We all come to housing advocacy from different places, literally and figuratively. As I take on the role of Director of Policy and Research for Abundant Housing LA, I wanted to take some time to introduce myself, in the context of the five neighborhoods where I have lived. This is the fifth installment of the “Housing Lessons From My Neighborhoods” series. You can read the previous post here.
Uptown Whittier
Greenleaf Avenue, Uptown Whittier. Photo: David Barboza.
I graduated from USC with a Master’s Degree in city planning, with a concentration in sustainable land use, straight into the maw of the aftermath of the Great Recession. It took a while to get my footing professionally, and in the meantime, it was back to living with my parents, which I am grateful I was able to do, even though I was disappointed to have to leave Koreatown. I eventually started working for the City of Lakewood (more on that another time), first in GIS and then as a planner. My finances started coming together and my then girlfriend (now wife) and I got our first apartment together in Uptown Whittier. This is another great reason to support housing: couples need places to live together and grow in their relationships.
Whittier is a city of about 90,000 people in eastern Los Angeles County. We chose to live in Whittier because it was affordable, reasonably close to both of our jobs, and Uptown is just awesome. It’s basically the neighborhood around Whittier’s historic downtown, centered on Greenleaf Avenue. It’s a walkable main street where buildings come up to the sidewalk, have entrances on the sidewalk and the parking is in back or consolidated in lots and garages off the main street. The roadway is narrow but the sidewalks are wide and there is a gorgeous canopy of mature Ficus trees. There’s a private college nearby along with tons of great restaurants, shops and even a movie theater. The housing stock is a mix of detached houses, townhomes, bungalow courts, and apartments.
Of course, Whittier has its flaws. The transit leaves something to be desired. There are no rail transit stops in Whittier currently, although we are supposed to get a light rail stop eventually, that will unfortunately just miss Uptown. The bus service is divided among several different operators and isn’t always frequent. Much of the city is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, and many mid-century tracts in the city outside of Uptown lack basic infrastructure, like sidewalks. The political climate is often hostile to new housing. With the encouragement and support of Abundant Housing LA, I co-founded a group called Homes For Whittier, that’s working to change that.
My neighborhood is a formerly redlined area that the federal government described as “somewhat infiltered by Mexicans and Negroes” in 1939, and as a result would not insure mortgages here during the redlining era, sharply reducing homeownership opportunities. My census tract is in the 93rd percentile of CalEnviroScreen’s Housing Burden Indicator score, which looks at the percentage of lower-income households who spend at least half their income on housing. This means we’re more severely impacted on this measure than 93% of census tracts in the state. In the alley behind my home, it’s not uncommon to see people digging through the trash to find things to use or recycle, a hustle nobody should have to resort to. When I see these folks I think about their strength and determination to survive in a society that seems not to care much about their needs, hopes, and dreams.
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Going back to the theme of privilege, I should mention that I’m a homeowner. My wife and I were very fortunate to be able to purchase a townhouse in Uptown, not far from where we first moved out together. This was a response to the joyful panic that ensued when we found out we were going to be parents. If you’re not familiar with townhomes, they’re typically two or three-story houses that share at least one wall on the side. Only about 6% of the homes in LA County are townhomes per the ACS, compared to about 48% of the homes being detached. Because townhomes sit on less land than a typical detached house, they are more affordable, but they’re typically less dense than apartments. My particular complex clocks in at about 30 units per acre.
Homeownership is not the right choice for everyone, and we need to center the experiences and needs of renters, who tend to be more severely impacted by the housing affordability crisis, in our advocacy. However, homeownership is something we should strive to make available to those who want it. A big advantage of homeownership is stable housing costs. I have a fixed-rate mortgage. My HOA dues are reasonable and pretty stable. My property taxes don’t rise more than 2% per year due to Prop 13. I fully acknowledge the need for Prop 13 reform so cities have incentives to permit housing and have money to pay for affordable housing. Reforming Prop 13 is also necessary in order to address its inequities, such as the fact that new homeowners pay much more in property taxes than longtime homeowners. We can create a more equitable and rational property tax system without pricing people out of their homes.
At the end of the day, I care about housing affordability because I want everyone to have the opportunities I’ve had, because we need better urban design to solve the climate crisis, because we have to undo the legacy of systemic racism in the built environment, and because there are just too many people suffering due to high housing costs. Los Angeles County is my home, and for everyone else who calls it home or wants to, Abundant Housing LA has your back. We can solve the housing affordability crisis, if we work together.
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