Don’t Hold Your Breath for an Urban New Deal from a Clinton (or Trump) Administration

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PLATKIN ON PLANNING-If you think a Hillary Clinton administration, even with another Great Recession and the Democrats in control of Congress, will result in an Urban New Deal, don’t hold your breath. It is not going to happen. This is why. 

Part of the story is the steady decline of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years. It does not just consist of negative campaigning and shallow debates, rigging the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders, smearing Dr. Jill Stein; endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya; flooding the Middle East with US weaponry; and unleashing aerial death squads called drone missiles. Nor is it just mass incarceration of US citizens and refugees, wholehearted support of fracking, and record levels of deportations. 

Less obviously, the Democratic Party’s downward trajectory also includes the total abandonment of the urban programs it once championed, such as public housing. As evidenced by the White House’s recent position paper on affordable housing, as well as a succession of ineffective affordable housing programs in Los Angeles from the 1980s to date, the party’s urban policy has imploded into unrestrained capitalism, also called urban neo-liberalism.  

Long gone are urban programs that included public investment in infrastructure and services, as well as careful regulation of private investment. Since the days of LA Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1980s to date, from Washington, DC, to LA’s City Hall, the Democratic Party’s approach has been a three-legged stool: jettison zoning and environmental laws, abolish government housing programs, and bend over backwards for glad-handing real estate speculators. When challenged, they invariably resort to name-calling. Their critics are always NIMBYs, not supporters of strong planning and environmental regulation. 

So, let’s get into the specifics, including the House LA approach now underway at LA’s City Hall. 

More Revelations from the Mountain Top: Straight from Washington, DC, the Obama Administration has issued a White House Housing Development Toolkit. It identifies two barriers to affordable housing production: local zoning and environmental laws. It never mentions that the U.S. has been in a perpetual housing crisis for the past 40 years and that this crisis coincides with the wholesale elimination of Federal housing programs in the 1970s and 1980s. 

As for the White House’s solutions, they are the same market-based mantras that have been recited by real estate speculators since today’s boomer retirees started paying off their student loans. I have listed them below, with my plain English translation written in italics. 

• Establishing by-right development. (Up-zone commercial properties to avoid discretionary zoning applications, environmental reviews, public notices, public hearings, and appeals.) 

• Taxing vacant land or donate it to non-profit developers. (Thirty years ago Mayor Tom Bradley called for using the air rights above City parking lots for affordable housing.) 

• Streamlining or shortening permitting processes and timelines. (Cutting corners for well-connected real estate investors.) 

• Eliminate off-street parking requirements. (Under-park apartments before a mass transit system is in place.)

• Allowing accessory dwelling units. (Turn single-family homes into duplexes without upgrading public facilities and infrastructure to accommodate a population increase.) 

• Establishing density bonuses. (Allow developers to get free variances in exchange for a handful of unverified affordable units.) 

• Enacting high-density and multifamily zoning. (Permit apartment houses in single-family neighborhoods without upgrading infrastructure and services.) 

• Employing inclusionary zoning. (Require new market-rate apartment buildings to include a small percentage of uninspected affordable units.) 

• Establishing development tax or value capture incentives. (Allow developers of market housing to pay an in lieu fee for off-site affordable units.) 

• Using property tax abatements. (In addition to Prop. 13 provisions that freeze most commercial property taxes to late 1970 rates, any increase in assessed valuations would also be exempt from property taxes.) 

It is my contention, especially for Los Angeles, these programs did not work several decades ago, and they will not work now. The simple reason is that the private sector has never been able to meet the housing needs of lower-income Americans. You can easily enrich the crony capitalists buzzing around elected officials intoxicated by the sweet nectar of laissez faire capitalism, but the cumulative, long-term result is dismal. After several decades, these market schemes have only managed to build a tiny fraction of the affordable housing needed in the United States. In fact, the situation is now so bad that every county in the entire county has an affordable housing shortage.  

Bradley Administration: To understand House LA, we need to step back in time to the Tom Bradley administration, when LA first acknowledged that it had an affordable housing crisis. Like the Depression, in the 1980s, only one family in five could afford to buy a home, 200,000 families were doubled or tripled up, 40,000 families lived in garages, and 150,000 families were homeless at some point in a year. 

Initially slow to respond, Mayor Bradley eventually made it clear that the crisis resulted from the extensive cutbacks in urban programs that began during the Nixon-Ford years (1968-1976), and only got worse under Carter (1976-1980), Bush 1 (1980-84), and Clinton (1984-1992). By the late 1980s, nearly all Federal urban programs, especially housing, had been eliminated. This era marked the end of New Deal liberalism and the beginning or urban neo-liberalism: the myth that the private market could solve persistent urban problem if showered with enough deregulation and financial incentives. 

