Missing Middle. LA City Planning’s New Approach to “Attainable” Housing

MY TAKE - As if Sacramento’s relentless parade of housing-streamlining legislation hasn’t disrupted Los Angeles neighborhoods enough, here comes Missing Middle.

Holy hell. What now?

Apparently, LA City Planning looked at SB 9, SB 684, SB 1123 and the rest of Sacramento’s grand experiment in density and streamlining and decided that what builders and developers really needed was even more streamlining at the local level. Because apparently Sacramento just wasn’t doing enough for them.

If you haven’t heard of Missing Middle, don’t worry. You haven’t missed the affordable housing. I can’t find that part either.

City Planning describes Missing Middle as an effort to encourage smaller homes, make better use of expensive land, remove development barriers and streamline approvals. All of this, we are told, will help create more “attainable” housing.

And there is City Planning’s carefully chosen word: attainable.

Attainable to whom? A household earning $60,000 a year? $100,000? $150,000? $200,000? Affordable housing at least gives us something measurable—an income level, a rent, a purchase price or an affordability restriction.

But “attainable”?

Until City Planning attaches a household income and a sales price to that word, attainable is not an affordability standard. It’s an adjective.

DO THE MATH

There is a wonderfully uncomplicated way to test the theory that smaller homes will make Los Angeles homeownership more attainable: run the comps.

We did. And that is precisely why I’m using a $1 million home when discussing what it actually costs to own a home in Los Angeles.

We aren’t cherry-picking a mansion in Bel Air. In parts of the San Fernando Valley, houses of roughly 1,100 to 1,300 square feet are already approaching or exceeding $1 million.

Those aren’t big houses for families. They’re modest homes. So if City Planning’s answer is to make housing smaller, exactly how much smaller are we going? Nine hundred square feet? Seven hundred? Five hundred?

We’re trying to house families, not store them.

A house doesn’t become affordable because someone shaved a few hundred square feet off the floor plan. Land, location, construction and demand all have a price. And unless someone restricts what the finished product can sell for, the market has a price.

Sometimes smaller housing simply means a smaller expensive house.

Now do the rest of the math. Take an existing 1,300-square-foot San Fernando Valley home selling for roughly $1 million. With 20 percent down, the buyer has somehow accumulated $200,000 before receiving the keys. Then comes the mortgage, property taxes, homeowners insurance, fire coverage where applicable, earthquake insurance, water, electricity, gas, maintenance and repairs.

Using reasonable illustrative assumptions, financing, carrying and maintaining an existing 1,300-square-foot, $1 million home can approach or exceed $100,000 a year.

And nobody has eaten dinner yet.

Add healthcare, food, gasoline, automobile insurance, retirement savings and the rest of ordinary life. Suddenly a household earning $150,000 or even $200,000 doesn’t sound nearly as wealthy as it did on paper.

It isn’t just the cost of buying the house. It’s the cost of keeping it.

Real affordability has to survive the entire equation:

ATTAIN → SUSTAIN → RETAIN

Can you attain the home? Can you sustain the cost of owning it? And ultimately, can you afford to retain it?

The Los Angeles Housing Department recorded 2,143 properties in its foreclosure registry during 2025. By July 13, 2026, the 2026 registry contained 2,508 properties—already more than the entire previous year.

Those registrations are not synonymous with completed foreclosures, and I won’t pretend they are. But they ought to get City Hall’s attention.

Perhaps the affordability crisis isn’t simply about getting people into houses. Perhaps somebody should also be asking why it is becoming so expensive to stay in them.

IF YOU WANT AFFORDABILITY, DEAL WITH AFFORDABILITY

Sacramento and Los Angeles keep attacking affordability by trying to sell Californians the faulty notion that building more housing creates affordability, rather than confronting the much harder question of why homeownership itself has become so unattainable.

Start with insurance. Why should an insurance company be able to retreat from insuring California homes against fire while continuing to sell other insurance products in California from which it can profit? You shouldn’t get to walk away from California homeowners when it comes to fire coverage while continuing to profit from those same California consumers through the rest of your insurance portfolio.

Then look at utilities. I have interviewed homeowners heating and cooling approximately 1,500-square-foot homes who are facing combined water and electricity costs of roughly $700 a month. That is $8,400 a year for water and electricity alone.

One Florida homeowner I spoke with pays roughly $300 a month in utilities for an approximately 1,100-square-foot home, with air conditioning running regularly; the water portion is about $48 a month. That isn’t a scientific national comparison, and I don’t pretend it is. But it ought to make policymakers curious about why the recurring cost of occupying a modest California home has become so punishing.

Why are we talking endlessly about making the house smaller without talking nearly enough about making the cost of living in the house smaller?

Insurance reform is hard. Utility costs are hard. Taxes are complicated. Taking on powerful institutions and entrenched systems is hard.

Increasing density is easy.

Change the zoning. Streamline the application. Allow more units on the same land. Make approval ministerial. Tell Californians it is being done in the name of affordability.

But we’re not falling for it anymore.

More units are more units. More density is more density. Neither is synonymous with affordability—or with City Planning’s preferred word, “attainability.”

HALF A MILLION DOLLARS LATER

Missing Middle didn’t fall out of the sky. Los Angeles budgeted $500,000 for the Low-Rise Design Lab, the effort City Planning describes as laying the groundwork for Missing Middle. Years later, City budget records show $1.565 million in pending consultant encumbrances associated jointly with the Low-Rise Design Lab and zoning-code document maintenance work, in addition to continuing City staffing costs.

The Lab used urban-design, architectural and economic consultants, developed hypothetical projects and conducted financial-feasibility analysis.

Fine.

