What local leaders are learning from Vienna’s social housing

August 17, 2024

Welcome to the eighth issue of Report Forward by journalist Alissa Walker. Photos by David Levitus.

A courtyard in a Vienna social housing project

THE BIG REPORT

Last May, Scarlett De León left her breastfeeding infant for the first time and boarded a plane from LAX to Vienna with a cohort of fellow housing leaders from Los Angeles. As Campaign Director for the ACT-LA coalition, she was well-versed in the social housing developments where 60 percent of Vienna renters live. But as she toured these properties with her colleagues and coalition partners, De León was unprepared for how emotional it would be to see them in person. “One of the last developments was so beautiful. All these kids running around. I was literally in tears,” she remembers. “I thought, we can have this in LA.”

Social housing is a “public option” for housing — it’s permanently affordable, under community control, generally mixed-income, and outside the speculative real estate market. Led by coalitions like ACT-LA , the social housing movement in LA County is also focused on ensuring that social housing is resident-run, rather than managed by large corporate or government bureaucracies, and that it offers pathways to ownership. In Vienna, about 40 percent of the housing stock falls under the broad definition. And over the last two years, dozens of LA elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and housing policy experts have traveled to Vienna to tour some of the most famous examples. These delegations, organized by the Global Policy Leadership Academy, have sparked high-level conversations around social housing models right in LA at the time that funding is available to actually turn ideas into action. A new report, “Social Housing in Vienna: Reflections from Los Angeles Housing Leaders” gathers their reactions into a comprehensive website that’s part toolkit, part policy framework, making a persuasive case for how the concept could change the conversation around LA’s housing crisis. 

The Gleis 21 co-op social housing building in the Sonnwendviertel district, which is part of a master-planned development on the site of a former railyard in the center of Vienna

The refreshingly jargon-free report is written for ground-floor entry into the concept, with basic terms and plenty of examples of social housing models. (For an introduction, start here: “I’m new to social housing and I want to learn more.”) Meeting people where they are in an attempt to find some shared ground was exactly the point, says Ari Pounaki, Community of Practice Manager at GPLA and a co-author of the report. “In the U.S., we have a lot of consensus around the problem, but not a lot of consensus around the solutions,” he says. “In Vienna, we heard such a strong consensus amongst residents, people who own businesses, people who work for the government: this is what the system is, and this is what we need to do to make it successful.” As more electeds made the trip to Vienna, the concept began to really take hold in the local housing discourse. While one LA group was in Vienna, Pounaki notes, a popular New York Times story about a previous trip was published while the group was literally on a tour of one of the same buildings featured in the story. Even Rick Caruso praised Vienna’s approach in a recent interview.

In Vienna, only 18 percent of residents are rent burdened — meaning they spend more than 40 percent of post-tax income on rent — compared to 58 percent of LA city residents

The timing for the report is critical. For the first year ever, the City of LA has a new funding source, drawing from the United to House LA transfer tax on real estate sales over $5 million. Up to $100 million each year in ULA money can be used for social housing strategies. And in addition to the city’s House LA Fund, there’s an important complementary effort at the county level: Measure A on the November ballot that could help fund social housing solutions through LACAHSA, the county’s newly formed housing authority. “Now with ULA, and hopefully, with the success of LACAHSA,” says Pounaki, “we can replicate one of these foundational elements of the Vienna program by having his ongoing funding source for capital, for refurbishment, for all the different kinds of tenant protections.”

As noted by the delegation, affordable housing in LA, like many other U.S. cities, has traditionally been built around a very narrow vision: publicly subsidizing housing, often using tax credits, to support low-income households or formerly homeless individuals. With social housing, says Pounaki, the scope becomes much broader: how can a city best house and support anyone, from seniors to single mothers to people experiencing financial crises to people who have mental health disorders? “The lesson from Vienna is that it’s not just one thing,” he says. “Our existence is within a spectrum, so this is really taking a more comprehensive worldview: how do we design a system to address the whole person at every stage of life?”

A view from a social housing unit in a recently developed area

The Gleis 21 building used wooden hybrid construction.

