Behind L.A.’s Homeless Crisis: Housing Codes Designed for the ‘60s

Mayor Richard Riordan’s proposal to build what amounts to a “Homeless Bowl” near Downtown represents the latest attempt to grapple with the seemingly in tractable problem of what to do about people who will not or cannot live indoors.

The proposal--which calls for a fenced-in urban campground for 800 people--has received warm support from Downtown business interests and a predictably chilly response from advocates for the homeless. In other words, the idea has been dragged into the political quagmire usually associated with homelessness, where all arguments quickly boil down to the question of whether the homeless are lazy criminals or saintly victims of society.

Because of this schism, we will never seriously deal with the homeless problem if all we do is argue about the personality and character of the homeless. We need to change the way we talk about the issue, because part of the problem of homelessness is a “supply-side” one.

Simply put, there aren’t enough housing options for poor or troubled people in Los Angeles, or any other city. Ironically, middle-class housing standards, originally designed to improve the lives of economically marginal people, stand as a serious impediment to progress. They discourage the construction of affordable housing and provide middle-class homeowners with political cover to oppose the construction of such housing.

This is not just political-science theory. It is happening in Los Angeles. While the hoopla surrounding the Homeless Bowl was making headlines, politicians such as former City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky have been quietly feeding an affordable-housing initiative into the grinder of middle-class housing values.

Whoever they are and whatever their “lifestyle preferences,” homeless people are on the streets partly because we have systematically emptied out the bedrooms where they used to live. For better or worse, mentally ill people used to live in mental institutions. Poor people used to live in slum neighborhoods. Alcoholics, drug addicts and difficult personalities used to live in our own homes because they were (and still are) our uncles, cousins or parents.

Today, all these options are gone, and those who used to depend on them scramble for housing. Mental institutions are downsized. Spare bedrooms are used for stray stuff, not stray people. Slum housing is snapped up by the working poor, who usually pay far too much for their substandard units. Those at the bottom of the housing chain end up in the streets.

Yet, creating more housing to put into the chain is not easy. In a world of growing homelessness and poverty, we still live by housing standards established in the 1960s. Then, the most vexing housing problem was not a lack of affordable housing but, rather, substandard conditions. As a result, today’s developers of affordable housing in Los Angeles have to provide lots of parking spaces, lots of open space and landscaping--and pay lots of fees. One recent affordable-housing project in the city of Los Angeles paid $8,000 per unit in fees, mostly for sewer hookups, schools facilities and processing the building permit. The fees increased the cost of the units by more than 5%.

Despite state laws permitting developers to build extra units if some affordable units are included in their projects, city regulations require Planning Commission and City Council approval on a case-by-case basis. (“Affordable” units generally mean units available to the working class and the working poor under a percentage-of-income formula.) This opens up the approval process to the emotional appeals of neighboring homeowners, which, in turn, drives up the cost of projects even further--and sometimes kills them.

The result is a Soviet-style paradox. Standards for all new housing are extremely high because we believe everyone should have middle-class housing. Yet, the resulting cost is so expensive--and the politics so difficult--that housing for poor and working-class people simply doesn’t get built. The code may call for one or two parking spaces per housing unit (plus guest parking); but, in reality, it’s people, not cars, who are living in the garages.

The politics of middle-class angst only make this irony worse. While the Homeless Bowl was drawing both fire and praise, the City Council was mulling a set of recommendations from the city staff and the Planning Commission to relax some of the pointlessly high standards for affordable housing in the city. But the proposal has run into opposition from homeowner activists.

As passed by the Planning Commission, the proposal would have permitted higher densities “by right” without a case-by-case permitting process. It would also have decreased the number of parking spaces required for affordable projects. For example, parking requirements would have been dropped from two per unit to one in projects located near transit stops; no guest parking would have been mandated; parking for single-room occupancy hotels, whose tenants typically have no cars, would have been dropped to one space per every four units. Balconies and rooftops would have counted toward satisfying the open-space requirement, and a height variance would have been permitted. While fees would not have been cut, at least payment would have been deferred until the construction was completed.

When this proposal came before the council’s Housing and Community Development Committee, Yaroslavsky objected, responding to the concerns of San Fernando Valley homeowner activists who fear an incursion of the poor into their two-car, middle-class neighborhoods. A compromise may be in the works, especially since Yaroslavsky is moving to the county Board of Supervisors. But the fact remains that while Riordan and homeless activists fiddle over the Homeless Bowl, a constructive step toward enlarging the housing chain has been blocked.

There’s nothing wrong with middle-class housing standards. They’re still an ideal that should be pursued. But the reality of today’s Los Angeles--indeed, of today’s America--is that people who are not middle class need appropriate housing that is affordable. Imposing middle-class housing standards on affordable-housing projects in Los Angeles will only continue to shrink their housing options.*