator to a new building runs about $175,000 to $275,000 for a typical five- to six-story senior project of 60 to 80 units, which is roughly half a percent to 1 percent of hard costs. Retrofitting one later not so much. It can cost $500,000 to over $1 million.
The problem is space. A second elevator takes up 60 to 100 square feet on every floor, so a building or project could lose one to three units or parking. Exceptions can be made, but the project would still need a backup of some kind, like guaranteed maintenance response times or a platform lift. Any exception would go to Council for information only. And since AB 130 freezes residential building standards from October 1, 2025 through June 1, 2031, a building code amendment for a second elevator is off the table until then.
Tonight’s meeting at least put it in front of the City Council, but there’s no timeline for any of it. For the residents of Movietown Square dealing with these accessibility issues, that’s a problem, and should be dealt with as soon as possible. As longtime resident Victor Omelczenko told Council during public comment, “We cannot wait another eight years while single elevator failures leave our vulnerable seniors stranded.”<\/p>\n