Los Angeles: Neighborhood Groups Can Make Affordable Housing Happen … Here’s How

PLATKIN ON PLANNING--In addition to hundreds of blocks clubs, homeowner associations (HOAs), tenant unions, and neighborhood groups, the current Los Angeles City Charter established Neighborhood Councils.  Despite their connection to city government, like LA’s other neighborhood groups, they are restricted to an advisory and advocacy role.  Nevertheless, there are still many ways that neighborhood groups can promote affordable housing. 

The first step is to understand why LA has an affordable housing crisis and why it has resulted in sky-high rents, gentrification, foreclosed houses, overcrowding, and homelessness.  

What we are witnessing is the gross failure of our economic and political system to provide safe, comfortable, and affordable housing, including LA’s residents.  These cascading failures include the: 

 1) Elimination of nearly all Federal, State, and local housing programs over the past 40 years, 

 2) Soaring wealth and income inequality,

 3) Massive bundles of underperforming investment capital hungry for more lucrative returns, and 

 4) Deregulation of local zoning and rent control ordinances and environmental laws, like CEQA, that regulate local land use, construction, and rental markets.   

While any one any of these failures could negatively effect housing affordability, in unintended combination they have produced a catastrophic housing crisis in Los Angeles. Even though community groups do not have the authority to restructure the economy to truly overcome this situation, they do have enough political clout to successfully promote affordable housing in Los Angeles. 

More specifically, neighborhood groups can take a leadership role in the following ways: 

Include tenants in all neighborhood organizations:  Single-family homes and apartment houses are close enough in most LA neighborhoods that both homeowners and tenants should be bound together in the same local civic groups.  One successful model is the Miracle Mile Residents Association, a neighborhood group that chose to represent all of its residents, whether they live in homes, condos, or apartments.  When it comes to planning issues, they all have far more in common that they realize, in particular ensuring that City Hall reins in runaway real estate speculation while providing high quality public services. 

Restore Funding for Public Affordable Housing Programs:  Since the Nixon era, publically funded affordable housing programs have been slashed at the Federal, State, and local levels.   LA urgently needs neighborhood groups to become advocates for the restoration of these programs.  This means heavy lobbying of legislators at all levels.  For example, the City of LA’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund is woefully underfunded.  It needs an immediate transfusion of money, then a substantial annual increase from the City’s budget.  We should remember that at the height of the depression Los Angeles built and managed its own public housing projects, a historic precedent that should be restored.

Mansionization:  One of the most important areas of political action is restricting mansionization, which is now rampant throughout Los Angeles.  At present, real estate speculators demolish about 2000 older, smaller, more affordable homes per year.  They then quickly replace them with expensive McMansions that sell for about three times the price of the vanished homes. 

The campaign against mansionization has gone on for over a decade, and City Planning, along with the City Planning Commission and the City Council, have either gutted mansionization ordinances or dilly-dallied in creating truly effective ones.  But, this may finally change.   City Planning indicates they now have staff to prepare amendments to the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance to eliminate its bonus and exemption loopholes, per an adopted Council motion. 

To make sure these BMO amendments are not stalled and watered down, it is imperative that Neighborhood Councils mobilize their communities to keep Council offices and City Planning’s feet to the fire.  If not, it is extremely likely that the eventual amendments will again be riddled with loopholes, leading to the further loss of thousands of affordable homes.

SB 1818:  As many neighborhoods have discovered, the local version of this State law, the Density Bonus Ordinance, is a total give-away to real estate speculators.  Neighborhood group need to scrupulously read each Thursday’s LA Times to identify proposed Mitigated Negative Declarations (MNDs) for all SB 1818 projects.  Every one of these projects should be invited before local Planning Committees.   Planning Committees should then demand evidence that the project will not have adverse environmental impacts and that its density bonuses are financially justified.  They should further demand evidence that each density bonus project complies with City Charter sections 556 and 558.  These sections requires all discretionary actions to be consistent with the City’s General Plan, even though City Planning arbitrarily claims that these Charter sections do not apply to density bonus projects.   Finally, according to Larry Gross, (Coalition for Economic Survival), in an LA Times ed-op, “The city could also expand on AB 2222, the 2014 law that requires projects that get a "density bonus" to replace preexisting affordable units one-for-one . . . The city could enact a regulation that applies this concept to projects seeking zone changes, removal of rent-controlled units or that receive government subsidies.”

Inclusionary Housing:  While SB 1818 type density bonuses are discretionary, some cities require all new apartment projects to contain affordable housing units.  One-third of California cities already have such requirements, but in Los Angeles, similar ordinances have been tabled for years.  It is now time they be resurrected and inclusionary housing should be on the legislative agenda of all neighborhood groups in LA.  Furthermore, the California State Supreme Court recently eliminated legal barriers for California cities to establish inclusionary zoning ordinances.  The time is ripe for these ordinances, and LA should be in the forefront, not at the end of the line.

{module [1177]}

Ellis Act Evictions:  According to the LA Times, since 2001 Los Angeles has lost 20,000 affordable housing units, usually through evictions allowed by the Ellis Act.  In his ed-op piece Larry Gross also wrote, “The mayor and City Council could enact an ordinance that monitors existing affordable housing and sets an annual limit on the number of demolitions of rent-controlled units. The city could require new construction plans for rent-controlled properties to be approved before demolition permits are issued.”

Rent Control:  Two major loopholes weaken rent control in Los Angeles.  First, rents increase by a minimum of 3 percent per year, regardless of inflation or the ability of tenants to pay.  Second, rent control is eliminated when tenants vacate an apartment, sometimes pressured by landlords.  These loopholes must go, and community groups can and should take the lead in advocating for strong rent control ordinances in Los Angeles.

These overlapping proposals can and would make a major dent in not only protecting existing affordable housing from destruction, but also enabling local government to fill the void through public housing programs and tough regulations that will counteract the political and economic failures resulting in LA affordable housing crisis.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who writes on planning issues for CityWatch. He serves on the Board of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association. He welcomes questions and comments at [email protected]. An earlier version of the article was presented at the recent LA Congress of Neighborhoods.  

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 84

Pub: Oct 16, 2015