A key Los Angeles City Council committee approved a sweeping rezoning plan Tuesday that would focus new market-rate and affordable housing on commercial corridors and in existing dense residential neighborhoods.
This effort responds to state housing mandates that seek to alleviate the housing crisis by requiring the city to find land where 255,000 additional housing units can be built and that the plan be in place by mid -FEBRUARY.
During hours of public comment, members of the Land Use Planning and Management Committee heard from Angelenos who wanted to preserve single-family neighborhoods and those who wanted to open areas to more development to reduce economic segregation and racial.
“We need affordable housing everywhere — in every neighborhood,” said Maria Patiño Gutierrez, policy director of the nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.
Patricia Carroll, a resident of St. Andrews Square in downtown Los Angeles, told the committee that although she lives in a multifamily area, she enjoys walking through nearby neighborhoods filled with single-family homes, grass and trees. trees.
“If it were to go away…Los Angeles would be a very sad place to live,” Carroll said.
Ultimately, the commission voted 4-0 to approve a planning commission recommendation that largely leaves out single-family zones.
The proposal can still be amended by the full City Council and some council members not on the PLUM committee have expressed interest in changing course regarding single-family zones.
“By opening up some of these neighborhoods — to new housing — we would actually be taking steps toward abolishing the city’s patterns of segregation that, in many cases, policymakers have imposed on this city,” Nithya said Raman, a city council member, on the committee.
As currently written, the proposed citywide housing incentive program would allow developers to build more than currently allowed in commercial zones and in residential neighborhoods where apartment buildings are already authorized. To do this, developers would have to include a certain percentage of affordable units – and the property should be located near public transportation or along a main street, near jobs and good schools.
100% affordable projects would be eligible for incentives in a larger part of the city.
The incentives would apply in single-family zones only if a property is owned by a public agency or faith-based organization, which represents only a portion of the city’s single-family lots.
Some tenant advocates feared that opening existing multifamily areas to major new development would cause a wave of displacement as existing buildings were demolished.
These advocates have called for new restrictions on demolition, which the Planning Department says could significantly reduce new housing construction, including units meant to be affordable to low-income households.
The PLUM commission did not adopt these additional restrictions, but recommended requesting a report to study them.
In a letter to city officials, the California Department of Housing and Community Development warned that such additional restrictions could put the city out of compliance with state housing law.
The PLUM committee, however, made some changes despite these warnings.
The committee adopted an amendment that would reduce the number of homes per lot that faith-based organizations would be allowed to build under its program.
The Western Regional Carpenters Council, as well as some council members, expressed concerns that faith-based organizations that build housing would choose to use the city’s incentive program, which would not require of wages at the union level, instead of using a new state law that gives incentives to nonprofit colleges and faith-based organizations if they pay such wages.
“We cannot solve the housing crisis by pushing construction workers into poverty,” carpenter Nicolas Reyes told commission members.
Brooke Wirtschafter, community organizing director for the Jewish congregation IKAR, told the committee that IKAR is seeking to build affordable housing with up to 78 units.
She urged the city to keep its faith-based proposal as originally proposed because it would create “more opportunities for congregations to build housing, especially in high-resource communities.”