Beginning in 1988, that is exactly what Mayor Bradley undertook through a detailed proposal whose premise was a quickly discredited low-ball calculation of LA’s residential zoning potential. The Bradley program intended to eliminate environmental reviews of small and medium sized apartment houses, permit apartment houses and second units in single-family neighborhoods, demolish houses with code violations to furnish free building sites to non-profit housing corporations, impose linkage fees on new residential projects to fund affordable housing projects, and build affordable housing in the airspace above 105 city-owned parking lots, beginning with 10 prototypes. 

In response to widespread community opposition, however, the initial Bradley program was modified to include the rehabilitation homes and apartments in low-income neighborhoods and a slumlord task force to target slum properties for criminal prosecution. It also shifted the construction of affordable apartments from single-family neighborhoods to transit corridors and stations. 

The Planning Department’s updated housing calculations also revealed that Los Angeles had sufficient zoning for one million additional housing units, or 25,000 new units per year for the next 40 years. Other Planning Department estimates from the early 1990s indicated an even larger buildout potential. Based on existing zoning, Los Angeles could add nearly 5,000,000 more people, reaching a total population of 8,000,000. In the intervening 26 years, however, the City has never updated any of its zoning build out calculations. Despite claims and counter-claims, the actual changes between 1990 and 2016 are not known. 

House LA - Old Wine in New Bottles: Based on information from the Los Angeles Business Council, House LA appears to be the Los Angeles version of the White House Housing Tool Kit. It mostly repackages old, off-the-shelf market programs. Unfortunately, most of them go back nearly three decades, with little to show for themselves. As before, my translation is in italics. 

• Expansion of Expedited Processing Section in Planning. (Pay to Play: Quick zoning approvals for well-off real estate speculators.) 

• Site Plan Review Modifications. (Zoning deregulation.) 

• Permitting Micro Unit Housing (Increasing density without upgrading public services and infrastructure.) 

• Deferring Fees. (Municipal subsidies for well-connected real estate speculators, like AEG.) 

• Expanding the Use of Shared Vehicles. (Under-parking new buildings prior to the build-out of the mass transit system.) 

• Facilitating Accessory Dwelling Units for Affordable Housing. (Turning single family’s homes into duplexes without upgrading public services and infrastructure and without collecting additional property taxes.) 

• Using City-owned parking lots for affordable housing. (House LA recently added Tom Bradley’s long-neglected program to use City-owned properties, mostly parking lots, as affordable housing sites. Other than a 30 year hiatus, the only other differences is that House LA identifies 100 not parking lots and proposes 11 not 10 affordable housing sites.) 

Why so much hostility from House LA to the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative? Gil Cedillo, the City Councilmember who has campaigned for the House LA market-incentive proposals, has sharply criticized the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. But, his talking points come straight from the Astroturf funders: CH Palladium, LLC and Westfield DD&C, LLC. These Big Real Estate players have every reason to oppose an Initiative that will force the City of Los Angeles to systematically and quickly update its General Plan, including permanent bans on parcel level spot-zoning and spot-General Plan amendments. 

This is because the Palladium and Westfield business models rely on spot-zoning and spot-planning. As they scour Los Angeles for shopping center and high-rise building sites, they inevitably run into conflicts with zoning and planning ordinances. But, they could care less if their projects conflict with the character and scale of existing neighborhoods or exceed the capacity of existing infrastructure.

For them, their criterion is profitability. But, they can hardly go to the city’s voters and fess up that they oppose the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative because it impinges on their bottom line. So instead, they have created an Astroturf organization, the Coalition to Save Los Angeles Neighborhoods and Jobs, that claims spot-zoning and spot-planning is essential to the production of affordable housing. 

It doesn’t matter that they cannot identify projects from the Bradley to the Garcetti eras where affordable housing projects required zone changes and General Plan Amendments. Even their latest gambit, grabbing a hold of the Tom Bradley program of using city parking lots for affordable housing sites, is a desperate act. This is because this option has been around for nearly 30 years, has hardly ever worked, and could be easily pursued on city-owned parcels that did not require the City Council to adopt spot-zones and spot-plans. 

So, with deception in one hand, and a check in the other, they march on to block a voter initiative that would force the City of LA to properly plan, including rigorous criteria for the approval of any deviations from legally adopted plans and zones.

 

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He also serves on the boards of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Planning Committee. Please send comments and corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.