By stopping homeless housing, abandoning renters, and pursuing bad housing policy, Los Angeles is promoting exclusionary zoning and reinforcing segregation on the Westside.

By Mike Bonin

“Locking arms” is the current mantra of Los Angeles politics. Repeated with frequency by Mayor Karen Bass and other public officials, the phrase is more than a slogan. It is a statement of a united effort to tackle the homelessness crisis and a rallying cry for a shared civic mission.

But city officials are letting affluent communities – especially the Westside – back away from that mission, just as most of Los Angeles is answering the call and stepping up.

Under the leadership of Mayor Bass, Los Angeles has largely moved past bickering and jurisdictional finger-pointing over homelessness. Recent homeless census numbers indicate her effort is making progress, with reductions in unsheltered homelessness and overall homelessness – but that progress will be unsustainable without providing significantly more housing and shelter for people who are homeless, and without preserving the affordable housing that exists in our city, and building significantly more where it doesn’t.

Where we provide housing and shelter is critical.  Los Angeles has been shaped and scarred by discriminatory land use policy. Restrictive covenants created mostly white single-family neighborhoods designed to exclude Blacks and other people of color on the Westside, in the San Fernando Valley, and in other parts of the city. Over several generations, that has segregated the city not just racially, but socially and economically. Wealthier Angelenos live in areas with more parks, better infrastructure, and cleaner neighborhoods. Lower-income residents live in areas with more pollution, more blight, more chronic health problems, and fewer job opportunities. The segregation has been reinforced by the city’s housing policies and practices, which have seen the vast majority of low-income or supportive housing built in lower-income communities of color, and very little built in more affluent areas. It is unjust and unfair.

In recent years, the City started to correct those injustices, making equity a lens for decisions about policy and budgeting. Officials recognized that we need significantly more public investment in low-income neighborhoods. They understood that wealthier “higher opportunity” neighborhoods needed to provide more affordable housing and offer at least their fair share of homeless housing, shelter, and services.

But city officials are now releasing wealthier neighborhoods from their obligations and asking poorer communities to once again carry a disproportionate burden, in this case, to solve the citywide crises of homelessness and affordable housing. Across Los Angeles, officials are exempting the wealthiest areas from policies promoting affordable housing. 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.

Let’s look at the specifics:

Streamlining Affordable Housing – Somewhere Else

A key element of the mayor’s homelessness and housing strategy is streamlining the approval of affordable housing by exempting multi-unit, 100% affordable projects from the usual slate of hearings, appeals, and environmental reviews. The policy was first unveiled as part of the mayor’s Executive Directive 1. But, in response to pressure from homeowners’ groups,  the mayor exempted single-family neighborhoods from the streamlining. Not only does that remove the biggest incentive for affordable housing in more affluent areas like the Westside and the West San Fernando Valley, but it increases pressure for affordable housing in places like South Los Angeles – where new projects tend to require demolition of existing apartment units, displacing current low-income residents. As the Los Angeles Times stated last fall, “This will only reinforce the inequity that has shaped housing policy in Los Angeles as affluent neighborhoods remain relatively sheltered from change while low-income neighborhoods are dismantled for the sake of growth.”

Increasing Housing & Fighting Segregation – Just Not Here

In 2021, the City City Council unanimously adopted an ambitious new policy, aimed at addressing the region’s tremendous housing crisis and reducing segregation. It called for rezoning enough land to accommodate 455,000 new units of housing, with nearly 185,000 for low-income residents. To comply with a state mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing” and “overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities,” the bulk of the new housing would be concentrated in “higher opportunity areas” with lots of jobs, good schools, transit stops, and parks. (That meant allowing increased density primarily in the Westside and San Fernando Valley.)

At the time, City Planning Director Vince Bertoni said, “The Plan to House LA is designed to protect the most vulnerable Angelenos from displacement, eviction, and homelessness. It centers racial equity and environmental justice at the forefront of our planning considerations, aligning Los Angeles’ citywide land use strategies to improve future access to housing, preservation, and production.”

