By Dolores Quintana
The LA Business Council (LABC) warned the City of Los Angeles that progress to build more affordable housing cannot happen without making some real changes to city policy during its 20th Annual Mayor’s Housing, Transportation and Jobs Summit , as reported by The Los Angeles Daily News.
LABC President Mary Leslie said, as quoted by The Los Angeles Daily News, “The City Council deserves great credit for setting an ambitious goal to bridge the housing shortage and related affordability gap that is widening by the day. day, but without significant reform and plan. That goal will not be met.”
Los Angeles produces only about 16,700 units per year, according to the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. The City will need to produce 57,000 units per year to meet the goals set by the state.
The city’s goal is to have 23,000 designated new units built as affordable housing, but it has actually only produced about 1,650 affordable units per year since 2014.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said during his keynote address at the LABC Summit, quoted by The Los Angeles Daily News: “We voted through something that will now set an honest number of 457,000 housing units in the City of Los Angeles. That’s like a San Fernando Valley. is being built on our LA. Can we get there? That is a question for all of you today, and for my successor, for the City Councils to come”.
Garcetti also said, quoted by The Los Angeles Daily News, “If we were still building the same number and allowing the same number of housing units per year as when I started (in 2013), it would take us 60 years to get there. Sixty years to do what we have to do by 2029.”
The business council’s research arm, The LABC Institute, works with the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. The LABC Institute and the Ziman Center report on the city’s challenges and potential to produce enough of the affordable housing Angelenos need. The LABC Institute hopes to have that report ready before June, when the mayoral election begins as an instructional text for the next mayor to help anyone deal with the housing crisis and formulate a real plan to face the problem.
Brad Cox, president of the LABC Institute, said, as quoted by the Los Angeles Daily Times, “Since the onset of COVID, the nation’s housing supply has been in serious turmoil with a dramatic shift in supply and demand in virtually all geographic markets in the country. Los Angeles is in dire need of solutions that effectively deliver large amounts of new affordable and market-rate housing in a short period of time.”
Cox elaborated further on the subject, saying, “Our LABC leadership and members are committed to working with local governments to implement effective strategies to reduce the cost of new housing. This public/private effort requires innovative solutions that dramatically increase the production of new housing for all income levels. We need to provide housing that all Los Angeles residents can afford.”
LABC issued recommendations to the City of Los Angeles on the same day as the summit to reduce construction costs by facilitating approvals for development.
