Part 130: “Looking for Unicorns" – Housing and Homelessness Progress in Los Angeles

Published November 20, 2024.

Photo of the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency meeting on November 18 at the Metropolitan Water District headquarters by Zachary Ellison (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

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By Ruth Roofless and Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalists

Finding housing in Los Angeles isn’t easy, much less finding the perfect units for potential tenants within a building. At the City Administrative Officer’s (CAO) pivotal Homeless Strategy Committee meeting on Thursday, November 7, Assistant City Administrative Officer Edwin Gipson remarked that he felt like he was “looking for unicorns” in making placements. The real unicorn though might be the relatively new “Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Authority” (LACAHSA), a new-ish body designed to comprehensively tackle the housing crisis. Hydra-like problems of housing unaffordability and homelessness are nothing new in Los Angeles, but LACAHSA’s novel multi-jurisdictional structure promises a new approach to building affordable housing, keeping people off the streets, and getting those on them housed.

The CAO’s meeting with a single elected, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, takes place in non-descript conference room Suite 1500 in City Hall East, attached to main City Hall by a bridge over Main Street. By contrast, LACAHSA meets in the boardroom of the Metropolitan Water District Building on Alameda Street, with elected officials gathered at DWP’s usual chamber underneath elaborate lighting. The room was only sparsely filled with attendees. With 77,049 evictions originating from within the City of Los Angeles being processed through LA County Courts from February through December 2023, according to Controller Kenneth Mejia, the room could have been filled with those who were evicted many, many times over. The despair is real, as several public commenters reminded LACAHSA of their housing struggles. Indeed, at one point, the board even discussed adding outreach workers to the meeting plan.

Councilwoman Raman was there too at the LACAHSA (say it “la casa” like “the house” en Español) as a representative for the City of Los Angeles alongside Chief Housing and Homelessness Officer Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, representing the office of Mayor Karen Bass. Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell sat nearby amidst representatives from other municipalities within the county in a meeting led by California Community Foundation President and CEO Miguel Santana and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who stated that the LBC might as well be another county given its size and independent agencies, including its own health department. The crisis of the unhoused has bedeviled Los Angeles in a fiscal way that only the Los Angeles Police Department could rival, with people hitting the streets perhaps almost as fast as they come off them. Is LA doomed to simply repeat the same old mistakes?

As part of its work, the CAO’s office on November 7 again took up an item from its October 3 meeting, now branded as a “Motion for the Development of the Comprehensive Work Plan for the Homelessness Strategy Committee” (Council File 24-1179). The measure by Nithya Raman, with a second from Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, was approved by City Council on October 29 with a 13-0-2 vote and involves an in-kind gift of 4 months from the California Community Foundation, The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Southern California Grantmakers “to develop a clear and cohesive map of the City’s homelessness operations, across departments.” The evaluation will be led by Sarah Solon of HR&A Advisors, who serves as Principal, Inclusive Cities. With Solon having previously worked for the New York City Mayor’s office in both criminal justice and mental health, as well as for the ACLU. Asked for a comment about the scope of her work and goals for the project, Sarah Solon didn’t immediately respond.

Clearly, our first recommendation would be to implement C.F. 19-1020, which we’ve campaigned for along with others in Los Angeles who wanted to see the City make good on its promise to create a Commission on Lived Experience with Homelessness. The motion, authored by former Councilmember Mike Bonin with a second from Harris-Dawson, was introduced on September 4, 2019. C.F. 19-1020 can be located in the City Clerk’s Council File Management System “CFMS” along with an 11-page report from the Chief Legislative Analyst office dated November 22, 2022. Creating the commission is a basic move to get more feedback from those being served, but attempts to revive it before the November 18th expiration date faltered. This was despite a last-ditch attempt to move it forward with the recent endorsements of 9 separate neighborhood councils ranging from Palms to Reseda to Rampart Village. CF19-1020 received the backing of a similar Lived Experience Advisory Body, "LEAB,” within Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), who had stated that they too wanted to see Council take this step forward by engaging the expertise of people who live on City streets and in City-run shelters. We can only hope that this great idea will rise again to the top of the agenda, especially with recent news from the Controller about massive underspend of City Homelessness funds, which likely would have been detected sooner had the City been listening to the streets.