It’s important to note that these models already exist in LA in a limited way, through community land trusts, co-ops, and other tenant-ownership models, as well as in the city’s own supportive housing. A recent paper by Dani Knoll explores how the LA Eco Village, an intentional community in Rampart Village, supports residents’ mental and emotional well-being. But overall, the type of housing available to LA renters is overwhelmingly one potentially harmful type. According to a 2021 SAJE report, 67 percent of all rental property in LA is owned by large landlords that own five or more properties, and 75 percent of LA renters live in buildings owned by investment companies or corporate landlords. This traps renters in extractive situations where landlords are not incentivized to repair or update properties. And it also yields more control to wealthy people and corporations that profit from housing, and then derive even more political power from that wealth which is used to dehumanize renters and take away their rights. 

LA’s current affordable housing approach also segregates the city. ”If you look at where most low-income housing and properties are built, it continues to be in high-poverty, high-minority neighborhoods,” Pounaki says. “And when you look at where the majority of Section 8 households live, it's again disproportionately concentrated in low-income and high-minority neighborhoods.” Not to romanticize Austria’s approach to racial and economic integration too much, Pounaki notes; the country continues to reckon with its own complicity in Nazi fascism and mass killing of its Jewish population. “But what we saw in Austria was this social mixing that doesn’t exist here.”

Members of Southern California GPLA trip talk in a Vienna social housing courtyard

Angelenos listening in a courtyard of one of Vienna's oldest social housing projects

That conversation — where exactly to put new places for people to live — is forefront at the moment as the city’s Housing Element is currently determining where LA should build hundreds of thousands of new homes per state requirements, mostly for low-income families. Right now the city is recommending that single-family-zoned neighborhoods — a majority of the city’s developable land — be exempted from any multi-family development. Former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin recently described these decisions as “LA’s new redlining,” reinforcing the racial and economic divides that already exist in LA. “Across Los Angeles, officials are exempting the wealthiest areas from policies promoting affordable housing,” he writes. “On the Westside, it’s even more disturbing. City officials have defiantly refused to protect existing affordable housing, are blocking homeless housing, and are even closing interim housing sites.” 

Right now the biggest challenge is finding public land that’s either made available by the city or acquired through land banks. Buying buildings — something the city is doing now more frequently — can also be one strategy, but many affordability covenants put in place through these deals eventually expire, and the goal is to keep properties off the private market permanently. This allows residents to manage their living situations directly, and even pass their units down to their children, says De León. “Affordable housing development is extremely important, and it's definitely part of the solution,” she says. “What we’re envisioning is a different model: where people have agency, and the home is really truly yours.”

The communal kitchen of the Gleis 21 social housing co-op building, which is part of a common area that occupies the entire top floor

As De León notes, the ACT-LA social housing coalition has been organizing around three key issues — land, people, homes — in its goal to decommodify at least 20 percent of the housing stock in LA. While acquisition of land is obviously most critical, ULA also funds about $7 to 8 million per year in capacity-building in the form of programs, training, and a resource hub to pull in community-based organizations and nonprofits. This creates the social infrastructure, if you will, training potential housing residents on a set of best practices for how to manage properties, oversee maintenance, or deploy programs like childcare and gardens. “In Vienna, the way the agencies supported folks living in these units really made the success of social housing possible,” says De León. “We don't want watered-down outreach, we want strong partnerships.” 

To create the homes themselves, the social housing movement will need quite a bit of help from city government. “The reality is that the only thing that can make this possible is a better financing mechanism for housing, and especially affordable housing,” says Councilmember Nithya Raman, who visited the same social housing developments as the delegations during a family vacation in Vienna. “Especially with interest rates and the current costs of construction, unless there’s real collaboration between policymakers and financial institutions and developers who know this process back and front, there’s no way that we can make social housing happen.” Raman was part of a recent convening of philanthropy groups, developers, and housing practitioners discussing how to begin to streamline that process. (ULA money, for example, has previously been used to fill in funding gaps for under-construction LA affordable housing projects.) She was also the co-author of a motion, passed out of the housing and homelessness committee last week, that requires the city and banks to report back on developing creative new financing solutions for collective ownership.

