Really solving housing in LA will mean offending everyone.
Every special interest group says they can fix the housing crises, and they’re all at least a little bit right
At this point, we all know it: Yes, LA has a terrible housing affordability problem.
Average rent in Los Angeles is $2,661, and 71% of its apartments are renting for more than $2,000 a month.
To put this in perspective: A full-time worker making $15 an hour earns $2,640 a month before taxes. You need to make $45 an hour, or $95,796 a year, to avoid being classified as rent-burdened.
Unsurprisingly, LA county is bleeding residents. It’s been losing population since 2016, and 2021 saw the largest population drop in the county’s history, about 160,000 people.
L.A. has a lot going for it, but it can’t get cocky. The city could very well join the ranks of formerly rich and powerful cities that are shadows of their former selves — Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis — if trends don’t reverse.
But to reverse population loss, LA needs to solve its affordable housing problem, and doing so means passing policies that offend everyone at least a little bit.
The first group to be offended: People who take Ronald Reagan literally. ““The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”, he famously said at a press conference.
But there is no solution to housing affordability that doesn’t involve government aid to the millions of Angelenos who can’t afford rent, new regulations, new subsidies, and new government interventions. While bad regulations are definitely a major cause of LA’s housing problems, good regulations must be part of the solution.
The second group to be offended: The people who want to “preserve neighborhood character”. Solving LA’s housing crisis means building taller, larger buildings, building missing middle housing, ending single family zoning, removing parking minimums, making streets worse for drivers and better for bikers, pedestrians, and busses, and building more public transit.
LA can’t have it both ways. It will either stay a city dominated by single-family homes with plenty of parking and terrible car traffic, or it will become more affordable, less car dependent, and friendlier to non-drivers. That means substantial changes to the city that will push everyone out of their comfort zone.
The third group to be offended: The people who distrust capitalists. Developers have a bad reputation, but there’s no solution to affordable housing in LA that doesn’t involve letting developers build lots of housing relatively quickly. This is something many at the forefront of LA’s affordable housing movement don’t want to admit for ideological reasons.
According to UCLA urbanist Shane Phillips in his excellent book The Affordable City, rent control and housing subsidies only work in cities where there’s already adequate housing supply and relatively low prices. Even in Vienna, one of the most successful and most socialized housing markets in the world, the majority of new housing supply is still privately funded.
Since 2010, LA county has spent generously on public housing but has built only a few thousand units, far short of the hundreds of thousands of units that are needed.
Meanwhile, private developers who could build hundreds of thousands of units in a matter of years instead spend their time and money trying to navigate LA’s broken public approval process.
Phillips also says the solution to housing affordability can be summed up by “the three S’s”: Supply, stability, and subsidy. Supply is about building enough homes in the first place through both public, private, and nonprofit means. Supply is the foundation to stability, which is about tenant protections, and to subsidy, which is about helping out the many people who struggle to make ends meet.
If LA doesn’t fix its housing problem, none of its other problems will get fixed. Homelessness and crime will continue its rise. LA will become ever more corporate and boring as small businesses fold and artists move to cheaper places.
Free spirits, the middle class, and scrappy upstarts will go to more affordable places, and many of their innovations and networks will go with them. More people will fall into the underclass and rage against an entitled and oblivious ruling class. This means LA will have fewer and fewer cooperative liberals and ever more nihilistic extremists with axes to grind.
Fixing LA’s housing shortage means offending everyone at least a little bit. But the discomfort of reform now will save the city decades of painful decline.
