In response to Los Angeles’ severe housing crisis—one of the worst among major U.S. cities— and state pressure, Mayor Karen Bass introduced Executive Directive 7. This surprising executive action aims to cut bureaucratic obstacles and stimulate housing development across all income brackets. Background Los Angeles struggles with high rents, overcrowded conditions, and increasing housing instability due to decades of restrained housing production. This shortage of affordable and accessible housing has highlighted the deepening disparities within communities and escalated the city’s homelessness crisis. Los Angeles’ housing crisis is a result of low levels of housing production and restrictive land use regulations dating
  •  megopie   ( @megopie@beehaw.org ) 
    1•1 year ago

    This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like, it a continuation of this narrative that the problem is a lack of units, and that if we just encourage more development the problem will solve it’s self.

    But what happens when the developers only build luxury units because that’s the only way to make their investment back in a reasonable time frame due to the absurd cost of land? What happens when those units are just bought up by speculators who refuse to fill them because then they’d have to maintain them and spend time dealing with residents? Sure they have some laws in place requiring the construction of affordable housing along side high end housing, but what are the chances that bit of regulation isn’t going to be the first one to get cut?

    The way it’s worded it sounds like the intention is for there to be more units of all price range getting built, but the permitting and regulatory process is not the reason there is a shortage of affordable units. That’s far more to do with gentrification, and private equity artificially inflating demand.