
L.A. Must Implement Reforms to Meet its Housing Goals
Meeting LA’s housing targets is crucial to driving down costs, lowering rents, and ensuring equitable economic development.
New housing development in L.A. remains too costly, too slow, and too mired in red tape to deliver at scale. The numbers show that without major changes to the status quo, we could fail to meet this target.
That’s why the Los Angeles Business Council believes the city must implement reforms to:
- Streamline approvals
- Create predictability for clearances to start and finish development
- Remove “extras” that drive up the cost of affordable housing
- Incentivize the development of workforce housing
In November of 2021, the LA City Council adopted an update to its Housing Element that sets strategies for the City to meet a target of over 450,000 residential units by 2029.
To meet the new 2029 guidelines, the City will need to produce approximately 61,000 units per year of which approximately 9,000 per year will need to be affordable to moderate income households at 81 to 120% AMI and 23,000 units per year will need to be affordable to lower income households at 80% AMI and below. Tracking back to 2014, in the 7-year period through September of 2021, the city issued building permits for 117,088 units, approximately 16,726 units per year of which only 9% were affordable.
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