LA City offers realistic capacity assessment for the housing element update, acknowledges significant rezoning is needed
Other cities should learn from LA’s data-driven site inventory analysis.
Last week, the City of Los Angeles released its long-awaited draft housing element, a roadmap for how the City will encourage the production of over 450,000 new homes by 2029. We’re still working through all the details, but one positive sign is that the housing element includes a high-quality, data-driven site inventory analysis – essentially, a fair estimate of the City’s current realistic capacity for new housing.
Here’s why this matters: for a city to successfully achieve the RHNA housing growth goal, the housing element needs to fairly estimate how much capacity the city has for housing growth under current law. To do this, cities must estimate how much theoretical zoned capacity they have, but also how likely it is for individual parcels to be redeveloped in the coming years. That way, cities can rezone enough parcels to meet the RHNA housing growth goal – the same way that UCLA admits a class of 4,000 students when they want 2,000 students to attend.
We are delighted to see LA’s site inventory analysis includes a thorough quantitative model that estimates this likelihood, and the housing element acknowledges that significant rezoning is needed for LA to achieve its RHNA goal. Our friend Professor Chris Elmendorf has a more detailed explanation here.
But most cities’ site inventories are completely missing the mark. Cities like Santa Monica, South Pasadena, and Beverly Hills aren’t including any analysis of the likelihood of development, which allows them to pretend that they don’t have to rezone to meet the RHNA goal. It’s a recipe for failure and continued housing scarcity.
Every city in Los Angeles County needs to adopt high-quality housing elements that fully accord with state law and expert recommendations, and this includes a fair estimate of realistic capacity and development likelihood. They don’t have to do it the exact same way that LA did, but they have to do something.
Chris Elmendorf Chris S. Elmendorf is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. Professor Elmendorf’s varied teaching and research interests include election law, property and land-use law, statutory interpretation, and administrative law. For this housing element update cycle, Professor Elmendorf collaborated with YIMBY groups to create a Housing Element Audit Tool (HEAT), empowering community members to review and critique their city’s housing element and learn about land use laws.
Follow Chris on Twitter
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Pushed Out: LA’s Unhoused Women LAist More than 50% of the unhoused women nationwide are survivors of domestic violence. In Los Angeles, close to 40% of women who are homeless experienced abuse in the last 12 months.
Driven by shame and fear, suffering in isolation, women in abusive situations often leave with nothing and nowhere to go. Their heartbreaking stories shed light on the many crushing mechanisms that ultimately drive them onto the streets, homeless.
Research
A new study from USC shows exactly how the severe housing shortage impacts the housing market dynamic. Using “residential mobility” as a measurement, researchers found that the lack of new rental/for-sale constructions essentially creates a gridlock in the rental market: renters who would’ve moved or bought are stuck in their current units, freezing the “vacancy chain” (a series of vacancies triggered by households moving). While being stuck in the middle-high end market brings no dire consequences, being stuck in the low-end of the housing market may mean dealing with unhealthy living situations or being squeezed out of the market altogether, becoming unhoused.
This week in…
mobility justice Car culture disproportionately kills Black Americans. The pandemic made things worse./ Grist
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lesson from Madrid These Families Wanted a Village, So They Built Their Own / Bloomberg CityLab
metro news LA Metro Will Pursue Alternatives to Police When Dealing with The Homeless / NBC Palm Springs
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