Brace Yourself For A Worse Housing Crisis

PLANNING WATCH - The California State Legislature will soon vote on the following draft legislation. Please carefully consider the arguments presented below.

YES on Assembly Bill 2576

As active residents and voters in Los Angeles County, we are alarmed by three of four proposed statewide housing bills. They do not allow sufficient time for a comprehensive analysis. Good housing policy requires collaborative planning, not top-down mandates that ignore actual outcomes. Recent events, such as the destruction of a busy intersection in Los Angeles because of a major water main break, highlight the need to upgrade public infrastructure before permitting more housing.

When you vote on these four bills, please consider the following:

Vote NO on Assembly Bill 2005. Senate Bill 9 was originally presented as legislation for homeowners and family trusts to split lots and add more housing, mostly expensive apartments. To protect communities from this predatory land speculation, the State Legislature included a mandatory three-year owner-occupancy requirement following any lot splits.

Assembly Bill 2005 severely undermines this protection with a loophole that allows Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), the corporate entities used by real estate developers, to initiate Senate Bill 9 lot splits, while deferring the occupancy requirement to a future buyer. Despite claims that this draft bill merely accommodates standard estate planning practices, Limited Liability Companies are developer tools, not instruments of estate planning. Assembly Bill 2005 allows corporate speculators to exploit Senate Bill 9 by expanding their real estate holdings without a long-term stake in local neighborhoods.

We strongly urge you to preserve the intent of Senate Bill 9, protection of single-family neighborhoods, by voting NO on Assembly Bill 2005.

Vote NO on Assembly Bill 1751. This proposed legislation would allow row townhouses on single-family lots. We support townhomes on lots with multi-family zoning and on commercial properties that face single-family neighborhoods. But allowing townhomes in single-family zones without discretionary approvals ignores adopted Community Plans for these neighborhoods. Instead, Assembly Bill 1751 relies on ministerial reviews even though these developments have major impacts and should be subject to a discretionary review and approval.

Vote NO on Senate Bill 1116: This proposed legislation is premature because legislators do not have enough time to assess the impacts of California Senate Bill 1123, before allowing it to include smaller lots.

By stripping away local discretionary review, Senate Bill 1116 removes an essential tool for successful community planning. It allows developer profits to dictate local development laws for low-density neighborhoods, whose aging streets, sewage, water, and electrical infrastructure cannot handle greater demand. Local jurisdictions must determine the adequacy of critical infrastructure before approving high-density infill housing through Senate Bill 1116.

Vote YES on Assembly Bill 2576. We strongly support this proposed legislation because it fills a critical spot in current transit-oriented development and streamlining laws, specifically California Senate Bill 79. While these laws allow local jurisdictions to protect historically registered parcels, they also allow properties to ministerial upzoning.

Good-faith housing actors and our architectural resources should not be victims of this collateral damage. Vote YES on Assembly Bill 2576 to expand protections against transit-oriented upzoning for designated historical sites, and to preserve local Historical Preservation Overlay Zones (HPOZs), the California Register of Historical Resources, and the National Register of Historic Places.

Adding more housing to local communities is welcome, as long as the communities can determine where this housing should be located, not the State of California.

Send your responses, your name and address by email to these representatives of the State of California:

[Note: I am indebted to Shelley Wagers, co-chair of the Beverly Grove Neighborhood Association, for an earlier version of this article.]

(Dick Platkin is a retired Los Angeles city planner who writes about planning issues in LA. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)