But the city is already backpedaling, and fast. Under intense pressure from homeowner associations, the Planning Department is recommending exempting single-family neighborhoods from its new policies. The impact of the change is jarring. Not only will the city fail to meet its housing quota, it will fail to remedy segregation and further fair housing. As scholars with the UCLA Lewis Center Housing Initiative have noted, it takes additional housing off the table in the city’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods. A coalition of housing groups has written that as long as “most of the city’s wealthiest and most privileged areas will remain off-limits to mixed-income multi-family housing development . . . we will never be able to truly address the critical shortage of affordable housing and reverse historic patterns of segregation.”

Giving single-family neighborhoods this special protection exempts 72% of the city from providing housing. That dramatically slows the production of rental housing in a city where three-quarters of households pay too much of their income in rent, particularly Blacks and Latinos, and where 40% of renters say they fear becoming homeless. That special protection also places intense development pressure on existing multi-unit properties, which is precisely where the bulk of L.A.’s rent-controlled housing is. Focusing development in those neighborhoods risks displacing existing residents, often low-income families. That means teachers, grocery workers, food servers, healthcare staff, and others can no longer afford to live in the communities where they work or where they grew up.

Barrington Plaza: Abandoning Tenants

In 2023, just weeks after Los Angeles passed landmark new tenant protections, Douglas Emmett Inc., one of the largest property owners in the city, announced it was evicting every resident – more than 500 families – from its rent-controlled units in the Barrington Plaza Apartments in West LA.  The brazen move was the largest mass eviction in Los Angeles in generations and was criticized as illegal by tenant and affordable groups, who warned it would set a precedent that could take tens of thousands of affordable rent-controlled units off the market.

With the mass eviction having a potentially profound citywide impact, the city should have intervened quickly on the side of the tenants. The City Attorney or the Los Angeles Housing Department could have told the property owner the evictions were illegal, or the mayor or City Council could have directed the Housing Department to do so. The city could have chosen to seek a legal injunction against the evictions, or at least join the tenants in their lawsuit. At a minimum, city officials could have aggressively denounced the evictions and sought ways to prevent them. Instead, they abandoned the tenants entirely. Councilmember Traci Park offered not a critical word about the evictions and refused to push for legal action. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto rebuffed the tenants, arguing that the landlord was acting legally and ultimately dissuading the City Council from intervening. Legal experts refuted Feldstein Soto’s position. Mayor Bass issued a statement lamenting the evictions and said she was relying on the advice of Feldstein-Soto.

Last month, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that the evictions were in fact illegal. While the tenants prevailed in court, the landlord won a war of attrition during the protracted legal battle, with more than 500 residents moving out, unlikely to return. It was a massive displacement of tenants, including seniors, people with disabilities, essential workers, and households that had lived there for decades. That tragedy could have been averted. Many residents said they would have hung on if they felt more confident in their prospects, but the lack of support from their city government left them dispirited and fearful of defeat.

Losing Affordable Housing Near the Coast

In 1982, the State of California adopted the Mello Act to preserve and increase the supply of affordable housing in the State’s Coastal Zone, which includes Pacific Palisades, Venice, and Playa del Rey. It requires, wherever feasible, that developers replace affordable housing units, and that projects incorporate new, inclusionary affordable housing units.  Since then, Los Angeles’ implementation of the Mello Act has been governed by “interim” rules that have been toothless. Affordable housing in coastal communities has shrunk dramatically. In 2015, the city began drafting an ordinance to provide new, tougher guidelines that would actually preserve, protect, and encourage affordable housing in the Coastal Zone. The Planning Department held dozens of public meetings, consulted with the California Coastal Commission, and worked closely with affordable housing activists on the ordinance. In 2022, the ordinance was nearing approval, pending final review from the City Attorney’s office. After nearly a decade of work with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and with affordable housing under assault on the Westside, the ordinance died a quiet death last November, after Feldstein Soto and Park took office and failed to move it forward.

