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…
Read the full article here
