On an early Wednesday afternoon, Rosa Garcia was at her restaurant El Apetito on César Chávez Avenue getting ready to open for the evening. Garcia cleaned the bar countertop while her friend Viva Padilla, a South LA native and owner of neighboring bookstore Re/Arte Centro Literario, sat at a table drinking a tall glass of Mexican Coca-Cola.
Garcia moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago and has operated the business for 14 years since taking over from the previous owner. She enjoys serving Mexican food like pozole and birria to the local musicians famously known to frequent the street referred to fondly by its previous name, Brooklyn Avenue.
The holiday season is particularly bittersweet for Garcia because she knows many of these musicians are from Mexico and apart from their families.
“I give thanks for being able to serve food to the less fortunate and all the musicians with no family here, especially during Christmas,” Garcia told Boyle Heights Beat in Spanish. “I’m telling them to come because this might be the final Christmas that I can give them something.”
Garcia’s restaurant and Padilla’s bookstore are two Brooklyn Avenue Historic Corridor shops that are currently in danger of being displaced. Tiao Properties, a Los Angeles-based real estate company that owns the building where the businesses are located, is planning to construct a new mixed-use housing development on the site.
In response, Padilla and other commercial tenants like Garcia and Finessa Salon created an informal organizing group known as El Apetito-Finessa Colectivo. The building also has three residential units.
According to the plot plan submitted to the city of Los Angeles, Tiao Properties intends to construct a six-story complex with the ground floor utilized for commercial use, five stories of apartment units, and an underground parking garage. While five of the 50 planned apartments will be deemed “affordable” and offered to extremely low-income tenants, the majority of the units will be leased at market rate.
Records show Tiao bought the building for $2.1 million in 2020. The company filed its project application with the city planning department in July of 2021.
A spokesperson for Tiao Properties told Boyle Heights Beat the company has gone through the formal approval process and is waiting for the go-ahead to begin construction.
Tiao Properties worked with the City’s Office of Historic Resources and redesigned the building based on their feedback. The company also presented the new design to the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council Planning and Land Use Management Committee in early 2023. The neighborhood council wrote a letter in June opposing the plan.
“That, in addition to the appeal process of the City’s Letter of Determination, has resulted in a delay in the construction timeline,” the spokesperson said.
The appeal was filed in September by Padilla, who says she is fighting alongside her neighbors because she now considers Boyle Heights her home.
“It’s not easy to have a small business in the neighborhood and stay here,” said Padilla, who opened her bookstore at the property two years ago. “I have put in so much time [here] and I’ve received so much support and love from the community that I just can’t get up and start over like that somewhere else.”
The collective is raising public awareness of the development project viewed by locals as an attempt to continue gentrification in Boyle Heights.
“They knew that I was going through the bureaucratic system to get our voices heard,” Padilla said. “We also felt this frustration that we weren’t visible enough. And so we became the Colectivo because we wanted to be more visible.”
The collective scored a minor victory at Monday’s LA Planning and Land Use Management Committee meeting. Councilmember Kevin de León appeared before the committee to read a letter voicing his support for Padilla’s appeal. De León is currently barred from sitting on any city committees, a punishment he received after tapes leaked last year which featured the councilmember and other city officials making racist remarks.
“I support the appeal filed by Ms. Viva Padilla of Re/Arte Centro Literario challenging the Director of Planning’s determination that the proposed project complies with the Adelante Eastside Redevelopment Plan,” de León said during the meeting.
He also spoke in favor of the updated Boyle Heights Community Plan which would prohibit the demolition of occupied Rent Stabilization Ordinance or RSO housing units, such as the ones on the Tiao-owned building.
De León had refused to state his position regarding the development before Monday’s meeting. Garcia and Padilla credit de Leon’s sudden decision to oppose this development to the community attention gained through a recently painted mural.
A couple of weeks ago, Padilla commissioned artist Sergio Robleto to paint a black-and-white mural outside El Apetito that would capture the spirit of the musicians that frequent the block and the restaurant while also drawing more attention to Tiao’s forthcoming project. The art features three Mexican musicians with skulls for faces with the phrase “Brooklyn Ave. is not for sale” hovering atop the figures.
The property owners whitewashed the phrase last week, the collective alleges. The rest of the mural was kept intact. Garcia isn’t deterred by this potential act of retaliation and is choosing to focus on the long fight ahead. She has to be hopeful because this restaurant is her family’s livelihood.
“This is a sad situation and the truth is I’m asking God that [the property owners] don’t throw us away and that they understand we need to be here,” Garcia said.
