The Mayor’s Affordable Housing Plan: Short on Production, Long on Implementation

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Hizzoner, Eric Garcetti, made minor headlines several days ago when he proposed new linkage fees on real estate projects in order to fund affordable housing. When the details are eventually fleshed out, and if the program is actually implemented, the Mayor predicts these new fees could generate $100 million per year -- all dedicated to affordable housing construction in Los Angeles. 

The next step is a City Planning Department study of the Mayor’s proposal, after which the City Council would adopt an ordinance establishing the linkage fees. To date, however, there is no mention of this study on the City Planning web page. This means that we do not yet know when the study will begin or when it will be completed. 

Once completed, however, City Planning can then prepare and guide the adoption of the new Linkage Fee ordinance, after which Building and Safety will collect the linkage fees. At that point the City’s Housing and Community Investment Department can deposit the fees into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Fund in order to award grants to housing corporations so they can acquire land, draft architectural plans, secure building permits, undertake construction, and then finally operate the affordable housing units.  

Despite these caveats, as I have previously written for CityWatch, considering the elimination of nearly all Federal, State, and local programs to build or subsidize lower priced housing, any allocation of municipal funds to this end is commendable. 

But, is this where the story should end? Are we talking about real gold or just fool’s gold (pyrite)?  Unfortunately, it is probably fools gold because the real story is what Mayor Garcetti either said elsewhere or what he did not say at all.   

In a separate story, the Mayor boasted about the construction of nearly 30,000 new housing units over the past several years. This means that in Los Angeles the Department of Building and Safety is now issuing building permits for between 10,000 to 15,000 housing units per year. Considering the extraordinary need for housing here, this is nothing to crow about because nearly all of this housing is either luxury or market rate housing. It is not affordable housing -- where the real need is. 

Furthermore, it is difficult to know which of the new housing units will eventually become available to the public to rent or buy, and which new units will be diverted to far more lucrative short-term rentals through such companies as Airbnb. 

There are actual real steps, however, that the Mayor could initiate now to preserve what little affordable housing remains in Los Angeles, while the linkage fee program slowly worms its way through the City’s complex ordinance preparation and adoption process. 

What they Mayor should have mentioned, and then acted on, are proposals to stem the continued loss of LA’s existing affordable housing. While the exact numbers are hard to quantify, housing planner Joan Ling estimates that Los Angeles is losing 3000 official affordable units per year, yet only building one thousand new units. If other housing units are folded in, such as those lost through mansionization, informal evictions (when landlords deliberately allow apartment buildings to deteriorate to the point that tenants voluntarily leave,) and gentrification, the overall total loss is easily 5000 units per year. 

One of the most obvious solutions to stem these losses is either the elimination of or major changes to the Ellis Act, the State of California legislation that allows landlords to evict tenants based on claims of future apartment construction. In fact, Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival reports that there have been 20,000 such evictions in LA since 2001. A back of the envelope calculation indicates that this averages out to 1400 preventable evictions per year. Until the Ellis Act is fundamentally changed in Los Angeles, we can safely assume that these evictions will not only continue, but will also probably increase, propelled by the current real estate bubble. 

According to the Department of Building and Safety, mansionization results in the demolition of approximately 2,000 homes per year in Los Angeles. These are older, smaller, affordable homes, usually in centrally located neighborhoods.  

The problems with the McMansions that replace these lower-priced homes in not just their awful architecture, invasion on privacy, shoddy construction, and enormous use of materials and energy, but their impact on affordable housing.  

The McMansions generally sell for three times the price of the affordable homes they supplant. Since it will optimistically take at least three years before the linkage fee produces any new, affordable housing in Los Angeles, this means that an estimated 6,000 more affordable homes will bite the dust under Mayor Garcetti’s haphazard watch.  

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The mansionization fix, however, is easy. It was clearly spelled out in a City Council resolution adopted in May 2014 to remove the mansionization loopholes from the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance. Since City Planning will only release its first draft of these amendments to the Baseline Mansionization on Friday, October 30, approximately 3,000 additional affordable homes have been leveled while they dawdled over the past one and a half years. 

If or when the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance is finally and effectively fixed, probably in early 2017, several thousand more affordable homes will have met their maker, quickly and often illegally bulldozed in less than a day.  

The Mayor could have used his bully pulpit in the past several years to prevent this dilly-dallying. He could have already preserved 5,000 affordable homes. But, since his focus is the construction of new housing, not the preservation of existing housing, the hemorrhaging of affordable apartments and homes will continue unabated under his watch. 

What Los Angeles truly needs is comprehensive leadership from Mayor Garcetti to both preserve existing affordable housing and to then build new affordable housing along side it. Without both sides of the equation, we are looking at fool’s gold, not the real thing. 

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who writes on planning issues for CityWatch. He serves on the Board of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and welcomes questions and comments at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams. 

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 88

Pub: Oct 30, 2015