The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative started as a squabble over a view.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, has taken on many struggles that are at best distantly related to his health-care advocacy. From the beginning, this one was personal.
Crescent Heights, a Miami developer, had proposed the restoration of the historic Hollywood Palladium in a project that at the time included two new 28-story condo towers on the theater’s parking lot. As proposed, the mixed-use development would block the view from Weinstein’s office on the 21st floor of the Sunset Media Center on Sunset Boulevard.
The prominent AIDS activist began showing up at community meetings to voice his opposition to the development. After several tense public forums, he agreed to meet with the entitlement consultant for Crescent Heights, Steven Afriat. As the two exchanged words in his Burbank office, Afriat later told The Real Deal, he felt the other man was becoming obsessive. Weinstein threatened to sue. Then he talked about sponsoring a referendum.
He did both.
In March 2016, the City Council unanimously approved the Palladium project. The foundation promptly filed a lawsuit against the city objecting to the zoning exemptions. But the local zoning code is so antiquated that most developments require such exemptions anyway. The project’s developers are awaiting trial but expect it to move forward.
Weinstein and a handful of senior managers at the AIDS organization he runs proceeded to draft the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative local ballot measure, which — should it pass in March — has the potential to halt most major development projects in Los Angeles for two years. The NII, as it is known, would prohibit any development projects that require zoning or height exemptions during that period unless they are 100 percent affordable housing and would not require amendments to the city’s general plan.
Not content with simply setting the wheels in motion, the foundation and its senior executives bankrolled the ballot measure campaign, known as the Coalition to Preserve L.A. Jill Stewart, the former managing editor of L.A. Weekly, left her post at the newspaper to run the lobbying group. Both Weinstein and Stewart declined to comment for this article.
In 2016, the AIDS group contributed at least $1.5 million from its annual budget to the anti-development lobbying group, according to filings with the L.A. City Ethics Commission. As it began to make headlines, an opposition group formed. The Coalition to Protect L.A. Neighborhoods & Jobs is supported by funding from Crescent Heights and billionaire businessman Eli Broad.
In an April 2016 editorial advertisement in the L.A. Weekly, Weinstein responded to concerns that the local development issue fell far beyond the bounds of the organization’s charitable work, which primarily consists of running AIDS support clinics in 36 countries. He wrote that the AIDS group was an “important stakeholder” in Los Angeles, where it was born and still maintains its international headquarters. He objected to the fact that “affordable housing is torn down to make way for luxury towers.”
In another interview that appeared in L.A. Weekly the same month, he took a slightly different tack — one that made the issue seem more personal. The Brooklyn-born activist — who lives in the Hollywood Hills and draws an annual salary from AHF of $380,000 — said he had moved to L.A. because he loved the lifestyle. “If I wanted to live in Manhattan, I would live there,” he said.
His friends say that he has been leading the good fight ever since he began his AIDS activism in the 1980s. “He’s a public-health advocate,” said Sharon Raphael, who has known him for more than 40 years, since the two met at a gay community center when he was a teenager. She was one of the co-founders of AHF, then known as the AIDS Hospice Foundation, in 1987. Raphael told TRD that the group views housing and homelessness as public-health issues.
Race to the ballot box
In September 2016, as staffers at the Coalition to Preserve L.A. were scurrying to submit the paperwork for the ballot measure, the group told the city that it would renounce the effort if Mayor Eric Garcetti took steps to reform the development process.
The mayor responded publicly that he would prohibit off-the-record communications between planning commissioners and project developers, one of the coalition’s key demands. He also agreed with its proposal to prevent developers from hiring the firms that conduct environmental impact reviews for their own projects.
In an interview that ran in TRD’s September issue, the mayor said that his office was addressing most of the issues raised by the coalition, and he had “heard their concerns.”
The coalition leaders shrugged their shoulders — and filed the signatures needed to put the initiative on the March ballot.