PRESS

WHAT DOES THE PRESS SAY?

Affordable Housing? I Would Not Be Able to Live There
by Aaron Shrank, July 11, 2024
Full article

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...The policy has also drawn backlash from LA homeowner and tenant groups who say some of the proposed affordable housing projects are bad for their neighborhoods.
Many developments have been deemed “out of scale” by neighborhood groups and LA City planners. Projects currently in the ED1 pipeline would demolish at least several hundred rent-stabilized units, displacing low-income renters like Juarez.
Last week, with concerns mounting, Mayor Bass rolled out new, stricter limits on how and where developers can build using ED1. Those changes include new design requirements, and exemptions from fast-tracking in LA’s local historic districts, as well as on properties with 12 or more rent-stabilized units.
Still, the controversy continues.
“Not everybody's aware of what ED1 is,” says Juarez. “When they walk by, they'll ask. ‘Affordable housing’ sounds good, but when you investigate what affordable housing is, then you learn, ‘oh, that's not so good. I would not be able to live there.’”
The vast majority of the 240 projects in the ED1 pipeline must be “affordable” to someone earning just over $70,000 a year –– or 80% of the Los Angeles Area Median Income.
That means tenants in the new building in Eagle Rock could be charged nearly $1,800 for a studio apartment.
Displaced renters like Juarez are supposed to be offered spots in the new development once it’s built.
“We're not going to be waiting around in an area that's overpriced already,” says Juarez. “I would not be able to afford to live here.”
The home Juarez rents is one of 17 rent-stabilized units on the property, so you might expect Bass’ new rules exempting properties with that many homes from development would spare her bungalow.
That’s not the case. The new rules only apply to new applications, according to the Los Angeles Planning Department. The eight-story tower is moving ahead.
City officials could not confirm the exact number of rent-stabilized units targeted for demolition under ED1 building plans.
“The vast majority of [rent-controlled] homes in LA are in buildings with 11 or fewer units, and they are just as valuable as those with more units,” says SAJE policy director Maria Patiño Gutierrez. “Redevelopment of those sites should not be expedited. A review process is necessary to ensure that the benefits … outweigh the trauma of relocating existing families.”
The new exclusions for properties with 12 or more rent-stabilized units still leave more than half the city’s rent-stabilized units vulnerable to future ED1 development, according to data provided by the Los Angeles Housing Department.
“ED1 is the newest way for real estate investors to profit off the eviction of long-time residents and bypass environmental protections,” organizers with the LA Tenants Union wrote in a statement provided to KCRW. “Even with the new amendments, more than 300,000 [rent-controlled] units are at risk of demolition, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of naturally affordable units in the city with California state tenant protections.”
Renters facing displacement development in LA Council District 13 are circulating an informal petition calling on Mayor Bass to protect buildings with two or more rent-stabilized units.

Los Angeles' One Weird Trick to Build Affordable Housing at No Public Cost
by Ben Christopher, Feb 7, 2024
Full article

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"In the year and change since, the city’s planning department has received plans for more than 13,770 affordable units, according to data provided by the city’s planning department. That’s just shy of the total number of approved affordable units in Los Angeles in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined."
"The city has also been the subject of at least two lawsuits and a multi-front political battle over whether and how to turn the mayoral decree — which is only in effect as long as Bass wants it to be and barring a court’s decision to end it — into a permanent fixture of Los Angeles housing policy."
"And while Bass’ order and the state’s density bonus laws are pulling privately funded developers into the suddenly profitable world of affordable housing development, other economic forces are pushing them out of the high-end luxury market: High interest rates have made waiting around on municipal approvals that may never come an especially costly proposition. Los Angeles’ recently enacted tax on multimillion-dollar real estate transactions, the so-called mansion tax, has also slowed the fancy apartment building business, said Ligety. As a result, he said, 'market rate developers are discovering affordable housing for the first time.'”
"Developers flocking to the city’s new program are essentially 'making a bet,' said Gary Benjamin, a land-use consultant who advises developers on how to navigate the city’s planning and permitting bureaucracies. The bet is that housing costs are so astronomically out of reach in Los Angeles that even someone making north of $70,000 per year would jump at the chance to rent 'a more bare bones product without all the bells and whistles' for what could amount to a modest rent reduction."
"Still up for debate: Just how many incentives and waivers the city is willing to grant 100% affordable developers as they make use of the state’s density bonus program. So far that decision has been left to the planning department’s discretion. That unlimited economizing and supersizing has resulted in projects that are 'substantially out of scale' with their surrounding neighborhoods, according to a planning department assessment. The most recent version of the ordinance caps the number of developer freebies at five. Slocum, the developer of the proposed Echo Park apartment building, said most of his projects would 'no longer work' if subject to such a cap. He said he needs eleven or twelve."

