With the California Housing Partnership estimating that almost a half million more affordable units are needed across the County of Los Angeles, a holistic planning approach to meet this fundamental need in our region is necessary and timely.
Every 8 years, the State of California requires the City of Los Angeles, and other cities across the State, to update its Housing Element of the General Plan. Through this process, LA City must demonstrate land use capacity to add 456,000 more housing units - including 184,000 affordable units - by 2029.
After months of ideation, community outreach and revisions, the Planning Department has prepared the “Plan to House LA”, which was adopted by the City Council on November 24, 2021. The Plan proposes increasing housing near transit and in areas of high opportunity such as underutilized commercial corridors. The Plan also seeks to eradicate historically systemic barriers to housing development and attainment through its policy goals and objectives, a crucial starting point to reverse decades of segregated land use practices. In October, the Department of City Planning and Housing Department reported that 14% of the affordable housing units permitted in the last decade were located within high-resource neighborhoods, while 86% were in neighborhoods deemed low-resource and high-poverty.
The Plan seeks to lay the groundwork to affirmatively further fair and equitable housing production, with the vision of locating high quality housing in all feasible areas of the City - including in areas that historically blocked new housing through exclusionary zoning practices.
While the Plan strives to address social and geographic barriers to housing production, attainment and affordability, the critical step will be supporting the actual permitting and development of housing for all Angelenos.
The next step will be refining the list of eligible housing sites over the next three years, through the development of a comprehensive citywide rezoning program that aims to accommodate real growth potential throughout Los Angeles. .
For more information on the Plan please visit planning.lacity.gov.
