Friends of Historic Miracle Mile (FOHMM) is a volunteer organization of owners, residents and preservation advocates who came together with a goal to preserve and advocate for the Miracle Mile Apartments Historic District in Los Angeles, California 90036. The Historic District is an excellent example of an architecturally intact and culturally significant mutifamily neighborhood dating to the 1920s through the 1940s, and was first identified as eligible for historic preservation in the 2014 SurveyLA. Through our efforts, resources were raised to hire the Architectural Resources Group to prepare a formal nomination, which was met with success when, in December 2022, the California Office of Historic Preservation endorsed the nomination and paved the way for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

One of the most significant aspects of our neighborhood being listed in the National Register of Historic Places is that preservation of historic housing is also preservation of “naturally occuring” affordable housing. The Los Angeles Conservancy reports that “other things being equal,” the older housing is, the cheaper it tends to be. The apartment homes constructed in the 1920s, 30s and 40s were created for working class families to put down roots and raise a family. A typical one bedroom apartment in our District is large enough for a couple to settle down and start a family, with 1-bedrooms typically ranging from 800-1,000 sq. ft. A typical 2-bedroom apartment in the Historic District ranges from 1,200 - 1,300 square feet.— the size of a small single family home from the same era. The apartment structures were intended to provide well -crafted permanent homes where a family would have enough space to raise their family and stay for decades if they lacked the means to buy a single family home. Today’s new construction, by contrast, creates “units” that are as much as 50% smaller, meaning fewer people can live in them. A 650 sq. ft. Density Bonus 2-bedroom “unit” cannot take the place of a 1,200 sq. ft. 2-bedroom apartment because the new unit can’t fit as many family members. Affordability is not just about price. It’s about what you get for that price. If fewer people can be housed in a new “rent restricted” unit, then even if the rent is the same as the demolished RSO unit, the new unit is less affordable because it costs more per person. Fewer people housed per dollar of rent is a net loss of affordable housing capacity. Because most if not all historic apartment buildings are rent-stabilized under Los Angeles’s Rent Stabilzation Ordinancer, preserving multifamily historic structures also preserves affordability along with the cultural and architectural history.

FOHMM continues to advocate for the Miracle Mile Apartments Historic District to ensure that it can flourish in the face of considerable pressures from overdevelopment, infrastructure failure and insufficiency, and quality of life issues that threaten its stability. Historic neighborhoods are often some of the most overcrowded neigborhoods with all of the burdens and impacts that can entail. FOHMM has consistently advocated with City officials and State officials for policies that are compatible with the needs of a crowded historic neighborhood. Our proudest moment may have been when in September 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 2712 (Friedman), a bill written by FOHMM president Barbara Gallen to address the AB 2097 Parking Loophole.

Through FOHMM’s lobbying efforts in Sacramento, and with the support of more than 20 neighborhood groups, AB 2712 was a victory for LA’s many parking-burdened multifamily neighborhoods chafing under the unintended consequences of State and local laws that reduced or abolished parking minimums for new developments based on proximity to transit.