Developers of affordable housing in California already have a rough time of it: funding is hard to secure; construction costs spiral; cities put up a fight for one reason or another. But Los Angeles’s bizarro bureaucracy routinely makes it impossible to quickly build lower- and moderate-income housing – and people are going broke, falling into homelessness, and dying because of it.
You’d think L.A.’s politicians would want to build more housing for the poor and working- and middle-class – pronto. After all, L.A. very recently reported a 3.4 percent spike in homelessness, with unsheltered homelessness increasing 7.9 percent. And there are 45,194 unhoused people in L.A. – and that’s probably an undercount.
There’s more disturbing news.
Eviction Lab, the very prestigious research institute at Princeton University (an institute that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson should pay full attention to), found unaffordable rents are tied to higher mortality rates.
“Someone paying half or more of their income towards rents was nine percent more likely to die over the next 20 years compared with someone paying a third of their income towards rents,” Eviction Lab wrote. “Meanwhile, someone paying 70 percent of their income toward rent was 12 percent more likely to die.”
The poor and middle- and working-class folks, who are getting slammed the hardest by unfair, sky-high rents, are obviously at high risk.
Then a massive homeless study by the University of California San Francisco, which was commissioned by the Newsom administration, found that the overriding reason that people fall into homelessness is that outrageous rents are pushing them into the street.
“People are homeless because their rent is too high. And their options are too few. And they have no cushion,” Dr. Margot Kushel, the lead investigator of the study, told the Associated Press. “And it really makes you wonder how different things would look if we could solve that underlying problem.”
She’s talking to every politician in California.
In addition, homeless deaths in the Los Angeles area increased every year between 2014 and 2021, with nearly 10,000 unhoused men and women, of all ages, passing away on the street. And activists think that number could be higher.
So let’s keep all of that in mind as we delve into the bizarro bureaucracy at L.A. City Hall.
While people are trying to figure out if they should pay the rent or use that cash for life-saving medications, and while people are shelling out a large chunk of the paychecks for rent and then face a higher possibility of a stroke, and while people can’t pay sky-high rents, fall into homelessness, and die, it’s widely known that affordable-housing developers are waiting years – yes, years! – to get the approvals and permits needed to build moderate- and lower-income housing in Los Angeles.
(If you don’t know how development works in L.A., a builder needs to get approvals first, then permits after that.)
And since affordable-housing developers are waiting years, there’s the real possibility that they’ll lose funding to build – and as the years go by, construction costs will definitely go up.
On top of that, it’s also widely known that city departments, which L.A.’s mayor manages, don’t even talk to each other as affordable-housing developments go through the approval and permitting process. Read that sentence again.
Routinely, insiders have seen, one city department is waiting extended periods of time for a permit from another city department so the project, which will save lives, can keep moving forward.
In fact, it’s common for a city department to be unable to even contact another city department to know when the permit will finally arrive.
Think about that for a second.
A person at one city department sends an email or calls a person at another city department to see how things are going. And that person gets total silence – while thousands of people are dying on the streets and trying to avoid heart attacks because the rent is too damn high.
Things are so bad at L.A. City Hall that it’s widely known that affordable-housing developers have actually been approached by a city department, asking if the developers have any contacts at another department so they can breach the wall of silence. Incredible!
And that’s just a few stories about L.A.’s scandalous bureaucratic mess that’s stopping the construction of thousands of lower- and moderate-income apartments.
So besides getting on the horn and ordering city managers to talk to each other, we offer Bass and Harris-Dawson a few ways to start fixing the red tape at city hall.
These are just a few suggestions to get things moving, as it were. Bass and Harris-Dawson should also look at the seemingly arbitrary decisions made by city departments to stall affordable-housing development. To wit:
- Reduce the amount of time for an affordable-housing developer to get approvals – and then, crucially, reduce the amount of time it takes to get permits.
- A development should go through one, comprehensive review. Once that’s completed, city departments can’t come back with additional issues. (Yes, that’s not the case now.)
- Any approval that’s made in a prior step of the approval process can’t be reviewed again in a later step. (Seems like common sense.)
It’ll be interesting to see if L.A.’s mayoral race brings up city hall’s lethal red tape that’s halting the construction of affordable housing. The politicians can’t say they haven’t been warned or not given a plan to start to fix things.
Some say power corrupts, but, in fact, power reveals, as prize-winning historian Robert Caro, who’s studied power for decades, often says. And if L.A.’s mayor and city council, who have the power, do nothing to expedite approvals and permits for lower- and moderate-income housing, they’re revealing that they care little about the plight of the poor and middle and working class.
Power reveals.
Patrick Range McDonald is a veteran investigative reporter and the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.