Stopping Homeless Housing on the Westside

One of the easiest places to build affordable or homeless housing is on government-owned property. That’s why the City Council approved a Venice Community Housing (VCH) project to be built on a city parking lot in Venice. The Venice Dell project would offer 140 affordable apartments (including 68 apartments for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, 34 apartments for lower-wage households, and 34 apartments for low-income artists). That’s why it’s maddening and counterproductive that the city has been roadblocking such a much-needed project. Both Feldstein Soto and Park have worked hard to stop the project, directing city agencies to stop legally required work to advance it. They are delaying work for so long that VCH is at risk of losing its state funding for the project. Mayor Bass, who has made building supportive housing on city property a priority, has not defended the project and has said she is letting Park determine the fate of the project.

Last week, affordable housing advocates themselves filed a lawsuit, this one to force the city to allow the project to move forward. The lawsuit states that “the City’s obstruction and delay of Venice Dell have made housing unavailable in a manner that discriminates—in both intent and impact—against persons of color and persons with disabilities . . . Allowing this obstruction to continue has a chilling effect on affordable housing development in areas of LA where there is vocal and well-resourced opposition like in Venice. The City’s actions to halt Venice Dell entrench existing patterns of segregation in the City, sending the message that affluent Council Districts are not required to participate in solving our housing and homelessness crisis.”

Meanwhile, Feldstein Soto and Park have stymied another potential project on city property. In 2022, the City was working to develop a site jointly owned with the Disability Community Rights Center (DCRC). This was a commonsense project to provide a minimum of 50 housing units for low-income individuals with disabilities in Mar Vista.  This project, too, is stalled in a bureaucratic limbo.

(Fortunately, many other projects were in construction at the end of 2022, and it was too late for newly elected officials to cancel them. That’s why hundreds of housing units for veterans have opened at the Veterans Administration Campus in West LA, and why several other projects will open in the next 2 years, providing hundreds of more units of homeless and affordable housing.)

Closing Down Interim Housing on the Westside

There has been no formal announcement, but the City has informed service providers and neighbors that it is shutting down the A Bridge Home (ABH) Venice, the largest interim housing facility on the Westside. Opened just a few weeks before COVID hit, the facility offers 100 beds for adults, and 54 beds for teens and young adults. According to the latest homeless count, there were 303 sheltered homeless people in Council District 11. Closing the Venice Bridge Home would eliminate shelter for 50% of the district’s sheltered population.

The news about Venice Bridge Home comes on the heels of the closure of the second largest interim housing program on the Westside, the Project Roomkey site at the Cadillac Hotel in Venice, which closed in early 2023. A third interim housing facility at a former Ramada Hotel in Venice is closed and being converted to long-term housing. That’s a net loss of 235 interim or bridge housing beds since 2022.  The Westside is the only part of Los Angeles that has reduced its shelter or interim housing capacity in the middle of the homelessness crisis. Sources say the decision to close the Venice ABH facility was Park’s. The mayor is displeased with the decision and managed to delay the closure by a few months, but has not acted to avert the shutdown.

Displacement: It’s Someone Else’s Problem

The mayor’s signature homelessness initiative, Inside Safe, moves people from selected encampments into interim housing, usually motel rooms. The mayor has brought the program to the Westside several times. The majority of the people engaged there have been moved out of the Westside and into neighborhoods in South LA or on the Eastside. The dynamic is generating consternation among council members from other parts of the city.

Some of the people that Inside Safe helped moved off the streets of Venice relocated to the Venice Bridge Home, but with the imminent shutdown of that facility, those people will soon be moved to another part of town, or evicted back onto the streets of Venice by the end of the year. This means the Westside gets to clear streets of encampments without having to do what the rest of the city is doing – providing interim beds.