A view from the balcony of the Gleis 21 social housing co-op

A mix of social and private housing surrounding the park, due to zoning that requires two-thirds of new residential development be dedicated to social housing, especially in formerly industrial and commercial areas. 

And that, says De León, is the real promise of social housing: self-determination. Being able to live in the neighborhood you want to live in, stay in your home for as long as you’d like, and have the right type of apartment to suit your needs at that moment — it’s all completely unthinkable for more Angelenos currently. “I think of my generation, young people who are starting families right now,” says De León. “There's a lot of pressure. Do I move out of the city to own a house and space with my family and have this type of agency? Or do I stay in the city where I have roots and connections to the people I love? Social housing is providing this vision of the future of what housing should look like in Los Angeles.”

Read “Social Housing in Vienna: Reflections from Los Angeles Housing Leaders.” And for further reading, check out these other recent reports. "Building Our Future: Grassroots Reflections on Social Housing” by the national Alliance for Housing Justice features updates on social housing campaigns in cities and states nationwide. At the federal level, the Climate + Community Project is recommending the establishment of a Green Social Housing Development Authority to build and preserve millions of homes.

The park running through the middle of the Sonnwendviertel district, a former railyard in Vienna's center. Imagine if we did this on the 215-acre site of the soon-to-be closed Santa Monica Airport?

PROGRESS REPORT

“Overwhelmingly positive outcomes” were reported last month for the 3,200 households that received $1000 monthly cash payments for one year under the city of LA’s first-ever guaranteed income (GI) program. According to analysis by researchers at UCLA and University of Pennsylvania, participants in BIG:LEAP (Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot) reported less food insecurity, an increased ability to cover emergency costs, and fewer incidents of domestic violence — with some using the guaranteed income to exit living situations with violent partners. BIG:LEAP participants were also more likely than a control group to find and maintain full-time or part-time employment. At a press conference, Ashley Davis, a 37-year-old single mom, reported buying more fresh food and taking time off from work to spend with her 8 year old: “Essentially, a lot of the stress that I had been dealing with, it was being alleviated by that extra income.”

“In Los Angeles, a city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, the opportunities for upward economic mobility can seem out of reach,” the researchers write. “BIG:LEAP, the largest GI program at its time of launch, represented a bold and significant investment to provide economic security and a solid foundation for mobility to a diverse group of caregivers with children.”

City leaders praised the outcome and pledged to find ways to expand the program, which cost $40 million, some of it reallocated from LAPD funds in 2020. “The BIG:LEAP program offers significant change for some and life-altering benefits for others,” said Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who will become council president next month. “The data underscores its effectiveness and success in improving health and wellbeing, and stability for all who participated.” The need remains obvious; over 50,000 households had applied during the launch. Meanwhile, LA County’s guaranteed income program, Breathe, will expand to include 2,000 people aged 18 to 21 in the foster care system.

LOCAL REPORT

74% of LA County voters would vote to expand the Board of Supervisors, according to a survey shared as part of a July motion supported by Supervisors Lindsey Horvath, Janice Hahn, and Hilda Solis. If voters pass a November ballot measure the county would increase the number of supervisors from five to nine, add an incredibly powerful mayor-like county executive, and create an ethics commission. Here’s more on how that might work and the pros and cons.https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-17/column-the-only-thing-as-broken-as-l-a-s-thousands-of-ruptured-sidewalks-is-city-halls-response

One-half of homeless residents reported being on the streets for more than three years in an ongoing RAND study that tracks homeless residents in Skid Row, Venice, and Hollywood encampments. The study concluded city-sponsored sweeps did little to reduce overall homelessness numbers, but Hollywood encampment residents were less likely to return to the streets due to “more frequent engagements with service providers.”

Nearly 40 percent of all arrests and citations in the city are of unhoused people, even though they make up 1 percent of the city’s population, according to the Human Rights Watch report “You Have to Move!” The 337-page report on the criminalization of LA’s homeless population includes excellent maps and data visualizations.

