Letters to the Editor: Are L.A.’s single-family neighborhoods worth protecting?
5 months, 4 weeks ago

Letters to the Editor: Are L.A.’s single-family neighborhoods worth protecting?

LA Times  

To the editor: I am a never-homeowner living in an apartment building on a street full of apartment buildings. As a native of Los Angeles, I have countless Latino and Black friends raised in dense environments who have worked hard to to move to single-family neighborhoods. Most recently, the Los Angeles Planning Commission voted to exempt single-family neighborhoods from the city’s new housing plan. To the editor: The Times’ editorial board has yet again gone to war against single-family neighborhoods, making them out to be the villain in our affordable housing crisis. Instead, The Times suggests that single-family neighborhoods be destroyed, ignoring the fact they provide social stability and a middle-class presence, not to mention valued property tax revenue and economic buying power for city coffers.

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History of this topic

L.A. City Council votes to boost housing development, while leaving out single-family-home zones
3 months, 2 weeks ago

L.A. City Council votes to boost housing development, while leaving out single-family-home zones

LA Times  

An apartment building under construction in the Palms neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2020. The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday voted to boost housing development in existing high-density residential neighborhoods and along commercial corridors, while leaving single-family zones largely untouched. Last month, a city council committee approved a plan that allowed for more building in existing high-density residential neighborhoods …

Letters to the Editor: Stop spreading this outdated trope about single-family neighborhoods
4 months, 1 week ago

Letters to the Editor: Stop spreading this outdated trope about single-family neighborhoods

LA Times  

To the editor: Once again, it is being suggested that those who own and live in single-family homes are wealthy and white. Such a suggestion implies that single-family zoning is inherently unfair and that every block of homes needs at least one huge box with balconies covering nearly an entire lot, just to bring these homeowners down a rung or …

Could L.A.’s rezoning plan to boost housing supply cause more tenant displacement?
4 months, 2 weeks ago

Could L.A.’s rezoning plan to boost housing supply cause more tenant displacement?

LA Times  

Sandra Sanchez described the headaches as strong. “It doesn’t make sense to have this huge cornerstone of our housing policy solution be at risk.” Los Angeles is proposing changes because state housing rules mandate the city find land where developers can add 255,000 new homes — just over half of which would be affordable to low-income families. The incentives vary …

Los Angeles has to rezone the entire city. Why are officials protecting single-family-home neighborhoods?
6 months ago

Los Angeles has to rezone the entire city. Why are officials protecting single-family-home neighborhoods?

LA Times  

The city of Los Angeles is on the verge of redrafting blueprints for its neighborhoods to accommodate more than 250,000 new homes. “This has resulted in an unaffordable housing market due, in part, to a pervasive lack of supply and the fact that single-family homes are more expensive than multi-family residences.” The future of single-family-home neighborhoods has been one of …

Editorial: A test for Mayor Bass’ Planning Commission — support affordable housing or preserve single-family zoning?
6 months ago

Editorial: A test for Mayor Bass’ Planning Commission — support affordable housing or preserve single-family zoning?

LA Times  

The Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday will make one of its most consequential decisions in years. And we hope Mayor Karen Bass’ appointees on the commission agree and back a proposal to allow apartments and townhomes to be built on single-family zoned properties near public transportation stops and major streets in affluent areas, such as Ventura Boulevard and Wilshire …

Letters to the Editor: Ending single-family zoning will wipe out what makes L.A. unique
9 months ago

Letters to the Editor: Ending single-family zoning will wipe out what makes L.A. unique

LA Times  

To the editor: Your editorial board shows its unwavering commitment to a strain of progressive politics best described as, “If I can’t have it, nobody can.” It’s a punitive form of social justice dressed up as enlightened policy. Abolishing single-family zoning would wipe out the neighborhoods that give Los Angeles its unique character and would turn L.A. into a third-rate …

Editorial: L.A. can't become affordable with single-family zoning
9 months, 1 week ago

Editorial: L.A. can't become affordable with single-family zoning

LA Times  

In 2021, Los Angeles adopted one of California’s most ambitious housing plans. The decision to exempt single-family zones perpetuates unfair land use patterns, a coalition of housing groups wrote last month in a letter to city leaders, and means “most of the city’s wealthiest and most privileged areas will remain off-limits to mixed-income multi-family housing development.” The Planning Department acknowledged …

