Housing Space in L.A. Running Out, Report Says
Los Angeles is running out of space to build new homes, according to figures released Wednesday by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning.
The figures show that under present zoning laws, the city has space for just over 1.4 million housing units and already has built about 1.3 million. To keep up with population growth, the city should be able to house about 25,000 new families a year, said Gary Squire, the city’s housing chief.
“We have a big problem ahead of us,” said Planning Director Melanie Fallon. “We are running out of room for housing, and we are going to have to take a serious look at increasing density for housing in some parts of the city.”
The residential land squeeze has a number of implications for a city with a history of skyrocketing real estate prices. As the scarcity fuels rising costs, it will make it even more difficult for local government to provide affordable rental housing and harder for prospective homeowners to buy houses.
“The central dilemma facing Los Angeles in the 1990s,” said Councilman Michael Woo, “is how we keep from going the direction of New York and other older cities where the only people left are the very rich, who can afford to stay, and the very poor, who can’t get out.”
The impending scarcity is likely to fuel arguments by planners and developers that one of the nation’s most horizontal cities must grow vertically. This could mean that some protected open spaces must give way to new building and that some undeveloped commercial property will be rezoned as residential despite the potential loss in profit to investors.
There is also the threat of a political battle between the city’s powerful slow-growth forces--who fought hard during the past decade to reduce population density in the Westside and San Fernando Valley--and advocates for low-income housing, a group with growing influence at City Hall.
A draft report on the housing shortage also indicates that there will be pressure to simplify environmental reviews often cited by developers as obstacles to the building of new homes.
How Los Angeles, the sixth-largest U.S. city in area, has developed this residential property shortage is the subject of intense debate.
On one side are people who blame the situation at least partly on zoning policies that reduced the amount of building in many neighborhoods of the city. Adopted during the 1980s, these polices were in response to the slow-growth movement, its ranks made up largely of middle-class homeowners.
On the other side of the debate are neighborhood activists such as Laura Lake of Westwood, who argues that the city’s appetite for tax revenue has caused it repeatedly to allow residential property to be rezoned for commercial building.
“We are constantly seeing sneaky attempts to convert residential to commercial,” Lake said Wednesday.
Compounding the residential land shortage, said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, is the city’s decade-long habit of building the least housing where population growth has been the greatest.
In the city’s southeast planning district, which includes Watts and several surrounding low-income neighborhoods, population grew by 47,600 people during the past decade, said Yaroslavsky. But at the same time, fewer than 200 new housing units were built, he said. A similar trend in Hollywood saw population growth of 32,851 and only 7,456 new homes built.
Meanwhile, in neighborhoods such as Encino, Tarzana, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Bel-Air, where population declined, there was growth across the board in new housing.
“Clearly, local and federal government have not created the financial opportunities for developers to go into areas that are crying out for housing,” Yaroslavsky said.
The councilman, who represents a Westside district that has been a hotbed of slow-growth politics, argues that it is a mistake to blame housing shortages in poor communities on the slow-growth politics of middle-class neighborhoods.
“It’s easy to turn this into a haves-versus-have-nots issue, but those who do are acting out of ignorance,” he said.
“You can’t blame the lack of housing in Westlake on some zoning action in Woodland Hills,” Yaroslavsky said.
Near downtown Los Angeles, Westlake is an inner-city neighborhood with a large immigrant population. Woodland Hills is a middle-class bedroom community in the west San Fernando Valley.
However, the Planning Department’s draft report on the housing shortage says that a major court victory by the slow-growth movement has turned out to be the most significant contribution to the city’s residential land scarcity.
In 1985, a federation of neighborhood associations won a court order requiring the city to pay closer attention to community plans--which often called for substantially less commercial and residential density than was allowed under city zoning laws. The court order said the city was governed by a state law, AB 283, which ordered the compliance with community plans.
In complying, the Planning Department lowered allowable building heights and restricted or prohibited new building on more than 200,000 parcels of land in the city.
As a result of these changes, said planning officials, the city’s residential capacity dropped from 6.2 million to just over 4 million people. According to the 1990 Census, there are 3.4 million people in the city. If history is a guide, that figure is probably low. The Census Bureau has acknowledged that the 1980 count was off by 4.7%.
Woo and others believe there are ways of finding room for more housing without trying to overturn the hard-won victories of middle-class homeowners to control densities in their neighborhoods.
“We can use city-owned land,” Woo said. “We can rezone parking lots and we can create more opportunities for mixed-use development.”
Mixed-use is a planner’s term for combining a variety of functions--offices, stores and apartments--in parts of town now reserved for commercial uses. Deputy planning director Sutton agreed with this tack.
“Despite what the numbers seem to say, we have a lot of opportunities for residential building, especially in South-Central Los Angeles and along major and secondary highways all over the city,” he said.
