Los Angeles City’s Dysfunctional Politics Threaten Housing Progress

When Karen Bass was elected mayor of Los Angeles, it seemed like the city’s shameful neglect of its housing crisis would finally end. Bass, after all, is a progressive, and she staked much of her political capital during her mayoral campaign on a commitment to addressing the sprawling city’s interconnected crises of homelessness and the lack of affordable and supportive housing.

Two years later, that promise has not been kept, and progress made through Bass-backed programs like Inside Safe, which moved thousands of people off the streets and into motels, is now at risk of being undone, according to advocates who have argued in court that city officials are using their influence to block new housing developments in affluent areas of the city. Becky Dennison, co-executive director of the Venice Community Housing Corporation, told me in a recent conversation that different agencies and city officials are at war with each other over how to address the housing crisis and whether to share the burden equitably among neighborhoods. “There’s no unified message coming out of the city; it’s total uncertainty. It creates a lose-lose situation.”

True, street homelessness numbers have declined for the first time since the start of the Covid pandemic, at least in part thanks to Bass’s efforts on the issue. But the declines are small (just over 2 percent in 2024), and more than 45,000 people continue to live on Los Angeles’s sidewalks, with tens of thousands more in the surrounding county.

When Los Angeles residents are polled, they overwhelmingly say that housing and homelessness are their top local concerns, and a large majority of residents favor greater city and state involvement in the development of affordable housing in the region. Two-thirds of residents also want more rental units in their neighborhoods. But progress is being stifled by an unsavory coalition of developers and wealthy homeowners, who have sought to block affordable housing from being built in the city’s wealthiest areas.

Karen Bass’s much-vaunted Executive Order 1, which aimed to accelerate the city’s public housing projects, has been watered down to the point of absurdity. Under pressure from homeowners, particularly on the affluent West Side and in the San Fernando Valley’s most luxurious enclaves, Bass rewrote the order to exclude neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes. This change automatically excluded about three-quarters of the city, including most of its wealthy and politically influential neighborhoods, from meeting public housing and supportive housing goals. The areas that were not excluded were poorer and less white, so poverty and homeless services remained concentrated in already struggling communities.

Perhaps nowhere has the promise been less effective than in Venice, a picturesque beach community that has seen an explosion of homelessness and encampments in recent years. As I wrote in 2021, homes along Venice’s canals can cost millions of dollars; meanwhile, a year into the pandemic, thousands were sleeping in tents along the boardwalk, in alleys, and in parking lots.

In the years since, many of the encampments have been razed, and more will likely be dismantled following the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing cities to close encampments and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order urging cities to do just that. But Venice’s affordable housing crisis remains as acute as ever.

Dennison’s group hopes to break ground on a 140-unit supportive housing development, one of eight city-owned parcels identified in 2016 as suitable for such projects, in early 2026. It’s known as the Venice Dell supportive housing development, and it was conceived as part of a larger, coordinated effort to address the community’s housing crisis. So far, though, it’s more of a dream than a reality.

In a sign of just how dysfunctional Los Angeles’ housing policy is, city agencies, urged on by affordable housing advocates, recently fought off two lawsuits filed by NIMBYist community groups opposed to the project. The city won the lawsuits, quelled the NIMBYists, and for a while it looked like the project would move forward as planned. In the meantime, however, City Councilwoman Traci Park and the City Attorney’s office under Hydee Feldstein Soto have quietly launched their own rearguard action to thwart the project, pressuring the City Planning and Transportation departments to withhold vital clarification notices from the Coastal Commission, without which the commission cannot issue the final permits needed to begin development projects near the ocean. Those documents have been frozen for more than a year, resulting in a fair housing lawsuit filed against the city last month and an investigation launched by the state’s housing accountability unit.

In other words, taxpayer money was recently spent to allow the city to fight in court for affordable housing development. Now, more taxpayer money will be spent to allow the city to defend itself in court against allegations of illegal opposition to that same development. This is not just dysfunctional; it is absurd.