Amid a yr dominated by discuss of rebuilding within the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, 2025 was yet one more yr of vanishingly few new houses in Los Angeles. At simply 8,714 residential permits issued by town, housing manufacturing stays close to a 10-year low — or roughly 5 instances fewer per capita than in cities like Austin, Texas.
These numbers have real-world penalties. In Austin, rents have plummeted 21% within the final three years and at the moment are again to pre-pandemic ranges. In Los Angeles, rents are up 28% from March 2020. For a lot of, that’s a distinction between making ends meet and dropping your private home.
This yr presents a possibility to vary course. And but if Mayor Karen Bass and her chief antagonist Rick Caruso signify two poles alongside the continuum of political views in L.A., their shared opposition to SB 79, a state regulation that legalized constructing extra houses close to main transit stops, hints at a deeper dysfunction in our physique politic.
The easy fact is that L.A.’s power housing scarcity isn’t for lack of technical capability or earnest speeches. It’s resulting from our political leaders’ basic ambivalence towards the treatment. Regardless of all of the ache our lack of houses inflicts on bizarre Angelenos, our elected officers nonetheless hesitate to declare, unconditionally, that constructing extra housing is sweet, truly.
This situation dates again a long time to the late Sixties, when anti-growth attitudes turned intertwined with progressive politics of the day. A Malthusian pressure of environmentalism — “if we don’t construct it, they gained’t have youngsters” — mixed with a worry of dense city environments and their predominantly Black and brown inhabitants following the riots that shook interior cities throughout the nation. A robust nationwide consensus took root that constructing fewer houses was higher.
That consensus reshaped Los Angeles. Underneath leaders like Zev Yaroslavsky who championed poll measures like Proposition U, town moved aggressively to limit progress, reducing its potential housing capacity from 10 million individuals to only 4 million.
After all, infants have been nonetheless born, jobs have been created, increasingly more individuals moved to L.A. looking for alternative — and anti-growth logic collapsed below the load of actuality. Rents soared. Homelessness exploded. Low earnings households have been displaced to Bakersfield, Victorville, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Metropolis leaders started to acknowledge L.A. wanted extra houses — kind of.
L.A. wants extra housing, we now hear our leaders declare — however provided that it doesn’t pressure infrastructure or solid shadows. Provided that it doesn’t change parking or drive anybody to maneuver. Provided that it’s 100% inexpensive, and provided that it preserves the “character” of present neighborhoods (72% of which are zoned for just one home per parcel).
It’s no shock, then, that our metropolis’s techniques to approve new houses are concurrently designed to thwart them. In any case, bureaucracies don’t invent priorities; they replicate them. In a metropolis the place Government Directive 1, the mayor’s signature program to construct inexpensive housing, has been systematically walked back and dismantled after it proved too profitable at constructing inexpensive housing, the most secure path for a civil servant reviewing your venture is to only say no at each juncture. Delay is tolerated. Accountability is shirked. Dysfunction abounds.
As famed administration theorist Stafford Beer said, the aim of a system is what it does. Broadly, L.A.’s housing insurance policies endure from three deadly flaws that collectively make up a system you’d be exhausting pressed to design higher in case your purpose was to fully stymie all dwelling constructing:
Synthetic shortage. Zoning continues to constrain progress within the high-opportunity areas the place demand to reside is highest, driving up the worth of the uncommon parcel of land the place it’s authorized and possible to construct. To go taller and denser, builders should pony up additional by offering “group advantages” that ignore the truth that new houses themselves are of nice profit to the group.
Regulatory uncertainty. Even code-compliant initiatives face a number of layers of unsure approvals and appeals. The typical unit in L.A. takes a mind-boggling 1,784 days to get built. The upper the chance of delays and value overruns, the upper the return demanded by buyers. A Rand Corp. evaluation signifies this can be a high cause housing costs 250% more to construct in California because it does in Texas.
Punitive taxes. Our authorities taxes cigarettes closely to discourage their use. In L.A., we apply related logic to new housing via affect charges, transfer taxes and inclusionary mandates that deter desperately wanted funding. As an alternative of collectively funding our infrastructure and inexpensive housing wants, we pin all of it on new initiatives — after which surprise why they don’t get constructed.
The distinction between Los Angeles and cities like Austin, Denver, Raleigh and Nashville which have made progress on housing isn’t the compassion or creativity of its residents. It’s the readability and braveness of its management.
Moments of real disaster — and we’ve all heard our legislators describe our housing and homelessness scenario as such — require leaders prepared to make powerful decisions. Cities that construct housing accomplish that as a result of they declare it a high precedence and align their establishments accordingly. Cities that hedge and delay quietly sabotage themselves.
The elemental query going through L.A. in 2026 isn’t whether or not we all know tips on how to construct extra houses. It’s whether or not we’re lastly prepared to say sure to them — and imply it.
Jesse Zwick is the Southern California director of the Housing Action Coalition.
