The Illegal Hotel Above the Boardwalk
This is a new one, even for me: an illegal mini-hotel in a candy-colored building on the Venice Boardwalk.
(Yeah, yeah, technically “Ocean Front Walk”. My Westsider relatives all call it the boardwalk, so I grew up calling it that too. Every Angeleno knows what and where it is.)
The ground floor of 2011 Ocean Front Walk is home to Ocean Front Kitchen, which dishes out typical beach-boardwalk food like hot dogs and funnel cake, and Poki Poke, which serves poke. But the snack stand isn’t the problem.
There are two apartments upstairs. Both are subject to RSO, according to ZIMAS. Both are listed on Airbnb, according to the real estate listing for the building.
It’s not legal to use RSO housing as a short-term rental. Not that it ever stops property owners from breaking the law and further wrecking the rental market.
The building also turns up on Hotpads. The listing says it was “taken off the market on 5/13/25”, but I wonder if someone rented the units for the summer, since the listing also says “perfect for extended stays from 1 to 6 months”.
This is why renters are getting squeezed out of Venice, and it offends me even more than the cheap-looking “wood” flooring in the remodeled apartments.
I pity the fool who books that place! The music blasting out of the speakers from the business below is insanely loud from open to close, nonstop thumping insanity. No rest for the wicked! Did you share this info with our clueless unconcerned CD 11 Venice Field Deputy Mr. Silva?
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