Los Angeles' Housing Shortage And Why Developers Get It Wrong
We have all heard of the massive housing crisis that’s facing the City of Los Angeles. Last year, one of the most active development years in a decade nearly, Los Angeles still fell well short of what it would need to even catch up on the housing shortage. Estimates say the city would need to deliver 100,000 units a year each year for a decade before it actually catches up with this shortage.
While everyone from developers to politicians to residents and locals all agree that there is a problem, very few actually have found a common ground to create a viable solution. The one solution developers seem to point to is “upzoning,” which essentially uses a density increase to let developers build up in order to add to the supply. While on the surface this would seem to be a quick fix, it is simply a very short-sighted solution to a problem that’s much more complex.
First, let's address some of the issues with this simple fix idea:
- Soil type and topography: Unlike Manhattan, known for its skyscraping structures, Los Angeles is mostly situated on either “liquefaction” areas or on fault lines. It’s easy to add density where you can build bigger and higher structures due to the foundation of granite and bedrock, such as in New York, but it's a much more precarious, costly and risky proposition to do the same here in Los Angeles. To apply the same methodology without taking into account topographic and natural challenges is simplistic at best.
- Congestion and infrastructure issues: As density is added, other concerns have to be addressed. Some of the most obvious ones that create challenges to communities and neighborhoods where density is added come from those that you can visibly recognize. Traffic congestion, commute times, the wear and tear on physical infrastructure are just some of those examples — but that’s also barely scratching the surface of what density addition without addressing core issues can aggravate.
- Water and droughts: Los Angeles is a desert turned into a metropolis. It was done so by channeling a lot of the water supply and reallocating those limited resources. What density addition and spot zoning/upzoning proponents forget is that the average daily consumption per capita in the Los Angeles area is 70.98 gallons. Adding density in Los Angeles without first actually looking at technology like desalination systems, air to water capture systems, greywater usage and sub ground drainage to capture rainwater which is now lost to the ocean in most of Los Angeles to increase our own supply of water would only add to our water crisis. From an environmental standpoint, this is worse than the housing crisis.
There are solutions to each of these problems, but they take time and coordinated effort and will need various agencies and organizations in the public sector to work with the private sector. Solving the issue will require developers to address local specific development plans and their drawbacks, and it will require us to truly understand the designated historic preservation zones and work around them. It will require us to work with the Coastal Commission to address various issues including environmental impact laws, CEQA and ADA restraints that would allow us to build without negative impacts. It will require us to really bring forth urban planning challenges to address a city as large as Los Angeles in geographic radius, and perhaps require us to make each “sub city” more walkable, more bike friendly, more accessible via public transit systems.
Finally, it will require us to learn more and use the best and most advanced building technology around to increase the safety of bigger projects, especially those surrounding susceptible fault lines. These are not small challenges fixed by short-term, extremely commercial and generally simplistic thinking.
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To really address the issue that Los Angeles faces, we have to start thinking in a complex manner to address a problem that is far from simple. As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”