Hey all,
I know that it has been a while since this listserv has been used, but as we move into the Fall and various legislative bodies come back into session, I am hoping to resume sending these updates out regularly.
I wanted to make you aware of two high-profile housing bills that are making their way through California’s legislature, both of which will be up for essential votes in the coming weeks. Recent years have shown that the state is the most effective level of government to make progress on housing affordability issues. Similar to how the state of California often sets environmental standards (since pollution in one city impacts the surrounding cities), housing choices made in one city or neighborhood impact all the surrounding areas. You can support these bills by clicking here. But if you want to read a little more before doing so, you can read my explanation of the two bills below:
SB 9: Duplexes
There are many reasons why housing in Los Angeles is so expensive, reasons that are too numerous to explore as a whole here (though I hope to soon on my blog). But one of the biggest drivers (which is also one of the easiest to understand) is that Los Angeles has had a master plan for most of the last 40 years has legally made it almost impossible for sufficient housing to be built.
One of the big reasons this has come to be the case? Regulations that promote exclusive zones where only very wealthy people can live. Here is a full explanation of what an “exclusionary zone” looks like:
One of the most widespread examples of this is known as single-family zoning. 75% of land in Los Angeles is zoned for single-family homes (also known as single-detached homes), meaning it is illegal to build anything other than a single-detached house on that land. The New York Times has mapped what this looks like on a map of Los Angeles (pink denotes land that is zoned for single-detached houses only)
While Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and Downtown have almost no plots zone exclusively for single-detached homes, much of the wealthier parts of the city have almost nothing but single-detached homes land! Unfortunately, this means that these more affluent neighborhoods have contributed virtually no land to increase the housing available to Angelinos!
Now, this was not always the case. For most of Los Angeles’ history (and US history), zoning was much more flexible. The idea that neighborhoods would be zoned exclusively for single-detached homes was not typical until the last 50-60 years: my street in East Los Angeles contains apartment complexes next to duplexes next to single detached homes. Having only one type of housing in a neighborhood is a very recent historical experiment. And while in many places in the US, single-detached homes are something that many working people can afford, Los Angeles has not been that city for a long time. According to Zillow, ten years ago, the average home value in Los Angeles was $514,000. Today the median single-detached home value is $1.16 Million!
Suppose the city continues to insist that single-detached homes are the only kinds that can exist in 75% of Los Angeles. As you can imagine, this will cause the vast majority of these neighborhoods to remain unaffordable, and there will be minimal options for families who need affordable options to come online.
SB 9 offers a modest but significant fix to this: it asks that every city in California allow lots to have up to 2 houses on them. This reform doesn’t mean that single-detached homes will go away; instead, homeowners can choose to expand or subdivide their houses if they want to! The Eastside of LA is already filled with many existing duplexes (including ones people in our church live in!), and they are quality alternatives for those who cannot afford a traditional single-detached house:
Duplexes give those who cannot afford to buy a house more options throughout the city of LA and thus open up new homes (and lower the price!) for those who will continue to rent into the future. The ability of homeowners to turn their single-detached home into a duplex also ensures that families can keep multiple generations on their shared land while allowing for expansion and privacy in separate houses on that land.
Now there is a good deal of debate about how much impact SB 9 will make. The modest scope of the law can be seen as both a pro and a con: the law is unlikely to disrupt or create much gentrification pressures: building duplexes are not super attractive to developers because they are not very profitable projects. But the fact that they are not profitable to developers limits the homes that will be built. UC Berkley has modeled that SB 9 should make a modest impact on increasing homes available (up to 400,000 new homes) and lowering prices in California. But 400,000 homes in California will not be nearly enough to drive prices back down to reasonable levels.
Some activists have criticized the bill as not going far enough. Others have argued that it does not do enough to help the lowest-income residents. And I think both of these critiques are valid! But as is almost always the case with policy, it is essential not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good!
SB 9 is facing a pretty discouraging campaign against it, led by groups who claim that it will destroy California’s character by changing the type of housing you find in neighborhoods here. To me, this is precisely backward: what is killing California’s character is that our neighbors, who helped build the culture of this city, can no longer afford to live here, and if changing the buildings in a neighborhood helps them stay, we should value people over buildings.
SB 10: Model Zoning for Small Development
California’s housing problem is not a problem of one city: while some cities like Los Angeles do have a disproportionately large influence, California is a state with 482 cities, each of which has its individual housing regulation and zoning. There are 88 cities in LA county alone! To fix the housing crisis at a scale that can impact the state, California needs to see reform across all these individual cities. Some small cities are intentionally exclusive, and so their lack of housing production is an intentional decision. But other cities (especially small, lower-income cities) cannot study best practices of making housing more affordable.
SB 10 would create a model zoning code that would allow cities to opt-in if they cannot complete their reform effort. Opting into the bill’s model zoning code would allow small apartment complexes (up to 10 homes) to be built around transit or downtown areas while limiting the bureaucratic hoops these projects would have to jump through. Many small cities have found that reforming in this direction can be a substantial positive both to housing affordability by creating more homes and creating economic opportunity by helping people live where they can access good jobs. In addition, neighborhoods with a mix of homes of all shapes and sizes tend to be some of the most productive economically. For example, the city of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley, no one’s idea of a big city, has seen tremendously positive economic impacts from their planning reforms, one of which was encouraging more housing.
While the bill’s model zoning code would probably not be adopted by Los Angeles, it could be a great tool for small cities in our area: Montebello, Commerce, Maywood, Alhambra. Given that our housing markets are intertwined with these cities, if they can take steps in the right direction, we would see improvements in our community. Like SB 9, SB 10 is a modest step, but by taking a series of modest steps toward reform, I firmly believe we will see things change for the better in LA.
Send a Personalized Note to our Local Reps
If you made it this far in the email, you probably are pretty interested in this topic and already sent the template email, but if you have not, do it now!
But if you care this much, would you also be interested in writing a short paragraph-long note to our elected representatives describing why housing affordability is so crucial to you/our community? I hope to have a brief conversation with some of their staff in the coming week or two where I can share perspectives of people who are being impacted by this
Thanks to all who helped out!