Affordable housing at the expense of existing tenants? L.A. council seeks new protections
by David Zahniser, May 2, 2024
Highlights / Full article

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Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez has begun pushing for new safeguards to ensure that projects submitted under the ED1 program do not result in the rapid demolition of rent-stabilized apartments in her Eastside district.
On Tuesday, the City Council — at Hernandez’s urging — voted 13-0 to instruct the Department of City Planning to draft [emphasis added] a temporary ban on the approval of affordable housing projects that result in the demolition of five or more occupied rent-stabilized units in parts of her district.
The new regulations... must be drafted and come back for another council vote... [As of June 25, 2024, the ban has not been drafted or voted on.] Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, did not provide the mayor’s position on Hernandez’s proposal when contacted by The Times.
In December, the City Council passed a motion from Councilmember Kevin de León seeking a temporary ban on the demolition of rent-controlled apartments in Boyle Heights. That ordinance has been drafted but not yet approved by the council [emphasis added], said Pete Brown, a spokesperson for De León. [As of June 25, 2024, the December draft has not been voted on.]
During her recent State of the City speech, [the mayor] announced that the city had cut the permitting process for 100% affordable housing projects from six months to 35 days.
Last year, [renters' rights activists] pointed out that dozens of tenants in South Los Angeles were being pushed out of apartments targeted for demolition by developers using ED1’s fast-track process.
Bass is looking to transform her executive order into a permanent ordinance. Although the proposal has been endorsed by the city’s planning commission, it has not yet come before the council.

Proposed ordinance could limit redevelopment of RSO units in Northeast L.A.
by Stephen Sharp, April 22, 2024
Full Article

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"'The possibility of eliminating RSO units due to permit and clearance streamlining efforts significantly impacts the housing stability of vulnerable communities,' reads the motion introduced by Hernandez. 'It exacerbates homelessness, especially as the relocation fees do not adequately cover skyrocketing market rate rent, nor do they equitably accommodate larger households.'"
"Hernandez sites Los Angeles Housing Department Data, which found that the 1st Council District has 51,631 rent stabilized units with a median rent ranging between $1,100 and $1,500 per month, versus average market rate rents of roughly $2,657 in Northeast Los Angeles."
"The motion was spurred in part by a proposed development on Toland Way in Eagle Rock, where an eight-story building with over 100 homes is planned for a site developed with 17 rent stabilized units. According to Hernandez's motion, as well as The Occidental, most of the existing tenants were unaware of plans until they were published by 'niche media outlets focused on development.'"

GWNC Land Use Committee Continues Opposition to ED1 Apartment Project Proposed for 507 N. Larchmont Blvd.
by Liz Fuller, April 24, 2024
Full article

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At its monthly meeting last night, the Land Use Committee of the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council took yet another look at – and voted once again to recommend continued opposition to – the 7-story, 52-unit, 100% affordable apartment project being proposed at 507 N. Larchmont Blvd. under the provisions of the Mayor’s Executive Directive 1.
...A standing-room-only crowd of area residents urged the group to oppose the project based on its height, potential to later turn 12 “recreation” areas into market-rate dwelling units, and its lack of parking based on what the neighbors contend is a flawed calculation of proximity to a major transit stop.
This month, property owner Sean Tabibian visited the Land Use Committee’s virtual meeting to give a brief overview of the project details and address questions from committee members and area residents, 87 of whom showed up to vehemently oppose the project. (Total attendance peaked at 97 during the session, including committee members, staff, and representatives of the local press.)
Tababian did, however, provide some new information about the size and pricing of the building’s units, which will be approximately 350 square feet (“micro units”), and rent for about $1,700/month... Finally, Tabibian also said that even if the recreation spaces were converted to market rate units, he couldn’t get much more than $1,700 for them on the open market because they’re so small.

