The Brief

The apartment building planned on East Morris Avenue in Modesto is exactly the kind of thing that California’s political leaders want to see a whole lot more of: The project promises 44 units of affordable housing — half reserved for people without homes. It’s received zoning approval, weathered public feedback, earned the support of local elected officials and sits beside a busy bus line. Once built, the project promises on-site mental health services, job training and Zumba classes.

What the project lacks is money.

Having quilted together a financial patchwork of local government and corporate grants, private debt, and a plot of land donated by a foundation, it remains just shy of the total needed to break ground.

Six years and 13 funding applications after it was first proposed, the Morris Village project sits ready, but waiting.

An estimated 39,880 affordable units across California are stuck in financial purgatory, according to a new report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that funds, consults and advocates for affordable housing. That’s 461 “shovel-ready developments” that, like the one on East Morris, are fully designed, legally green-lit and backed with a significant — but still insufficient — amount of money.

Many have “been sitting for a year or two waiting for funding,” said Justine Marcus, policy director for Enterprise’s Northern California office and one of the report’s co-authors. “There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”

For many developers and affordable housing advocates, that bottleneck represents an especially frustrating inconsistency of California public policy. Lawmakers are desperate to see the state build more homes — of all kinds, but especially for people with the least ability to pay the state’s exorbitant rents. State housing regulators have ordered local governments to plan for the construction of an additional 2.5 million units by the end of the decade. One million of those are supposed to be for people making less than 80% of each region’s median income.

As a general rule, that’s a population of hard-up renters that the private market has been unable to profitably serve at scale. To fill that gap, non-profit low-income housing developers typically turn to taxpayer-funded support. At the moment, according to the report, there isn’t enough of that to go around.

Enterprise took publicly available but hard-to-parse applicant lists from seven subsidy programs administered by various wings of California’s state government going back three years. With a combination of number crunching and a little inference, the report estimates that clearing the current backlog would require an extra $4.1 billion, split between state administered grants, low-cost loans and tax write-offs.

Once awarded, this final layer of state subsidy has to be spent in relatively short order. That means this list of 39,880 units comprise a group of affordable housing projects that are all but ready to go, said Marcus. “They kinda have to have their (stuff) together.”

Case in point: Two-thirds of the projects on the list have already received support from at least one other state program. Those dollars aren't awarded to just any developer, said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, one of two non-profits behind Morris Village.

“These are all projects that are close to amenities,” she said. “These are all projects providing resident services. These are all projects that are financially feasible...They are all meeting the bar for what we want to see as a state out of our affordable housing community.”

In February, McGovern-Garcia and her colleagues applied for a final round of financial support from the state “to close the gap” and finally start construction.

“We are optimistic this might be our round,” she said in an interview, her fingers crossed.

A moving bottleneck

California has seen gridlock in affordable housing production before, but the precise location of the traffic jam has changed over time.

When Nevada Merriman was leading a team of affordable developers in Silicon Valley a decade ago, she said local approval was the major hold-up. Getting the legal okay to build low-income housing on a particular site in a particular town required developers to run a gauntlet of planning department and city council meetings, win over hostile neighbors with costly concessions, community meetings and design revisions and to fend off the ever-present possibility of litigation. Because relatively few projects survived that ordeal, the competition for funding on the other side wasn’t especially stiff, said Merriman, who is now policy advocate for MidPen Housing, an affordable developer in San Mateo County.

That began to change earlier this decade. California lawmakers began passing laws overriding these local impediments — especially for affordable projects. All of a sudden more projects were clearing those early regulatory hurdles and competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal government’s signature affordable housing construction subsidy. The bottleneck moved further up the road.

But then that too began to change late last year. Buried in President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill from 2025 was a significant boost to the tax credit program. (Specifically, the law increased the total supply of one type of credit while allowing another kind to be spread out over twice as many projects).

Which brings us to the latest bottleneck.

Now projects can get through local approval. They can more easily acquire the final and most important layer of federal financing. But project sponsors typically can’t apply for that until all other financial holes are plugged.

“We’re looking for state sources to fill that gap,” said Merriman. “We want to make sure we don’t leave those federal sources on the table.”

MidPen currently has 1,198 units spread across seven developments waiting for that last bit of funding, she said. “Should there be a source…there’s a pipeline that is ready to go.”

“There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”Justine Marcus, Northern California policy director, Enterprise Community PartnersCalifornia’s last major infusion of public affordable housing dollars came in the form of a voter-approved bond in 2018. That well has run dry. A hodgepodge of funding streams remain.

Adding together funding that has already been approved by legislators but not yet spent and a variety of other state and federal sources, California’s Housing and Community Development department says at least $1.8 billion should be available for affordable developer applicants this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year doesn’t include any new discretionary spending beyond that.

