As her reelection campaign was heating up, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass held a news conference last month at an apartment complex recently built above the Vermont/Santa Monica station on the Metro B Line.
Her message: During her first term in office, the city has tackled high rents by facilitating construction of more than 10,000 new income-restricted apartments.
“Today marks an important milestone in our work to make Los Angeles more affordable for the people who call this city home,” Bass said outside the colorful, six-story apartment building.
Affordability, she said, was the city’s “number one issue.”
L.A. voters who agree with that assessment will need to decide in Tuesday’s election whether Bass has done enough on housing affordability to merit a second term, or whether her challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, would do a better job addressing the deep-rooted problem.
Bass vs. Raman
Raman has pitched herself as the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) alternative to L.A.’s status quo, bucking consensus opinion among elected leaders who have often been skeptical about the benefits of new housing construction. As a result, she has at times struggled to win majority support on the council for pro-development proposals.
Bass has made several policy changes aimed at boosting affordable housing production. But housing policy experts say the results have been mixed. One thing she didn’t mention in her announcement at the Metro stop housing project was that the building that served as a backdrop had been funded by Proposition HHH.
That $1.2 billion measure to build units for formerly unhoused tenants was supported by former Mayor Eric Garcetti and passed by voters a decade ago.
About half of the building’s 187 units are not available for most renters — they’re reserved for people exiting homelessness, in accordance with the goals of Prop. HHH. The other half is open only to tenants earning less than 50% of the area’s median income.
Jason Ward, an economist and director at Santa Monica-based policy research organization the RAND Housing Center, said permanent supportive housing units can help get chronically unhoused people off the streets, but they have “nothing to do with the housing affordability of an average low-income Angeleno household.”
An LAist analysis found that about 40% of the 10,000 affordable units built during Bass’ time in office were in projects funded by Prop. HHH. That measure passed in 2016, long before her inauguration in late 2022.
“Things that really allowed HHH to have a pretty big impact all preceded the mayor's term,” Ward said. “Any projects getting built in a current mayor's four-year term, you can just basically assume that [mayor] didn't have a lot to do with the conditions that enabled them to begin.”
LAist asked Bass’ campaign about her statements outside the apartment complex above the Metro station. A spokesperson sent LAist an email saying, “Los Angeles underbuilt housing for decades,” and “Mayor Bass changed that.”
“But the Mayor is not satisfied,” the spokesperson continued. “She's continuing to take action to finally address our city's housing crisis."
Housing accomplishments under Bass
Some housing policy experts give Bass credit for taking some meaningful steps to speed up low-income housing creation, which they say is needed in a city where about 60% of renters spend more on housing than is considered affordable under federal government standards.
Bass signed off on what is, perhaps, her signature housing reform during her first week in office. Her Executive Directive One (ED 1) speeds up city permitting for projects where all units have rents capped at levels deemed affordable to low- and moderate-income tenants.
Developers responded to the program’s fast-tracking by submitting plans for more than 47,000 income-restricted apartments.
Shane Phillips, the housing initiative manager for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, openly supports Raman. But he said ED 1 has been a positive change for L.A.
“It's certainly not enough, but I think it was an effective policy,” Phillips said. “In some ways, the mayor's office, I think, was a little surprised by how effective it was.”
Most of those ED 1 units remain unbuilt. Again, completing new housing developments often takes longer than a single mayoral term.
Bass’ campaign told LAist that 7,728 units in ED 1 projects are currently under construction, and 418 units are now ready for occupancy.
Bass says the affordable units completed during her time in office represent a fourfold increase from levels under the Garcetti administration.
But L.A. remains far short of meeting the housing production targets laid out in a state-required planning process. To reach those goals, the city would need to build about 23,000 units of affordable housing every year.
“We don't have a lot to be super proud of,” Phillips said. “We've kind of had this trade-off where, yes, we've been building more low-income affordable housing than in past years. But that's been offset by a reduction in housing production overall. And it's housing production overall that actually affects prices and rents for the city as a whole.”