Environmental Reviews Are Holding Up New Affordable Housing In LA, Despite Mayor's Promise
by David Wagner, Jan 22, 2024
Full article

HIGHLIGHTS

"During her first week on the job, Bass signed an executive order streamlining the approval of new affordable housing. Executive Directive One, or ED1, represents her biggest step toward making good on those promises. And exempting new affordable housing from lengthy environmental reviews has been a key pillar of ED1."
"Now, about a year after her swearing in, LAist has found that city officials have quietly started accepting environmental challenges from groups opposed to new apartments."
"One developer aiming to construct a four-story apartment building for low and moderate-income renters in the Westside neighborhood of Sawtelle was assured in writing by the L.A. Planning Department in mid-December that their project was exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Two weeks later, the same department accepted a CEQA appeal from opponents of the development."
"Standing in a dirt parcel where two single-family homes were recently torn down to make way for the 44-unit project, Scheibe said, 'We would not have acquired this lot if it wasn't for ED1.'”
"City planning officials also recently accepted a CEQA appeal for an ED1 project in the San Fernando Valley’s Sherman Oaks neighborhood."
"If the apartments were being rented today, most one-bedroom units in the building would rent for no more than $1,892 per month. 'If you go two blocks over, you're looking at $3,000 rents for a one-bedroom'..."
"The number of people experiencing homelessness in the city of L.A. increased 10% last year to 46,260 [2023]."
"Most L.A. County tenants pay more than 30% of their income on rent according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a level deemed unaffordable by federal government standards."

Opinion: How tenant unions are finding power in numbers to fight L.A.’s housing crisis
By Annie Powers and Leonardo Vilchis-Zarate, April 10, 2024
Full article

highlights

"Many Los Angeles residents struggle to stay in their homes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city instituted a moratorium on evictions. Since those restrictions ended in April 2023, evictions have skyrocketed well past pre-pandemic levels."
"The city’s answer is to send tenants to the courts and provide them with bare-bones legal representation. Yet few people have actually gotten access to an attorney to help them fight eviction, and even then, burdened with excessive caseloads, these lawyers negotiate measly sums in exchange for tenants’ relocation rather than fighting for them to stay in their homes."
"In a tenant union, residents of an apartment complex join forces to represent their interests as a collective. Unlike the city’s delayed response to housing problems — which occurs only once residents reach the eviction stage or arrive at the courts — tenant unions are proactive. They negotiate directly with landlords and carry out protests, rent strikes, community events and other strategies to help protect their homes. And tenants get to be part of the conversation in solving the city’s housing woes."

"The number of people experiencing homelessness in the city of L.A. increased 10% last year [2023] to 46,260."³

-LAist

Karen Bass introduces new system for homeless housing
By Anna Scott, Oct. 12, 2023
FULL ARTICLE

HIGHLIGHTS

The city has 46,260 unhoused individuals and only 16,521 shelter beds, by last count.

Anna Scott reflects on 8 years of covering LA homelessness
By Anna Scott, Jan. 11, 2024
FULL ARTICLE

HIGHLIGHTS

LA Mayor Karen Bass has been on the job for a little more than a year now. Has she approached homelessness differently compared to the previous mayor, Eric Garcetti? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Both of them have focused on expanding shelter beds, with Garcetti’s A Bridge Home program and Bass’ Inside Safe initiative, for example. Bass says she’s moved 14,000 people off the streets since taking office, and she’s one of several city and county officials who say a top priority right now is moving people indoors, even if it’s to temporary places.
Isn’t that a departure from the idea of “Housing First,” which says you find people permanent housing as the first goal? Sort of. The Housing First strategy is still considered best practice, and it’s still the guiding principle behind federal and local homelessness policy by and large. But now city and county officials say that we can’t have a binary approach to investing in shelter versus permanent housing; we need both, because as long as we’re short on affordable housing, we can’t have the streets be the waiting rooms. That said, resources are finite, and while for some people, if homelessness is out of sight, it’s also out of mind, but that’s not the case for the people experiencing it.

