Los Angeles has been crippled by an acute shortage of housing, especially deeply affordable housing, thanks to decades of poor local policy making – some of which was explicitly designed to slow multi-family housing construction in the city.

According to our most recent state-mandated housing needs assessment, the city will need to construct nearly half a million new units to ease its housing shortage.

We are also losing our existing affordable housing stock: thousands of deed-restricted affordable units in the city have expiring covenants in the next few years. Reporters and researchers have revealed that many rent-stabilized units are being illegally utilized as short-term rentals, meaning they are no longer available to the long-term rental market. Additionally, outdated zoning codes that limit where new building can take place mean that developers are often demolishing existing rent-stabilized or naturally occurring affordable units to make way for new multi-family units. This trade off need not happen: we should do our best to preserve our existing housing stock, even as we make space to build new units.

Bringing new housing online as well as protecting existing stocks of affordable housing in a way that preserves communities and improves neighborhoods overall must be the central project of the next decade in Los Angeles.

As a champion of new housing and – as of last year – the Chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, I’ve dedicated myself to the work to build the housing we desperately need more quickly and cheaply. I’ve also been a careful steward of our existing housing stock.

We can lower cost burdens for renters, first-time home owners, and everyone who seeks to make a home in this city.

Here is some of what we have done in the last three years:

• We made it easier, faster, and cheaper to build affordable housing. Our proposal to streamline the process of approving affordable housing led to 40 new positions being funded across departments to shorten timelines for approvals for affordable units. I also proposed an Affordable Housing Overlay Zone to create incentives for building 100% affordable housing in high-income neighborhoods. This overlay will now be included in a new zoning plan for the city called the Housing Element, which will be approved this year.

• We updated the Hollywood Community Plan, which was decades out of date, ensuring that one of the most central neighborhoods in Los Angeles had modern zoning, with a focus on incentives for affordable housing, and on protecting existing tenants.

• We led the implementation of the United to House LA tax measure, ensuring that investments in the construction of new, union-built affordable housing were made as quickly as possible.

• We created a more transparent and predictable process within the Council office for engaging with developers on major projects in the district and for engaging deeply with impacted community members, and approved hundreds more units of affordable housing.

I see this city as being at a major turning point, and I think it’s essential that we have leaders in office who will prioritize new housing and affordability while not being politically beholden to development interests, and who will fight to preserve existing housing.

If I’m elected to a second term, here’s what I believe we can accomplish together:

• Pass new zoning regulations that will allow for much more new housing to be constructed by right, through a robust city-wide Housing Element and new Community Plans for the Southern San Fernando Valley. Most of the city’s zoning plans are decades out of date, having been last updated when the city’s population was significantly smaller than it is today, and when the city was actively trying to limit growth. This means that nearly every multi-family project requires parcel-level variances from outdated zoning, which require time-intensive discretionary approvals from the Council. According to a study published last year by the Los Angeles Business Council (LABC), the average multifamily construction project in the city took over 1.5 years to get its approvals, with some projects taking significantly longer. Much of that time came from discretionary reviews during the approval, which added both time and uncertainty to the process. The LABC study found that projects which had “by right” processes – ie, those that did not have to seek discretionary approvals – took significantly less time to get approved, cutting total timelines by many months.

  In addition to significantly slowing construction, these discretionary powers are the reasons why we have had such blatant recent corruption cases on the Council: when Council needs to approve any larger project, developers have repeatedly resorted to bribing Councilmembers to move projects forward.

  We have an opportunity now to update the Housing Element and the San Fernando Valley Community Plans to allow for by-right multi-family construction along our major boulevards, such as along Ventura Blvd or Van Nuys Blvd. Greater density does not have to mean high-rises: permitting buildings with three to five stories can produce many more units of much-needed housing than our current zoning. These new zoning plans for Los Angeles are being developed right now, and the choices we make at this moment will reverberate for many years to come. Our office is determined to get this right to build the right kind of housing at the scale that we need.

• Streamline the approvals processes for all new housing in Los Angeles. An evaluation of the impacts of SB35, a state bill enacted in 2018 that allowed for qualified projects to get streamlined entitlements as long as they met certain criteria such as including a minimum percentage of affordable housing, is illustrative of the impacts of streamlining. In 4 years, SB35 was used to approve 156 projects that yielded 18,000 new units of housing across the state, and most approved projects were 100% affordable. The impacts of Mayor Bass’s Executive Directive 1, which promised that 100% affordable housing projects would get approvals within 60 days, were similar: 9,000 new units of 100% affordable housing were permitted in LA in less than a year. Indeed, projects in Council District 4 that had initially submitted as market rate housing resubmitted as 100% affordable housing when ED1 went into effect, demonstrating the power of predictability to shape what is built.

  My motion to streamline the approvals for 100% affordable housing yielded a public and detailed breakdown of the approvals process for all new construction in Los Angeles. In partnership with the Mayor’s leadership on Executive Directive 7, we are working on ways to streamline and reduce approval timelines for all new construction in the city. This will include bringing in departmental partners that have historically not been at the table, such as LADWP, which has been the source of unexpected costs and delays for many projects, and the Fire Department, which is understaffed for building approvals.

• Eliminate costly and pointless street dedications. The city currently mandates that, depending on what kind of street it’s being built on, new multi-family construction must widen the street. These mandatory street dedications are expensive to implement, and result in streets that confusingly shrink and expand in width. Moreover, these street dedications can result in the removal of precious old-growth street trees, undermine planning for bike-lanes and safe sidewalks, and provide limited benefits, if any, to residents and users of the street. Our office has kickstarted the process of ending the mandatory street dedication process, and we look forward to removing this outdated mandate from our planning regulation.

• Enforce the provisions of LA’s Home Sharing Ordinance. LA passed regulations on short-term rentals in 2018, but enforcement of this law has been extremely limited. Investigations have uncovered thousands of illegal listings including RSO units being rented out, hosts who lack city registration numbers, homes being rented out by people who do not live in them, and hosts using fake addresses. The City has taken almost no enforcement action in response, meaning that thousands of rent stabilized and affordable units have been lost to the short term rental market, homes are being used for disruptive parties, and that some neighborhoods have lost their sense of community entirely. Thanks to the work of our office, the City has finally kickstarted the process of reforming the enforcement of short term rentals.

  Truly enforcing the short term rental ordinance will mean that thousands of units of Rent Stabilized and other housing will come back to the long-term rental market, effectively increasing our local supply of housing.

• Develop a credible and targeted response to the expiring affordable housing covenants. Deed-restricted affordable housing that has been built over decades in Los Angeles with public financial support have affordable covenants that are time-limited, usually for a period of 50 years. For some years now, researchers have identified that thousands of those affordable covenants are due to expire, meaning that these units will no longer be part of the city’s affordable housing stock. Extending all of these covenants would be prohibitively expensive for the city, with an estimated cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

  For the first time, at my request in the Housing and Homelessness Committee, the Housing Department finally undertook a detailed risk analysis of all of these units. Their analysis identified that some units would lose their covenants but would still be covered by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, meaning that the city would be able to regulate rent increases in those units and prevent sharp rent increases or rent gouging. The study also identified units that are most in need of city intervention, where rapid rent increases are possible that could lead to displacement of existing low-income families. Armed with this new analysis, my goal is to find funding sources that will help us to extend covenants in the most dire cases, while offering residents in other units with expiring covenants case management and other support services to ensure that they stay housed and stay in their communities. Ensuring that residents of these units are able to be stabilized must be a core focus for the city in the coming years.