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  • L.A. City Council passes ordinance to streamline affordable housing

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    During her first week in office three years ago, Mayor Karen Bass issued a sweeping directive to speed up affordable housing applications. Now, that plan is permanent.

    The L.A. City Council unanimously voted Tuesday to adopt the Affordable Housing Streamlining Ordinance. Essentially, the ordinance takes Bass’ housing initiative, known as Executive Directive 1, and incorporates it into the L.A. Municipal Code, so the streamlined process will stick around even after Bass leaves office.

    Under the ordinance, developers get fast-tracked city approval for projects that include 100% affordable housing. Reviews for such projects typically take six to nine months, but under the directive, they’re required to be approved within 60 days.

    The expedited processing works by stripping away many of the discretionary review processes that typically bog down housing projects: City Council hearings, environmental reports, neighborhood outreach meetings, etc. As long as projects comply with certain criteria, including zoning and design review standards, they qualify for streamlined approval.

    Bass introduced the directive to make good on her campaign’s promise to address the city’s affordability and homelessness crises. It also serves as a response to housing developers who have long complained about the city’s complex permitting process, in which projects languish for weeks or months while navigating the red tape of reviews and inspections.

    Affordable housing applications have been pouring in under the directive.

    As of November, 490 projects have been streamlined, accounting for more than 40,000 affordable housing units, according to the Planning Department. Of those, 437 projects have been approved, with an average application process of 22 days.

    It’s unclear how many of those projects are actually being built. At a December City Council meeting, Planning Department officials said that as of July, 44 streamlined projects had been started, accounting for roughly 2,500 units. But there are no data on how many have been finished.

    Maria Patiño Gutierrez, deputy director for policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), celebrated the decision to make the directive permanent, but said she hopes to see changes to the process down the road.

    “We want this ordinance to work and bring affordable housing, but we also want to make sure it doesn’t displace tenants,” she said.

    The directive has become increasingly watered down over the last three years as Bass carved out more and more areas from being subjected to streamlined applications. In June 2023, Bass exempted single-family zones from the directive, which accounts for 72% of land in L.A.

    A year later, she exempted historic districts — including areas of Highland Park and Lincoln Heights — as well as “very high fire hazard severity zones,” which include parts of Silver Lake and Hollywood Hills.

    To make sure streamlined projects weren’t displacing renters, Bass also exempted those that would replace rent-controlled apartment buildings with 12 units or more.

    These exemptions will carry into the newly adopted ordinance, though they may be tweaked in the months to come. In a Dec. 2 meeting, City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado argued that the exemption to preserve rent-controlled buildings should shrink from a minimum of 12 units to five units, claiming such projects could displace tenants in neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.

    Jurado said the current ordinance exempts 19% of rent-controlled buildings, but if the minimum threshold were set at five units instead of 12, it would exempt 36%.

    Housing groups are pushing for amendments as well. A public comment letter published by Public Counsel and SAJE argued that maximum rents for streamlined projects should be cheaper than they’re allowed to be under current rules.

    The directive defines “100% affordable housing” as 80% low-income units and 20% moderate-income units, but the nonprofits claimed that those rates, which would still let a “low-income” two-bedroom apartment be rented for as much as $2,726, are still too expensive for many Angelenos.

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    Jack Flemming

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  • Renters across L.A. are under strain and many fear becoming homeless, survey finds

    Renters across L.A. are under strain and many fear becoming homeless, survey finds

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    Nearly 4 in 10 renters in Los Angeles County have worried about losing their homes and becoming homeless in the last few years, according to the results of a new survey from UCLA. A similar share have worried that they or their family would go hungry because they cannot afford the cost of food.

    The 2024 Quality of Life Index, prepared by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, suggests that the county‘s renters are feeling particularly intense strain from the steep cost of housing combined with inflation.

    “Everybody feels they’re being squeezed by the cost of living, even affluent people,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, the former longtime county supervisor and city councilmember, now director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School. But for renters, that pressure is especially acute, he added.

    Overall, researchers found the high cost of living, especially housing, is pushing down quality of life for people across the county.

    This year, the overall quality of life rating reported by survey respondents dropped to 53 on a scale of 10 to 100 — tying with 2022 for the lowest rating since the survey launched in 2016. The rating for cost of living dropped to 38, the lowest score ever observed in any category.

    Renters reported lower satisfaction with the cost of living and jobs and the economy than nearly every other major demographic group in the survey of 1,686 county residents.

    Fewer than a quarter of renters said they thought they would ever be able to buy a home in a part of L.A. where they would want to live. And about half, 51%, of renters reported being pessimistic about their economic future in L.A. County, while 61% of homeowners said they felt optimistic.

    Pablo Estupiñan, campaign director for the tenant advocacy group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, or SAJE, said the findings reflect his experience working with tenants across Los Angeles.

    “Community members are very concerned about facing an eviction or becoming homeless,” he said. “That’s kind of been the trend we’re seeing, with wages that are pretty stagnant as rents keep going up.”

    Median rent in Los Angeles is $2,083, according to Apartment List. That’s down slightly from last year but still high enough to create significant challenges for renters across the region.

    Earlier this year, a report from the Housing Initiative at Penn estimated that between 97,000 and 153,000 households in the city of L.A. were behind on rent as of August 2023. While much of that rent debt was accumulated during the pandemic, a lot of it piled up more recently, indicating that economic strains since the pandemic are challenging renters.

    “As much as possible, it will be easier and less expensive to keep people housed than to find people new housing after they are evicted or become homeless,” the Penn report concluded.

    Last year, there were more than 47,000 eviction court filings across the county, the most since 2016, according to data compiled by Kyle Nelson, senior policy and research analyst for SAJE.

    Advocates expect that number could increase again this year, after the last of COVID-era renter protections expired in February.

    The survey, conducted in English and Spanish from late February to mid-March, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.

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    Paloma Esquivel

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