'Inside Safe' and Sweeps Didn't Help Unhoused Residents on Aetna Street
By Zoie Matthew Oct. 17, 2023
FULL ARTICLE

HIGHLIGHTS

"...But last month, the encampment became the target of Karen Bass’ “Inside Safe” program, which aims to rapidly move people living in encampments indoors. The Aetna Street encampment was cleared completely, and the area was fenced off for good.

Harrell refused housing from the program because she was skeptical that it would be permanent. Others accepted placements at hotels. But she says the sweep has been detrimental to community members’ ability to support each other.

“Our regular outreach people who come deliver food … to do volunteer work, to bring clothes and shoes [are asking], ‘Oh, we don't know where everybody's at. Where's everybody? Where did they put you guys?’” she says. “We're displaced. Everybody’s scattered around.”

Some Aetna residents who did accept hotel placements have also reported dealing with sub-par conditions and strict rules — complaints that have been made by a number of other participants in the “Inside Safe” program.

But Orendorff says that even though the Aetna encampment is gone, the Aetna Street Collective will continue meeting every week and urging the city to do more.

One big demand they have is for public officials to provide written offers for housing in the future, so when sweeps like this happen, residents have a clearer idea of their options.

“The mayor has said she cannot honor that, she can't put things in writing,” says Orendorff. “And we question that, because if you can't put it in writing, what kind of offer is that?”

Bass’s signature homelessness program faces big growing pains
By Zoie Matthew, Mar. 13, 2023
FULL ARTICLE

HIGHLIGHTS

“...It was kind of just like, ‘Let's get them in a hotel and then figure it out,’ instead of having this program be well-thought-out and executed,” says Bennett. “‘Let's get them off the street and out of people's eyes, and out of the complaining homeowners view.’”

Bass admits that it has been a struggle to find enough manpower to staff the new sites.

“What we would like is the day you leave your tent is the same day you receive services. And so that is a struggle, because the social service providers that do that work are stretched to capacity, as well,” she says.

She also notes that finding affordable motels has been harder in some areas than others. “We have a lot of issues with that, because there tend to be less-expensive motel rooms in inner-city areas, versus all over the city, and we don't want to move people far from where they were camping,” says Bass.

Molly Rysman, chief program officer at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, says the rooms they have secured are in a patchwork of different places and types of motels.

“It might be we're using 20 rooms at this motel, and there's 80 other rooms being used by just regular motel clients,” says Rysman. “In that scenario, there often is not a lot of negotiation with the motel owner, and the motel owner is responsible for the maintenance of the site. Different motel owners maintain sites in very different ways.”

...This also means different motels might have different rules — for instance, Rysman says, some require guests to have IDs, which can make it difficult to check in Inside Safe participants who don’t have documents. Because rooms are available to the general public, some participants are also being bounced around from room to room as other bookings come up.

...Right now, the income for some of the motel owners is significant. A representative for St. Joseph Center, the service provider that oversees Inside Safe on LA’s west side, says that while the organization always tries to negotiate for lower rates, they typically pay around the standard nightly rate for Inside Safe rooms.

Receipts shared by one Inside Safe participant at the motel in Culver City showed that her room cost around $160 per night — which would add up to about $5,000 per month, far more than many studio or one-bedroom apartments.

And while Bass says the next step is to move these participants into permanent housing, that might take some time — affordable units are in short supply, and even when unhoused people do receive vouchers, many struggle to find landlords who accept them.

...Now, she’s one of just 20 Inside Safe participants who have been moved into permanent housing so far. She says after all the chaos, having some calm and quiet has been a relief.

Monthly payments of $1,000 could get thousands of homeless people off the streets, researchers say
By Doug Smith, April 30, 2024
FULL ARTICLE

HIGHLIGHTS

A monthly payment of $750 to $1,000 would allow thousands of the city’s homeless people to find informal housing, living in boarding homes, in shared apartments and with family and friends, according to a policy brief by four prominent Los Angeles academics.

Citing positive preliminary results of pilot studies in several cities, including Los Angeles, they argue the income could provide access to housing for a portion of the population who became homeless primarily as the result of an economic setback. This could ultimately save millions of dollars in public services, they argued, and leave the overstretched and far more expensive subsidized and service-enriched housing for those who have more complicated social needs.

