Crowding Antonio

Los Angeles' housing shortage has ballooned for so long that city residents have almost grown accustomed to it. Families looking for an affordable place to live face nightmarish prospects. Even before the 1990s economic recovery, the city's population increase far outstripped new housing construction. There has been much talk, some shouts of alarm, several reports, the creation of a small, $100-million city housing trust fund (by itself, enough for 600 units), and the failure of a $1 billion housing bond issue. What there doesn't seem to be is effective, consistent city leadership. That leadership has been particularly slow in coming from the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Meanwhile, the situation worsens steadily. Around 1999, it became almost impossible for a family earning $50,000 a year to afford a house. This current year's figures suggest it is now almost as hard for such a family to afford an apartment.

L.A.'s official arrival at a population of four million provided minor news excitement last week; that's half the population of the Big Apple. But a troubling statistic lay under the surface: In 2006, Los Angeles acquired 37,658 new residents. In the same year, it built 10,239 housing units. Simply, L.A.'s getting new residents nearly four times faster than it can house them.

You could optimize this statistic: In 1999, L.A. built less than 2,000 new housing units while the city gained 65,000 people. That was the year when the city's Housing Crisis Task Force Study officially confirmed the shortage had become a crisis. Since then, it's turned into a famine. It's more than just too many people and not enough apartments. Condo conversion of extant apartments and demolitions of apartments to build condos have sliced nearly 13,000 units out of existence since 2001 - only slightly fewer than the number of new apartments built in that time. In the 1980s, a sag in housing signaled an easing apartment market. But this economy keeps expanding, while high prices and disappearance of easy mortgages have dumped former potential home buyers into the strangled rental market. The result is an L.A. vacancy rate of less than 3 percent - under 2.4 percent in the apartment-dense San Fernando Valley.

Worse, the snowballing effects of 1978's Proposition 13 mean that Los Angeles, like all California cities, needs new sales tax revenues to remedy its lost right to increase property taxes. As a result, sales-tax enhancing retail development has gulped down housing stock and land.

This makes finding an apartment more of an agony than ever and when you do, you might not be able to afford it. Even professionals with starting salaries in the low $50-thousands - nurses, LAPD officers, and firefighters, for instance - end up paying more than the recommended 30 percent of income for housing. Apartment rents in the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys rose 15 percent in two years to an average of $1,400. Housing statistics show that 140,000 L.A. families pay more than half their combined incomes for apartments, many of them wretched. There are an estimated 100,000 garage and numerous other bootleg units. On an even lower-income tier, an estimated 20,000 of the city's 109,000 homeless hold jobs but can't afford regular shelter.

Ed Reyes, the city council's most housing-conscious member, says, "These are the people who have to live a week in their cars so they can afford to live the rest of the month in a motel."

Get Dense

Los Angeles is one of America's most sprawling cities - 469 square miles, roughly 300,000 acres. In its midst, you can stand on a mountain ridge and see as much of Los Angeles looking north as you can looking south. But, even though the surrounding county might have a few undeveloped tracts, the city is just about fully inhabited. There's hardly any room left for more people. At least, not in single-family homes.

L.A. was planned for low density in the 1920s, when that was an ideological mandate. The thinking then was that dense cities were the source of all social evils, full of poor people and high crime rates. Los Angeles was to be a city of interlinked leafy suburbs, whose creation made many fortunes, including those of the Los Angeles Times' Chandler family and savings-and-loan tycoons like Mark Taper and Howard Ahmanson. There was barely enough of a downtown for the theaters, banks, and department stores, the city hall and court houses and law partnerships. This downtown also ended up being surrounded by the dense housing of poor newcomers who couldn't fit elsewhere.

For the most part, it was the American dream writ large: blocks of transplanted little Midwestern, single-family dream homes with orange trees and skimpy winter fuel bills, symbolizing family and decency. In James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler novels, L.A. people who lived in apartments tended to be tough dames whose boyfriends got gunned down in gambling joints.

Even today, when over 60 percent of Angelenos - or 2.5 million of the city's 4 million people - live in apartments, this stigma survives in the city's DNA. Residential living makes up 42 percent of the city, or 125,000 acres. Less than 20 percent of that is multi-family housing, including condominiums.

Some still argue passionately that the city should stay low density. The "Homeowner Society" is vaunted by Pepperdine futurist Joel Kotkin, who declined two requests to be interviewed for this article. The contention goes that L.A. is intentionally a homeowner culture. Thirty-five years ago, sociologist Reyner Banham called this a new middle-class freedom. But, as the saying goes, "The only paradises are past paradises." Since the 1990s, the Los Angeles regional consensus, even from parties locked in combat on other issues, says this paradigm is history. That it just can't work within the 21st Century economy.

As the L.A. Housing Crisis report put it: "The city's inability to house its growing work force threatens its continued economic recovery. Skilled workers may be lost." The answer is increased density: "The city will have to ease land use restrictions to permit more multifamily uses in mixed residential areas and on underutilized or obsolete commercial or industrial properties." That means building upward, which includes "upzoning" neighborhoods for higher concentrations of people.

