For decades, Los Angeles hasn’t built enough homes to meet its growing housing demands. This has created fast-rising rents and home prices and put homeownership out of reach for thousands of Angelenos. Some families have responded by leaving Southern California altogether. Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two reforms targeting California housing, senate bills 9 and 10, into law. Perry Budd delves more into this issue.
*****
Anthony Dedousis is the director of policy and research at Abundant Housing LA, a nonprofit organization that campaigns to make Los Angeles and California more affordable with more housing options for people at all levels of income.
ANTHONY DEDOUSIS: Organizations like Abundant Housing and many, many others, environmental organizations, transit advocates, affordable housing advocates, business organizations, labor organizations; understand that it’s appropriate after decades of cities kind of puttering along and deciding that the current zoning rules worked ‘just fine’, that the states step in and take action.
Los Angeles leads every city in the nation in both the cost of housing and lack of housing options. This places the city at the epicenter of the California housing crisis — trends which Dedousis say are deeply connected.
DEDOUSIS: And so those two things go together. The reality is that over the last 30 to 40 years, Los Angeles and cities across California have made it really difficult to build housing even in areas where you’d think it would be quite logical to have a lot of housing — like mass transit in job rich areas in high resource, popular [and] desirable neighborhoods & cities.
For years, California has employed restrictive single-family zoning laws which prohibit developers and homeowners from meeting the demands of California’s ever growing housing market.
DEDOUSIS: 75% of the land in Los Angeles that is zoned for housing is zoned for single family homes only. That means no duplexes, no fourplexes, no bungalow cords, no mid rise apartment buildings, no high rise apartment buildings — nothing except for a house.
This barrier has down-stream effects which negatively impact the most income insecure Angelenos.
DEDOUSIS: Now, that’s fine and dandy if you have enough money to afford a house, which in Los Angeles can cost almost a million dollars depending on where it is, but most people can’t afford a million dollar house. We have effectively banned more affordable forms of housing on three quarters of our city’s land, which helps to explain why we have some of the highest housing costs in the nation. It also helps to explain why our neighborhoods are so segregated by race and class.
Two weeks ago, Governor Gavin Newsom signed senate bills 9 and 10 — the first reforms to California’s zoning laws in decades.
DEDOUSIS: There is no one magic pill or magic bullet, right? There is no one law that’s going to fix the problem. And so that’s why our policy agenda focuses on what we call the core four. We support legalizing more housing. We support making housing easier to build. We support funding affordable subsidized housing in order to help end homelessness. And we support expanding renter’s legal rights.
While the challenges are plentiful, Dedousis remains confident that these recent reforms are a step in the right direction.
DEDOUSIS: There’s no one big law we’re going to need dozens of incremental laws to solve the problem. But with SB 9 and 10, we’ve gotten a few steps closer to that.