Every week, we round up the week’s biggest housing news for the Abundant Housing LA newsletter.
The LA Times documented the “financial implosion” of the Skid Row Housing Trust, Mayor Bass’ effort to use vacant city-owned properties for housing, Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s declaration that Californians should “stay in California.”
On the op-ed page, Jason Ward wrote about how the owner-occupancy requirement “effectively rule[s] out any professional builder, large or small, from using SB 9 unless they want to purchase one property at a time and live on it while the lot is split and, at most, three new units of housing are created.”
In California news, Scott Wiener announced an effort to make is landmark 2017 housing-streamlining bill SB 35 permanent (you can read more about SB 35 and SB 423 here), Attorney General Rob Bonta warned Huntington Beach that their proposed law to block Builder’s Remedy projects is illegal, and housing prices seem to be falling slightly.
The national press covered the trend toward homeowners declining to sell their properties when they move out, instead turning them into rental properties and New York Governor Hochul’s efforts to encourage new housing construction.
And if you’re looking for a long read on housing problems elsewhere in the country, the Middlebury professor Gary Winslett’s substack piece on “How Vermont’s Housing Crisis Got So Bad” is excellent.
