Shoehorn In More Housing
Remember the old woman who lived in a shoe? Far too many Southern Californians can identify with that nursery rhyme, living as they do in small and unpleasant places, packed so tight that children seem to spill from every window.
The region’s housing shortage hits poor families hardest, but the crisis described in a recent Times series affects almost everybody, especially Los Angeles residents. If this city is to achieve its touted destiny as the 21st century’s model metropolis, people of all incomes must have suitable places to rent or buy. Los Angeles needs at least 10,000 additional apartment buildings and homes every year just to keep pace with population growth. As it is, a fraction of that number is being built, and the mayor and most of the City Council have been so unresponsive it’s as if they think people really can live in old shoes.
The next mayor needs to make housing production and homeownership a priority. And Angelenos should not let him and other civic leaders get away with pretending they don’t know where to start on this admittedly daunting challenge--there are just too many solid solutions awaiting implementation and too many creative models already built.
Money, of course, is the biggest hurdle. To begin, the next mayor and council should put more federal money into housing. Last year New York spent 65% of its community development block grants on housing; L.A., a very stingy 27%.
On a related front, the city’s housing trust fund merits the $100-million annual infusion recommended last year by a housing crisis task force. The budget approved by the council last week gave the fund just over $10 million; while that doubles last year’s amount, it is still a pittance compared with New York’s funding of $265 million last year.
To raise the recommended amount for the L.A. housing trust fund, affordable housing advocates suggest that the city tap several sources. In Boston and San Francisco, commercial developers pay a fee linked to the size of their projects. That concept is under study by L.A. City Hall, but broad “linkage fees” would put Los Angeles at a competitive disadvantage with neighboring towns. Part of the city’s hotel tax should be dedicated for housing; adding a dollar to every real estate transaction would also generate a steady flow of money for the fund, but it would require a two-thirds popular vote.
More housing won’t happen without bold leadership from the next mayor. For inspiration, he might catch a flight to Oakland, where Mayor Jerry Brown is pushing hard to build 7,600 units downtown, with one in four of these condos and apartments being set aside for low-and moderate-income residents. Or he could drive down to Brea, where a coalition of city planners, residents, developers and architects transformed a blighted neighborhood into a bustling six-block area with 98 single-family homes, 40 townhouses and 64 lofts above retail stores.
Los Angeles should be cheering on groups such as Neighborhood Effort, a nonprofit development company that buys run-down, crime-infested buildings and solicits federal subsidies and private investment to remake them into subsidized apartments so attractive that hundreds of prospective renters are on waiting lists.
Think about it: A family that arrived in Los Angeles in 1950 was welcomed by the sound of hammers building 32,579 new housing units. “If you can create affordable housing it brings up the neighborhood, it has a domino effect,” one of the co-founders of Neighborhood Effort told The Times’ Jennifer Oldham.
Without enough housing, the domino effect can go the other way. A schoolteacher who can’t afford the neighborhood he grew up in arrives at work exhausted after driving in from Riverside. He’s confronted by a once-motivated student who’s now acting out because his big family with its small income is forced to move in with six other people in an unimproved garage. Then that angry kid is stopped by a hard-working cop who never gets to know the people in this city because she lives in Simi Valley, where a good house in a safe neighborhood goes for a lot less than it does in L.A.
Meanwhile, sticker shock drives away doctors recruited by Kaiser Permanente and professors sought by UCLA.
So affordable housing matters. And not just to poor people.