66 luxury homes sold in the city of LA last quarter, 46.7 percent more than the first quarter of 2024 and 15.8 percent more year over year. “The strong quarter hints that the city’s luxury market has fully digested a mansion tax that stifled activity after it went into effect in April 2023.” Related: Listen to KIWA Executive Director Alexandra Suh and United to House LA Director Joe Donlin discuss why ULA worked. 

There are more than 3,400 requests for sidewalk accessibility repairs like curb cuts pending at LA’s Bureau of Engineering, despite a $1.4 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit in 2016. That number doesn’t include a backlog of tens of thousands more requests to fix broken sidewalks made by people without mobility disabilities. Some city employees have wondered if using data from sidewalk delivery robots could help LA make repairs faster.

STATE REPORT

PENSION PROBLEMS: Public pensions are fueling displacement in the state, asserts a Private Equity Stakeholder Project report. Retirement plans for employees of LADWP, the California Teachers Union, and University of California are being invested in the high-risk funds of the private equity firm Blackstone, which buys buildings, raises rents, and spends millions to oppose rent control campaigns. Here’s an idea: why not invest pension funds in social housing?

CLIMATE CUTS: NextGen Policy has an overview of the state’s climate investment plan, where the original 5-year, $54 billion Commitment has been cut to $45 billion: “Dim projections for state revenues in future years mean that there is little hope that new general fund infusions can revive the Commitment and restore cuts in the near or medium term without bond-based borrowing or creating new revenue sources.”

NOT-COOL SCHOOLS: At California public schools, a median 6.4 percent of the areas used by students are covered in tree canopy, according to a Green Schoolyards America study. Approximately 2.6 million students attend schools with less than 5 percent tree canopy in student zones, offering little space to safely play outdoors in the blistering heat.

FIELD REPORT

The lawsuit was filed by Community Power Collective, East LA Community Corporation, and Inclusive Action for the City along with vendor plaintiffs Merlín Alvarado and Ruth Monroy. Photo by Public Counsel

Street vendors rallied in Hollywood on July 19 after news of a sweeping settlement in the landmark case Community Power Collective v. City of Los Angeles, which argued that the city’s arbitrary vending restrictions violated state law. In addition to repealing no-vending zones around the city, the settlement ensures that vendors who were criminalized under the unjust system will have any citations canceled and reimbursed. LA’s city council also voted last month to reduce annual street vendor fees from $541 to a much more reasonable $27.51. The Hollywood celebration also effectively culminated a decade-long fight to formally legalize vending in LA. The timing is exceptional as the city just started a major streetscape plan for Hollywood Boulevard named Access to Hollywood that will create more outdoor dining spaces, and can now include vendors instead of excluding them.

Coming up next…

On Sunday, August 18, the first Climate Justice Park Meetup will take place in Palms Park. From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., grab a coffee, (feel free to bring kids you’ve got ‘em) and join LAFI near the playground to talk about climate issues. RSVP here

Then, on Tuesday, August 20, join LAFI for a Measure A teach-in to learn about a housing affordability and homelessness prevention measure on the LA County ballot this November (and offers a possible funding source for social housing)! That’s on Zoom from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., register here.

And on Monday, August 26, it’s Affordable Housing Development 101 with LAFI's Housing Justice Action Team, Alan Greenlee, Executive Director of SCANPH, Tara Barauskas from Santa Monica Community Corporation, and Cynthia Mejia from National Core. 6 p.m to 7 p.m. on Zoom, register here.

REPORT IN

Hi, Alissa Walker here — I’ll be compiling Report Forward every month. Please send reports, studies, white papers, and big policy wins to me at reports@laf.institute — and forward this to someone working to make LA a better place.

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Why this LA Councilmember votes no on the city’s budget

June 14, 2024

Welcome to the seventh issue of Report Forward by journalist Alissa Walker. 