Boosters of more funding have reasons to be optimistic. Newsom has taken such an austere posture in early budget negotiations before only to have the Legislature successfully pour hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing subsidies back into the final budget agreement.

California lawmakers are also considering a record-breaking $10 billion affordable housing bond for the 2026 ballot. If a majority of voters go for that, “we’d be off to the races,” said Merriman.

Cutting costs

One way to get more affordable housing built is by spending more money. The other is trying to make the existing money go further by cutting costs.

The cost of affordable housing construction is notoriously high in California: A 2025 study estimated that tax credit-financed projects here cost two- to four-times the amount of comparable projects in Colorado and Texas. There is no single reason for this disparity. Land costs in California are significantly higher. So too, often, is the cost of labor. Regulatory barriers like restrictive zoning, slow permitting and stiff impact fees are frequently named as culprits. Sometimes old-fashioned construction methods and materials get blamed.

But there’s also the cost of just waiting around.

A typical affordable development in California will have two or three public funding sources, with some drawing on six or more. Many of these sources are awarded on their own timelines. Each has its own program-specific requirements that can take time to meet. Some are conditional on the receipt of another. As time goes by, developers still have to make payroll, pay interest on pre-construction loans and watch as inflation drives construction costs up further. As delays compound, funding sources that have already been secured might expire, setting things back further.

Each additional funding source delays the start of construction on a project by an average of four months, adding an extra $20,460 per unit, according to an analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

The Newsom administration is currently tinkering under the hood of California’s affordable housing finance system in an effort to speed things up.

Last year, the governor proposed the creation of the state’s first ever cabinet-level housing agency. The California Housing and Homelessness Agency is scheduled to take over the state’s disparate housing loan and grant programs. The governor’s office also proposed legislative language that would force the new agency and the Treasurer’s Office to operate in tandem, giving affordable housing developers a single place to apply for the state’s various funding programs — and to cut out some of the time they spend stuck in line.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A new free record shop for survivors of last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires is celebrating with a grand opening party Saturday night.

After losing his home in the Eaton Fire, Brandon Jay founded Altadena Musicians to get instruments back into the hands of musicians who lost their gear in fires.

Now he’s doing that with vinyl records, too.

“We want to be here to help replace those items and support music in people’s lives that can’t necessarily afford it right now because they’re saving all their pennies just to live and also just to rebuild their homes,” Jay told LAist.

Jay says they’ve seen roughly 3,000 records donated so far. Now they have a dedicated space on Lincoln Avenue where fire survivors can sign up for time slots and shop for up to 10 records a month.

“It’s a really lovely distraction but it kind of keeps me going as well just to know that we’re trying to build something great for the community and keep us all moving forward,” Jay said.

The store will carry copies of the benefit album, Gimme Shelter: Songs for LA Fire Relief. The compilation features cover art by Shepard Fairey and L.A. specific tracks from artists like Elliott Smith ("Angeles" of course), Norah Jones, The Flaming Lips, as well as a cover of "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads performed by Jay and about 50 other fire-impacted musicians.

Reggae star Ziggy Marley has spent decades carrying one of music’s most celebrated legacies. But until now, he had never written a song directly about his father, Bob Marley.

That’s changed with “Many Mourn for Bob,” a track on Marley’s ninth solo album Brightside, his first release recorded in his new studio in North Hollywood.

Marley was just 12 when his father died of cancer in 1981. Now 57, Marley says the song instinctually emerged after years of life experience and producing the biopic One Love, which revisited his father’s struggles like an assassination attempt amid political violence in Jamaica.

“He went through some things that was really tough on a human being – and just understanding him in that light is to have a little bit more emotional, deeper connection to his experience,” Marley said in an interview at his studio.

Searching for the bright side

The deeply personal track is part of a splashy return for Marley, who's touring behind Brightside and will perform at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21.

The new album blends political themes, optimism and musical experimentation.

Its lead single, “Racism Is a Killa,” featuring Big Boi, pairs the heavy topic with an upbeat groove that he hopes will make the song more accessible to young people.

“We just wanna come out straightforward, like I never want to come out tiptoeing,” Marley said. “I want to say something that can catch your ears or catch your thoughts.”

That tension between darkness and hope runs throughout Brightside. Marley described the album as a reflection on enduring difficult periods – from the pandemic to the Los Angeles wildfires – without losing sight of optimism.

“Sometimes we get lost in that so much that we don't realize that there is always a bright side,” Marley said.

The 432 Hz experiment

The album also experiments sonically: Marley recorded Brightside using 432 hertz tuning instead of the standard 440 hertz in most mainstream music. Advocates of 432 hertz believe it produces a warmer, more meditative sound better synced to the natural world. (You can hear the difference for yourself here.)

“It's a lower musical frequency, but it's a higher frequency in a next sense of your spirituality and emotion,” he said. “So even though the numbers go down, the frequency actually go up.”

