A Crisis in Housing
A recent report by a city task force painted a bleak picture of affordable housing in Los Angeles, a bad situation that could become dramatically worse in the future, according to its authors.
The Los Angeles Housing Crisis Task Force stated that the city’s housing prices have risen so much “they devour the wages of working families with the result that many people end up living in overcrowded and unsafe conditions.”
And while the city’s population is growing by tens of thousands each year, affordable housing is being added by the hundreds, the report said.
Responding to the report, City Council members Mike Feuer, Jackie Goldberg and Nick Pacheco have called for the city to study establishing a housing trust fund, which would help low-income residents buy homes and provide financial incentives to landlords who rented apartments at below-market rates.
The Times recently interviewed Feuer about the scope of the housing problem and possible solutions to it.
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Question: What is the status of affordable housing in the city of Los Angeles right now?
Answer: We have a housing crisis. And it’s a crisis that affects everybody in the city. For example, it would take a person earning minimum wage 100 hours a week of work to afford a two-bedroom apartment that costs $766. That encapsulates a big part of the problem. A couple of years ago, the city opened up a waiting list for Section 8 (federal rent subsidy) housing. Ten percent of the city’s households applied. It’s a 10-year waiting list. Hundreds of thousands, maybe as many as a million people, in our city live in substandard housing conditions. Most of these people are kids. One in seven people in the city lives in overcrowded housing conditions.
There’s no way for people at the lower end of our economic spectrum to be able to afford a decent place to live in our city. A hard-working wage earner, someone who is helping sustain the economic recovery, not lead it, is relegated to living in substandard housing conditions and has children who may never see conditions other than those.
Q: That’s a bleak picture but, not surprisingly, one that is rooted in poverty.
A: It’s a completely unacceptable situation in our city. And it has a moral as well as a legal dimension to it. I think that it’s intolerable for a city to allow a third, a quarter, of its population to live this way, in conditions that the balance of the city would never, for one second, tolerate. But this is not merely a problem for poor people. In order to be able to sustain economic growth at the middle and upper-middle level, people need to be able to afford to buy houses here. Los Angeles has the second-worst rate of housing ownership of any city in the country, New York being first. Employers in Los Angeles are having a difficult time recruiting people to come here because of housing costs. One of a couple of things happens: Either new homeowners scrape up enough money for a home that comes nowhere close to their expectations or, more likely, they end up living far from where they work, which intensifies another crisis in our community, and that is our transportation crisis. So there’s a whole array of pieces that are interrelated.
Q: Given that, would it be easier to tackle the transportation problem than the housing problem?
A: To look at the two areas in isolation is a mistake because of the dynamic I just described. They’re actually very deeply related to each other. For example, as the transportation infrastructure improves a little bit, should we be concentrating housing near transportation hubs, to make it easier for people to rely on other forms of transit than their cars? These issues go to the heart of who we’re going to be as a community for a long time to come. And again, it affects everybody throughout the entire city. Even people who actually have houses here or can afford to buy in Los Angeles will find the quality of their lives dramatically eroded if our economy sputters because we can no longer attract people to work here or because workers who have sustained the economy, like the janitor or the food service worker, can no longer tolerate the conditions that we have here, and move elsewhere.
Q: What can government do?
A: There are a number of things on the table, and I think that each one of them deserves very serious consideration. There was a report recently issued by the task force on the housing crisis. And that report contains dozens of recommendations. Among those that I think are most promising are the creation of a housing trust fund in the city to help narrow the gap between what one earns and what one needs to be able to pay in order to afford a decent apartment. A housing trust fund requires an ongoing stable source of funding. And finding that source of funding is going to be hard work. Conceptually, though, I think it’s very important to have the city get into the ballgame. When you compare Los Angeles on a per capita basis to other cities around the country, we spend much, much less on housing subsidies. For example, L.A. spends $23 per person on housing. New York spends $89. Other cities spend much more as well. We have allowed ourselves to get way behind the curve here. And at precisely the same time, federal funding for housing in real dollars has diminished dramatically, with perhaps a third of the funding that formerly was available actually being spent this year. So a housing trust fund is part of the solution. I think we also need to look at inclusionary zoning, which requires that when multiple unit housing is built, a component of it be affordable housing. Or if a developer is not prepared to do that, require a fee in lieu of that source of affordable housing to be kicked into a housing trust fund.
Q: How would this trust fund work? Would it go to subsidize the individual? Would it go so subsidize landlords?
A: We would be able to choose from an array of options. At least a portion of it could go to subsidizing individual rents. It could go to creating more affordable housing. It could go to rehabilitating existing units to make conditions more humane. I think some combination of those choices would be what I would select.
Q: Are you advocating a return to public housing?
