How much housing is LA actually building?

This piece is adapted from the first issue of Building Your Block, a seven-issue newsletter course that unpacks the obstacles to housing development in L.A. and what you can do to make things better. Sign up for the whole series here.

Experts agree that L.A. County is in a housing shortage, including the state housing department, the state legislative analyst’s office, policy analysts and academics.

This shortage, they say, is the main driver of the exorbitant rents and housing prices across Southern California. But no single policy or elected official is to blame — today’s challenges are the result of decades of building too little housing to keep up with population growth. Here are some numbers to consider: over a 40-year period since the 1970s, California added only 325 new housing units for every 1,000 people added to our population. It’s a similar story for the country at large.

That’s why the state government set ambitious housing production goals for counties across California. The state housing department establishes new goals every eight years for how much new housing to produce. For the period from 2021 to 2029, California’s overall goal is 2.5 million new homes — more than double the target for the previous cycle.

Southern California needs to plan for 1.3 million new homes by 2029 to keep up with demand in our region and hit the state’s targets. All the cities within L.A. County are responsible for 812,000 in total, with 450,000 of those units coming from the city of L.A.

L.A. County is nowhere near meeting these numbers.

Together the 88 cities in L.A. County are supposed to add about 101,500 units per year to stay on track with their goals. In 2024, they built 28,453.

Why progress is so slow: We made it difficult to build 

In Southern California, we built our cities out, not up. There are a lot of historical reasons for why our region ended up spread out and decentralized. Jobs opportunities grew in different areas, instead of a single urban core, and during the housing booms of the late 19th century and early 20th century, there was room to sprawl. Suburbs and single-family homes were idealized and developed in large numbers. Discriminatory housing practices, such as racially restrictive covenants, furthered segregation. Car culture spawned freeways and parking lots. This all means that today, there’s not much empty land left to build on.

Another factor: local zoning rules. Because there isn’t a lot of empty land left, adding housing density is key — for example replacing a five-unit apartment building with a 20-unit one. But our rules restrict where we can densify housing.

Until recently in the city of L.A., for example, it wasn't even legal to build the housing required to reach state-mandated goals. When the city received its target of building 450,000 new homes, its regulations only allowed for about half of that to be built. The city had to change its rules about what housing can be built and where.

Building anything new takes a long time and is really expensive 

Even if city ordinances allowed us to build more housing, a labyrinth of red tape slows down the approval process, including getting departments to review the plans and waiting for utilities to get connected.

And when housing proposals get political, as they so often do, the process gets bogged down even more with public hearings, lawsuits, City Council discussions and so on.

There’s also the cost of building housing. Any one of myriad factors can make prices jump: supply chain disruptions, the scarcity of materials, labor shortages, inflation and more.

Plus, since most of the land in L.A. is already built on, to build something new you usually have to tear down existing structures first. That makes it — you guessed it! — more expensive.

These factors don’t just affect the rate at which we’re getting new housing, but also the kind of housing we end up getting.

We can’t get out of this crisis without building more housing 

Plenty of other factors exacerbate the crisis we’re seeing today: Corporations or foreign investors buying up housing. The proliferation of short-term rentals like Airbnb. Gaps in rent control or other tenant protections. Empty lots or buildings that aren’t utilized.

But housing experts agree: we still need to build. And even if building new housing can’t solve the crisis alone, we also can’t solve the crisis without it.

Those state housing production goals we mentioned? There are consequences if cities don’t make a meaningful effort to cooperate. They could lose access to affordable housing funds, get sued, and get fined as much as $600,000 a month. The state could also take over decisions about what buildings get approved, which means L.A. residents would have less influence on new housing in their communities.

The big questions: What kinds of housing and where? 

Surveys show that a majority of Angelenos support building new housing.

But where should it get built?

And what kind of housing should it be? Subsidized apartments for low-income residents? Permanent supportive housing for formerly unhoused people? High-rises? Duplexes? All of the above and everything in between? What should be preserved, and how do we alleviate our housing shortage without worsening gentrification?

These are the questions that underlie most local housing battles today — and the answers we choose will shape our neighborhoods for years to come.

Weighing in on L.A.’s housing future starts with figuring out what kind of housing you want to support and where you think it should go, then figuring out what stands in the way of that. For more information to help you do that, sign up for the Building Your Block newsletter course here.