Marley sees the move as part of a larger search for new creative approaches.

“I'm very open-minded and always trying to evolve and just experiment with life and music,” Marley said.

The Grammy winner, who joins James Blake and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead as the most high-profile artists to record at the lower frequency, floated the idea of a larger movement among artists.

“Let's just have a revolution in the music industry,” he said. “Let's change the frequency.”

Building a dream

Marley works out of his Rebel Lion Studio in North Hollywood, its name a nod to his 2018 album Rebellion Rises while also a play on the word “rebellion.”

He described the studio as an extension of the independent spirit his father built with Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica.

Musicians set up for rehearsal ahead of the next leg of Ziggy Marley's tour.

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“My father had a dream, and I had a dream too,” Marley said.

Like with Tuff Gong, Marley also plans to expand the studio operation to include vinyl pressing as records continue their resurgence in the streaming era.

“There’s always gonna be a vinyl present going on,” Marley said. “A thousand years from now, people that we're still gonna need vinyl records to listen to music.”

Ziggy Marley in the hallway of his new studio in North Hollywood.

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For years, Marley said, he worked out of smaller home setups and rented facilities before deciding to build a larger permanent space in L.A.

Marley said the city has become central to his own creative evolution over the last two decades of living and working here.

Drawn initially by music, friends and the city's small but tight-knit Jamaican community, he says being surrounded by creatives from different backgrounds helped push his artistry in new directions.

“I left my safety and my community, my tribe, and come out by myself to L.A.,” he said. “But it's a great experience. It really helped my growth as a human being being here.”

What’s next

Fresh off the release of Brightside, Marley says he’s already working on another album – a notably quicker turnaround since his last album, the family-music release More Family Time in 2020,

“We're doing back to back,” he said.

Ziggy Marley will be performing at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21 as part of a tour supporting his new album Brightside.

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He’s also busy writing a children’s book based on his feel-good hit anthem “True to Myself” and eyeing opportunities in front – or behind the camera – inspired by his time working on One Love and making the video for “Racism Is A Killa.”

“Same philosophy, same message, but within visuals, you know?” Marley said excitedly. “I want to create some stories and try out. I feel it coming. I can feel it.”

A City Council committee voted Friday to shelve a proposed ballot measure aimed at cutting L.A.'s “mansion tax” nearly in half.

The ad hoc committee on Measure ULA voted 2-1 to set aside a proposal by Councilmembers John Lee and Marqueece Harris-Dawson that would have asked voters in November to reduce the ULA transfer tax rate for multifamily and mixed-use properties to somewhere between 2% and 3.5%, down from the current rate of up to 5.5%.

However, the ballot measure proposal was also referred to the City Council’s rules, elections, and intergovernmental relations committee, which could still choose to move it forward.

Instead, the ad hoc committee advanced a narrower pilot program that would reduce the property transfer tax only for newly built affordable housing projects.

The pilot program won't need voter approval in the form of a ballot measure. Committee Chair Ysabel Jurado, who introduced the substitute language, said she believes the city should avoid a ULA ballot measure because it’s still too early to evaluate the measure’s long-term effects.

“ I'm against going to the ballot, but I'm for making fixes that make this better,” Jurado said.

Voters will see a separate proposal on their ballots by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to effectively repeal Measure ULA.

If the L.A. City Council does not approve reforming the measure, the only decision on the ballot in November may be whether to keep the mansion tax in its current form or end it.

About the mansion tax

L.A. voters approved Measure ULA in 2022 to fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. The measure taxes real estate sales over about $5 million. Since taking effect in April 2023, ULA has raised just over $1.1 billion from 1,633 real estate transactions, according to the city’s housing department.

The city projects it will generate about $500 million in the coming fiscal year — about half of what proponents initially promised. It has funded about 800 new affordable units and helped stabilize thousands of renters facing eviction, according to the housing department.

But critics say the tax has suppressed housing development. Several studies link the tax to a slowdown in apartment construction in Los Angeles, but ULA supporters say high interest rates and broader economic conditions are to blame.

The City Council's ad hoc committee on Measure ULA was formed earlier this year to study how the measure is working and develop potential reforms. That work took on more urgency inside L.A. city hall after the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association qualified a statewide ballot measure for November that would effectively repeal Measure ULA entirely.

Joe Donlin, director of the United to House LA coalition, which campaigned for the original measure, said the City Council committee made the right call by rejecting broader exemptions.

“By not taking up the extreme calls for broad, 15-year waivers that could cost the program about a third of its revenue, the committee acknowledged that ULA is working,” Donlin said in a statement.

A separate group of housing developers, union workers and advocacy groups calling itself the “Mend It, Don’t End It” coalition has been urging city hall to make changes to ULA. On Friday, the group said it supports the measure, but believes targeted reforms are still needed.