“If the idea is to reduce the number of people on the street, definitely the fastest way to do that is money and not this incredibly complex system that we have built up primarily to help people with serious disabilities,” said lead author Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Law.

“The truth is, we cannot afford not to do better than the current system, which spends a huge amount of money to house a small fraction of those in need,” they wrote.

That system, relying on housing navigators to “seek very scarce subsidized housing subject to strict criteria” is a “lengthy and expensive process” leaving thousands of rental subsidy vouchers unused and thousands of people unable to find housing.

“Providing interim housing during this process can be very costly, as is adding to the supply of housing,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, a source of readily available affordable housing goes untapped.
“Informal housing, once a subject of study only in developing countries, means housing that does not conform to the standards of the formal housing market,” they wrote. “It includes shared housing arrangements, housing that does not meet all code requirements, rooms rented in single-family homes.”

“There’s a vast informal rental market going on already all across California,” co-author Sam Tsemberis, a clinical community psychologist with the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, said in an interview. “People are renting out single-family homes. They have two or three beds in each of the bedrooms and are charging $400, $500 a month for people to sleep.”

Tsemberis is the founder of Pathways to Housing, a New York program that pioneered the Housing First approach now adopted across the nation as a model for housing chronically homeless people with compounding issues of mental illness and substance abuse.

Basic aid is not a substitute for housing first, Tsemberis said.

“This is for the group that has more resources internally, a work history, isn’t struggling mightily with mental illness or addiction,” he said.

Pointing to research by the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco, the authors suggest that more than half of people living on the streets fall into that category.

The study found that fewer than a third of a large sample of unhoused people in California had been tenants in “ordinary” housing before becoming homeless. “Most were last housed in a unit rented by someone else — i.e., the informal housing market. If they were required to pay rent, their median monthly rent was $450.19,” they wrote.
The authors cited a 2022 survey by Urban Institute of guaranteed income programs in Austin, Chicago and Arlington County, Virginia, that found cash subsidies provided more flexible housing support at lower cost, allowed recipients more dignity, avoided voucher discrimination by landlords and served people who were ineligible for government subsidies.
While those programs, and similar ones currently under way in Los Angeles County, are for a general population, a preliminary study by one of the authors has found that homeless people also benefit.

Ben Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, designed a controlled study of a cash stipend pilot mounted by the San Francisco-based nonprofit Miracle Messages.

Early results were so promising that Henwood released a preliminary six-month analysis breaking down recipients’ spending as 36.6% food, 19.5% housing, 12.7% transportation, 11.5% clothing and 6.2% healthcare, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.

“The idea that to give poor people money is controversial is just strange to me,” Henwood said. “Of course that will help.”

At its conclusion, twice as many participants were housed and 40% more were employed than at its inception.
“The larger perspective is that homelessness is a result of economic inequality and income at least as much as it is a lack of affordable housing,” Flaming said. “I don’t see a way that we can house our way out of homelessness. This is another tool, the tool providing people a basic income, that we need to be making a better use of.”

While not proposing a specific administrative plan, the authors point to a potential mechanism for implementing basic income: raising General Relief, the county program mandated to provide minimal assistance to people who are “destitute, unemployed and ineligible for any other form of assistance.”

“Liberal L.A. County hasn’t raised the GR grant in 40 years,” Blasi said.
Since the 1970s the rate has been $221 per month. If it had risen with inflation, it would be $1,008.

“Unsurprisingly, the County’s Department of Public Social Services reports that about 75% of the more than 100,000 General Relief recipients are homeless and have no stable address.” they wrote.

The paper anticipates, and counters, the potential objection that their plan would push people into substandard housing.

“There is no reason to think that housing will be worse than the last stable housing they had before becoming homeless,” it said.

“I don’t have any illusions that people are going to be living in places that middle-class people would find acceptable,” Blasi said.

Informal housing is no substitute for the thousands of units of supportive housing that are needed.

But “somewhere around half of the people on the street and in those encampments don’t need supportive housing,” he said. “They don’t. And they don’t qualify for it and they’re not getting into it,” Blasi said.
“We’re sort of communicating if you can just hang on for four years on the street, you’ll be troubled enough that you will rise to the top of our list. That’s just crazy.”