Meanwhile, LACAHSA, separate from LAHSA, was doing its thing on affordable housing like a finely-tuned machine. If LAHSA were a joint-powers authority between the City and the County, LACAHSA is modeled much more like the Metro Board, with representation from cities from across the County. Administratively led by Ryan Johnson, Interim Chief Executive Officer, an investments specialist with experience in New York City, Orange County, and Greenville, South Carolina; Johnson also served in the U.S. Army with the 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion. Johnson’s presentation on “Alternative Affordable Investment Models” states that “LACAHSA is able to unleash large scale production by creating investments that avoid the bond cap allocation.” The bond cap allocation limits borrowing under a state ceiling by the California Debt Limit Allocation Committee (CDLAC) in order to manage limited public borrowing power. LACAHSA would take an end-run around state limits, promising to provide “a conduit for significant rehabilitation of aging affordable housing.” Johnson’s presentation suggested that “the organization in partnership with philanthropy & private sector can create catalytic investment partnerships to leverage agency financing on [sic] 4-1 basis.” 

Asked how this would be accomplished, Ryan Johnson stated that “LACAHSA has been engaged with both philanthropic and private sources of funding prior to the passing of Measure A.” Furthermore, Johnson plans to leverage "additional sources from my career in the non-profit and private sector.” LACHSA’s investment models are seemingly still under consideration, but Johnson’s presentation stated under “Guarantee Programs” that “Government or Philanthropy can create pools of money designed to unleash private capital (equity or debt) by providing gap coverage” and bridging “the delivery of other government sources of investments or catalytic investment in underinvested communities.” The presentation further suggested a “Joint Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae Preservation Product” to achieve its goal with a “July/August 2025 Launch” date set. Also on the table are “LACAHSA Social Mortgage Bonds,” for which “LACAHSA is the sole lender or risk shares with senior leader.” In an email response, Johnson added that LACAHSA, unlike similar projects in the Bay Area and Charlotte, “has the unique dual ability to issue bonds and a sustainably source of funding via Measure A.” The presentation left at least one commissioner asking if this was really the solution that LACAHSA leadership promised and if the risk of such widespread lending was in fact perhaps greater than anticipated at the start. YIMBY somewhat?

Next on the agenda was a quick approval of hiring a General Counsel and Inspector General for LACAHSA at a recruiting and solicitation cost “in an amount not to exceed in total, $450,000, for a term not to exceed eighteen months.” Will turning affordable housing in Los Angeles County into a Wall Street model work to unleash the levers of capital? There are clearly no guarantees, even under the current effort to change zoning laws to promote density. In fact, as Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillon recently reported, at least one think tank thinks the proposed rezoning wouldn’t even produce enough housing to meet the state goal of 250,000 more units by 2030. Moreover, how do you get past the NIMBY effect? The story noted in “single family home neighborhoods” that “City officials had considered allowing changes…but reversed course after pushback from homeowner groups that protested the potential for traffic and parking problems.” Financing and planning alone clearly can’t get Los Angeles out of this crunch, nor can more bureaucracy, even done with the best apparent intentions as LACAHSA has set out. If anyone knows of additional funding sources, please do let LACAHSA know ASAP.

Perhaps Edwin Gipson was right; developing housing in Los Angeles is a bit like “looking for unicorns,” much less getting housing clients, including the unhoused into it! Without even using the G-word, gentrification, the pushback against just about any project is common. LACAHSA discussed how in general the construction of new condominium units has stalled, but more broadly, even despite a so-called “mansion tax” under Measure ULA, the city just isn’t producing very much housing. In 2023-2024, according to Los Angeles City Planning, 22,623 units were proposed, of which 16,458 were deed-restricted to be affordable versus market rate. From these planned units, “17,556 housing units were approved, of which 10,588 units (or 60%) were deed-restricted affordable units,” per a report from journalist Kenneth Schrupp in The Center Square from October. Nevertheless, Mayor Karen Bass trumpeted on Instagram: “Housing Permit Wait Time Slashed 75% Over Past Two Years,” citing a monthly public progress report citing “27,210 affordable housing units…being accelerated all across the City.”

Mayor Bass claimed that “Housing permit timelines that previously took six to nine months to secure now only take an average of 44 days,” citing 335 pending applications of which 239 had received entitlements for the land they hoped to build upon. Still, reaching a goal like 250,000 new units within even a four-year term as Mayor seems like a stretch, and Bass has two years left on her current term and then 4 more should she win re-election. At the current apparent breakneck rate, Los Angeles would produce 163,260 units, falling 86,740 units short of the state goal. How much more housing can be unleashed? And what about major projects that have been sidelined, such as Oceanwide Plaza or the Sears Mail Order building? Is density alone a goal considering the need to distribute population growth versus confining it to the South Park area in Downtown, much less Boyle Heights? Hitting these goals has made not just about new construction but also increasing affordability a priority, and that will require increasing wages.

