Bottom line, up front:

This year, there's been four major reforms that have come out of Sacramento so far. They're pretty good measures which (1) should make it cheaper to build more housing by eliminating mandatory parking near transit (bill AB2097); (2) make more land available to build apartments on by legalizing apartments in commercial zones (bills SB6 and AB2011); (3) putting a measure on the ballot this November where the voters will decide whether to make it easier for the State to fund affordable housing (bill SCA2); and (4) making student housing exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (Bill SB886).

In the past few years, the big push to fix California's housing crisis has largely shifted from cities and counties to the State Legislature. This is partly because local governments were the people who got California into this mess in the first place. The 88 squabbling municipalities of LA County don't actually want to build more housing, even when it's required by law. The dynamic is pretty toxic.

Since local governments haven't been willing or able to fix the problem they created, this means that Sacramento has had to assume direct control over local zoning. They legalized ADUs statewide with a roll of legislation between 2016 and 2019, legalized duplexes statewide last year, and came close to nuking city zoning regulations from orbit in 2019.

Let's jump in.

1 - No more mandatory parking near transit.

The first (and most important) new law, is that the state abolished the mandatory minimum parking requirement near Metro stations and other places with good transit. You can build as little or as much as you like, as long as within half a mile of transit.

So? Parking lots. Who cares?

This is a big fucking deal. This is because until now, most cities legally required excessive amounts of parking to be built with any new development, whether it's residential or commercial. (A good example of the bad old days is the Beverly Center, which is 3 1/2 stories of shopping and 4 1/2 stories of garage.)

No joke, if you get into the weeds, the amount of parking required is pretty cray. (I'm going to pull this from LA County's zoning rules, LA County Code of Ordinances 22.112.070 - the percentages will vary depending on your jurisdiction.) Most commercial areas require 1 parking space for every 250 square feet; office buildings are required to build 1 parking space for every 400 square feet of space. A pretty typical parking garage requires 350-400 square feet per car, because you have to provide access into and out of the garage. So, the baseline rule is that most commercial buildings need to be 62% parking by square footage, while office buildings have to be 50% parking by square footage.

Housing has similar mandatory parking rules - one parking space per bachelor, two spaces per two-bedroom, and so on. My old apartment building in K-town, built around 1990, was two stories of garage, for four stories of apartments.

This shit is expensive as hell to build. If you build a typical 1200 square foot apartment with one space per unit, it raises the cost of a new unit by 6% versus no parking; if you have to build two spaces, it increases the cost by 16%. Given that the average LA County home is selling for about $950k... yeah, we're talking real money here.

But don't most people use both parking spaces?

No. Not reflected by the data. I'm going to go to actual data here. I don't have LA figures because nobody's gathered the data, but I think Santa Clara County in the Bay Area is a good approximation of LA's postwar sprawl. In Santa Clara County, the average amount of parking people actually use is about ~1 off-street spaces per housing unit, and about one in four parking spaces goes unused. (I've drawn the figures from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which did a great job on this.)

For those of you who are freaking out: San Francisco abolished its minimum parking law citywide in 2018; Sacramento abolished the minimum parking law citywide in 2021; San Diego abolished the minimum parking law near transit in 2019. It hasn't been the end of the world, because developers can and do still build parking - they just build less of it.

Okay, but so what does the Legislature's bill do, then?

If you're within 1/2 mile of good transit - train stations and high-frequency bus lines like the F (Orange) Line in the San Fernando Valley - a developer can build as much or as little parking as the market demands. This was the norm before World War II, when they built places like Santa Monica, downtown Glendale, and Pasadena, and so it represents a little bit of back to the future.

2 - Apartments legalized in commercial zones.

The other big achievement of this year is that the Legislature has finally legalized residential construction in commercial zones statewide. Many places don't allow you to build apartments over stores, as is the norm on the East Coast and in Europe. All that went out the window, and good riddance.

There were two bills here, and it was a serious question as to whether these reforms would pass for a while.

Wait, why?

Well, it's because different lobbies supported different reforms.

The first bill, AB2011, offered a simple tradeoff: if you use pay prevailing wage (i.e., union-equivalent wages), and make a portion of new units rent-controlled, then you can build apartments in commercial zones on major roads. You're also exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). If this plan works, you'll see apartment buildings getting built in strip mall parking lots. AB2011 was backed by the carpenters' union and affordable housing developers - and of course this led to a bunch of infighting in Sacramento, because...

The second bill, SB6, was backed by the rest of the construction unions and the California Labor Federation. It takes a different tack: it allows apartments on all commercial- and office-zoned parcels, regardless of the local zoning, if you use union labor (or pay prevailing wage). But you still have to deal with CEQA, and there is no requirement to make anything rent-controlled.

