More that a million people are expected to move to Los Angeles County over the next 20 years, raising concerns that the area’s housing crisis could worsen, according a report released on November 3 by the Southern California Association of Governments.
“L.A. County’s population will grow from its current level of 10.2 million residents to nearly 11.2 million residents by 2035,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments. “What we cherish the most — our region’s quality of life — is at stake if we cannot build more housing or build and maintain the transportation infrastructure necessary to accommodate this growth.”
The city and county of Los Angeles have seen a surge in the cost of housing over the past few years, continuing the decades-long struggle to keep pace with burgeoning population growth.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has set a goal for the city to build 100,000 new units by 2021 and the City Council has passed a number of motions in the past year, aimed at creating new housing or preserving existing units.
“We’re working together to get the affordability crisis under control, because hardworking Angelenos shouldn’t have to fear being priced out of their communities,” Garcetti said. “That’s why L.A. is making it easier to finance and build the housing we need.”
The report was released at the 16th annual Mayoral Housing, Transportation and Jobs Summit at the UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center.
Clyde Holland, CEO and chairman of Holland Partner Group and a keynote speaker at the summit, called for public-private solutions to help solve the housing crisis; high-density residential development in about five percent of the region’s land area; the recalibration of impact fees to reflect actual costs of infrastructure service for high-density development; and use of a 10- year property tax abatement as a gap-financing tool for new affordable housing production.
“More and more people continue to move into California’s urban employment centers, yet this demand far exceeds the existing supply of housing, making housing unaffordable for most Californians,” Holland said. “Current regulations are actually worsening the crisis by discouraging the production of enough housing to meet the growing demand.
Elected leaders have a tremendous opportunity to set a new policy direction that will dramatically increase new housing production in our urban centers without reshaping single-family residential neighborhoods — while also bringing down the cost of housing, generating more affordable units, reducing vehicle tailpipe emissions, and creating thousands of new jobs and hundreds of millions in new revenue at the state and local level,” Holland said.
