Facing need for more housing, LA's City Council votes to keep new apartments away from homeowners

In the midst of a housing shortage that has driven up rents and increased the city’s unhoused population, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to leave most of the city’s residential land off-limits to new apartments.

The council is facing a state-imposed deadline to rezone the city for more than a quarter-million new homes. Ten of the council’s 15 members rejected a proposal that would have allowed mid-sized apartment buildings in some neighborhoods zoned for single-family houses. Instead, they decided to incentivize new, larger apartment buildings in already dense urban areas.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who put forward the failed proposal, said the issue of adding more housing in single-family zones will inevitably come back to the council.

“It will come up again because the need for housing is so intensive and our shortfall is so extreme,” Raman said in an interview with LAist after the vote. “Looking at the moment of crisis that we’re in, I think the people of Los Angeles are ready for change… City Hall has to catch up.”

The vote, which came during the first post-election meeting to feature two new council members, is a bitter disappointment to housing advocates who saw this vote as a crucial inflection point for confronting the city’s dismal affordability issues.

Single-family neighborhoods currently make up 72% of L.A.’s residential land. Without opening up at least some of those areas to new development, we're “not going to see affordable housing being built in the city of L.A. sufficient to meet the need,” Mahdi Manji, director of public policy with the Inner City Law Center, told LAist.

The push for more housing in single-family zones

For months, tenant organizers, affordable housing developers and homeless service providers have been pushing city officials to revise zoning restrictions that largely lock low- and middle-income Angelenos out of neighborhoods where homes routinely sell for more than $1 million.

These advocates have repeatedly pointed out that renters make up a majority of the city’s population, and most spend more on rent than is considered affordable by federal government standards. They’ve also highlighted the struggles of young families who are fleeing the city or raising kids in overcrowded apartments due to the lack of affordable housing options.

However, Tuesday’s vote will come as a relief to homeowner groups who have been lobbying city officials to leave single-family neighborhoods untouched.

Barbara Broide, president of the Westwood South of Santa Monica Boulevard Homeowners Association, said she believes commercial corridors are better suited for new apartments than single-family neighborhoods.

“You can't have suddenly 10 units sprouting up here, there and everywhere,” Broide said in an interview with LAist. “That is an irresponsible way to approach zoning in our city, because developers and speculators then become the planners who decide where density goes, regardless of any impacts or negative consequences.”

Why this issue is coming to a head now

Under a state law that requires cities to plan for new housing every eight years, the city of L.A. must outline strategies for creating more than 456,000 new housing units between 2021 and 2029. About 40% of those units must be affordable to low-income households. Now more than three years into this cycle, the city has only built about 15% of the required units.

A recent study from the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies found the city’s proposal to leave single-family neighborhoods untouched will not produce enough housing to meet those state-mandated goals by 2029.

The plan does increase housing capacity by about 30% compared with current policies, the UCLA researchers found. And it succeeds at channeling much of that new housing into wealthier parts of the city.

But Shane Phillips, the UCLA Lewis Center’s Housing Initiative Project Manager and a co-author of the study, told LAist, “You will not solve our housing problems — you will not reverse patterns of segregation — if you leave single family neighborhoods completely untouched.”

Some council members say current plan is ‘anti-tenant’

Raman’s proposed amendment would have allowed buildings with up to 16 units in some existing single-family neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods would have needed to be located near public transit lines, and in areas deemed to have good schools, parks and other amenities.

Raman said her amendment was crafted with the goal of “undoing some of the bad land use planning we’ve done here in L.A.” She argued that concentrating development in already dense neighborhoods will result in old, rent-controlled buildings getting torn down to make room for new, larger projects — forcing current tenants out of their housing.

Raman said asking renter-heavy neighborhoods to accept more development while sparing single-family neighborhoods was unfair. “Approving this plan, exactly as it is, is one of the most anti-tenant things we can do,” she said.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez echoed Raman’s arguments, saying that preserving wealthy single-family neighborhoods represents a continuation of past segregationist policies. Raman’s amendment was also supported by Councilmembers Ysabel Jurado, Curren Price and Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

With 10 other council members voting against Raman’s proposal, the amendment failed to move forward. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez said while he agreed with many of Raman’s points, his constituents felt changes to single-family neighborhoods would be hasty.

“Unfortunately, as I’ve toured my neighborhoods,” Soto-Martinez said, “I don’t believe my constituents have been part of a thoughtful, deliberative process.”

Many council members argued the plan to leave single-family zones untouched was sufficient to meet state goals. The state’s housing department sent the city a letter last month saying the rezoning proposal adequately meets the city’s requirement to plan for new housing. Under state law, the city must finalize these rezoning plans by February.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said incorporating single-family zones into the plans before that deadline would not allow enough time for nuanced decisions.

“I worry about the solutions that are proposed as being a little bit too one-size-fits-all,” he said.