20 Ways to Fix Los Angeles
Not a single incumbent city councilmember was rejected by voters, and Mayor Eric Garcetti was re-elected with an unheard-of 81 percent of the plebiscite. It's hard to recall a time when our city leaders were this popular.
Yet no one would deny that L.A. faces crises on multiple fronts. Foremost is the cost of housing, which has trudged upward all decade and has roiled the city. People are being evicted and are living in their cars and on the streets. Others are getting priced out of their apartments and moving to cheaper neighborhoods, setting off waves of gentrification. A new kind of neighborhood-based xenophobia has taken hold, fed by housing anxiety. People are forced to live farther and farther from where they work, exacerbating a traffic problem that already is the worst in the nation.
Housing is not the city's only problem. Los Angeles has had more fatal police shootings than any other city in the country for two years running — just one example of the growing divide between law enforcement and residents, particularly those in low-income areas. Many neighborhoods are desperately short on both park space and healthy food. Pension costs continue to hog the budget. Public schools are losing students, revenue and the faith of parents.
There are, of course, no easy solutions to these problems. Every new idea creates winners and losers, and brings more change to which certain factions will be ever more resistant.
But there are ideas that can make a sizable dent in these problems, and we'd like to take the opportunity to surface some of them. Some are expensive. Some are free. Many already have been proposed, in policy-wonk circles or in opinion pieces. We've restricted ourselves to ideas that have not been adopted by any legislative body or by the voters yet, and we've tried to offer a range of ideas tackling issues that matter to a broad swath of Angelenos, from housing to education to the environment to police reform.
Here are 20 ideas that could fix L.A.
HOUSING
1 & 2. Make it cheaper and easier to build housing.
During the first half of this decade, Los Angeles added more than 230,000 residents and 150,000 jobs. During that same time, it added just 40,000 housing units. What happened as a result is a simple matter of supply and demand: The average rent for an L.A. apartment has gone up $1,000 a month in the last six years, while the median home price has increased by nearly $200,000 since 2010.
Reforming two laws would go a long way toward increasing the housing supply in Los Angeles, which experts say could drive down housing costs — or at least halt their precipitous rise.
1. The first law in need of reform requires that every new building provide a minimum number of parking spaces, which, according to developer Mott Smith, can be prohibitively expensive. "Parking spots can cost $30,000 or $40,000 apiece," he says.
Only about a third of households in Los Angeles have more than one car, yet apartment developers usually must secure 2.5 parking spaces for every housing unit they construct.
Doing away with or at least easing the parking requirement would lead to more housing units being built, Smith and others says. As for people living in a building without parking, they could be forced to pay for it — or they could decide to go carless. Smith goes so far as to say that getting rid of parking minimums "is the No. 1 thing we could do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
2. The second law is the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which perhaps unwittingly opened the door to a parade of lawsuits challenging any large construction project, though of late it has mostly targeted new apartment buildings. Between 2012 and 2015, 14,000 housing units were challenged under CEQA. Many of them were never built; others were delayed for years.
Some projects were halted or pared down before any suit was filed. Just the ever-present threat of a CEQA lawsuit raises the cost of apartment construction, since developers are forced to hire high-priced attorneys and consultants to CEQA-proof their projects.
Jennifer Hernandez, a San Francisco–based land-use attorney and CEQA expert, suggests several ways to change the law: Eliminate the ability for plaintiffs to remain anonymous when suing under CEQA; force plaintiffs to show that they're trying to protect the environment (and not just protect their own economic interests or preserve the "character of a community"); and limit a judge to halting only projects that are actually harming the environment.
CEQA reform wouldn't just make housing cheaper to build, it also would make other big infrastructure projects cheaper — and faster — to build, including parks and light rail. Hernandez says that thanks to CEQA, "It literally takes 20 years to build a rail line, which is crazy!"
3 & 4. Reform rent-control laws
The housing crisis isn't just a supply problem — an accelerated construction blitz would do nothing to help people being displaced from their homes today. That's why housing advocates are calling on lawmakers to repeal and replace two state laws that limit local rent-control ordinances.