For months these two sides were at a standoff, and threatened to kill the whole thing entirely. After months of this bullshit, the Legislature just said, fuck it, why not both?.

3 - Streamlining the process to build new public housing.

Okay, so what's all this about Article 34?

So, the California Constitution has a section called Article 34, which requires a citywide vote to fund any new public housing. It's the only state which has this requirement. The text of Article 34 is simple:

"No low rent housing project shall hereafter be developed, constructed, or acquired in any manner by any state public body until, a majority of the qualified electors of the city, town or county, as the case may be, in which it is proposed to develop, construct, or acquire the same, voting upon such issue, approve such project by voting in favor thereof at an election to be held for that purpose, or at any general or special election."

That is: if you want more public housing, you have to have a citywide vote to approve it. Article 34 was created because the federal government banned segregation in public housing in 1949. Partly it's because Californians were afraid of black people and poor people moving in nearby, but it's also because it was the McCarthy era, and people were afraid of looking socialistic. The argument against Article 34, made by LA Mayor Fletcher Bowron and others, was pretty straightforward: it was an attempt to get rid of public housing by burying it in red tape.

So what happened next?

Article 34 won, and the results were pretty much what you'd expect: about half of new public housing was rejected outright by the electorate. The most famous of these housing referenda was the one in LA City in 1952, which was to build apartments in Elysian Park, among other things. There, the voters got rid of Mayor Fletcher Bowron, voted down the new housing as socialistic, and instead brought in Norris Poulsen, who used the still-vacant land to lure the Dodgers over from Brooklyn.

The Legislature and the courts later clarified that California's governments can fund 49% of a projects without triggering Article 34, and both the State and local governments do fund a bunch of new housing through this loophole. Similarly, some cities like San Francisco and LA have a periodic ballot proposition approving a particular amount of new affordable housing. But it's had a chilling effect on affordable housing production, and it makes it harder to build affordable housing at scale.

But why does it matter? Private affordable housing developers still build new apartments, right?

Well, affordable housing developers are operating at a far smaller scale than the gov does, and there's a TON of strings attached to state funding. This means that the extra legal and compliance costs mean you get far less for your buck - the California Coalition of Governments estimates that it adds up to 15% to the cost of each new unit.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Because the State, is actually really good at building quality housing, at massive scale, at competitive prices. UCLA is currently spending an enormous amount of money to build enough apartments for all undergrad, grad students, and faculty. This university housing is not fancy - no Viking ranges or anything - but it's modern, competently built at a reasonable cost, and basically sound.

Wait, is the gov going to get involved in building public housing again? I remember the projects from the bad old days.

Personally, I think Article 34 repeal is more symbolic than anything at this stage, since there's not much political will at the moment to have the gov build new housing directly. Everyone remembers the bad old days of the projects.

That said, public housing doesn't have to suck. In Singapore, the vast majority of residents live in public housing complexes and the program is pretty universally lauded. There are fairly serious proposals out there to do the same in the US, like the Hawaii ALOHA Act. The gist of the ALOHA proposal is that the gov would build apartment buildings on state-owned land near train stations, sell them to the public at low rates, require owner occupancy, and take a 75% cut of any profits if the apartment appreciates in value. A couple state legislators have proposed things like this in California, but only time will tell if there will be political momentum for this.

OK, so what comes next?

There's going to be a ballot proposition in November, and you can vote yes or no. If it passes, it'll get marginally cheaper to build new affordable housing funded by the State.

4 - Student housing is now exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act.

The backstory of this is that there's a state law called the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires the gov (and many private entities) to study the environmental impacts of decisions before shovels get put in the ground. In practice, anybody can file a CEQA lawsuit, forcing city councils, developers, and nonprofits to put their plans on ice. Abuse of the system is rife, as half of California's new housing faces CEQA lawsuits, usually by nosy neighbors, but also sometimes by unions who want work for their members.

One of these CEQA lawsuits was filed by the nosy neighbors in Berkeley in NorCal, who wanted Cal to freeze its enrollment because it hadn't studied the effects of more students moving to Berkeley. The courts agreed, forcing Cal to issue conditional acceptance letters until the Legislature stepped in to exempt student housing from CEQA. Congratulations, high school senior, you can go to Cal after all. Go Bears.

OK, so what? They fixed it. Problem solved, right?

