Los Angeles City Council Admits There is No Money for Homeless, No Money to Build Housing
As the City stagnates, the City Council and Mayor offer no new solutions. There are obvious solutions: rezone LA to be multi-family everywhere, make it easy to build by-right and get out of the way!
Los Angeles faces a housing shortage crisis. Los Angeles faces a chronic homelessness crisis. Los Angeles has higher than the national average joblessness. Los Angeles is going bankrupt.
All four of these issues stem from the same problem—we make it entirely impossible to build mixed income as well as low income affordable housing in the City through market forces.
The reality of not building enough housing is putting pressure everywhere. During the Housing and Homelessness Committee Meeting on Wednesday, November 6, 2024 we learned:
The City projects it can only build 17,000 housing units based on current ULA Tax receipts totaling $440 million, plus the potential for grants from California and the Federal government (although these grants will most likely disappear with the Trump and Republican victory last week)
While the Committee did pass the ULA program resolution for consideration by the full City Council, there is no timeline for the Council to pass the ordinance, nor is there a timeline to when the first housing units would be available
If the City does not cough up another $50 million dollars for the current fiscal year 2024/2025, hundreds of “interim” housing beds for homeless persons will disappear
If the City does not cough up another $186 million million dollars for fiscal year 2025/2026, up to 1,300 “interim” housing beds will disappear
The City has a projected 2024/2025 budget deficit of $476 million
The City has a projected 2025/2026 budget deficit of up to $2 billion
The City Council cannot get an audit of the Inside Safe program from Mayor Karen Bass’ office
If Los Angeles only needed 17,000 low income housing units, this would not be a problem. However, LA needs almost 450,000 housing units: 300,000 mixed income units and 150,000 low income units.
Losing 1,300 beds might not be the end of the world if there were only 1,300 people to house. However, LA needs to house 29,275 unsheltered homeless people (there are an additional 15,977 sheltered homeless, but most are in temporary, not permanent housing).
While the people of Los Angeles County approved Measure A and its 0.5% sales tax increase to combat homelessness (nominally a permanent 0.25% sales tax increase on top of the now repealed Measure H’s original temporary 0.25% sales tax increase), there is no guarantee of the County sending the City additional funds to pay for interim housing. Or if the County does send additional funds to the City, that those dollars will be enough to offset the increased budget requests for these services.
Either way, even with new Measure A funds, it looks like the City will still have a larger and larger budget hole as it tries to help move people off the streets and into shelter.
Somehow, the news still gets worse. Because Inside Safe pays higher bed rates than the other interim bed solutions funded by the City, it is hard for the Council to push back on requests from the service providers.
As Councilmember Monica Rodriguez put it, “We’re negotiating against ourselves.”
Not once during the Committee meeting did any of the five members provide their thoughts on how LA can solve these four issues of housing, homelessness, jobs or budget deficit. Rezone LA to be multi-family everywhere, make it easy to build by-right and get out of the way. Fortunately, we can Build! Build! Build! our way to a bright future.
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