A: Public housing has proved, for a variety of reasons, not to work very well. But one shouldn’t go from that fact to the conclusion that government has no role to play in creating affordable housing for people. And I think we just need to be very innovative about how we use our funding so that we get highest and best value out of every dollar. Housing is very expensive, creating it is very expensive, subsidizing it is very expensive, but government, I think, does have a place in trying to assure that people have a decent place to live.
Q: What about developing the downtown core of the city?
A: That could well be a part of it. The problem is going to require many solutions brought together at the same time. There is no single fix for the problem we’ve gotten ourselves into over years. The core of the city, even the most gritty parts of downtown, has historically been ignored as a place for people to return to. That is changing now. One developer is trying to bring back a part of downtown. The kind of housing that he is focused on creating is largely upscale, for which there is also a need. But there’s no question that bringing back residents to the core of downtown at the highest ends could also be a catalyst for other kinds of housing here. But if we’re going to attract people to the core of the city, there have to be the amenities that those people desire. Good schools, among them, good shopping opportunities, parks and so forth. And these are amenities that we have not been good at providing in Los Angeles. Therefore, people have tended to go to the outer reaches of the city and beyond for schools and housing. It would be a big mistake for us to simply continue to sprawl without looking at other approaches, because the farther out people have to live from their jobs, the worse our traffic congestion is going to be, the worse the quality of our air is going to be and the less of a connection people in the most outlying areas are going to feel to a city that they need to support.
Q: You talk about an array of options. What are they?
A: The solutions here require new housing, require rehabilitating existing housing, require subsidizing rents at existing housing for which rehabilitation is not necessary. It requires more multipurpose construction in the city. It requires looking at the stock of affordable housing that we do have and not being content with its demolition. It will require having a Department of Housing in the city that is much more user-friendly. That sounds like sort of a prosaic fix, but it’s among the array of things we have to pursue. A number of specific ways that the Housing Department can work more effectively includes having somebody who’s a case manager for people seeking to build affordable housing in Los Angeles.
Q: Is there a stock of affordable housing?
A: There is a situation in the Valley that really exemplifies what we could lose if we aren’t more vigilant about protecting the housing stock that we have, which is a key component of this problem. There is a housing complex called Chase Knolls in Sherman Oaks. And the current owners of the property, who recently purchased it, are seeking to raze it and replace what is an affordable housing complex with luxury units. The loss of that as housing stock would be, I think, a real tragedy, and the threat to it really exemplifies in microcosm what we’re facing here. And that is, we’ve allowed, over the course of time in Los Angeles, affordable buildings, even nice ones, to be demolished for the sake of the dollar. And it’s incumbent, I think, on all of us to try to think differently about the way our city should function in the future, about creating economic incentives for developers not to do the “knock it down and build it up more expensively” approach. And this particular battle, which is underway right now at the Chase Knolls project, really does typify the much broader challenge here in the city because without being able to say to a developer, “There are other approaches you can take here that would sustain this existing housing,” we are going to relegate people, like the current occupants of Chase Knolls, to having to fight to find something they can afford outside of the community where they’ve had their roots for years, and that is not acceptable.
Q: How would you fund this housing trust fund?
A: The idea of inclusionary zoning with an “in lieu” fee is a very important component. If you build a multifamily structure, the city would say a certain percentage must be affordable or you should pay a fee so that we can create this source of money for other purposes off-site. I think the idea of a linkage fee on commercial development is another promising idea.
Q: Is that going to raise the old cry about “it’s too expensive to move to Los Angeles to do business”?
A: I think if it’s done properly, we can avoid that criticism. But it requires a study, and we should do this with some care. The alternative is simply allowing our current practices to continue. And it’s not economically wise to do that because it will prevent the existing recovery from being sustainable and it relegates a huge percentage of our population to living in overcrowded or substandard conditions. One could argue that it’s been an implicit assumption of our economic recovery in the city that those are acceptable costs to pay for creating wealth that tends to move elsewhere. I personally think that is simply not tolerable.
Q: Can we muster the will citywide to pursue these goals?
A: This is an issue that requires the active teamwork of federal, state and local officials and partnership between public officials and the private sector. The city can in no way address this problem successfully as a city alone, as a public entity. The private sector cannot do so on its own. The federal government can’t do this on its own and neither can the state. We need to be working collectively. There’s a state bond measure that’s contemplated for the November ballot to create affordable housing throughout the state. It’s very important for us to be getting behind that and supporting it.
There are many who will say that this effort to try to reverse years of increasingly bad housing conditions is doomed to fail because the problem is simply too big. But the alternative is to simply allow them to persist and have our successors look back on us and say, “When they had a chance to do something, they did nothing because the problem seemed so intractable.”