L.A. is not alone in failing to keep up with its state housing production targets. Most cities are far behind. But Bass’ opponent argues the city could be doing much more to reach those goals.
Where has Raman disagreed with Bass?
Raman’s positions on some major housing policies offer a stark contrast with Bass.
Before it was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Bass opposed SB 79, a recent state law that overrides local zoning restrictions to allow more housing density near major public transit lines. She said the law could “disproportionately impact low-resource neighborhoods.”
A majority of the City Council joined Bass in opposing SB 79. But Raman, who until recently chaired the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, voted against the council’s opposition, saying state lawmakers were right to push reluctant city officials toward permitting more homes.
After ED 1 applications began flooding in, angering some homeowners near proposed projects, Bass rolled back the program. She canceled ED 1 near single-family zones and in historic districts. Nearly three-quarters of L.A.’s residential land remains reserved for single-family homes, and this zoning has been protected by Bass and other elected leaders.
Raman was the lone council member to favor allowing some controversial ED 1 projects to move forward. Her position earned strong disapproval from some homeowners in her district.
Court rulings later found that the city illegally blocked the projects.
“Working Angelenos are leaving the city every single day because they can’t afford to pay the rent,” Raman said in a recent forum. “We can change the policies in the city that have made Los Angeles one of the slowest, most unpredictable, most expensive places to build.”
Bass’ case against Raman
Bass has said that taking a more permissive approach to market-rate housing development could harm existing tenants. She has said she believes new market-rate apartments can end up gentrifying neighborhoods.
“We need housing, but we cannot displace Black and Brown people,” Bass said at another recent forum. “If you have housing that is just built anywhere and everywhere, they're coming for us.”
Bass has also said Raman’s talk on housing hasn’t produced enough results for her district, which stretches from Encino east through the Hollywood Hills and into Los Feliz. Bass’ administration says Raman’s district has seen 130 affordable units completed in the last four years, the second-lowest of any council district.
The Raman campaign has said her district was redrawn in 2022 to exclude many of the neighborhoods where affordable apartments could be built. The single-family zones that dominate her district now restrict low-income units more than in other districts, they’ve said.
“Comparing raw unit totals across districts with very different zoning doesn’t show which offices are actually doing the work to get housing built,” a campaign spokesperson said in an email.
In L.A.’s political system, mayors need to work closely with the City Council on major legislative reforms. But during Raman’s time in City Hall, she has not been able to convince a majority of her colleagues to explore making certain single-family zones more dense, to exempt new apartments from the city’s “mansion tax” or to join her in other housing-related reforms.
“There's a lot of unwillingness to do things dramatically different than the status quo, at least on average, in the City Council,” Ward said. “I think that's going to continue to be a challenge.”
A Raman campaign spokesperson told LAist in an email that some of her reforms, such as speeding up utility hookups for new buildings, could be enacted without council approval.
“Much of her platform is focused on cutting red tape and implementing bureaucratic reforms that fall squarely under the powers of the mayor,” they said.
Where the candidates are aligned
Both Bass and Raman have been eager to take credit for lowering the city’s rent control caps, which apply to annual rent increases for most of the city’s apartment dwellers.
As chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman oversaw legislative debate on the new policy, which lowered the city’s maximum allowable rent increase from 10% to 4%.
Bass signed that reform into law last year.
Both have also supported efforts to rein in Measure ULA, the city’s so-called “mansion tax.” Many economists blame the tax, which applies to all kinds of real estate selling for more than $5.4 million, for dragging down the development of new apartment buildings.
Bass said her support for “mansion tax” reforms at the state level fell apart as Sacramento lawmakers hit a legislative deadline last year.
Raman’s proposal to ask voters to cancel the tax on new apartment buildings never made it to a vote in the City Council.
For more on Los Angeles-area races in the upcoming election, go to LAist's Voter Game Plan.