After all that taxpayer money, staff time, consulting and financial analysis, we arrive at Missing Middle and I still can’t find an answer to the most elementary question of all:

What does an “attainable” home actually cost?

How many square feet? What sales price? Attainable to a household earning what income? What will the mortgage, property taxes, insurance and utilities cost? What will that family have left at the end of the month?

Financially feasible to build and financially feasible to purchase and keep are two entirely different things.

There is another word conspicuously absent from Missing Middle: community.

Maria Pavlou Kalban and Cindy Chvatal-Keane of United Neighbors have spent years doing something increasingly rare in California housing politics: trying to get to misguided housing policy before it becomes law. Rather than simply swimming upstream after Sacramento has passed another bill, United Neighbors has organized communities, worked with policymakers and Planning, proposed alternatives and pushed for changes while there was still time to make them.

Kalban put the problem with Missing Middle rather perfectly: it is missing “community.”

Urban planning cannot be reduced to what can be squeezed onto an individual parcel. A home exists on a street, in a neighborhood, inside a community. What happens to one property can affect privacy, parking, infrastructure, evacuation, trees, traffic—and ultimately the confidence people have in the neighborhood where they invested their savings and built their lives.

That uncertainty is itself another burden of homeownership. It is difficult enough to attain → sustain → retain a home when the mortgage, taxes, insurance and utilities keep climbing. Add the uncertainty of not knowing what density may suddenly appear next door—or whether you will even have an opportunity to be heard about it—and government has created another cost that doesn’t appear on a mortgage statement.

Good urban planning isn’t simply about what can be built on a lot. It’s about what happens to the community when you build it.

AND HERE WE GO AGAIN — MINISTERIAL

Then comes a word California homeowners have learned to recognize: ministerial.

And here we go again.

For a qualifying ministerial project, the homeowner next door doesn’t get the traditional discretionary project-level hearing where they can stand before City planners and explain what the proposal will do to their street and their home.

Not even one lousy hearing. Not even a minute and a half at the microphone.

We aren’t talking about giving neighbors veto power over somebody else’s property. We are talking about giving the people who actually live there a chair at the table.

Missing Middle includes streamlined pathways, including a Starter Home framework implementing SB 684 and SB 1123 that City Planning says can facilitate up to 10 lots or homes in qualifying circumstances.

Imagine you bought your little 1,200-square-foot cottage on a street of other modest homes. You paid the mortgage, property taxes and insurance for years. Then the house next door sells. A developer buys it and a qualifying ministerial project comes in.

Naturally, you want to attend the hearing.

What hearing?

You are quite literally in the middle of what happens next, yet when it comes to a traditional project-level discretionary hearing, you are once again outside the circle.

WHO IS PICKING UP THE CHECK?

This is where Mayor Bass, City Planning and Sacramento need to remember exactly whom they are talking to.

Today’s homeowners aren’t some theoretical future constituency. They are here now. They are paying property taxes, utility bills and the carrying costs of maintaining Los Angeles property. Their tax dollars are supporting the governments writing these policies right now.

So before government removes another chair from the table, perhaps somebody should ask: Who is picking up the check?

The homeowners of today. The property owners of today. The taxpayers of today.

Yet the prescription keeps returning to more density, more development, more streamlining and more ministerial approvals. Builders build. Developers develop. Applications keep moving.

But where is the guarantee that the eventual homebuyer receives affordable—or even “attainable”—housing?

There isn’t one that I can find.

If Sacramento and Los Angeles want to deal with affordability, then deal with affordability. Run the carrying costs. Attack the costs government actually has some ability to address. Determine what a family can afford and build housing policy backward from that number.

MAYOR BASS, TELL THE TRUTH

Mayor Bass, I’m begging you. And I like you. But you have to tell the truth.

Sacramento, you too. LA City Planning, you too.

More units are more units. More density is more density. Neither is synonymous with affordability—or with City Planning’s preferred word, “attainability.”

If you want to call Missing Middle an affordability or “attainability” strategy, show us the finished home. Show us the square footage. Show us the sales price. Show us the household income required to purchase it. Then run every damn carrying cost required to keep it.

Because facts are stubborn things, folks.

And the numbers don’t care what adjective City Planning puts on the brochure.

City Planning calls it Missing Middle. Perhaps they got the name right for the wrong reason.

Somewhere between Sacramento’s mandates, City Hall’s streamlining and the development industry’s enthusiasm for greater certainty, somebody really has gone missing: the taxpayers, property owners and voters who already live here.

They aren’t obstacles to housing. They are stakeholders. They are the people picking up the check while government considers removing their chair from the table.

So before Sacramento or Los Angeles streamlines another hearing, increases density on another neighborhood street or tells another homeowner this is the price of “attainability,” run the damn numbers.

If the numbers prove Missing Middle will produce homes ordinary Angelenos can afford to purchase and keep, show us.

If they don’t, stop calling it an affordability solution.

And if you cannot tell us what the house will cost, who can afford it or how they will afford to keep it, then perhaps the best thing that could happen to Missing Middle is exactly what its name suggests:

It should go missing.

Because City Hall may call the policy Missing Middle, but the taxpayers and homeowners picking up the check are the ones you’ve managed to leave out of it.

WANT MISSING MIDDLE TO GO MISSING?

If you believe Los Angeles should prove that Missing Middle will create housing Angelenos can actually attain → sustain → retain before permanently changing neighborhoods and removing traditional discretionary hearings for qualifying projects, tell City Hall before the ordinances move forward—not after.

Contact Mayor Karen Bass — Share Your Opinion

Find Your Los Angeles City Councilmember

Ask them one simple question: What will a Missing Middle home cost, and what household income will actually be able to afford—and keep—it?

(Eva Amar is a West San Fernando Valley community organizer. She is also a National Sexual Assault Victim Advocate.)