Havoc in the City: How Will the Homeless Crisis in Los Angeles be Solved?
For as long as Angelenos my age can remember the homeless crisis has been apparent and persistent in their everyday lives. Personally, I see all the time, all over Los Angeles people living in their trailers and trucks for one simple reason. It is not cost-effective for them to rent or buy a home or apartment. There was someone outside of my apartment sophomore year that lived in their van, and it was a sad thing to see. I talked to this man, and he told me that he has a job and pays his bills. Although the one bill that he could not keep up with was his rent. He made the decision to move out of his apartment and buy a van. This is the case for thousands of people in the city, seeing people live in their vans, cars, and RVs is commonplace all throughout the city. Not to mention all the people who cannot afford vehicles and are subject to living in makeshift homes like tents. The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is not sustainable, the city needs to facilitate the construction of affordable housing and work with local developers to build affordable units as fast as possible.
The homeless situation in Los Angeles is dire. According to a CNN article, there are more than 66,400 homeless people in Los Angeles (Maxouris 1). That number was also 12.7 percent higher than the previous year. Most of the people that experience homelessness are men, 24% are mentally ill, 22% suffer from serious mental illness, and 33% experienced domestic violence from a partner (Maxouris 1). Los Angeles
currently ranks number two in the highest homeless population behind New York but has a higher population per capita. Homeless people have been camping out on our beaches, in front of our grocery stores, and even in people’s homes. This dissuades people from buying homes in certain neighborhoods and visiting local stores. This directly affects the local economies of neighborhoods; the city needs to hire local developers and revive the supply of affordable housing for the sake of homeless people and the city’s residents.
People can blame the federal government for the high rents and home prices. According to USC Lusk’s 2022 multifamily report, rising interest rates can slow the economy through two channels: decreasing consumer demand and choking off new housing construction. The government’s hike in interest rates has made financing for construction almost impossible. This also affects rent, landlords need to raise rents to keep up with rising interest rates on their loans. One of the main takeaways from Colliers Q2 2022 Multifamily report is that rents have gone up on average 7.2%. The vast deployment of capital into the economy is to blame for this economic downturn. The rents and home prices in Los Angeles are suffering as a result and all the people that live on the street in Los Angeles are suffering as well.
From my understanding as a real estate development major, there are a few ways that this situation can be improved. The city government would need to do what is called “up zoning”. Up zoning is a practice that cities use to add more dwelling units to a lot. This would allow the family that currently lived there to add an additional dwelling unit to their property and along with that, rent it out to a tenant and receive passive income. This past year Gavin Newsom passed SB 9, which eliminates zoning for single-
family homes throughout the entire state. Relaxed zoning laws can increase the supply of affordable housing and incentivize developers to build real estate. Although I do not think that the measures that Newsom passed were enough. Aside from residential areas, there are zones for retail and industrial buildings. Buildings that could be rezoned and converted into affordable housing developments. Los Angeles county needs to do a massive rezoning project to increase the supply of housing which would drive down home prices and rents.
There are a vast number of vacant buildings in the city that could be rezoned. This would take a massive effort on the part of the city and the local affordable housing developers. That is why properties around the entire city of Los Angeles need to be rezoned. So that developers can go into properties like malls and abandoned retail centers to rehabilitate them and make them livable. The obstacle to this is that the city does not want to just throw people into random buildings or warehouses. The building needs to have running water in various rooms as an apartment building would. There would also need to be interior improvements made to section out rooms. This plan is feasible, the largest obstacle would be the city planning commission. Such a massive rezoning in areas where there are few residential units would be tough to pass. All I think the city needs is a well-thought-out business plan to outline how they can do this. They would have to contract affordable housing developers and commit them to building units in the newly zoned areas. Next, they would have to tell the “story” of why these vacant buildings need to be rezoned. How they would do this is beyond my scope but presenting the lack of affordable housing supply and the surplus pf those who needed it
would be a start. This is something the city must commit to taking more homeless people off the streets.
Currently, in this economy, it is the worst time to buy a house since the Great Financial Crisis. This is the time for the Los Angeles city council to make changes to its current policies to make it easier to build something in this city. A suggestion could be that they could increase the budget for their entitlement office. This would allow developers to build affordable housing much more quickly. The entitlement process can take years for a property to get entitled from retail to affordable housing. The main way they would make the process faster would be to hire more employees. Doing this would allow documents, requests, and phone calls to be processed much faster. So, if this process were to be expedited and if it were to become shorter then it would allow for more people to have housing that is affordable. In fact, the state department of housing of California said this March that Los Angeles is not fully complying with the mandate that they need to zone more land for affordable housing (Daily News 1). According to the state, Los Angeles would need to zone housing for a quarter million more units.