3. The Costa-Hawkins Act limits local rent-control ordinances to housing units built before 1995. More important, it bans any law that would limit a landlord's ability to raise the rent of a vacated apartment. Because L.A.'s rent-control law limits the amount a landlord can raise the rent for an existing tenant (in units built before October 1978, anyway), Costa-Hawkins gives landlords a huge incentive to get rid of old tenants.
"It essentially puts a bull's-eye target on every rent-control tenant in the city," says Larry Gross, who helped write L.A.'s rent-control law and who heads the Coalition for Economic Survival.
State Assemblyman Richard Bloom, who represents West Los Angeles, co-authored a bill to repeal Costa-Hawkins. But the proposal was delayed until next year.
4. Another bill Assemblyman Bloom is looking to change is the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants under certain conditions. Since 2001, more than 22,000 rent-controlled units have been taken off the market by landlords using the Ellis Act. Every month, the city loses another 100 rent-controlled units.
"We're not going to address our affordable-housing crisis unless we preserve our existing affordable housing," Gross says. One change, he says, would be to limit landlords to one Ellis Act usage a year. Another would be to limit Ellis Act evictions to properties where the owner has owned the building for more than five years. "But really," he says, "the solution is to just get rid of the law."
5. Build a million homes in the Wilshire Corridor.
The majority of environmentalists say the only way to make L.A. environmentally sustainable is to make it denser. That would reduce automobile trips, which are by far the single greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And the increase in supply would make housing across the city cheaper, some say.
To that end, renowned architect Thom Mayne has a bold idea. Instead of building taller buildings willy-nilly in different parts of the city, why not leave 99 percent of Los Angeles alone and focus densification efforts along one single stretch of roadway: the Wilshire Corridor.
Mayne and other urban planners say Wilshire is perfect for such radical densification. It runs from downtown to the beach, passes LACMA and UCLA, and is served by the Purple Line subway, which will run from downtown to Westwood by the middle of the next decade. Mayne's plan extends the Purple Line to the beach and allows for the construction of very tall apartment buildings along the corridor. It also would add a ton of parks. Think of it as a long, slender stretch of Manhattan, embedded within the L.A. sprawl.
"Wilshire can already be seen as a city within a city," Mayne says. "We're only intensifying that condition."
6. Build pods for the homeless.
Los Angeles has more people experiencing chronic homelessness than any other city in America. The city has taken some notable steps in the last year, such as passing a tax hike to pay for the construction of permanent supportive housing for the homeless. But those buildings will take several years to be constructed. There's much that could be done to improve the lives of people living on the streets right now.
One idea comes from a grant-funded USC architecture class tasked with designing emergency housing for people living on the streets: 92-square-foot prefabricated pods that can be easily assembled, customized, stacked and transported by a flatbed truck or forklift. The units, dubbed Homes for Hope, would cost no more than $25,000 apiece, including construction.
The class worked with city officials to pre-certify the pods, which should expedite the approval process.
"The goal isn't for this to be a forever home," says one of the class's teachers, Sofia Borges, a designer and director of Madworkshop. "The goal is for this to be a place for people to stabilize, catch their breath and move on."
7. For a homelessness plan, look to Long Beach.
The number of people experiencing homelessness in the city of Los Angeles surged 20 percent last year, to more than 34,000. The homeless population in Long Beach, meanwhile, has dropped 21 percent over the last two years. In the two years before that, it fell 18 percent.
Yes, Long Beach is a much smaller city. But its demographics aren't all that different from L.A.'s, and Long Beach officials say there's no reason their own solutions couldn't be scaled up. All it takes is money — and since L.A. County voters recently approved a tax hike to pay for homeless services, that shouldn't be too much of an impediment.
Like Los Angeles, Long Beach builds supportive housing for people without homes and offers rental subsidies to people living at the margins of homelessness. But it does some other things from which L.A. could learn a thing or two.
"Our outreach team can honestly say they know everyone out there," says Teresa Chandler, Long Beach's Human Services Bureau manager. "They know them by name. Because of the constant contacts they make, when people are finally ready to come in, they let them know they're ready. It's all about relationship building, and that's what our team does well."
The bureau has a database that lists every person living on the street, every time they've been contacted, every service they've been provided. Also, it has one building that houses 11 agencies and functions as a one-stop shop for all homeless services. A person can walk in and immediately speak with a case manager. There is a single phone line to call for anyone requesting help, and calls are returned within 24 hours.