Hey church family,
I hope this email finds you doing well! Today I wanted to pass along two items related to housing need, both in the present and future.
1) Housing Update
There is widespread agreement that our city has not built enough housing to accommodate every person who lives in Los Angles with an affordable home. However, there is a lot of debate around where housing has been built and where it should be built. Many here on the Eastside are concerned that when the city does build new housing, both dedicated affordable housing and market-rate housing, it disproportionately ends up on the Eastside rather than the westside. There are different opinions about which specific projects are good or bad for the community. Still, there is a broad consensus that it is unfair for the Eastside to shoulder the burden of fixing the housing crisis.
Changing this will require many of the more affluent parts of Los Angeles to build housing to help increase housing affordability. Much of the Westside and San Fernando Valley has put in place exclusionary housing rules that make it very hard to build housing to accommodate new residents in their neighborhoods:
Thankfully, Los Angeles is currently going through California's process to update its city-wide housing plan to plan for the new housing (~500,000 units) the city needs. This will include keeping about one-third of that new housing to be dedicated to affordable housing. Given this process, many advocates ask that the new housing be fairly distributed through the city, including areas on the Westside that have purposefully kept new housing out. The current motion is set to be heard tomorrow, and you can send a form letter to support it here. If you want to go further and give more support to the measure, check out this guide to giving written public comment. While limited in what it can do in the short-run, this is a change that will have a tremendously positive effect on the city in the long-run.
2) Housing Stories: A repeat from last week, but we are still collecting accounts of how COVID has impacted our community and neighbors' housing situations. We want to relay these to our council representative to ensure he understands what people are going through on the ground. With a new presidential administration coming in, there will most likely be a renewed interest in federal funds to help cities and states, and making sure some of those funds go to those who are most in housing need will be vital for folks in our community’s economic survival. Please, fill out this short form, and pass it along to friends and family (we will not use your real name) to share your experience with housing during COVID.
That’s all for this week!