THE BIG REPORT

“Investing in the services that catch our people when they are in crises is an investment that pays dividends down the line,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said before voting no on the city’s budget

Last month, Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez voted against approving the city’s $12.8 billion budget. It was the second time that Hernandez had voted no, and this time, she was joined by Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez. In remarks Hernandez made in council just before the vote, she called the budget a “crisis of our own making,” noting how it allocates one-quarter of its dollars to one department, LAPD, while forcing severe cuts on chronically underfunded departments. “Studies have shown again and again that preventing harm and violence is much cheaper than responding to it,” she said. “Investing in the services that catch our people when they are in crises is an investment that pays dividends down the line.” Hernandez spoke with Report Forward about what got funded, what got cut, and what changes she’d like to see in the budget process.

Alissa Walker: You’ve talked very openly about the problems with LA City’s budget and how it’s indicative of where we are as a city. Do you remember how you started noticing these discrepancies?

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez: Last year, I was the only one on the council to vote “no” on the budget, because of what I was seeing. I saw that we invested over $6 million in police uniforms for the LAPD and just a few pages after, the entire Youth Development Department that’s supposed to be serving the young people of the city of Los Angeles, we only invested $2.3 million. That, for me, was a reflection of the entire budget of the city of Los Angeles, of how we prioritize our money. The city of LA has a youth population just above 800,000. That's nearly a quarter of our entire city population. Yet nearly a quarter of our entire city budget goes into one department, which is the LAPD.

You’ve also been very vocal about how this lopsided budget impacts how long it takes to receive basic city services.

It takes us 10 years to fix a sidewalk in the City of Los Angeles. And that's if your sidewalk gets on the fix-it list. If it doesn't get on the fix-it list, it never gets fixed. There are trees in my district that haven't been trimmed in over a decade. It takes us five years to install a blue handicap curb. All of these things take us so long compared to other cities, because we do not invest in this infrastructure. We have light poles that have fallen on people, where we're having to pay out $20 million lawsuits, instead of actually fixing the things. What I was told was that $20 million would fund the entire unit within the Bureau of Street Lighting that could be working on the anti-theft work that needs to be done around the copper in our streetlights.

The mayor attempted to balance the budget by cutting vacant positions. During the final week some final negotiations added back some jobs to departments like Street Services, so we can get a few more sidewalks fixed. But these are departments, to your point, where you really do notice the vacancies.

We're going to start feeling the impact of those losses. Some of these vacant positions are critical to actually doing the work. Like the leaders of certain teams, the actual people who are on the ground, fixing our sidewalks, these vacancies are incredibly impactful, and will delay our work. And as a city, we make it incredibly difficult to bring back those positions. So once they're deleted, they're deleted. And that's how we lose historical knowledge. That's how we lose skills.

“We’re going to be in a deficit until 2028. This is a self-inflicted wound. We, as a council, did this to the city of Los Angeles.”

What can the city change about the hiring process?

It takes people many months to get employment here in the city. And this goes for all departments. Like we have a shortage of PSRS, police service responders, which are our 911 dispatchers. And it takes us many months to hire people on. And right now, many of our PSRS are mandated to do overtime, because we don't have the coverage. Some of these hiring processes are ordinance based, which means we can change them, and some of us have been actively trying to do that, myself around the PSRS. But there's a lot that's actually governed by the charter around hiring. And so in our government reform ad hoc committee, we've been talking about what changes need to happen during the charter reform process, so that our hiring process can become more efficient and faster, because we're losing good people to other departments. We're losing people to other cities. Even my brother applied and it took him about nine months total just to go through the first step. So it's a very arduous process.

We also see issues that seem to be broadly popular with the council but keep getting delayed when it comes to money. I’m thinking about unarmed response, which we’ve talked about before, which can’t seem to get adequately funded, even though it does seem to have this very strong council support behind it.

Last year we got $15 million dollars to build out an alternate crisis response system in the budget cycle. We had to wait many, many months for the contracts to be approved with the providers to begin launching this work. For a lot of us, this is not a pet project. Takar Smith was killed in my district in January of 2023. This is critically important. But when it comes time to implement the work, the city is just really terrible at it. I know that the political will is there, but I don't know if the political will is there to actually implement it effectively.

There have been a lot of conversations this year about a few proposed reforms to the budget process: introducing a capital infrastructure plan, or even just planning two years in advance instead of one. What have you been talking about as a way to fix this?

