UCLA Study Points to One Solution To End Our Housing Crisis—Upzone ALL of Los Angeles
CHIP Ordinance Draft #3 is a technically correct document to satisfy the letter of state law, but the draft is not feasible at all to solve our housing crisis. Upzone LA now!
On Tuesday, November 19, 2024, the Los Angeles City Council Planning and Land Use Management Committee will take up Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) Ordinance Draft #3. Instead of using this state-mandated opportunity to solve our housing shortage crisis, the Committee is set to send the full Council an ordinance that will keep us trapped in a vicious disaster of our own making.
The lack of seriousness of CHIP Ordinance Draft #3 in tackling our housing crisis, and the knock-on homelessness crisis, is clearly spelled out in CHIPing In: Evaluating the effect's of LA's Citywide Housing Incentive Program on neighborhood development potential, authored by Aaron Barrall and Shane Phillips from the The UCLA Lewis Center For Regional Policy Studies.
Here is the gist: without upzoning the 74% of the city’s residential areas from single-family zones to multi-family zones, LA will never solve our housing crisis, and almost all negative aspects caused by the housing shortage will continue to be felt by our poorest residents in the least resourced areas.
Before diving into the paper’s findings, let us remind ourself about the City’s own objectives under state law to address Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) from the Los Angeles Department of City Planning CHIP Ordinance report to the Los Angeles City Planning Commission.
Inclusion of any of the (Single Family Consideration) options…would further support equity goals that the City outlined in the 2021-2029 Housing Element. One of the main Housing Element goals was to preserve and enhance the quality of housing and provide greater housing stability for households of all income levels. Objective 4.3 specifically addresses Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) in all housing and land use programs by taking proactive measures to promote diverse, inclusive communities that grant all Angelenos access to housing, particularly in Higher Opportunity Areas, increase place-based strategies to encourage community revitalization, and protect existing residents from displacement.
The UCLA report could not be more clear how CHIP Ordinance Draft #3 will fail to deliver the necessary housing units and will continue to burden the people in low resource areas!
Relative to existing policy, (Mixed Income Incentive Program) MIIP also increases capacity most in “high resource” and “highest resource” census tracts, as defined by the state. Net realistic capacity rises by 67-84% in higher resource neighborhoods and by less than 10% in low and moderate resource neighborhoods.
However, total realistic housing capacity remains concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods. Nearly 60% of the total net realistic housing capacity is in lower-tier housing markets, where a city consultant determined that mixed-income development is generally infeasible.
MIIP represents a positive step forward, but Los Angeles will fall far short of its housing production goal unless SF Option 1 — or a similarly ambitious single-family upzoning policy — is also adopted. Failing to incorporate single-family parcels into its reforms will also delay progress on neighborhood desegregation and sustain rising rents and displacement of vulnerable households.
In other words, CHIP Ordinance Draft #3 is a technically correct document to satisfy the letter of state law, but it is not feasible at all to solve our housing crisis.
Also consider that the report finds that Affordable Housing Incentive Programs (AHIP) will never achieve their goals of building approximately 150,000 of the necessary 450,000 housing units.
AHIP would substantially increase housing capacity on many parcels throughout the city, but we do not expect it to increase housing production very significantly, and therefore we do not explore AHIP in the same depth as the Mixed Income Incentive Program in this report. We discuss our reasons for this decision in the Methods section.
There will never be enough money to build housing that does not offer a return to the investor. I know the DSAers and Public Housing advocates will be saddened to hear this. We will save for another time that AHIP should end and all density bonuses should simply be by-right. The bottom line, though, is the housing deficit will only grow with any reliance on AHIP.
Which brings us back to the first and most important solution to solve the housing crisis in LA: upzone all 74% of the single family zone residential areas to multi-family zones, including the coastal zone and repealing Historic Preservation Overlay Zones (HPOZ). Then Build! Build! Build!
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