NICK’S VIEW - Europe this past week offers Los Angeles a stark warning: across several countries, unaffordable housing has pushed frustrated residents from peaceful marches to street clashes, arson, and looting.
A major factor behind the protests is the collapse of attainable housing which forms part of a broader cost‑of‑living revolt that differs by country. The protests have made it truly clear that when housing is treated first as a speculative asset and second as a basic need, public anger can spill into the streets.
"A house cannot be a privilege": Thousands rally in Lisbon over housing crisis.
For me, what we are now experiencing is more of a governance crisis than a housing crisis. It is all because the rules, the regulations, and the institutions that were supposed to keep life manageable and healthy, have not kept pace with reality.
In my book, "The Making of Modern Los Angeles", I wrote the biggest problem we face in dealing with homelessness and housing affordability today is that no one is managing the bureaucracy. In fact, the bureaucracy is crawling at a snail’s pace, if it moves at all. It has no direction, no leadership, and nothing gets done.
People are reacting to a system that no longer makes sense, one that drives up costs and has left housing broken for years. Los Angeles must rebuild its planning and building codes from the ground up. Until then, prices will keep rising and residents will remain under pressure.
We must start fresh by streamlining development approvals and making the process ministerial rather than discretionary. In a ministerial act, the law specifies exactly what officials must do, when they must do it, and under what conditions. Once the criteria are met, approval follows automatically. By contrast, a discretionary act inserts judgment, interpretation, or policy choices, allowing officials to interpret standards, thus slowing the process, pay-to-play practice, and festers rampant corruption, as City Hall has experienced lately.
Discretionary review is a cost multiplier with environmental evaluations, conditional use approvals, and neighborhood appeals injecting uncertainty that leads into higher costs. Then there are layers of fire, seismic, energy, parking, and accessibility requirements added over decades without ever being reconciled or updated.
Put simply, ministerial actions are duties city officials must perform, while discretionary actions are choices City Hall may make. That discretion can trigger public hearings and community-driven redesigns, delay housing development and increasing carrying costs.
European housing policy is often set by central governments able to impose nationwide building programs or mandates. In the U.S., local city councils, and county boards control land-use regulation. That is why we must focus on the state, county, and city to modernize the system.
Based on my experience as an electrical engineer dealing with the department of Building & Safety and working with architects, contractors, and developers of affordable housing over decades, I have developed a list of suggestions on how to reduce the cost of housing, which are included in my book.
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, “Housing crisis is key in mayoral contest,” Karen Bass and Nithya Raman pledged to address affordability but offered few specifics for reducing costs.
Bass touts Executive Directive 1, which she signed her first week in office but later rolled back in some areas. The Directive requires to fast-track approval of 100% affordable housing projects. Raman supports YIMBYism "yes in my backyard" movement. The concept allows higher density along transit corridors and around transit stations. Neither, however, has addressed construction costs.
Today we are faced with developers who are not building new apartments, and many tenants who still cannot afford rent despite largely flat prices over the past four years, as well as falling home values.
To meaningfully lower construction costs, we must stop making marginal fixes and reform the system itself.
There has been a dearth of new ideas and lack of leadership to lowering construction costs from the Planning, Building &Safety and Public Works departments.
I urgently suggest that the elected mayor immediately form a task force of builders, planners, architects, engineers, contractors, developers, and homeowner advocates, and involve Planning, Building and Safety, and Public Works, to consider the list I have suggested below and propose additional recommendations. If we are going to bring construction costs down, we need radical changes in the planning and building codes.
Proposals to reduce the cost of affordable housing.
Affordability housing costs must be reduced beginning today by the state, county, and the city, as follows:
- Coordinate all plan checks, permits, and other approvals needed from the Department of Building and Safety and City Planning, and also from the Bureau of Engineering, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the Fire Department.
- Appoint a person or small team of people with authority to move all city approvals and decisions on a guaranteed, preset timeline.
- Reduce or eliminate multiple approvals by the City Council and mayor. The Housing Department should not be required to secure City Council/mayoral reapproval of a loan unless the project or loan terms have substantially changed since the initial approval.
- Implement the planned universal application process as soon as possible, before the next funding rounds at the city, county, or Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles.
- When approvals cannot be provided across all local funding sources at the initial application, ensure that applications meet a certain threshold and can be funded in the next round(s) solely via updates to pro formas, not requiring a full re-application.
- Clarify the Housing Authority rental subsidy timeline and availability, and coordinate decisions.
- Make accessibility/certified access specialist review and approvals to the Department of Building and Safety and reduce subjectivity in approvals.
- Shorten the Housing Department’s process for approving draws and releasing funds, including commitment to funding draws within three days of approval and the ability to wire funds instead of cutting and mailing checks.
- Reduce and better define the timeline for city attorney review and approval. Assign a dedicated city attorney to each project, and ensure the developer is notified of the assigned attorney, so that other funders can be informed.
- Streamline the funding applications and approvals for all local sources of funds, with a universal application for capital funds and rental subsidies.
- Identify less traditionally desirable sites to drive down acquisitions’ costs. Design creativity can make sites work advantageously.
- Add density to existing structures, such as Star Apartments.
- •Use of modular/container at significant scale, more than 500 units. Cost efficiencies should allow for custom design of common/community spaces and intimate scale in a large building.
- Pre-permit standard design components for partial or complete housing products, such as bathroom and kitchen units, to control risk costs related to entitlement process.
- Modify regulations to allow building on sites adjacent to freeways. Eliminate the 500-foot exclusion rule from infrastructure for nonprofit developers.
- Examine alternative living arrangement unit types, such as co-living, which potentially reduces the number of expensive bathrooms and kitchens per resident.
Further, there should be no parking minimums, no apartment size minimums, no private space requirements such as balconies, and unit calculations should be stricken down. Value engineer ADA and Energy standards.
Building department must be limited to inspection role with Architect and Engineer of Record to release projects for construction on peer review only. It is done in most other states.
In Los Angeles, a typical apartment project can spend years navigating hearings, lawsuits, revisions, and agency bottlenecks before construction begins. That is not a process; it is a cost‑production machine feeding lobbyists. Each delay, rule, and appeal raises the price—and renters and families already stretched thin bear the burden.
While we differ with Europe in many ways, there are key similarities and shared pressure points. We both have a severe supply deficit, as well as a historic drop in home ownership with younger generations, especially Millennials. Added to this is the severe rent burden of people who must spend over thirty to fifty percent of their gross income on housing costs.
The time to ponder this issue is long over. When the price of keeping a roof overhead becomes untethered from what people earn, the public stops seeing housing as an economic problem and starts seeing it as a breach of the social contract.
Europe’s unrest is not a distant spectacle. It is a warning of what can happen when leaders delay action for too long.
(Nick Patsaouras is an electrical engineer, civic leader, and a longtime public advocate. He ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He has served on major public boards, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "The Making of Modern Los Angeles.")
