Feb 4th Status Quo Plan Opposition Letter

[pdf-embedder url=”https://abundanthousingla.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/210204-Los-Angeles-Housing-Element-Letter-WEBSITE-VERSION.pdf” title=”210204 Los Angeles Housing Element Letter – WEBSITE VERSION”]

February 4, 2021

Dear Mr. Bertoni,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the process of updating the housing element of Los Angeles’ general plan. We are writing on behalf of a coalition of organizations representing the policy, academic, environmental, business, social justice, and affordable housing communities. We support efforts to expand the availability of housing at all levels of income, and ensure that cities meet their obligations to affirmatively further fair housing. We are concerned that the current community planning and housing element update processes are not on track to achieve this goal.

Exclusionary zoning and land use practices have led to an undersupply of affordable medium- and high-density housing near jobs and transit, and have perpetuated segregated living patterns and the exclusion of historically disadvantaged communities. The housing and homelessness crisis, together with this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, severe wildfires, and civil unrest, illustrate the need for a totally new approach to solving our city and region’s housing crisis. 

For these reasons, we support a housing element update in Los Angeles that is equitable and balanced, promotes socioeconomic integration, and takes a strategic, citywide view of updating zoning and land use regulations. This requires a planning process that allocates housing using a fair and intentional methodology, in which new homes are concentrated near jobs, transit, and high-opportunity neighborhoods.

Additionally, it is critical that housing element updates affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH), which is required by state law under AB 686 (2018). According to the State Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), a housing element must “ensure that sites zoned to accommodate housing for lower-income households are not concentrated in lower resource areas and segregated concentrated areas of poverty, but rather dispersed throughout the community, including in areas with access to greater resources, amenities, and opportunity.” Cities should accommodate at least a pro-rata portion of the lower-income RHNA target in high-opportunity census tracts (e.g. if 30% of a jurisdiction’s land area is located in high-opportunity tracts, then at least 30% of the lower-income RHNA should be allocated to such tracts.) This includes high-opportunity neighborhoods that have frequently used exclusionary land use rules to shut out lower-income households and affordable housing.

We have called for Planning to develop a distribution of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) target of 455,000 homes to each of Los Angeles’ community plan areas (CPA) for purposes of the sites inventory. Each CPA’s target should be based on a formula that includes objective, quantifiable criteria like housing costs, median income, access to transit, proximity to job centers, access to public resources (e.g. parks, schools), patterns of historical exclusion and segregation, and environmental quality. 

Planning’s methodology should also include CPA-level housing growth targets by income level. Los Angeles’ target of 184,000 homes that are affordable to lower-income households must be distributed fairly across CPAs; all neighborhoods, particularly high-opportunity neighborhoods that have historically blocked new housing through exclusionary zoning, must accommodate more affordable housing. 

This equitable distribution of housing growth would reduce traffic and carbon emissions, increase access to jobs and transit, open up exclusionary neighborhoods to Angelenos of all backgrounds, and foster economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, while also ensuring that the City’s housing element update complies with AB 686’s requirement to affirmatively further fair housing. This would also align with Council President Martinez’s recent motion calling for “an equitable distribution of new housing around the city based on high quality jobs, transit, and historic housing production.”

It is therefore disappointing that Planning does not intend to pursue the equitable distribution approach in the housing element update, despite receiving significant feedback from many members of the Housing Element Task Force in support of this approach. Planning recently released an Initial Study for the housing element update which contains numerous inadequacies that merit serious concern. Planning’s analysis suggests that the City can achieve over 80% of its RHNA target with no significant zoning or policy changes, and that the remaining 20% can be accommodated via already-in-progress community plan updates and changes to the City’s Density Bonus program.

We believe that the facts do not support these conclusions. Additionally, this approach to the housing element update would perpetuate an unsatisfactory status quo, doing little to meaningfully address unaffordable housing costs, lengthy commutes, poor air quality, excessive water use, displacement of lower-income renters, and segregated neighborhoods. We must not continue down this path.

