My source, a longtime Glendale resident, tells me the situation is becoming dire:
Total chaos over at the Glendale Garden Homes … the owner and his famous historic landmark killer attorney found a dirty trick workaround to chop down the trees by reporting it as a fire hazard that sent fire officials running over to investigate it and give them the okay to chop things down …All those units from your last report are still empty … and the owner is now suing the city and expects to get the EIR thrown out and is telling people he plans to start demolishing sometime in the next two months .
Sometime IN the next two months? Excuse me?
As a former property manager, I have to point out that California renters are legally entitled to at least 60 days’ notice if they have lived in a rental unit for over one year (which, to the best of my knowledge, is the case for all of the remaining tenants). Can anyone confirm if the few remaining tenants received any notice at all?
But wait, there’s more:
Essentially, the stories I have heard from residents is that every time someone complains about a plumbing problem or any kind of repair, they are told that it is unfixable, and now their unit is uninhabitable, and they are given their notice to move out…there are more than 25 units I believe that are empty and never will be rented again…
But the issue now is that the city had ordered an environmental impact review because it was concluded that it was a historic resource, so the EIR was supposed to study the entire property and conclude what aspects comprise the “character defining elements“ that make it historic as a garden apartments movement historic property…
But instead of waiting for that CEQA process to occur, the owner found a loophole to go through the community development department and the fire officials and claim that the trees were a hazard, and unless he chopped them down now he would lose his insurance policy… So he found a way to do exactly what he had wanted to do without waiting for the environmental impact report and that is the dirty part…
The city staff walked through the property with the fire officials and signed off on 42 trees to be chopped down, but then communicated none of this to the city council or the other departments in the city or the residents or the neighbors… All of whom were completely caught off guard the day the chainsaws arrived and started cutting everything down. This exact same attorney is doing the same thing with another property in Los Angeles called the birdhouse… It is all part of the new plan to eliminate trees everywhere.
Everybody from the neighborhood was out today with channel 7 ABC News… Andrew Salimian, Director of Advocacy for the L.A. Conservancy spoke to them,  along with all of the neighbors and Francesca Smith, the local historian and board member from the Glendale historical Society…  unfortunately they have chopped down all the amazing trees that were there so it is really now just a barren dystopian stump field …  along with broken glass windows from where the trees flew down and smashed into the buildings… Pictured here is resident Jack Salakian, whose apartment is the second floor unit you see in the video of all the trees flying around… And the broken windows on the first floor below him are from the trees hitting the building. 
Broken windows caused by falling trees smashing into the buildings, along with some of the tree carnage.
It isn’t clear if any of the smashed windows belong to occupied units (can anyone confirm)? And can anyone tell me anything about the legality of allowing trees to be felled in such a way that they smash windows? That seems like a safety hazard for the remaining tenants.