It’s no secret that wealth has become increasingly concentrated at the top. Simply put, in Los Angeles, some have a great amount of wealth, and others have just about absolutely nothing left in their pockets. California Proposition 32, which would have increased the hourly rate to $17 immediately and $18 in 2022, narrowly failed 51%-49%, but such a wage isn’t even close to what it takes to afford housing in Los Angeles County. Opponents claimed that increasing the bottom wage rung would hurt small businesses, but really the rejection seemed more ideologically based. With Jot Condie, President & CEO of the California Restaurant Association, stating: “It is important that policymakers hear the message being sent by the voters — stop using California consumers as guinea pigs for public policy experiments that make life more expensive for everyone.” The apparent resurgence of conservatism in California reflects widespread dissatisfaction with the current order of things as well as specific grievances. 

Undoubtedly, it’s less expensive to keep people off the streets than to push them into living on them by being priced out. Is it any wonder that people are leaving California? According to Forbes Magazine in a recent report, “The average cost of a single-family home in California is a shocking $737,677, more than double the national average.” Even as the population of homeowners in California has slowly grayed out, the exodus to the Sunbelt and Pacific Northwest has continued. Demographics may be destiny, but the writing is on the wall: California isn’t quite for the young so much anymore. Where will the workforce needed to take care of and provide services to this aging population live? Assuredly, not in market-rate apartments! Housing additions like Accessory Dwelling Units ("casitas," small homes) are increasingly popular, but the question begs: is the older Trump voting population simply deeply out of touch with their own needs in wanting to deport migrants, who are critical to our economy?

Loathing the homeless and unemployed is one thing, but this generation, which has more buying power than any other, has a tight grip on finances, locally and nationally, in a way that is truly astonishing. Granting loans as LACAHSA would do for developers who would lend to underfunded millennials, Generation Y and Z, is a novel concept, but it doesn’t guarantee re-payment (see student loans). With the U.S. National debt approaching $36 trillion and the annual Gross Domestic Product closing in on $30 trillion, the fact is that you could shut down the entire economy for an entire year and it still wouldn’t pay off our debts. Moreover, the U.S. is increasingly leveraged to foreign governments to finance this extravagant living in a country that hasn’t seen a serious economic blowout since 2008-09. Wall Street has rallied around the election of Donald Trump, but will Wall Street rally around preserving old housing stock in Los Angeles? The ambitions of LACAHSA to be an investment agency might be grand, but in the larger scheme of things, even mighty Los Angeles can be just a small boat in a larger ocean. Previous attempts to preserve old affordable housing from demolition, like 2008’s LAMC § 41.17 Residential Hotel units. Will LACAHSA attempt to protect these buildings with enforcement?

LACAHSA promises to bring together: Academic, Business Community, Faith Community, Homeless Service Providers, Labor Community, Persons with Lived Expertise, and the Veteran Community. But can it survive another administration under Donald Trump, who previously threatened to strip California of federal funds for housing and homelessness?

Los Angeles County Measure A thankfully passed with a surprising 58% support, with Los Angeles Public Press journalist Ashley Orona reporting that of the $1.1 billion expected to be raised, approximately $400 million will go to LACAHSA. She quoted LACAHSA Vice Chair Miguel Santana, declaring, “We have now an ongoing permanent revenue stream that is not tied to any federal program or state program.” LACAHSA was created in 2022 by the state legislature for the purpose of helping “ensure greater flexibility and reliability for affordable housing financing, among other tasks related to homelessness prevention.” Orona noted the complexity, comparing it to a “house of cards.” We’re not so sure about that totally, but there are still plenty of people with barely a tent to sleep in on the streets of Los Angeles, and many working poor are teetering towards evictions every month. Just where will the buck stop in America, much less Los Angeles? LA may not be doomed, but more work is needed.

Link: CAO Comprehensive Homeless Strategy Committee

Link: Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Authority

Link: LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s 2023 Eviction Notices Table

Link: Housing & Homelessness Committee Meeting Wednesday November 6th, 2024

Link: Los Angeles rezoning plan won’t spur enough new housing, report finds

Link: New market rate housing disappearing in Los Angeles, city reports

Link: Mayor Karen Bass Instagram Post RE: Affordable Housing

Link: Foes of raising California’s minimum wage declare victory

Link: Why Are People Leaving California? Stats That May Surprise You

Link: Planning for California’s Growing Senior Population

Link: LA now has Trump-proof funds for addressing homelessness

Please support my work with your subscription, or for direct support, use Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, or Zelle using zachary.b.ellison@gmail.com

Ruth “Roofless” has lived outside in the City of Los Angeles continuously for over five years. She attends public meetings about homelessness and exposes widespread programmatic corruption from within.

Zachary “Obama” Ellison is a whistleblower journalist who is writing an investigative journalism series about Los Angeles on politics, investigations, and media. 

Ruth and Zachary have teamed up to collaborate on a series covering the LA Alliance lawsuit and more. We hope to expose the inner workings of the government real estate development world and the impact felt by the people residing there.