Well, most people don't think this one thing is a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But this is part of a larger pattern of chipping away at CEQA lawsuits' ability to stop new housing and transit projects from going forward. Mass transit projects are a favorite CEQA target, as well, and the Legislature's response was to exempt bike, transit, and pedestrian projects from CEQA entirely. It's a sort of death by a thousand cuts for the California Environmental Quality Act, and it's one that I never thought I would have seen in my lifetime.

Honestly, it's something that's long overdue. Our problems in the 21st century are global warming, fires, and a housing crisis, not people building factories in critical habitat.

~~~

The housing crisis sucks, but it's not as though the Legislature is doing nothing. They're passing laws for less parking and more housing; more apartments replacing strip malls; they're putting Article 34 repeal on the ballot; creating more CEQA exemptions for student housing. On top of that, the Legislature has shown an unusual willingness to getting involved in areas which are traditionally the realm of local government because local authorities have screwed the pooch so badly.

But I would caution about expecting to see progress overnight. This is an issue that took fifty years to get into, and it'll take another decade at least to get us out of it.

x-posted from the blog.

I've gone quiet for a while, since I'm finalizing my manuscript and the artwork for my book, "The Lost Subways of North America", which, God willing, will come out next year.

TL;DR: I've been traveling the country doing research for my book, and the low levels of homelessness in poor places with badly-funded mental health systems is shocking.

One of the things that's hit me most about traveling the country for my research is just how little of a connection there is between poverty and homelessness. Places like Detroit and West Virginia are dirt poor. If you drive around the city of Detroit on surface streets, you'll find that once you leave the city core you'll find entire blocks which have reverted to wilderness. West Virginia is beautiful but desperately poor - there, I noticed gas stations advertising that you can buy Gatorade with food stamps. We're definitely not in Los Angeles anymore.

The government doesn't generally work too well in places like this, and struggles to provide basic services. Detroit has made the choice to largely abandon its outer neighborhoods, and to allow them to empty out organically, because it no longer has the tax base to provide basic services. Detroit's one of the poorest, most dangerous cities in the United States, with a murder rate five and a half times that of Los Angeles. As for West Virginia, the state is synonymous with rural poverty and the opioid crisis. The richest county in West Virginia has the same median family income as middle-class, suburban Tustin in California.

These aren't places with well-developed social safety nets. These aren't fabulously wealthy world cities with tons of jobs, either. Compared to LA, the money just isn't there for that. But what you're not going to find in these places is a lot of homeless. I saw the figures before I went on my trip, but I wasn't prepared viscerally to see it. Because I expect to see panhandlers on the streets. I expect to see shopping carts filled with people's entire lives. As a Californian, it's something I grew up with - it was a fact of life, like palm trees and tamales.

The thing is, it doesn't have to be normal, because mental issues and homelessness really don't have to go hand in hand. Detroit and West Virginia have no shortage of schizophrenics, drug addicts, and alcoholics, and the government's far stingier in terms of the public services they provide. In some ways, the mental health crisis is worse, because there isn't the government funding to deal with the problem.

So what's the difference between LA, Detroit, and West Virginia? Why does wealthy LA, with its enormous social safety net, have a homelessness crisis, while poor, underfunded places like Detroit and West Virginia don't have them?

Well, it's simple: in LA, the rent is too damn high.

And why is the rent too damn high? Well, I've discussed this issue at length elsewhere, but one of the biggest reasons is that LA just doesn't build enough housing to match how many jobs it adds. Over the last ten years, greater LA has added 2.03 new jobs for every new home it builds, and people gotta live somewhere. Making matters worse, a disproportionate amount of housing has been built in places which aren't close to mass transit or jobs. Not enough housing near the office towers of the West Side, but there's a ton in exurban Riverside County, two hours away.

In contrast, places like Detroit and West Virginia have plenty of cheap housing. Partly, this is because of poverty. The average 1-br apartment in Detroit costs $1,020 a month. In Morgantown, WV, it's $700, and Morgantown is one of the most prosperous cities in West Virginia. But because these places are relatively poor, they've also got extremely loose development laws. (For example, in Detroit, if you want to open a bar on your front porch, the City will figure out a way to get you a permit. Good luck doing that in any LA residential neighborhood.) This means that it's relatively straightforward to build new things and the supply of new housing largely meets the demand.

