Home builders across Los Angeles are falling far short of a housing goal set by the state.
A City Council committee is poised to consider a plan to rezone the city for 255,000 more homes by 2029, while developers aren’t able to keep pace, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing a UCLA analysis.
A plan to be considered by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee on Tuesday, Nov. 19, is likely to satisfy the state housing element requirement.
But when looking at the likelihood of what developers would build, researchers found the number of new homes would be far lower, according to Shane Phillips, Housing Initiative Project Manager at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
Housing production is now a third of what’s needed to meet the state-mandated goal.
Taking into account costs of development and other factors, the rezoning only increases the realistic capacity for new construction by about 30 percent, the study determined.
That would put the city on track to build 161,000 homes by 2029, 37 percent short of the required 255,000.
“The kinds of changes that would be necessary would need to be transformative rather than incremental,” Phillips, a co-author of the study, told the Times.
The Citywide Housing Incentive Program ordinance, to be reviewed Tuesday, would supercharge building incentives for developers while displacing tenants in older units.
The proposed legislation would give builders a break on height and parking if they include a certain percentage of affordable units and the property is near transit, a major street and jobs and schools.
Projects that are 100 percent affordable would be eligible for incentives across a wider part of the city.
The full City Council and state housing regulators also must sign off on the plans prior to a February deadline.
The UCLA analysis found that some of the most likely land to see new construction are parking lots and parcels in existing low-density, multifamily zones.
“Nearly 60 percent of new capacity —roughly 225,000 units — is in lower-tier markets where development is generally infeasible according to a city-commissioned feasibility analysis,” the report stated. “In higher-market communities, the proposed ordinance undermines development feasibility by increasing the share of units that must be rented at below-market prices.”
The city could supercharge growth by expanding the development incentives to cover some single-family-home neighborhoods, which make up 72 percent of the city’s residentially zoned land, the study found. Doing so could as much as triple the realistic capacity for building compared to current rules, Phillips said.
City officials had considered allowing changes in these neighborhoods, which are the city’s wealthiest and least integrated, but reversed course after pushback from homeowner groups who protested the potential for traffic and parking problems.
Phillips said the city should reconsider the exclusion of single-family neighborhoods if it wants to lower rents and relieve displacement pressures on lower-income neighborhoods where redevelopment now is concentrated.
“We know that housing scarcity is at the root of the affordability crisis,” Phillips told the Times. “To the extent that we are sustaining housing scarcity, we are sustaining rising rents and home prices and unaffordability.”
Los Angeles has a housing production target of 457,000 units for 2021-2029, increased from just 82,002 units for 2013-2021. Of that, 255,000 homes would be created via land rezoning.
— Dana Bartholomew