Opinion: The future of Los Angeles housing can learn from Silver Lake, Fairfax and Crenshaw
1 year ago

Opinion: The future of Los Angeles housing can learn from Silver Lake, Fairfax and Crenshaw

LA Times  

Just off Sunset Boulevard sits a bleached white structure topped by onion domes as if it had been lifted off the coast of North Africa. Yet from Parkman Avenue to the fourplexes of the Fairfax district and garden apartments in Crenshaw, multifamily housing has a legacy as deep and rich in Los Angeles as single-family homes. These features made early …

Opinion: Don’t gut L.A.’s best shot at building affordable housing
1 year ago

Opinion: Don’t gut L.A.’s best shot at building affordable housing

LA Times  

Development west of USC. Two housing initiatives — an Affordable Housing Overlay and expansions to the Transit Oriented Communities program — would have made it possible to build affordable and mixed-income housing in areas traditionally off-limits to multifamily homes. California law requires that development programs “ affirmatively further fair housing, ” meaning that they should “overcome patterns of segregation and …

Opinion: Why is L.A. still letting single-family homeowners block solutions to the housing crisis?
1 year, 1 month ago

Opinion: Why is L.A. still letting single-family homeowners block solutions to the housing crisis?

LA Times  

Last month YIMBY Law, a nonprofit, pro-housing advocacy group, sued the City of Los Angeles on behalf of a private developer seeking to construct a 360-unit apartment building in Canoga Park. Last year, the mayor’s office amended ED1 to shield single-family zones from streamlined development — after eight such applications, including the Canoga Park proposal, were already submitted. Bass announced …

Opinion: Who gets to live in L.A? A bold plan to create affordable housing has a serious flaw
1 year, 4 months ago

Opinion: Who gets to live in L.A? A bold plan to create affordable housing has a serious flaw

LA Times  

Last December, Mayor Karen Bass moved to speed up the production of affordable housing in Los Angeles by issuing Executive Directive 1. In her effort to permanently streamline the construction of affordable housing, Mayor Bass is asking the city to weigh in on a bigger question: Who gets to live in Los Angeles? This change came after the city planning …

Letters to the Editor: This housing project isn’t ‘down the street.’ It’s right next to single-family homes
1 year, 4 months ago

Letters to the Editor: This housing project isn’t ‘down the street.’ It’s right next to single-family homes

LA Times  

A proposed 33-bed interim homelessness shelter at the site of a city parking lot on Midvale Avenue in West L.A. has drawn backlash from housed residents nearby. To the editor: Your editorial on the local opposition to a temporary housing project for homeless people in a West L.A. residential neighborhood failed to include any objective data or arguments on why …

Opinion: How L.A. can build more housing without looking like New York
1 year, 7 months ago

Opinion: How L.A. can build more housing without looking like New York

LA Times  

With the typical cost of a home in Los Angeles soon topping $1 million, and the state’s median rent approaching $3,000, there’s a sense of doom around how unaffordable California has become. Los Angeles is geographically vast — nearly twice the size of Chicago and significantly larger than New York City, with much lower population density than those two cities. …

Opinion: The $1-million home is becoming the norm in L.A. This is an outrage we could have prevented
1 year, 7 months ago

Opinion: The $1-million home is becoming the norm in L.A. This is an outrage we could have prevented

LA Times  

Single-family homes in South L.A. More than three-quarters of the region is zoned for them. UC Berkeley’s Terner Center modeled six different housing policies for Los Angeles and found that the single intervention with the biggest impact on supply growth was loosening density restrictions. In 2020, white homeownership reached a postwar peak of 75%, while Black homeownership lagged far behind …

How five homeowners chose their L.A.-area neighborhoods
3 years ago

How five homeowners chose their L.A.-area neighborhoods

LA Times  

In a region as vast as Greater Los Angeles, simply saying you live here doesn’t say much. I couldn’t believe it.” Ever since then, “I’ve always wanted to buy in View Park,” she said. I did this!” JOEL ROSENBERG HOLLYWOOD When Joel Rosenberg said he would consider only condos that were near his longtime dog walker, his real estate agent …

Editorial: Los Angeles will soon have a plan to start solving its housing crisis
3 years, 5 months ago