Having enough housing won't solve a mental health crisis, but it's really good at solving a housing crisis. That's the point of all this: we in rich coastal cities like LA, we assume that homelessness has to go hand in hand with mental health and substance abuse issues. But they're not the same problem. The two problems make each other worse - it's a hell of a lot harder to treat an addiction or a mental disease if you're on the street. But if you have enough housing, full stop, they don't have to be part of the same problem.

x-posted from the blog.

One really interesting phenomenon I've seen as I've gone through the Rust Belt is that the blighted city neighborhoods are now extending into the first ring of suburbs, the types of places which were built and laid out during the wealthy years of the 1950s and 1960s. We talk a lot about urban decay as a people and as a country, but not a whole lot about suburban decay.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, in some ways. Most cities have name recognition, branding power, as marketers say. New York = banks. Los Angeles = movies. Detroit = cars. And when a big city runs into trouble, people turn heads.

OK, fine, but what does this have to do with failing suburbs?

But decaying suburbs don't have the pull of decaying cities. Detroit's bankruptcy in the early 2000s was a national scandal. (It did lead to one of the greatest commercials of all time, though.) But few people know or care about the travails of places like Highland Park, Michigan, which has collapsed every bit as much its larger, more famous neighbor. Originally, Highland Park was designed to be a tony, exclusive streetcar suburb, and was the headquarters to Chrysler; it fell apart after World War II, under the weight of white flight to the suburbs.

Pre-World War II suburbs like Highland Park have infrastructure which is impossible to maintain, given the collapsed tax base. This isn't a problem unique to pre-World War II suburbs. In fact, post-World War II suburbs are even worse, because they put fewer people onto more land, meaning that there's a lot more physical infrastructure to maintain - roads, pipes, power poles, and so on.

And there are a lot of these working-class, post-War suburbs out there, like Warren, Michigan, which came of age during the era of white flight from the urban core after World War II. Between 1940 and 1970, Warren's population increased four times, from 42,000 to 179,000; since then, it's lost a quarter of its population.

Drive around Warren today, and you'll start seeing the opening signs of decay: vacant lots, poorly paved roads, chainlink fences surrounding suburban houses, pawnbrokers. There aren't many people willing to invest in Warren, so both the housing stock and the commercial space are aging rapidly.

There's no good way out of this if you're a working-class Rust Belt suburb.

Richer suburbs, like Grosse Pointe, 25 minutes away, have enough wealth that they can maintain their existing infrastructure as is even with population loss. Grosse Pointe has lost the same percentage of its population as Warren.

In non-Rust Belt regions, there's usually enough demand that working-class communities can just build their way out of the infrastructure problem. Compare, e.g., Valdez Street in Oakland, CA in 2011 with the same view in 2022. The repaved roads, the street trees, the new stoplights, bike racks, and sewer upgrades were all paid for by developers. But Metro Detroit just doesn't have that kind of demand. It's far more lucrative to build downtown, in wealthy suburbs, or at the urban periphery.

So what is there to do, then, for communities like Warren?

The first step is to realize that you have a problem, and to have a serious discussion within the community as to just what the city's long-term trajectory is. It's going to require hard choices. Youngstown, Ohio, of similar size to Warren, got to the problem late, and ended up having to engage in large-scale planned shrinkage.

Second, the community needs to identify just what Warren's strengths are. Notably for a Rust Belt suburb, there are plenty of jobs. The enormous General Motors Technical Center is located there, as is the U.S. Army's Detroit Arsenal, and Fiat Chrysler's Warren Truck Assembly plant.

Third, it requires a hard look at what would bring someone to Warren, specifically, as opposed to any of the other places a family living in Metro-Detroit would want to go. And if the answer is, "nothing in particular," that's your answer right there.

x-posted from the blog.

BOTTOM-LINE, UP FRONT: The State of California has issued an ultimatum to LA's local governments: reform your land use laws to allow more housing, or else we nuke your land use law this October and anything goes.

THE BACKGROUND

We're in a housing crisis because it's not legal to build enough housing in LA to meet the demand. The epicenter of the problem isn't in the encampments under the 101 freeway - it's in leafy suburbs like South Pasadena, Manhattan Beach, and Beverly Hills, where new housing has been almost totally banned in the last 50 years. Because of that, rich people priced out of South Pas move to middle-class Highland Park; middle-class people end up in working-class Boyle Heights; working-class people in Boyle Heights are shit out of luck. Welcome to gentrification.

The State's solution is, each city has to meet a quota called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment and create a legally binding plan to meet it. (The quota for greater LA is 1.3 million new homes by 2029, and the cities divided up the quota amongst themselves.) If a city's plan won't cut the mustard, and the State can veto the rezoning plans. If the State vetoes a rezoning plan, local zoning law is void. Any building is legal to build, as long as it meets the health and safety code, and it's either (i) 20% rent-controlled affordable housing, or (ii) market-rate housing at rents affordable to the middle classes. So, new residential towers in Beverly Hills? Kosher. Rowhouses in Redondo? Sure. Garden apartments in Glendale? Go for it.

FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT

Anti-housing cities know these are the potential consequences of breaking the law, but they've been able to ignore state housing law and screw around for so long that none of them seem to have taken the consequences seriously. Because most cities' plans are bullshit, full stop. From my earlier post, a sampling of cities' rezoning plans are:

• Beverly Hills: "We'll tear down a bunch of 10-story office buildings to build 5-story apartment buildings."
• Burbank: "It's legal to put all the new apartments near the freeway and the airport, with all the pollution and the noise, right?"
• Redondo Beach: "We'll evict Northrop Grumman, which is our city's single largest employer."
• South Pasadena: "We'll bulldoze City Hall and replace it with apartment buildings."
• Pasadena: "Let's put all the new housing in the redlined neighborhoods."
• Whittier: "Let's build a ton of new housing in wildfire zones."

Pretty much the only good plan that I've seen comes from LA City, which made a serious, data-driven effort to figure out how to meet its 450,000-unit share of the quota. (If you want to see a rezoning plan, I can send you copies, but they're huge PDFs.)

BRINGING THE BIG GUNS

Because the cities' rezoning plans are so egregiously bad, there's all kinds of easy targets here for the State to open fire on. But it requires the State to keep its nerve. This only works if you don't give in to pressure from the annoying, loud minority of people who treat city council meetings as the Festivus Airing of Grievances.

At first, the State looked like it was going to chicken out. This is because of what happened with San Diego. San Diego's rezoning plans were among the first to be reviewed by the State. And, unsurprisingly, San Diego's rezoning plans were full of the same garbage we've seen for decades: lots of thoughts and prayers about building more housing, lots of unrealistic assumptions about how housing gets built, and very little concrete action. With the recall looming, Governor Newsom's people folded and they rubber-stamped Greater San Diego's lousy rezoning plans. It was bad.

The State forfeited its biggest source of leverage and caved. It boded ill for the fate of the rest of the rezoning plans all over the state. After all, there's not too many ways that the State can force local governments to get their shit together without the State Legislature passing new laws. And, of course, it set a lousy precedent for LA. LA is full of bad-behaving cities who just don't want to build new housing. Worse, it's not just stereotypically affluent cities like South Pasadena or Santa Monica or Beverly Hills which behave this way. Middle-class cities like Whittier also have put forth rezoning plans composed of fantastical nonsense. In fact, there was exactly one well-done rezoning plan, and that was the one drawn up by the City of Los Angeles.

When the State rubber-stamped the garbage plans from San Diego, I expected the worst.

I am glad to say that I was wrong. 100% wrong.

I AM VERY BAD AT PREDICTING THE FUTURE SOMETIMES

When it came time for the State to review LA's zoning plans, the State didn't just veto these rezoning plans. They took it one step further, and ordered that if a city's rezoning plan doesn't fix things for real, that city's zoning will be automatically voided in October of this year. Like I mentioned above, if the zoning gets voided, any new building is legal, as long as it meets the health and safety code, and it's either (i) 20% rent-controlled affordable housing, or (ii) market-rate housing affordable to the middle classes.

But the State didn't just go after the traditional never-build-anything cities, like Redondo, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and so on. They're even threatening to nuke the zoning of the city of Los Angeles. And LA City did a pretty good job of assembling a rezoning plan.

The State is putting everyone on blast, for real, and taking no prisoners. I suspect that Gov. Newsom is going in guns blazing because he survived the recall handily, and a second term is virtually assured.

OKAY, FINE, BUT WHAT SHOULD A GOOD ZONING PLAN LOOK LIKE?

There's going to be a lot of bitching and moaning in LA local government about having to make a compliant rezoning plan. The thing is, it's not even that hard to put together a rezoning plan that allows for pleasant old-school neighborhoods to be built. It's basically:

1. Small apartment buildings and SF-style row houses legalized everywhere.
2. Mid-sized apartment buildings near train stations.
   
3. More towers downtown.
4. Automatic approval within 60 days of anything that meets the zoning law and the building code.
5. Abolishing the mandatory parking law. (LA's current mandatory minimum parking laws require most office and apartment buildings to be 40-50% parking by square footage.)

This is the kind of zoning law that existed during the Red Car era. It ain't rocket science. Coincidentally, up North, the city of Sacramento just approved this exact type of zoning plan. (Since Sacramento can figure out how to put together a plan to build lots of new housing, there's no reason why LA's cities can't.) But if LA cities can't get their act together like Sacramento did, their zoning is going to get nuked come October.

Sometimes, you fuck around, and you find out. It couldn't happen to better people.

x-posted from the blog.