A detailed plan to help address LA’s housing crisis.
Housing, traffic, and climate are actually intertwined.
To solve one, is to solve them all.
The Livable Communities Initiative is a plan to address LA’s housing, traffic and climate crisis by building 3-5 stories of gentle density above small retail along carefully chosen commercial streets that are transformed to be walkable, bikeable, and livable. It is a vision for “15 minute” walkable communities in LA.
How parking caused the housing crisis
In the 1990s, you could get anywhere in LA in 20 minutes and rent a cheap apartment by the beach. The city became a mecca for the weather, the people and the jobs. But without reliable transit or safe biking, cars slowly took over. As traffic worsened and finding parking got harder, resistance to new multi-family housing grew – because it brought more cars.
A compromise was created that addressed part of the problem: parking was required in all new buildings. But parking is enormously expensive to build, and it’s bulky. Buildings got wider and taller, and buildings got bigger and more expensive. But it made the traffic problem worse – because parking also brings more cars and congestion, causing neighbors to fight housing even more. Voters were adept at getting their elected officials to add delays and red tape, which came with staggering costs, especially for affordable housing. While luxury housing penciled and continued to get built, affordable typologies didn’t make economic sense, and. When projects don’t “pencil,” they don’t get built. This economic reality contributed to a housing shortage, which is now estimated at 456,000 units. According to Professor Michael Manville, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, LA rents to soared to twice what they would be if we’d built.
But it’s actually far worse for several reasons: (1) High rents are directly tied to homelessness, and as long as rents remain high, the status quo will continue, as every day more people fall into homelessness than we house. (2) The housing scarcity is preventing our solutions from working: we have vouchers for every homeless family in LA, but no available units.
We are in a catastrophic failure and the only way out is to build a lot of housing. But the exorbitant cost of parking makes it impossible for affordable/reachable housing to pencil without taxpayer subsidies, but we only have a limited amount of funding and the need is far too great.
