Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive directive Wednesday in an attempt to make housing construction more affordable and streamline permit approval processes throughout Los Angeles.
The directive seeks to address barriers to homeownership, help convert existing buildings into housing and incentivize new projects to be built faster for people of all income levels, emphasizing affordable housing for mixed-income families.
“We have to look for ways to prevent people from falling into homelessness,” Bass said, “but we also have to make sure that our city is open and available to everyone to be able to purchase a home.”
The directive comes in part as a response to the 2013-21 Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which showed that L.A. reached only 10 percent of its target for moderate income housing units, and less than half of its goal for low and very low income units.
As of November 2023, the city is on track to meet only 40 percent of the assessment’s targets under the current 2021-2029 RHNA plan for all income levels. .
Due to this discrepancy, Bass said it is crucial to make housing more affordable for contractors to build by speeding up the permitting process. Currently, the permit approval process takes one and a half years for multi-family developments, according to the L.A. Business Council’s May 2023 report. The study also found that projects take almost four years on average to be permitted and eventually built.
Bass’ directive sets forth procedures to reduce processing timelines for permit and clearance-related services by 25-30% for “housing development projects of five or more units that contain at least 20% lower income restricted affordable housing units.”
“We have just heard from developers all over the place, they can go down the street to another town like Downey and get something done very quickly,” Bass said. “Why is it when it comes to building in our city everything takes so long?”
The directive orders the Department of City Planning to come up with ways to reduce the need for discretionary review, the process by which city officials review and approve construction of housing projects and report them to the mayor’s office.
L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, chair of the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the directive will push to allow more housing projects, particularly those that are going to be producing the largest number of housing units, to skip the formal discretionary process.
“Now we have an opportunity to take decision-making processes in the city that have slowed down housing because they’re sequential and make them simultaneous,” Raman said.
The formal process typically includes meetings with neighborhood councils, the City Planning Commission and potentially the City Council itself.
“All of these processes increase the length of projects so much before they can even put a shovel in the ground,” Raman said.
The directive also ordered eight city departments to come together to form a working group led by the mayor’s office to “focus on organizational and procedural improvements, pre-development review, and interdepartmental permit clearance coordination.”
L.A.’s biggest healthcare employer sees benefits to the order.
Michelle Gaskill-Hames, president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals of Southern California and Hawaii, thanked the city for implementing the directive, which she said will positively affect her employees.
“Significant increases in affordable and accessible housing is crucial if Los Angeles is to successfully compete with other cities and states across the country as we all strive to recruit and retain nurses and other health care professionals,” Gaskill-Hames said.
With nearly 24,000 physicians and staff at Kaiser, it is one of the largest employers in L.A.
“We need help to meet the housing needs of a workforce that is already stretched thin,” Gaskill-Hames said.
Bass said the community-based approach to the plan will cut living costs for families and young adults just starting their careers who have been “pushed out” too many times.
“Creating a future where Angelenos can live more affordably must center around Angelenos in their communities,” she said.