Criminalizing Homelessness and Poverty

In the past 18 months, the Westside has seen the addition of more zones where homelessness is criminalized than any other part of the City. Councilwoman Park has designated 21 zones where it is illegal to sleep, even if there is no alternative, while at the same time closing down any shelter option that people might be able to make use of. She has created four dozen special parking zones designed to displace people who are living in their vehicles, just one precarious step away from sleeping on the streets. The Westside has the second highest rate of arrest for laws against homelessness, with the first being another affluent area in the north San Fernando Valley.

Data and experience show that criminalizing homelessness does not end it. It pushes it elsewhere, whether to the next block, or the next council district, and ultimately makes homelessness harder to solve. A recent analysis from several city and county agencies determined L.A.’s criminalization policies were an expensive failure. A RAND study released in June found that “the share of unhoused people living literally unsheltered (without a tent or vehicle) in Venice increased from 20 percent to 46 percent, a change that corresponds with policy changes in the neighborhood regarding tent encampments.”  This approach leaves homeless people even more vulnerable and leads to increased trauma, which makes it harder and more costly to help people.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month issued a ruling making it easier for cities to criminalize homelessness or push it outside of its borders. Within hours, Park had submitted a motion asking Feldstein Soto for guidance on how to begin increased enforcement, and told KNX radio she wants the authority to do so, “regardless of housing or shelter availability.”

Faulty Assumptions

These dynamics exist because politicians and public officials are often convinced that the loud voices objecting to housing and shelter speak for the majority, and must be heeded. In the public arena, it is hard to escape that perception. Angry crowds show up at town hall meetings, anti-homeless activists aggressively troll social media, and opponents of housing and shelter dominate many active neighborhood groups and homeowners associations. Opponents are litigious, have deep pockets, and wage skillful public relations, media, and political campaigns. For local officials, it can be daunting, and easy to feel like opposition dwarfs support.

But polling consistently shows otherwise. In a survey conducted this spring by the Los Angeles Business Council (LABC), 85% of Angelenos said they support increasing the supply of affordable rental housing in their neighborhoods. Loyola Marymount University’s annual Study LA Angeleno Poll shows two-thirds of Angelenos support making it considerably easier to build rental units in their neighborhoods. Likewise, the LABC survey shows nearly two-thirds of Angelenos, 63%, support providing long-term housing with supportive services – in their neighborhoods – for homeless people.

A Devastating Impact, Unless . . .

Many of the decisions and policies roadblocking housing are made quietly and under the radar, administratively, or as an act of deference to the local official or neighborhood politics. It can be easy to miss the big picture and difficult to appreciate the cumulative impact. Individually, each of these decisions or dynamics is problematic and harmful, and slows the city’s progress on homelessness and affordable housing. Collectively, the impact is even more devastating and amounts to a concerted reinforcement of long-standing patterns of inequity and segregation. It’s nothing short of 21st Century redlining.

It does not need to be this way. While many of the decisions are shaped by the councilmember and city attorney, the mayor has the ability to end this regressive slide. She has real power – through direct management of city agencies, through the bully pulpit, and through the political goodwill she has accumulated – to right these wrongs. She has every incentive to do so. Addressing the crises of homelessness and affordable housing is her focus, and she won’t be successful as long as more affluent communities refuse to lock arms, and instead lock people out.

Mayor Bass, a lifetime leader in the fight for equity and civil rights, can be the hero here. She represents the interests of the entire city, not just selected neighborhoods or constituencies. Her track record shows she cares deeply about fairness and equity. Her guts, tenacity, and willingness to make tough choices won her the Profile in Courage Award in 2010. The politics of this fight for housing equity will surely be challenging, but she was elected by a commanding majority that shares her vision, and we will back her in implementing it.  With public support and her trademark calm determination, she can insist that “locking arms” isn’t just an invitation, but a civic duty, for every part of Los Angeles.

Mike Bonin served on the Los Angeles City Council for nine years, representing the Westside’s Council District 11 which includes Mar Vista, Pacific Palisades, Palms, and Venice among other neighborhoods. This article originally appeared in Mike’s Substack, which we encourage you to subscribe to: mikebonin.substack.com