During her first week in office, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive directive to fast-track the process for building affordable housing and shelters, a move that also enables developers to cut costs and potentially build more units.
In the first six months since enacting her Executive Directive 1, the city has slashed the average time it takes to approve 100% affordable housing and shelter projects from more than six months to 37 days, according to the mayor’s office.
Now some city councilmembers have proposed legislation to codify key provisions of the mayor’s directive to make them permanent. Otherwise, the provisions would expire when the city is no longer in a declared state of emergency when it comes to homelessness. Bass announced the emergency declaration her first day in office.
“The City of Los Angeles is in a housing affordability crisis partially of its own making,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who introduced the motion, said in a statement after the proposal advanced out of the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee on Tuesday, June 20.
“For decades, the City has stood in its own way, creating unnecessary bureaucracy that fails to address this crisis with the urgency it requires,” she stated. “(Executive Directive) 1 changed that by dramatically shortening the time it takes to get shovels in the ground, and new affordable housing built. We can’t go back to the way it was before – we must take swift action and enshrine ED1 into law.”
Councilmember Nithya Raman and Council President Paul Krekorian are also sponsors of the motion, which would instruct the city’s planning director to prepare an ordinance for the council to vote that would turn the provisions of the mayor’s executive directive into law.
On Wednesday, the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee took up the motion and passed it out of committee. It now heads to the full council for a vote.
Raman, who chairs the Housing and…
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