Understanding New Housing Policy in Los Angeles

Los Angeles, CA, USA

By Lyric Kelkar
housing, transportation, zoning, policy

Housing policy is hard to understand. This is a tool for seeing where growth will happen most in a rapidly changing environment.

Housing Policy in Los Angeles is a rapidly changing scene. There is a statewide affordable housing crisis and it is especially apparent in LA where the income inequality is at some of the highest in the country. In the past two years there have been tens of different bills and measures proposed both at the state and local levels. Getting a grasp on them to determine how they will affect the physical landscape is what this project is about.

Los Angeles is having a growth spurt right now, that is being fueled both by policy, but also by future events such as the 2028 Olympics. Because LA was chosen as the host city for that year, it sparked many conversations about speeding up timelines of the expanded transit system that was funded for a 40 year, $80 billion expansion back in 2016. Here is where the policies fundamentally intertwine. The housing measures passed in 2016 were heavily contingent on Measure M, the expansion package of the Metro system. And now, when these timelines are being moved up for development, how can we visualize what the effects of these policies are on the landscape?

This project is not an accurate depiction of what exactly is going to happen in the future, but instead a tool to determine how densifying some of our lowest zoned neighborhoods might look in the future. Inspiration from this project came from Policy Club and their maps that looked at SB 827 - a state-wide bill aimed at quickly densifying areas around transit, without regard to local zoning codes.

[photo taken from Policy Club’s website. This is a screen capture of their work.]

As historically with planning and development, bills like this one would have had a deeply adverse effect on low-income neighborhoods. California is experiencing what some call state-wise gentrification because more people are moving out than moving in; and those moving in, are higher income and have better educational attainment than those leaving. So looking at policy, particularly those that have to do with densifying, how does that play out for the people these new laws are being built to keep?

By having an affordable housing metric overlayed on top of the map, this tool can see how the lower density areas having higher capacity for building market rate development might affect individuals who are economically disadvantaged.

Then, by allowing the user to check and uncheck R1, R2, R3 and RD zoned areas, they can see how and where more development can happen (hint: it is almost all of Los Angeles). With the transit lines and stations put on the map, it shows geographically the intersection of the housing and the transit policies.

The information for this page came from LA City geohub, LA Metro, census data, and then a metric that I had put together to determine where needs affordable housing the most. This map can be built on and revised to understand any new laws that come LA’s way. Because the base layer is of the current zoning of the city, queries can be made to determine which parcels are at highest risk based on the details of the bill/measure in question.

Ultimately, this platform can be used both by residents and organizations to get a general sense of a bill in order to better inform their opinions of good it will or won’t do.