I've been vocal about a two-year budget process and in addition to that, a robust community engagement plan. What we've seen in my two years here in this budget process is that there's not a lot of community engagement in the budget. A lot of it happens in the back rooms. And oftentimes, we get served a budget in front of us that's 95 percent cooked. I would like to see a more open and transparent budgeting process that not only includes the community but councilmembers as well, so you can really think things through and have more public discussions about what we're walking the city into. We're going to be in a deficit until 2028. This is a self-inflicted wound. We, as a council, did this to the city of Los Angeles. So I would hope that a two-year budget process allows us for better analysis, better projections, space to move resources when they are not spent because a lot of dollars go unused just because of the enormity of the budget. And so that's what I'm aiming for, a two-year budget process, where we have robust community engagement and a transparent and open process for all our elected leaders here in the city.

You’ve done some of this within your own district.

We've conducted a few budget trainings for the community. We tell people, this is what your budget looks like, this is where the money is coming from: your property taxes, your rent, when you buy things locally. This is how it's being spent. And this is why we can't fix your sidewalks. I represent 22 neighborhoods, yet that's all I can offer, because that's all that's budgeted, but these one-on-ones have been very illuminating for our community. And I think it's been very helpful for them to understand why the city is failing so much.

On May 24, LA’s budget passed 12-3 with Councilmembers Hernandez, Raman, and Soto-Martínez voting no

Let's talk about some good things. What did you get into the budget that you want people to know that you fought for and are happy about?

I don't want to see any cuts made to the departments that actually provide services and programming to families and young people and elders. So we pushed for funding for the Department of Aging. At Recreation and Parks, we've pushed for those jobs not to be eliminated, and a good chunk of those jobs were kept. The Community Investment for Families Department (CFID) and Economic and Workforce Development Department (EWDD) are two departments that do phenomenal work. But the work that they do is grant funded. So we pushed to keep positions that were going to be eliminated that would help administer grants. Without these jobs, we wouldn't be able to use these grants or actually give out the money. And for me, that's really important, especially because they're not tapping into our general fund for these positions. 

Actually, I think there were a few good examples like that of trying to creatively move money around in these final negotiations.

We know that LAPD has been having a difficult time hiring people. We give them all the positions that they asked for, at a certain rate. And sometimes they don't even hire that number. So that money just sits there. What we tried to do instead is ask for some of it to be set aside into the unappropriated balance. So let's say they don't hire the number of people that they need, then that funding in this account could hopefully go to LA's BEST Afterschool Enrichment Program, because we cut over $2 million from this after-school program that helps keep kids in school while their parents are working.

And these things have real impacts on families, especially when they don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have access to childcare. It's very, very stressful.

And that’s a shame that families have to go through that struggle, because that’s what I think about when I think about public safety. That is public safety. Have you seen that work framed as public safety? So it's just disappointing. And it’s very sad that for the amount of taxes that people pay, that the city is not delivering on the things that they need for their families to thrive and actually make it here. LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell says that a budget is a statement of our values. A budget that gives 25 percent to law enforcement and makes everybody else fight for crumbs and leaves us with a time period of 10 years of fixing a sidewalk is not the budget that meets my values or meets the demands of my constituents.

Need more budget resources? LAist put together an excellent LA city budget explainer. Metro has a fun tool where you can decide where its $9 billion budget goes. The California Budget and Policy Center is the best resource for how the state budget works. CalMatters explores how California swung so dramatically from surplus to deficit. And what about LA County, which is larger in population than 41 states? LA Public Press has a guide to the county’s $45.5 billion budget, which this year includes more much-needed money for mental health responders.

Saturday, June 15 is Budget Day! This is the annual convening of Budget Advocates, an independent consortium of Neighborhood Council representatives who provide community input on the city’s budget. This year’s event will feature a primer on how the budget works and a panel discussion with city leaders. In addition, the 2024 Budget Advocates white paper, Who Does the Work?, is an excellent overview of the challenges the city faces. RSVP for the event, held at City Hall.

