Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass introduced new limits this week to her administration’s program to streamline affordable housing. The changes will further restrict where low-income apartments can be fast-tracked in the city at a time when rents are rising further out of reach for many residents.
In a message on the July 1 update, Bass framed the changes as creating “additional protections for existing residential tenants” and ensuring the “protection of historic resources.” Others see a significant rollback of a promising program that has spurred lots of much-needed development.
The long list of new restrictions includes a prohibition on fast-tracking affordable housing in the city’s designated historic districts, an idea proposed earlier by City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavksy in response to plans for low-income apartments in pricey Windsor Village.
Another new restriction will ban fast-tracked affordable housing projects on properties that already contain rent-controlled apartment buildings with 12 or more units.
From ‘remarkable’ to ‘status quo’
Housing policy experts said the latest changes will likely curtail plans for new affordable housing, especially from private developers who have used the mayor’s streamlining initiative to propose thousands of low-income apartments without any public funding.
“It’s just turning something that was really remarkable into another status quo type tool,” said Jason Ward, an economist and co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness. “That’s never going to get us where we need to go in terms of housing production.”
LAist reached out to the mayor’s office to ask…
Read the full article here
