The Little Tokyo Service Center built more than 1,000 affordable housing units and plans to construct 600 more to address a crisis in Los Angeles.
The Center’s Director of Community Development Takao Suzuki is hoping for a share of the $35 billion Housing Supply Fund — proposed in President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ plans — to meet the nationwide shortage of affordable housing.
Project 2025 — a blueprint for the next Republican Presidential term written, in part, by multiple allies of the Republican Party’s 2024 Presidential nominee Donald Trump — would kill the fund.
Suzuki said such a move would be “devastating” to affordable housing development.
“It’s going to kill production of affordable housing,” Suzuki said. “We already have a shortage of money [to build affordable housing], so that, again, is just another hit.”
Within the first year of his 2016 term, former President Trump adopted 64% of the policies proposed by the prominent conservative think tank’s previous “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint.
Project 2025 also takes aim at fair housing programs instituted under the Biden Administration to remove racial bias in home valuation.
The Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity is a joint effort by HUD and the White House to end bias in home valuation. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation, re-instituted by the Biden Administration, enforces the 1968 Fair Housing Act that required HUD to take active strides for fair housing valuations.
Project 2025 dismisses both programs as “progressive ideology.”
Deepak Bahl, the programming director at USC’s Center for Economic Development and adjunct professor, said his research on housing issues does not support removal of the policies.
“Repealing AFFH regulation is just a political device and a belief in a color-blind, race neutral society free of any bias or discrimination,” Bahl wrote in an email.
Greg Spiegel, the Los Angeles Housing Department’s senior housing economic and policy analyst, said that these policies are important because discrimination is already built into institutions, so it takes a conscious effort to remove them.
“Staying status quo and not making things worse perpetuates the discrimination that’s historically in this system,” Spiegel said. “[Getting rid of policies that limit racial bias in home valuation] would maintain the status quo.”
According to Tridib Banerjee, a professor emeritus specializing in urban design at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, a lack of income mobility worsens the problem.
“It’s not only income inequality, but also racial,” Banerjee said. “The outcomes for Black and brown communities are poorer than white households.”
The Housing Supply Fund would provide $25 billion for new affordable housing and $10 billion in grants for local and state governments to eliminate housing regulations.
Spiegel said L.A. officials would likely want to tap the fund to help with the housing crisis.
Los Angeles County is currently short 500,000 affordable housing units, according to the County of Los Angeles Homeless Initiative.
Existing homes are already expensive. Nearly two-thirds of the houses on the market in the city of Los Angeles are listed at over $1 million. Nearly 12% are listed at over $5 million, according to a 2023 study by Point2, an online real estate marketplace. Both percentages were the highest of the 30 “large” cities surveyed.
A June 28 county report found 75,312 L.A. County residents are homeless. On her first day in office in 2022 Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared homelessness a state of emergency.
Spiegel said the housing market needs a government subsidy, like the supply fund, to stabilize.
“For-profit developers have no obligation to house poor people … they’re in it for the money,” Spiegel said. “It’s either naive or callous to say, ‘Oh, the market will just take care of it.’ When has that been the case?”
In their argument in favor of eliminating the fund, the authors of Project 2025 wrote that constructing more lower-income housing would not alleviate the housing crisis.
Bahl said that is “just wrong.”
“The increased supply of housing, whether it is rental or for ownership, is going to alleviate the crisis.” Bahl said. “It will bring the rents down. It will bring the price of the units down. I mean, that’s just simple supply and demand, right?”
While Bahl agreed with Project 2025 that eliminating regulations and red tape will reduce housing prices, he said it should be done along with building more housing.
Banerjee said one problem with this proposal is that local governments, not incentivized to change policies, control zoning, rather than the state or national government.
“The fact is there are communities with strong zoning control because people who live there want it that way,” Banerjee said. “They don’t want more housing in their community. That causes more traffic, more load on schools and other services.”
Banerjee said that Project 2025′s approach is based on a flawed classic housing filtering model. The model says that older housing declines in value over time — also known as downward filtering — to, in turn, create more affordable housing in the future. In major California cities, like L.A., however, Banerjee said the opposite is true.
“Instead of downward filtering, [L.A. has] an upward filtering, often associated with gentrification, and the result of that is a loss of housing available for low-income people, adding to the crisis,” Banerjee said. “A lot of people are getting left behind.”