Editorial: Los Angeles will soon have a plan to start solving its housing crisis

LA Times  

It’s possible that 2021 will be the year that California begins to end the state’s housing crisis. The city’s proposed Housing Element is honest, ambitious and has the potential to make L.A. a more equitable and affordable city. As part of the Housing Element, the city must identify properties that could be developed for 455,000 new units of housing, including …

Editorial: To save California, sacrifice single-family zoning
3 years, 7 months ago

Editorial: To save California, sacrifice single-family zoning

LA Times  

Andrew Aguayo works on an Accessory Dwelling Unit being built as part of a new initiative called Backyard Homes, in which homeowners receive help building an ADU in their backyard in exchange for agreeing to rent it to a low-income Section 8 resident. SB 9 would allow up to four units of housing on a single-family lot. California has already …

In a first for California, Sacramento poised to allow apartments in single-family home neighborhoods
4 years, 1 month ago

In a first for California, Sacramento poised to allow apartments in single-family home neighborhoods

LA Times  

A jogger passes single family homes in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Sacramento.Sacramento is on the verge of approving a plan that would make the city the first in California to end zoning that permits only one single-family home on a property. “I not only take pride in the fact that we’re leading — I insist on it.” A “Don’t Become …

Editorial: SB 50 is dead. L.A. lawmakers need a housing solution
5 years, 1 month ago

Editorial: SB 50 is dead. L.A. lawmakers need a housing solution

LA Times  

Once again, Los Angeles-area lawmakers have come together in Sacramento to block Senate Bill 50, which was the most significant and far-reaching bill proposed this year to help address California’s dire housing shortage. Even though poll after poll shows that housing and homelessness are Californians’ top concerns, legislators are still incapable of reaching a rational, mutually acceptable compromise that would …

A little-noticed zoning twist is set to spark a home-building boom in L.A.
5 years, 10 months ago

A little-noticed zoning twist is set to spark a home-building boom in L.A.

LA Times  

An apartment complex under construction on Sawtelle Boulevard in Los Angeles is being built under the city’s Transit Oriented Communities program. New units proposed near transit Since the Transit Oriented Communities, or TOC, program launched in September 2017, developers have proposed more than 12,000 units, including at least 2,300 homes kept affordable for lower-income households, according to city data through …

California could bring radical change to single-family-home neighborhoods
5 years, 10 months ago

California could bring radical change to single-family-home neighborhoods

LA Times  

A single-family home goes up in Palo Alto last month. “I do not think it’s possible to solve housing affordability problems and meet climate change goals without dealing with this issue of single-family homes only,” Galante said. “I think much of it should be preserved.” High-profile California housing bill clears hurdle after tense debate over local control » In the …

Op-Ed: L.A.’s land use rules were born out of racism and segregation. They’re not worth fighting for
6 years, 11 months ago

Op-Ed: L.A.’s land use rules were born out of racism and segregation. They’re not worth fighting for

LA Times  

Like many people in Los Angeles, I like detached houses. In Los Angeles, that would allow small-to-medium-sized apartment buildings to be built on approximately 190,000 single family-zoned lots where such development has been banned for decades. That change could simultaneously take Los Angeles back to the 1920s, when zoning was more flexible, and forward into the 2020s, by allowing the …

California Journal: When it comes to L.A. development projects, does anyone really care what the neighbors think?
7 years, 8 months ago

California Journal: When it comes to L.A. development projects, does anyone really care what the neighbors think?

LA Times  

Al Casas, who helped found the West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, stands in the public alley that Los Angeles gave to the developers of a proposed apartment house project on Gateway and Pico boulevards. “The mayor wants to make L.A. a denser city,” said Al Casas, a business owner and community activist who helped found the West Los Angeles Neighborhood …

L.A. isn’t a suburb. We need to stop planning it like one.
8 years, 8 months ago

L.A. isn’t a suburb. We need to stop planning it like one.

LA Times  

Living in Los Angeles can be frustrating. Zoning is a 20th century relic designed to “protect” existing residents from the encroachment of people and buildings they see as “undesirable.” Think of the challenges L.A. is facing: rising homelessness and rents, hotter weather and severe drought from climate change, ongoing divides between wealthy and lower-income neighborhoods. Zoning is a 20th century …

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