Council Urged to Set Up Fund for Affordable Housing
In an effort to ease Los Angeles’ affordable housing crisis, the Los Angeles City Council is considering setting up a special account to help low-income residents buy homes and to provide financial incentives to landlords who rent apartments at below-market rates.
Citing the success of similar programs in San Francisco and Boston, three council members introduced a motion Wednesday asking their colleagues to consider establishing a housing trust fund in Los Angeles with funding to come from a variety of fees and taxes. Although the proposal did not definitively name the funding sources, city officials are considering a variety of options, including increasing the city’s transient occupancy tax and raising building permit fees on commercial developments.
“The city has to act in much more bold and decisive ways when it comes to our housing crisis,” Councilman Mike Feuer said. “The crisis implicates all of us. . . . Perhaps a million of our residents live in slum housing. It’s inexcusable to allow this to persist.”
At the urging of lawmakers Jackie Goldberg, Nick Pacheco and Feuer, the council’s Housing and Community Redevelopment Committee will review the proposal and make recommendations on how to proceed within the next few weeks.
The proposal, which City Hall insiders expect to pass in some form, is the result of a study released last week by the Los Angeles Housing Crisis Task Force, a broad and highly respected group pulled together last year by city officials.
The task force, led by Sister Diane Donoghue and Lauren Saunders of Bet Tzedik Legal Services, painted a bleak picture of housing in Los Angeles.
“The city’s housing prices have risen so high they devour the wages of working families, with the result that many people end up living in overcrowded and unsafe conditions,” Saunders said.
For example, a worker must earn $14.90 per hour to pay the average rent of $766 per month for a typical two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. Someone at the minimum wage of $5.75 per hour would have to work 102 hours per week to cover an average rent, according to the task force report.
The “cost of living has gone up so incredibly,” said Donoghue, who serves as the executive director of the Esperanza Community Housing Corp. “We are acting irresponsibly if we don’t address this.”
She said she is hopeful that the trust fund could raise $100 million over the next few years.
In addition to helping low-income residents buy homes, the fund could also be used to help finance the construction of affordable housing while fixing slum conditions in existing buildings.
According to the study conducted by the task force, Los Angeles spends $23 annually per capita on affordable housing. Seattle spends $66, while Chicago spends $76 and New York spends $89.
Complicating the matter, the number of low-income housing units in the city is shrinking, while too few new ones are being built, the task force found.
As many as 10,000 of the city’s low-income housing units could lose government subsidies if converted to market-rate rentals by owners who choose to opt out of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 rent subsidy program.
The task force further discovered that between June 1998 and June 1999, only 1,940 new housing units were built within the city, while the population increased by 65,000 over the same period.
“It’s time for city government to stand up and resolve this crisis and address the very real housing needs for the working poor in Los Angeles,” Goldberg said. “The City Council must act now and adopt the recommendations of this task force because this problem is only going to get dramatically worse.”