That density, while viewed as a negative against this rose-tinted past, also has plenty of advocates. Fans of other big cities say that a Los Angeles of suburbs might never develop the metropolitan critical mass of creative and cultural life in the sense that, say, New York or London has. That greater density equals urban maturity. Whether this follows, the fact is that L.A., long called an urban adolescent, has probably reached adulthood.

And, says L.A. City Councilman Herb Wesson, it needs housing to match its growth. "L.A. is getting to be a much denser city, whether or not we plan for it. But we are a lot better off planning for it," says Wesson, who heads the council's Housing Committee, where the battle for more housing is often fought.

"You've heard of 'If you build it, they will come,'" says Wesson. "Well, here we didn't build it, and they came anyway."

Developing for You and Me

City Planning Commission member Mike Woo - a former councilman and mayoral candidate - guesses the city needs 114,000 more housing units. He supports City Planner Gail Goldberg's new 14-point plan to build more housing and strengthen the city's housing initiative. But at the current build rate, he just sees the city falling further behind. One key requirement is to free up the city's red-taped permitting process. "We also need incentives," Woo says. "Incentives for profit and nonprofit developers." So far, the city's attempts to bring for-profit developers into the low-end housing market have not been very successful.

The city's rental housing cause in general, and low income housing in particular, took two major hits over the past two years. The first was the 2005 trouncing of Councilman Ed Reyes's inclusionary

zoning proposal, which fell victim to astute propaganda and lobbying by opponents as well an apparent lack of support by some council members. This would have required housing built in certain areas to include, as a matter of course, low-income units. Backed by local progressives and several unions, its defeat showed the power of the developer-dominated Central City Association (CCA) under its leader, Carol Schatz. During the debate, the debonair Schatz switched her high-heeled street shoes for shiny new Nikes as she sprinted around the council chamber grimacing and gesturing at the members. In the end, Reyes lost all support for inclusionary zoning and sustained the final humiliation of not even being able to get a second for its reintroduction - certainly not from councilman and soon-to-be-mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa.

Reyes now says, "The clock [on low income housing] really stopped then, two years ago."

Schatz now says that the measure's passage "would have curtailed the entire downtown housing boom," including the adaptive reuse housing revival downtown. Others note that the downtown boom was pretty well advanced already two years ago, and that propaganda distributed in opposition to inclusionary zoning included a false claim that it could be extended into single-family housing areas. Housing advocates say inclusionary zoning has been successful in other California cities. But while there is hope it might be revisited in some form, one city official said, "If we do, we better call it something else." Rightly or wrongly, any program called inclusionary zoning is deeply loathed by most developers.

The second big affordable housing setback was the 2006 defeat of the city's Proposition H, a billion-dollar housing bond proposal. Housing advocate Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival says the 10,000 units per year it would have provided would barely have replaced what's being lost. But the city had high hopes for its passage.

Since that time, Mayor Villaraigosa has wrestled with the school district and with gang problems. Two mayoral deputies have just been appointed to deal with the housing issue, however. And the mayor announced a special $137-million program from the city's affordable-housing trust fund to building housing for "Angelenos with the greatest needs."

Last month, the mayor promised: "This money will leverage more than $1 billion in state and federal funds and enable us to build nearly 1,500 units of housing for low-income and homeless people. In addition to covering construction costs, part of the money will be used to subsidize rent and rehabilitation service."

The mayor also said he'd already swept out the corruption and inefficiency that bedeviled the city's housing operations. He wants to put the Proposition H housing bond back on the ballot as soon as next year. But the question remains whether this is really a program or just another of the mayor's flashes of enthusiasm.

The Rev. Altagracia Perez, who sits on the city's Housing Commission, says, "The mayor's office seems to have lost the housing enthusiasm it had before Measure H went to the polls." The proposal scored 62 percent - ironically, just a bit more than the percentage of renters in the city. But it needed two-thirds vote to become law. Perez says some opposed the measure because it would have offered housing assistance to the lower middle-class. She says: "There's a lag in perception out there - people just don't understand that the housing shortage heavily impacts the middle class, too."

Gil Duran, a Villaraigosa spokesman, said that the mayor hopes to "revisit" the bond issue. Wesson suggests a better sales pitch: "Sell it to benefit firefighters, whom everyone likes. Or nurses."

But the heaviest housing burden falls on the poorest. In the absence of money for new housing, Perez says much of her authority's current work is in rehabilitating really bad low-income housing. Much of this, she says, might better be torn down and rebuilt, were it not for the clear danger that the current tenants might then be displaced. She says the Bush administration keeps cutting community block grants and the Section 8 housing vouchers crucial to keeping many of the working poor off the streets. The new Democratic majority congress has yet to show its claws on these issues.

Some housing types are skeptical that community block grants - originally a Nixon administration invention - can ever be brought back to what they were 10 years ago. "The thing is, when you really emasculate something, it doesn't grow back," one city official says.

