Welcome New Housing Guidelines
Four thousand families see their modest apartments topple to make way for development every year in Los Angeles. Despite the city’s severe shortage of affordable housing, there is nothing to require developers to replace demolished housing, except in areas where the rules are set by the Community Redevelopment Agency.
New agency guidelines would require developers to replace any housing that is torn down in the Central Business District. Single-room-occupancy hotels, the most common form of housing in that downtown district, already are protected from demolition. The proposed rules would cover as many as 1,000 apartments and the Los Angeles City Council should endorse them.
But the council also should make some changes. Under its own charter, the redevelopment agency has five years to replace housing that it tears down, and it would extend the same rule to developers. The council should require replacement of housing at least concurrent with development. Developers would be required to locate 30% of the replacement housing within the district’s boundaries, but they could build the rest anywhere in the city, a sensible provision of flexibility.
The agency has had the authority to require replacement of housing since 1975, but it only recently decided that developers find downtown projects attractive enough that they can live with the replacement rules.
Most housing disappears under bulldozer blades in areas outside the Central Business District. One neighborhood west of the Harbor Freeway has lost 2,000 apartments and houses since 1980. The council also ought to adopt the redevelopment rules for the rest of the city.
The city Planning Commission recently proposed a small step in that direction. It wants council approval of a condition requiring the developer of the Watt City Center, a $600-million office complex scheduled for construction downtown west of the freeway, to build 82 units of low-income housing. It is significant because the housing was destroyed before the developer bought the land.
Los Angeles has lost thousands of apartments and modest houses to make way for office buildings, stores and parking lots. As the housing crisis worsens, the city cannot afford to lose more low-income housing.
