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PLANNING WATCH - State Senator Scott Wiener’s latest venture, Senate Bill 79, was approved by the California State Legislature and signed by the Governor. LA Mayor Karen Bass, along with the City Council, oppose this new state law. The legislation allows new residential buildings up to 9 stories high in residential areas up to a half-mile from busy transit routes. Wiener’s legislation, however, is based on a false claim. People are NOT homeless or overcrowded because of a housing shortage. The cause is low incomes. You cannot build more market housing, magically pull down prices, and somehow solve homelessness and overcrowding.
Why SB79 will not solve the housing crisis. This new legislation avoids the real problem, the low incomes of the homeless and overcrowded. Instead we are told that homelessness is caused by a housing shortage. Even though there is more than enough vacant housing in Los Angeles, especially apartments, an imaginary housing shortage supposedly accounts for homelessness and overcrowding. The alternative explanation of low incomes is avoided, even though it explains the problem and leads to the solution: raise wages and restore Federal non-market housing programs.
So why don’t elected officials opt for the obvious solutions to the housing crisis: raising wage and benefit levels. The answer -- the phony housing shortage explanation for homelessness and overcrowding serves developers and lenders, while it avoids the real cause, the low incomes of the homeless and overcrowded.
After all, in LA over the past three decades, the price of housing has increased by 400 percent when controlling for inflation. For most Angelenos, this means a major housing affordability crisis. One unexpected expense and they could end up sleeping in their cars. This is hardly based on conjecture, because poverty is rampant in Los Angeles County, and so are its side effects: homelessness and overcrowding.
How much damage can SB 79 inflict? In theory, quite a lot, which is why so many neighborhood groups oppose it, even though they confuse its potential damage with its likely damage. We have seen other Wiener-initiated legislation offer generous carrots to landlords and real estate developers, and they still fizzled out. My prediction is that SB79 will meet the same fate.
After all, the LA area still has many vacant apartments despite the enormous destruction of homes and apartments in last winter’s wildfires. Furthermore, interest rates are high and predicted to rise even higher, a further barrier to rebuilding destroyed housing and constructing new housing.
This reality does not mean that local neighborhood groups should support Wiener’s SB 79. Instead their opposition should include proposals to raise wage and benefit levels so the homeless and over-crowded can afford vacant housing. It is not enough to say the sky is falling, that 9 story buildings will destroy single-family neighborhoods. After all, previous Wiener-inspired bills have had little impact. For example, owners of single-family homes can add up to three units on a lot zoned for single-family homes, but few have. Likewise, owners of these properties can demolish an existing house, divide the underlying parcel in half, and then build a duplex and three small units on each half. Nevertheless few have. The price of homes and apartments continues to rise faster than most incomes, along with the number of homeless and overcrowded people.
The facts are that private market housing cannot be built cheap enough to solve homelessness and overcrowding. The only way this circle can be squared is to increase wages or build non-market public housing. While these solutions can’t totally eliminate homelessness and overcrowding, unlike SB79 they can substantially reduce it.
(Dick Platkin ([email protected]) is a retired LA city planner. He reports on local planning issues and is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles. Previous columns are at the CityWatchLA archives)