Wesson is more optimistic. "What we really need is more than a new Congress; we need a new man in the White House." But after George W. Bush's war-fueled budget expansion, it's likely that any new Democratic administration will have to preach spending restraint and moderation, and such remedies could be years in the pipeline.

The city will have to somehow build new low-income housing on its own. Before it can do that, it has to convince its residents that making a lot more housing available, with all the attendant impacts on already-horrid traffic and overcrowding, is in everyone's best interests.

Otherwise, Reyes sees a rising crisis, with inner-city hopelessness building along with the housing drought. "I'm hearing the kind of desperation you heard in the early 1990s," he says, recalling multiple families in small apartments, multiple people in single rooms, all in dangerous neighborhoods, in-filled to the point where every garage had a family living in it. As apartments are candied and gentrification advances into traditionally poor areas like Pico-Union, the growing number of impoverished and under-housed people is being forced back into smaller spaces, where Reyes feels they achieve a critical social mass. Like fellow council member Bill Rosendahl, he says preserving what little rental housing exists is the immediate issue.

Yet when talking about long-term solutions, Reyes seems to be on exactly the same high-density page as Wesson, Schatz, and most others. Selling such density is the key. As Reyes, a former L.A. planner, puts it, "You have to first define areas in which higher density is acceptable to the stakeholders. And you try to create a housing community along rail and other transit lines."

Some experts say local government can actively support such a community's development. Peter Dreier, professor of politics at Occidental College, notes that, "Santa Monica requires commercial developers to pay a 'linkage' - housing mitigation - fee, which is used to fund affordable housing. In fact, even though Santa Monica only has about 2 percent of L.A.'s population it spends about 10 percent of what L.A. allocates for affordable housing."

Community Chest

Reyes says he learned from his experience with inclusive zoning that you have to sell density community by community. "You can't throw a blanket [approach] over the whole city," he says. He sees the city's reclaimed riverfront as having housing. He looks with satisfaction at the five-year program that created a consensus behind the new 40-acre Taylor Yard state park near the L.A. River. "We got the whole community to identify with the process."

The 400-pound gorilla in the community process room is obviously the increasingly important neighborhood councils. In some areas, like the Valley, they've been called the embodiment of NIMBY. Others have suggested they might be persuaded to go more dense. Can this happen? Can homeowner types learn to love higher density?

Former Councilwoman Ruth Galanter left office before they were a factor. But she said that, in her district, which saw some 5,000 new housing units built, she made community organizations part of the bargaining process, and then held all sides to the agreements once they were reached. She points to the Oxford Triangle high-rise area near the Marina and the Glencoe-Maxella areas near Culver City. In these areas were proposed huge shopping centers. The residents decided they'd prefer the properties be developed as condominiums and apartments, and the deal was done. Without inclusive zoning, the units were mostly high end, but they were housing and easier to live with than what Galanter termed, "A new Beverly Center."

"People have to realize they have a choice," she said. Galanter's most controversial development was, of course, Playa Vista. While she was widely excoriated by environmentalists from outside her district for brokering a reduced-development deal with a large housing component on a large empty tract, she says, "We didn't lose a single extant housing unit in creating Playa Vista." Her successor, Rosendahl, says he's going to try to sell more housing density to his constituents in what is now the 11th District in the same spirit, but he'll do it via the neighborhood councils.

Council President Eric Garcetti is also optimistic: He says he gained a neighborhood consensus on revamping the 13th Council District's Sears store as an eight-story commercial-retail-residential site. He sees a place for new housing density sitting on top of stores and offices, just as it has in traditional cities for millennia. He says there's a tradeoff between the old L.A. and the new: "You used to be able to drive to the edge of the city in 20 minutes: Now, in that time, you can walk through a fascinating new neighborhood."

Somewhere outside the realms of both the city housing consensus and the CCA is the ebullient downtown adaptive reuse developer Tom Gilmore. He completely agrees with Ed Reyes's dire forecast: "If we don't fix this housing thing, we'll be fucked."

But he disagrees with most of the city's low-end housing approaches. "The problem is, too many people see low-income housing as a moral issue. It isn't. We have to make it an amoral issue. We have to make it profitable. Otherwise, we have to feed this bear forever."

Gilmore gets more credit than most for repopulating the derelict center city. He guided that old Bank District into its landmark revival. He now has renovated old St. Vibiana's Cathedral as a new cultural center, adjacent to a new public library and what are to be several hundred units of new high-end housing.

He claims: "If someone were to give me a way to earn 17 percent on low-end housing instead of the 16 percent I make on market-rate housing, I'd have already built hundreds of units like that downtown. Give developers tax breaks, forgive taxes in advance; give them incentives." He says that in the end, the city will save much more by having an abundance of new affordable housing stock than it loses in taxes. Or better still, inspire mixed-income housing: rich, poor, and middle.

"That's the holy grail of housing," he says. "You have to make people want to build it. Developers are amoral, not immoral. You can pay them to do the right thing."