LOS ANGELES — A new county agency aimed at addressing the homelessness crisis received a $660,000 grant to develop and launch a plan to ramp up how affordable housing is built, officials announced Thursday.
The L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency received the grant from the Southern California Association of Governments. The funds will help the agency establish a plan to guide operations, attract private investment capital and prevent homelessness in the process.
“This is such a big moment, a new era toward making housing more affordable for all of us,” Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who began her term this year as LACAHSA’s first board chair, said in a statement.
According to Mitchell, there’s a frustration among county leaders with how “difficult and expensive” it is to break the logjam in the housing crisis.
“LACAHSA is our first-ever regional approach to making housing more affordable across the whole county,” Mitchell said. “The award is like rocket fuel to help get us off the ground and make the first projects possible to accelerate how we produce and preserve affordable homes and prevent people from falling into homelessness.”
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LACAHSA was created by a 2022 state law introduced by then-state Sen. Sydney Kamlager, and is governed by a board of leaders and experts from communities across the county.
The grant funds will also support the design of new pilot programs to simplify how affordable housing can be funded and built across the county of Los Angeles, officials said.
One affordable housing pilot, for example, will unlock a tax-emption tool that would enable developers to tap into one single private loan —bypassing the often “complex” public financing and tax credit models that make housing develop in the county so slow and expensive.
County officials said the pilot would correct a “key failure” of…
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