City Hall to Blame for Letting Luxury Housing Developers Kick Tenants to the Curb

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ATTACK ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING-An irresponsible and complicit City Hall has sat idle in recent years as 20,000 rent-controlled apartment units in Los Angeles have been destroyed or converted, forcing working class tenants into the streets, scrambling to find replacement housing while luxury units were built to replace the affordable apartments that have been lost. 

That was the story told in part by Los AngelesTimes in a page-one investigative report. “The paper did a good job of documenting the destruction and pain caused by this housing trend,” said Jill Stewart, campaign director of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. 

“Unfortunately the Times did not go the extra mile and properly lay the blame for this tragedy at City Hall’s doorstep – as it should have,” said Stewart. “This is a crisis that City Hall has helped create because of its cozy relationship with the real estate industry, and it is a crisis that City Hall has certainly failed to correct.” 

Stewart called on Mayor Garcetti and the City Council to immediately place a moratorium on projects that will destroy affordable housing unless the new project will provide significant numbers of affordable units – at the very least replace the lost affordable units with an equal number of new affordable units. 

“Homelessness is spiking in Los Angeles as a direct result of City Hall's thoughtless behavior,” said Stewart. “Yet our elected officials have looked the other way for years as landlords and developers razed or converted building after building and wiped out our inexpensive rent-controlled apartments.” 

Since January, the Coalition to Preserve LA, sponsor of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative aiming for the March 2017 ballot, has challenged the frequent back room deals and votes by the Los Angeles City Council to place outsized luxury buildings in neighborhoods that were once affordable. 

The City Council has openly ignored critics who say the preservation of existing affordable housing is the only way to prevent a housing disaster and the spiking homelessness in LA. 

The actions and inactions of the City Council have set off a dramatic domino effect on block after block of Los Angeles: landlords jack up their rents and evict existing tenants — so they, too, can join the “luxury” density movement promoted and approved by City Hall. 

As the Coalition to Preserve LA has reported, all but one of 17 elected officials at City Hall are accepting campaign cash, gifts and/or money for their pet projects, from developers and the real estate industry. Since 2000, the City Council and mayor have accepted $6 million from real estate industry sources alone. This amount does not include contributions from an army of land-use attorneys and lobbyists who facilitate the real estate industry’s big-growth agenda at City Hall. 

In the face of this conflict of interest, Los Angeles city leaders have touted the wrong-headed idea that constructing luxury housing for the rich will help poor and low-income families. “There is no evidence to support this conclusion,” said Stewart. “Their argument is essentially that luxury housing will become over 25 or so years affordable. That’s no solace to families now who are being evicted. They need affordable housing now – not 25 years from now.”

The Los Angeles Times investigation by Ben Poston and Andrew Khouri notes: “The number of lost units is a fraction of the roughly 641,000 rent-controlled apartments in the city, but in a tight market the removals have had an outsized effect, tenant advocates say.” Most of the units were lost to demolition but some were converted into condos. 

Approval by voters of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative next March will end the most egregious actions by the City Council to uproot communities in favor of luxury housing built by their developer friends. But until voters put a halt to this, and require non-corrupt planning by City Hall — a core aspect of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative — the City Council should enact a moratorium to bar further destruction and conversion of LA's desperately needed rent-controlled units, according to Stewart. 

The initiative will impose a two-year moratorium on the biggest and worst projects that can be built only if City Hall provides developers with building exemptions and special favors. This time-out will give Los Angeles a breather from the current development frenzy now swamping LA’s streets with traffic, ruining neighborhoods, creating an environment of concrete and pollution, displacing working class families and overwhelming the city’s infrastructure. 

In addition, the initiative will empower neighbors to have a bigger say in shaping the community plans that govern growth in their neighborhoods. “Our initiative will help level the playing field so residents can have as much say or more say in how their communities are developed than the developers – who are now almost exclusively in control of the city’s growth machine,” said Stewart.

(John Schwada is a former investigative reporter for Fox 11 in Los Angeles, the LA Times and the late Herald Examiner. He is a contributor to CityWatch. His consulting firm is MediaFix Associates.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.