Council Reports No Action Taken in Closed Session on Julia Morgan YWCA Building

The City Council reported no action was taken in its closed session meeting Monday with builders hoping to develop the Julia Morgan YWCA in the city’s historic Civic Center, near City Hall.

HRI Properties, LLC of New Orleans, would restore the historic but long-vacant and dilapidated former Y into a 179-room hotel, and Edgewood Realty Partners, LLC, of nearby South Pasadena, is proposing to restore the building into a 164-room hotel operated by Palisociety.

According to Monday’s agenda, City Manager Steve Mermell was scheduled to discuss the “price and terms of payment” in negotiations with the two developers.

The city purchased the YWCA building, designed by famed architect Julia Morgan, seven years ago through eminent domain for $8.6 million. At that point, the now 97-year-old structure had fallen into serious disrepair, having changed ownership in1996.

Morgan, the first licensed woman architect in California and the first woman admitted to the architecture program at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, designed the YWCA in the early 1920s, with the building completed in 1923.

But since the city’s acquisition of the historic structure, it has remained unused and Pasadena officials have not recouped the money spent to buy it.

In 2017, preservationists opposed the idea of turning the building into a 127,192 square foot, 60-feet high, 181-room hotel. 

That project was eventually scrapped when the developer asked for a $30 million subsidy to help cover increasing costs on the project. If it had been approved, the subsidy would have provided the developer with decades of free rent and parking.

After that, local activists began calling on the City Council to use the project for affordable housing.

The lack of affordable housing in the city has devastated local schools. The district has lost more than 1,000 students over the past five years and has been forced to close a number of schools due to a decline in funding. The district makes about $10,000 per student in average daily attendance funds from the state.

Negotiations have begun with a nearby developer on a project at a site on nearby Ramona Street which was once considered for a Water and Power building. 

That project came back to the forefront in September when the developers were given 15 minutes to present their projects to city officials and local residents during a Zoom call.