We wish to draw your attention to the following shortcomings of Planning’s “status quo” proposal and analysis:

• Planning’s “status quo” proposal fails to affirmatively further fair housing. By planning for most housing growth on parcels where multifamily development is already allowed, the City is steering housing opportunities away from the 75% of the City’s residentially-zoned land that is restricted to single-family housing only. This perpetuates historic patterns of segregation and exclusion, and continues to push housing opportunities for lower-income households towards lower-income neighborhoods. 
  • About one-quarter of the City’s residentially-zoned land is in CPAs where the median annual household income is below $48,000. But 36% of the City’s zoned capacity is located in these low-income CPAs, helping to explain why 47% of new housing built in Los Angeles between 2013 and 2019 was built in low-income CPAs. Just 12% of new housing was built in high-income CPAs (those with a median annual household income above $86,000), despite these areas making up 28% of the City’s residentially-zoned land.
• Planning anticipates that under current zoning (including the nearly-completed Downtown, Hollywood, and Boyle Heights community plan updates), Los Angeles has a realistic development capacity to build 307,000 more homes by the end of the eight-year 6th cycle in 2029. However, Los Angeles only permitted about 114,000 homes during the eight-year period ending in 2019, leading to a net increase of 99,000 homes during that time. Planning offers no convincing rationale for why they expect housing production to nearly triple without significant policy or zoning changes. Additionally, their scoping document fails to document how Planning staff arrived at their 307,000-home estimate, nor does it provide an estimate of likelihood of development, a critical factor in assessing realistic development capacity.
• Planning’s anticipated site inventory, where they expect the development of 307,000 more homes to occur, appears to contain a large number of parcels zoned for multifamily residential development. This suggests that a large number of existing rent-stabilized housing units would be redeveloped under Planning’s “status quo” approach, increasing lower-income renter households’ risk of displacement. Planning should decline to include parcels containing RSO housing units in the site inventory, instead identifying additional areas for housing production via rezoning.
• Since Planning has made overly optimistic assumptions regarding how much of the RHNA target can be achieved without zoning changes, Planning expects that only 93,000 homes need to be accommodated through rezoning and changes to the City’s Density Bonus program. Planning anticipates accommodating much of this 93,000-home gap through a series of community plan updates that are already in progress. However, many draft community plan updates highlighted in the Initial Study, including updates for the Westside, Hollywood, Southwest Valley, Southeast Valley, and Purple Line Transit Neighborhood Plan, are unambitious and do little to create significant amounts of new housing capacity. This approach also allows high-resource neighborhoods whose community plan update processes have not yet started, like Brentwood-Pacific Palisades and Westwood, to avoid zoning reforms that are necessary to accommodate the City’s RHNA goal. This is unfair.
• The “status quo” approach does not reflect the input given by the Housing Element Task Force, a diverse group of community leaders, special needs service providers, affordable and market-rate housing developers, and other housing and community development professionals who represent a wide range of expertise. The Housing Element Task Force requested that the City: 
  • “update the citywide growth strategy to ensure equity is a core part of future land use decisions,” 
  • “develop citywide housing goals by Community Plan areas to ensure more equitable distribution of affordable housing,” 
  • “strategically increase housing opportunities in lower density areas,”
  • “provide land use incentives/preferences in high resource areas for affordable housing developments,” 
  • “increase access to opportunities and proactively desegregate the City by planning for more affordable and mixed-income housing in high resource areas,” 
  • “facilitate missing middle housing options through the new zoning code.”
• The “status quo” plan is directly opposite to the goals developed on the Task Force because it perpetuates patterns of segregation and fails to meaningfully increase housing production in lower-density and higher-opportunity areas.

Finally, it is worth noting that the racist practice of redlining, which divided our city’s neighborhoods by race and income, strongly influenced zoning laws that remain on the books today, defining where affordable housing may and may not be built. On the maps below, you can see that single-family zoning today is frequently concentrated in areas that were labeled “desirable” (green and blue) in the 1930s, and that new apartment production is generally allowed only in areas that were labeled as “declining” or “hazardous” (yellow and red) when redlining was legal. Consequently, Planning’s proposed site inventory map appears to promote most housing growth in areas that were once labeled as “declining” or “hazardous”.

Clearly, a “status quo” approach to the housing element that fails to undertake meaningful zoning reform would simply reinforce the barriers that redlining created in our communities decades ago.

For all these reasons, we strongly oppose Planning’s “status quo” approach to the housing element update. Fortunately, there is still time to change course and create an equitable, transformative housing element. 

While housing element updates are due to HCD by October 15, 2021, the City could request that HCD approve a housing element conditionally. This would give Planning additional time to make necessary revisions. Recently, HCD approved San Diego’s housing element update on a conditional basis, giving San Diego an additional six months to “amend the element and address requirements related to affirmatively furthering fair housing and making findings to demonstrate the likelihood of redevelopment on nonvacant sites.” There’s no reason why Los Angeles shouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to get the housing element right, especially given that HCD is likely to scrutinize the same issues that we’ve identified above.

We request the opportunity to meet with you to discuss this matter, and we urge you to instruct the Department of City Planning to revise its approach to the housing element update. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,