Good to see this happening.<p>That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations?<p>There's a big problem for me in the latter building inefficient bureaucratic systems and being able to be gamed (e.g. If I'm rich maybe I can still buy a lower income unit for my children or perhaps my wife or mother and then rent it out. I could lower my income for one year just to qualify etc.)
> approving more units through this program in the last 13 months than all affordable housing approved in previous three years combined — without dedicating any additional subsidy.<p>oh, so it was NIMBYs all along!? <i>pikatchu face</i>
There is no code to crack. Just build more housing and it will become affordable. If it’s not affordable, you haven’t built enough yet.<p>It’s crazy how these cities will try literally anything except building more housing.
> A single person making $70,000 would qualify for a one-bedroom for about $2,000 per month. A family of four making $100,000 would qualify for a three-bed for about $2,500.<p>So not what most people would consider "affordable". It's "affordable" because it's currently affordable to people making below the area's median income and is deed restricted. It's nearly-market rate housing.<p>And that's a good thing! We need more housing of all kinds for all people.<p>>ED1 is not going to end homelessness in LA. (Though some non-profit developers — including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which spends millions of dollars advocating against housing policies like ED1 — are using the law to build affordable housing for the formerly homeless.)<p>The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is mentioned in a throwaway line, but it's truly one of the most bizarre parts of the housing discourse in California. It's a non-profit organization controlled by Michael Weinstein, who uses the organization as his personal slush fund to sue housing development that would block views from his office and his personal home, and sued to block any development in the city of Los Angeles. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Healthcare_Foundation</a>
I think they need to revisit their definition of done. All I saw was a 3d render and some people who said "could I build this" and they've somehow cracked something.<p>Eli goldrat would say you've solved nothing until people are living in those homes and producing in your society. (Customers' customers have received value)
"The housing crisis of the middle class is largely self-inflicted. "<p>Yeah. With current technology, you can build an incredible amount of housing in a year or so.<p>The most prominent obstacle is legal, and that's mostly NIMBY activity. You can sink anything into decades of quagmire by weaponizing all sorts of environmental laws and bylaws.
What is “affordable housing”? All housing becomes affordable once you build enough of it. Is it just the politically correct way of saying “low-quality housing”?
There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainless anti-housing pseudo-left.
Making things affordable in LA will be easy. Almost everyone I know is either in the process of leaving CA or planning on leaving. This includes everything from middle-class individuals to high-net-worth families, soon-to-retire and retired. Everyone is sick of the financially abusive environment in CA, at every level. And, of course, other issues.<p>My wife and I are so sick of it that it has become an almost weekly conversation. She is actively investigating where to go. There are a range of options, from other places in the US to Europe. Today she was showing me her research on opportunities in Valencia, Spain.<p>When we go, we will take three businesses and as many of the people working for us as possible out of CA. Logistically, it is far more likely that the move will happen within the US, of course.<p>So yeah, keep going on this path and housing affordability will not be a problem at all. That's my take on it. Right or wrong.
My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out of the way.<p>I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get approved and built.<p>The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1" but seems like a fine tradeoff.
Given california's long record of utter failure on this issue, I am skeptical.I see proposed, how many are actually approved and in construction? Its a decent start if they are actually managing to gwt building started
HUD and state/local counterparts should invest in real estate with the sole purpose of lowering housing costs. They should aim to break-even on their investments. They should also directly build and sell houses for profit to compete against commercial entities and drive down new housing cost.
I'll save you a click: no.<p>Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never.<p>What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.
So let’s see if I have this right … build a bunch of shitty project housing … pols and devs get sweet kickbacks … slumlords create another junkie dealer hellhole. Everybody high fives and declares mission accomplished!
Cracking the code is about as easy as reversing a rot-13 cipher. Apparently "build more housing where people want to be" faces more... political difficulties than purely technical ones.
There's NOTHING good in building dense housing. It always (ALWAYS) leads to more misery down the road: higher housing costs, smaller units, more congestion, etc.<p>Want truly affordable housing? Bring jobs to smaller cities. You don't have ANY other option.<p>No, "transit-enabled" housing won't help you. No, banning cars and forcing people to bike won't help you. No, screaming at the "end stage capitalism" won't help you.
Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session).<p>Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're richer but really they're not. You typically still own one housing unit of wealth in almost all cases. It's just the nominal value is higher. For this benefit, eye-wateringly massive subsidies have been given to Disney, institutional property holders and the very wealthy for absolutely no gain.<p>But this goes to show how powerful NIMBYs are and the level of delusional self-interest people possess.<p>For those unfamiliar, Prop 13 capped the annual property tax increases to 1-2%. Property tax rates are reset when the property is sold. Property held in LLCs is <i>never</i> reset because the LLC not the property is sold. This is why Disney's property tax rate was basically set in the 1960s and never been adjusted for current values. The net effect is that incumbent property owners from the 70s and 80s pay a tiny fraction of the assessable property tax on their properties and this has been a massive drain on state budgets. This was sold as not kicking seniors out of their houses. Texas handles this a lot better: property taxes can be deferred until death or the sale of the property.<p>But it gets worse: this beneficial tax rate can be <i>inherited</i>. It's just locking in generational wealth. It's also not allowing people to move because they can't keep this beneficial tax rate.<p>Recently, there was a very minor partial rollback on this known as Prop 19. What is it? It limits this beneficial property tax rate inheritance to only one property. That's right. If you owned 10 properties then your family could inherit all your tax rates prior to this. So this only affects people who bought multiple properties in the 20th century and sat on them. That's probably less than 1% of CAlifornians.<p>Prop 13 passed with <i>only 51% of the vote</i>. 49% of voters rejected this very minor reform. That's how powerful the NIMBY brain rot is.<p>Now against this force, which tends to overtake all local cities, towns, councils and planning boards, there have been a whole bunch of reforms: stopping the abuse of CEQA to block any development, increasing density without years-long planning approvals in certain cases (eg on major roads), all CA municpalities having to plan for how they're going to build more housing (aka the housing element) with real consequences for not complying (eg the builder's remedy) and so on.<p>Passing any of these given the power of NIMBYism with voters is a major accomplishment and I think these are starting to have an effect.