PROGRESS REPORT

As the city’s charter turned 100 years old on May 6, Raphael Sonenshein, Executive Director of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and a member of the Los Angeles Governance Reform Project, shared lessons from the last time the city got serious about reform: “In 2024 as a century ago, the wider civic community, not just the city council, should be part of deciding what reforms reach the ultimate deciders of all charter changes — the voters.” The following week, after a year of discussions prompted by the fallout from the Fed Tapes and a revolving door of corruption cases, LA’s City Council advanced a disappointingly diluted governance reform package.

Data from a FM3 Research poll released by Fair Rep LA in 2023 showed majority support for governance reforms

Headed to the November 2024 ballot are two measures: 1) a weakened ethics reform plan where councilmembers have final say over ballot measures that the commission wants to put in front of voters 2) an independent redistricting plan so councilmembers will have no say over where lines are drawn. While a newly created charter reform commission will review and consider other changes, what the council did not advance are additional reforms which were not only strongly recommended by diverse groups of coalitions and academics, but also broadly popular in polling and surveys citywide: taking councilmembers out of land-use decisions, switching to ranked-choice voting, and expanding a council that hasn’t grown in size since 1924. But just because the council upheld the status quo doesn’t mean the fight for change is over, said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause. “This is a disheartening setback, but we will not allow this to be the end of the road for ethics reform in Los Angeles.”

LOCAL REPORT

60% of Angelenos have considered leaving LA due to high housing costs, according to an annual Los Angeles Business Council survey. Over three-fourths of those polled supported expanding the city’s Executive Directive 1, which fast-tracks the construction of low- and moderate-income housing, to include apartments for middle-income residents as well.

$1,000 monthly payments would get thousands of homeless Angelenos off the street and save the city millions in services, argues a new brief by four homelessness policy scholars: “Los Angeles has created a very complex, bureaucratic, and expensive system that struggles to find even ‘interim’ housing for those who are unhoused. That system ignores the potential of many unhoused people to solve their housing problems if they had a little more money.”

96.3 billion gallons of stormwater have been captured by LA County since October, enough to supply water to nearly one-fourth of the county’s population for a year. But this was the second-wettest winter in LA history, and with better infrastructure investments funded through Measure W’s Safe Clean Water Program, the county could be capturing so much more.

STATE REPORT

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: A new report on Project Roomkey (PRK) shows that the statewide effort to use empty hotel rooms to house homeless people during the early years of the pandemic did save lives and advance the overall level of care for interim housing, but didn’t result in more housing placements — only 19 percent of LA County PRK clients moved into permanent housing.

UNEQUAL STATE: The gap between high and low incomes is wider in California than in all but seven states, according to new Public Policy Institute of America data. In California, families in the 90th percentile of income distribution are earning 10 times more than the families at the 10th percentile of income distribution — $305,000 vs. $29,000 annually.

THE CEQA IS OUT: A Little Hoover Commission report warns that the state must broadly exempt housing development from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to have a striking chance at building a planned 2.5 million homes: “California will never achieve its housing goals as long as CEQA has the potential to turn housing development into something akin to urban warfare.” 

COUNTERPOINT: The Little Hoover Commission’s process to interrogate CEQA was flawed, says Julia Stein, Project Director for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, who strongly disagrees with their findings.

FIELD REPORT

What it looks like to deliver 400,000 signatures — the most ever collected for a county ballot initiative — to the LA County Registrar

On May 7, a broad coalition of housing and labor advocates gathered at the LA County Registrar to deliver over 400,000 signatures from LA County voters supporting the Affordable Housing, Homelessness Solutions and Prevention Now Measure — the first-ever countywide citizen’s initiative. What is set to appear on the November 2024 ballot will repeal 2016’s Measure H and replace it with a half-cent sales tax that expands housing affordability programs and mental health services, implements stronger accountability metrics, and provides dedicated funding for LACAHSA, a new housing authority for LA County. Learn more about the campaign and read the full measure.

REPORT IN

Hi, Alissa Walker here — I’ll be compiling Report Forward every month. Please send reports, studies, white papers, and big policy wins to me at reports@laf.institute — and forward this to someone working to make LA a better place.

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