One way that I think Los Angeles can achieve this at a faster pace is by using public land and designating it for affordable housing. There are already thousands of homeless people that are encamped on public land anyway so to use it for affordable would make sense. There are parks and fields all around the city that could be converted into apartment units. What is the point of having a bunch of tents there when there could be an affordable housing development? This isn’t very easy for a city to do because of the costs of financing and the cost of raw materials. That is why they need to outsource this responsibility to a developer that knows what they are doing.
According to Daily News, to meet their goals to squash homelessness they need to produce 57,000 units of housing in a year. Although since 2014 it has been producing 16,700 units of housing per year. Also, the city wants to have 23,000 designated as affordable, this expectation is not at all realistic and the city must be real with itself. The reason why is that, since 2014, there have only been 1,650 affordable units produced per year (Daily News 2). The city is telling its citizens false information every year about how much output they will have with affordable housing units. The reason for this is that it is so hard to develop properties in Los Angeles. The city planning commission is notorious for not being friendly to local developers. Even ones that want to help the city and develop affordable housing. This summer I worked alongside a person who would brokered loans for affordable housing deals in Los Angeles. He has been doing this for the past twenty years and even said himself that the city impedes developers every step of the way when they are trying to develop affordable housing.
The government can incentivize affordable housing is by giving financial incentives to real estate developers. There are many obstacles that developers face when building in Los Angeles many of those are financially based. Problems like the costs of raw materials and high-interest rates prevent them from making it financially feasible. The government can make a program that involves a screening process for developers to apply to and try and get this stipend. There are various federal housing programs that lend to real estate developers at affordable and competitive rates. These would be Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Federal Housing Association (FHA), Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. I was thinking that California has a big enough economy to mock these government programs on a state level. They could do the same things
and it would be more focused on the mission of financing affordable housing at a lower interest rate.
The government is exercising a practice right now to add to the new supply of affordable housing in Los Angeles. Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission is a nonprofit organization that is currently building tiny housing units all over the city. Each home is 64 square feet and has a desk, bathroom, and a front door (Hope of the Valley). They provide meals and job training to transition homeless people into more normal life. This mission was started in February of 2021, around this time Angelenos wanted to see more change with the current state of the homeless crisis. It had been worsening ever since COVID-19 struck in 2020. So, since February of 2021, the city has invested millions of dollars to build more than five of these communities, mostly located in North Hollywood and Highland Park. There are currently 908 Beds and counting, this is the initiative that the city needs to keep investing in. This action should have been spearheaded ten years ago when the homeless crisis was more manageable than in the post covid world.As everyone who lives in Los Angeles knows, this city is not flush with cash. Los Angeles needs to prioritize their spending into more feasible things that they can outsource to a nonprofit like Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission.
Something else that is a large issue on the ballot of this upcoming mayoral election is mental health. A vast majority of the people that are homeless in this city are mentally ill. Whether it be from drug abuse or domestic violence the city has an obligation to provide outreach and mental health workers. That is something that the mayoral candidate Rick Caruso is running on, he will provide the health care workers and mental health services that the city has been lagging on for decades. Despite
common belief, the city does have the tools and budget to make this happen. The city hiring one thousand mental health workers can vastly improve the lives of people on the street. About 25 percent of the homeless in Los Angeles according to surveys are there due to mental illness (LA Almanac). Therefore, there are plenty of people on the street that need help. Also, people that are not mentally ill might be more easily persuaded to leave the streets and get help.
The number of homeless shelters in Los Angeles simply cannot support the vast number of homeless people there are in the city. There needs to be a higher number of supportive homes and interim homes to meet the demand. In Los Angeles, there are 9 supportive housing sites with 430 units and 27 interim housing sites with 2,026 units (LA Almanac). This math simply does not add up about 2,400 units is not nearly enough to support all the homeless people in Los Angeles when the total population is over 66,000.
The rising rents and home prices in LA are not sustainable. Los Angeles has the highest homeless population in the country, and it is up to the government to create programs and incentives to house more people. The government is taking baby steps in the right direction, but I think that these steps need to be much greater. The homeless in this city have been dehumanized for decades and the city is perpetuating this. They are letting human beings live on the streets amongst trash and filth. The federal government must declare a state of emergency and take control of this city.
