The Los Angeles Mayoral Housing Summit: A Bag Full of Tricks

by Tony Chavira

Let's cut right to the chase: property value is plummeting, people are defaulting on their loans, the economy is taking a downturn, repossessions are rampant, and equity isn't worth the six letters it took me to type it.

Where are the solutions (and it's only taken about 70 years to work our way up to this conclusion)?

Responsible urban design and workforce housing!

At the 2007 Mayoral Housing Summit (held October 17 at UCLA's Anderson School of Management), city and elected officials, developers, and builders came together to basically "begin a dialog" on what we can do to lead ourselves out of the slum. Mayor Villaraigosa was quick to bring up that the cost of housing in Los Angeles is now the highest in the United States, City Planning Department Director Gail Goldberg was quick to point out that the roads and parking may not be able to handle the population growth, and CRA Chief Cecilia Estolano was quick to point out that infrastructure upgrades in transportation particularly have become absolutely imperative.

As always, lots of promises were made. Lynn Jacobs at the State Department of Housing and Community has high hopes for Proposition 1C (the Housing and Emergency Shelter Trust Fund Act of 2006) to provide more cash for developers and cities to beef up their workforce housing. Proposition 46 (same act, in 2002) has brought about 122,000 affordable units to California, so that's pretty decent evidence that Prop 1C would be useful. Most interestingly, Jacobs brought up the concept which seemed to be the theme of the day: Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). TOD is basically all about putting more emphasis on development around public transportation hubs (like the light rail or bus hubs) in L.A., which seems like a smart idea considering we could save a TON of cash by leaving our cars at home on the weekdays.

American Plaza Station,
San Diego; center of a TOD.

Developers need their own set of incentives, especially considering that the majority of developers in L.A. aren't big national groups with tons of cash to blow. It's hard to put together good affordable housing when there's confusion between which government jurisdiction has the final say in an area, and existing codes aren't necessarily being enforced (like the percentage of affordable units required in all developments or the requirement for civic inclusion). When the policies are unpredictable, there aren't enough local incentives for developers, there's no infrastructure to handle the development, and there aren't enough subsidies for the actual family who's going to live there, why would a developer even think about going affordable with their units? Needless to say, the summit had a lot to tackle in just a few hours.

In terms of aligning city policies, Mayor Villaraigosa seemed to have made good with his promise for better interdepartmental communication. Seemed like Mercedes Marquez (the L.A. Housing Department General Manager), Gail Goldberg (the L.A. City Planning Department Director) and Cecilia Estolano (CEO of the Community Redevelopment Agency) have been having biweekly meetings to make sure that their staff are working in conjunction with each other both on developers' projects and their own pro-active ones. I left the summit with a deep respect for the work that these three officials do to tie together the city of Los Angeles, which says a lot considering that I went in planning for this story to be a rant about the fulfillment of promises.

The various officials covered incentives for both the developer and the end-buyer, all speaking about their work to streamline the number of steps you need to take in order to get money for TOD. When Cecilia Estolano told the crowd about the CRA's plans to put some money and focus on the Olympic/Soto Sears Building area, I literally clapped until my hands hurt. The state decided to focus their transportation efforts on heavy instead of light rail (to the dismay of the East L.A. Gold Line), but we were promised by Lynn Jacobs a second round to adjust for the needs of Los Angeles.

photo: Rich DuBose

Last but certainly not least (especially since it was the buzz-acronym of the day), everyone was exploding over the idea of TOD (especially master-planning developers throughout the crowd). How are we going to do it, you ask? Two words: Incentive Zoning. Let me summarize: if I worked for city planning and had 20 blocks of space where I wanted development, I'm sure I could find developers. But what if all of the developers were jerks who ALL wanted to put motels in that area? Eventually, it might become one of two things: Vegas or trashy (and with motels, most likely trashy). So how do I avoid this? Well, I'll just zone the area for "Housing Development," "Apartments," or "Commercial" for small businesses and stores. Lo and behold, I've zoned off a whole community and now only developers who are interested in providing housing and commerce will be attracted to the space. The politics of this aren't always that easy (and some areas of L.A. haven't changed zoning since the 1930s), so it's a pretty complex thing to mandate throughout the entire city.  Transit-Oriented Development can do a lot for everyone in L.A. (alleviate the traffic, lower pollution, relieve sitting-angrily-in-traffic stress, etc.) so why not zone off workforce housing around the Gold, Red, Blue, Green or whatever lines?

We can't expect any of these things to happen overnight, of course, but at the same time we can't just sit back and swallow rhetoric without seeing results. Check out the list of people who spoke at the summit and follow their progress yourself. What kind of community watchdog would we be if we didn't bark every once in a while?

Note: several Housing Summit presentations are available here.