“Parting is such sweet sorrow…” - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2
This is my last week as a full-time staff member at Abundant Housing LA. As Policy and Research Director over the past two years (and volunteer Research Director before that), it’s been my job to make a data-driven, fact-focused public case for housing abundance throughout California, and for well-designed reforms that can help us build that future.
This mission has been challenging, rewarding, and profoundly meaningful, and I’m excited to now pass the torch to David Barboza. David is a longtime former planner for the City of Lakewood, a co-founder of Homes for Whittier, and a graduate of the masters’ program in urban planning at USC Price. With David, we’re in very good hands.
Inspired by David’s recent articles about how his neighborhoods have shaped his worldview on housing reform, I’ve been doing some thinking this week on my own path to YIMBY advocacy and Abundant Housing LA.
Like most YIMBYs, I came to Abundant Housing LA without strong knowledge of housing or planning, and found much of the jargon surrounding the field (“conditional use permits”, “discretionary review”, “housing elements”) totally unfamiliar.
But I was attracted to AHLA’s focus on using facts and data to advocate for comprehensive housing reform; in an issue area pervasive with misinformation, anger, and fear, AHLA stood apart, providing a breath of fresh air. As I got more involved, my fellow members encouraged me to dive into housing data sources and see what I could learn from them. Once I found that I was good at taking messy datasets, synthesizing them, and creating blog posts and interactive maps that illustrated the nature of Los Angeles’ housing crisis, I knew that I’d found something that I wanted to work on more.
And so as Policy and Research Director, I sought to advance AHLA’s mission in three ways:
- Leading our efforts to create data-driven housing policy analysis and research
- Educating the public on the nature of California’s housing crisis and on policy solutions
- Collaborating with AHLA volunteers, interns, and academics to comment on and develop policy proposals
Today, looking back on the past two years, I’m proud to say that our organization has made major strides in all three of those areas.
I’m most excited about what we accomplished in our housing element advocacy. Last year, we audited 15 cities’ housing element updates, shedding light on major inadequacies and violations of state law baked into these plans. We partnered with MapCraft, an economic and policy analysis firm with housing policy expertise, to forecast the true amount of housing growth that could occur under 10 key cities’ proposed housing elements. We found that almost half the housing units that cities claimed would be built are infeasible to build in reality, providing added evidence that these cities’ housing elements were deficient. We wrote comment letters to HCD early and often, and discussed our concerns about poor housing elements in meetings with HCD staff members.
These efforts are getting results: HCD has started pushing back against bad housing elements. Last month, they refused to certify Beverly Hills and Redondo Beach’s housing elements, urging these cities to make major revisions.
Most promising of all: the City of Los Angeles adopted a high-quality housing element that would rezone for 1.4 million units of new housing capacity, with nearly half of new zoned capacity accommodated in high-resource neighborhoods. If fully implemented, the plan will help the City meet its goal of building 450,000 more homes by the end of the decade.
The housing element update process is difficult to decode and was historically ineffective at encouraging housing growth, and could have easily slipped under the radar. But thanks to our energetic campaigning for the Coastal Plan at SCAG in late 2019, and thanks to dozens of YIMBYs who spent their spare hours parsing through planning documents and attending city council hearings, we were well-equipped to take action.
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We’ve also made progress on statewide reform: last year, Senate Bill 9 legalized duplexes and lot splits, and Senate Bill 10 makes it easier for cities to rezone land to accommodate up to 10 homes. Both bills received crucial support from L.A. County’s Assembly and Senate delegations, aiding their passage.
Bringing forward our first co-sponsored bill, Assembly Bill 1401, was another major step. This bill, which would have made on-site parking optional for buildings near transit, passed the Assembly and came close to Senate passage last year. When opponents attacked the bill on the mistaken grounds that parking reform would somehow discourage affordable housing construction, we rebutted this argument through original research, published in Streetsblog, demonstrating that a similar parking reform in San Diego was associated with a six-fold increase in affordable housing production. We’re hopeful that statewide parking reform will achieve passage in 2022.
AHLA has also established itself as a trusted, data-driven voice on housing reform, which is why our work is regularly published in major media outlets. Our policy advocacy has appeared on the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Daily News op-ed pages, as well as in City Observatory, Urbanize, and Streetsblog, helping us reach a larger, broader audience.
Speaking of reaching a broader audience, we frequently give policy-focused presentations to a diverse range of organizations and clubs. Over the past year, I’ve been a guest speaker for business organizations, like the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, the Hollywood Partnership, and the California Association of Realtors; tenants’ rights and affordable housing advocates, like Making Housing and Community Happen in Pasadena and Monrovia Housing and Tenant Advocates; planning organizations, like the Urban Land Institute and Circulate San Diego; and academic audiences, like the UCLA Luskin Data Informed Governance conference. Besides just being fun, giving these presentations furthers our mission to inform the public on the housing crisis, and to build bridges with groups who seek to be part of the solution.
Finally, I’m especially proud of creating a policy and research student internship program, which is incubating the next generation of housing policy talent. Rob Lynn-Green and David Edimo undertook sobering research on the link between housing costs and homelessness, and Lauren Nip took the lead on auditing Long Beach and West Hollywood’s housing elements. All three of them are distinguishing themselves in data-driven professional settings today, and David is vice-chair of AHLA’s Board.
So we’ve achieved a quantum leap in policy and research over the past two years. But we still have a long way to go before achieving housing abundance and affordability for all.
Right now, anti-housing cities are trying to kneecap SB 9 by making duplex construction infeasible, just as they tried to block ADUs a few years ago. It’s not clear whether HCD will ultimately keep the pressure on cities to adopt and implement high-quality housing elements, and whether Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration will sue cities that refuse. And two years after the defeat of Senate Bill 50, the path to rezoning and streamlining dense housing production in high-cost areas near jobs and transit is still unclear.
The obstacles we face are significant. But we’re going to overcome these obstacles. That’s because on our side, we have the facts, the data, and — most importantly — the energy of thousands of passionate, creative neighbors who love Los Angeles and its people. And that’s why we’re going to win the fight for housing.
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