“Independent research shows that Measure ULA has slowed housing production in Los Angeles at a time when we need more housing, not less,” said Melanie Mendoza, a coalition spokesperson.

What the data show

The debate over ULA's impact played out in the committee room Friday morning. The city's chief legislative analyst reviewed seven independent studies on ULA’s impact. Three of those studies concluded ULA had suppressed housing production and reduced property tax revenues, while four found no meaningful negative impact.

Before ULA took effect, Los Angeles collected about $22 million a month in transfer tax. After that, it dropped to about $13 million. But city legislative analyst Henry Flatt told the committee a similar decline happened in cities without the tax, including Glendale, Long Beach, Pasadena and Santa Clarita.

“We are not currently convinced that Measure ULA has had an extremely negative impact on general fund revenues,” Flatt told the committee.

The county assessor's office read the same period differently. Scott Thornberry, an assistant assessor with L.A. County, told the committee that commercial and industrial property sales are falling in the city but not elsewhere in the county.

“We are seeing, we believe, a trend line of impact to property tax revenue growth in the city of L.A. specifically," Thornberry said.

What the committee did

Instead of the ballot measure, the committee voted to develop a five-year pilot program cutting the ULA tax to 1.5% for newly constructed affordable housing projects that meet specific requirements.

Lee, whose ballot measure was replaced with language advancing the pilot program, said he hadn't seen the substitute prior to Friday’s meeting and voted against it.

“This was just placed in front of me,” he said. Lee objected to a provision in the substitute recommendations calling for $30 million in new spending on homelessness support.

“Without knowing where this money's coming from, I'm going to have to vote no,” he said.

Lee told LAist he supports stronger oversight and technical improvements to Measure ULA, but believes a ballot measure is the right approach.

“Voters deserve the opportunity to consider targeted changes that would preserve the intent of the measure while addressing its unintended impacts on housing production and real estate activity in Los Angeles,” the councilmember said, in a statement.

Friday's meeting was the committee's final scheduled hearing. The committee, which is set to dissolve June 1, also voted to advance a narrower nonprofit tax refund limited to organizations that can prove all sale proceeds went directly to affordable housing.

The committee continued a separate motion on fire exemptions for Palisades fire victims, which will be heard by another council committee. A motion to loosen eligibility rules for the ULA Citizens Oversight Committee was noted and filed.

Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who introduced several of the committee's motions, said the process had been guided by a commitment to protect the measure.

"My goal has always been to listen carefully, bring people into the conversation, and protect ULA while honoring the voters' intent," she said at Friday’s meeting.

In her closing remarks, Jurado reflected on the three-member committee’s past work.

“We released $14 million in rental assistance to the most vulnerable Angelenos and $300 million for affordable housing,” she said. “We did in six or seven meetings what others couldn't do in five years.”

The ad hoc committee's recommendations now move to the full City Council.

Harris-Dawson and Lee’s ballot measure motion will be considered by the City Council’s rules committee at a later date, officials said.

Monsterpalooza, the annual movie-monster bash for horror fans, returns to the Pasadena Convention Center this weekend, starting Friday night (May 29) and lasting through Sunday.

What to expect

Now in its 18th year, devotees can rub elbows with legendary beastie creators, browse hundreds of vendors who traffic in the weird and unsettling, and marvel at practical effects that’ll make your flesh creep.

Dozens of panels and presentations are scheduled, including a deep-dive into the 95th anniversary of the Dracula and Frankenstein movies by writer Julian David Stone.

Writer Julian David Stone gives a presentation at a past Monsterpalooza event.

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Stone said that the two classic movies have left a lasting impact.

“Dracula is a movie about supernatural horror..... and Frankenstein is about technological or man-made horror," he said. "You can just trace those two themes all the way forward to this past year with Sinners and Megan 2.0."

Richard Redlefsen's Armageddon Rat at the PPI Booth at a past Monsterpalooza.

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Stone first attended the convention in 2008, returning over the years as a fan, spectator and presenter.

“It’s just a terrific convention that celebrates all things horror,” Stone said. “There’s a lot of celebrities you can meet who were in these horror films and you can get pictures with them." He added that he’ll never forget when he met Carla Laemmle in 2010 — the last living cast member of the original 1931 Dracula.

Mike Mekash and Chris Nelson re-created Twisty the Clown on Dan Gilbert at the PPI Booth at a past Monsterpalooza.

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Who's attending

If you’re jonesing to be photographed with high-profile entertainers (expect a fee for many), this year's event has a line-up that includes musician Alice Cooper, actress Lin Shaye from the Insidious movie franchise and David Howard Thornton, who plays Art the Clown in the popular Terrifier movie series.

Cosplay and crazy costumes are encouraged, although a T-shirt celebrating a classic horror movie will also do. Just come ready to adore all things that gnaw and gash.