For the first time in 60 years, a large group of vacant houses owned by the state of California within the path of the defunct 710 Freeway extension will be purchased by the city of Pasadena, then re-sold by brokers to private buyers and families to occupy.
Caltrans, the owners of about 100 properties in Pasadena located on both sides of the 710 ditch, along St. John Avenue, Pasadena Avenue, State Street and side streets since the mid 1960s, has released 17 vacant single-family homes to the city for acquisition, said Bill Huang, Pasadena’s housing director on Wednesday, July 19.
By Tuesday, July 25, the city will choose from several interested real estate brokers. The staff will go to the City Council by the end of summer for approval of the specific, vacant homes the city will buy, as well as the brokers chosen to re-sell the properties to the public, he said.
In order to build a 6.3-mile extension of the 710 Freeway, which starts at the Port of Los Angeles and ends at the northern terminus near Alhambra at Valley Boulevard, Caltrans bought about 450 homes in the 1960s in El Sereno, South Pasadena and Pasadena. But the city of South Pasadena and environmental groups stopped the freeway through lawsuits in the 1970s and 1980s.
Later, the agency wanted to build the freeway extension underground, as a long tunnel connecting to the 210/134 freeways. But any extension was killed by LA Metro, and then by Caltrans and the state secretary of transportation in November 2018.
What was left were a string of houses in middle-income El Sereno and pricey South Pasadena and Pasadena. Some are occupied by tenants who pay rent to Caltrans but when tenants died or were evicted, Caltrans often did not rent them to new occupants. The transportation agency was criticized by state lawmakers for leaving homes empty during the coronavirus pandemic, leading to squatters who moved into the vacant homes.
In 2019, about 163 residential units, mostly single family homes, were…
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