The Phantom Housing Crisis

LA is Losing Population. Does it Really Need More Housing?

Los Angeles is a city of misdiagnosed ills. Tent cities are romanticized as “diverse street life”, preventable routine wildfires are dubbed “climate emergencies”, the drug zombie epidemic is euphemized as merely “individuals experiencing homelessness”. It should come as no surprise, then, that the housing affordability woes in Los Angeles have been misdiagnosed, badly, and in a way that obscures the solution behind a cacophony of YIMBY twitter crash-outs.

For years, we’ve been misled that the housing issue is a supply & demand problem. Activists, legislators, commie journalists, and pandering political candidates universally scream “WE NEED TO BUILD MORE HOUSING”. It has taken on the form of a mindless religious cult mantra, with the expected unconscious fervor and zeal in tow.

I had a front-row seat to this BUILD MORE HOUSING crusade when my home and my whole town burned to moondust last January. Before the flames had even finished consuming all my life’s belongings, Sacramento politicians were frothing at the mouth, circling the smoking corpse of my hometown like vultures, eager to pave over the historic singe-family neighborhood with high-density housing. Even as the bodies of the 12 fatalities were still smoldering behind him, Gavin Newsom infamously wiggled with an alacritous shimmy as he described his plan to auction off our birthright to developers. Only a Sacramento politician could look at the chaotic evacuation logjam on the Palisades Fire and think “you know what would make this mess even better? 50,000 more people.”

Nonetheless, the rent IS too damn high, and I actually agree we need to build more housing, just not in all caps. Critically, however, it is important to note that more housing is not the panacea they want you to believe it is. It’s actually a myth to say we have a supply problem in Los Angeles (well, it’s true in the Palisades). Recent reporting has showed that residents are fleeing LA County in hordes. Last year, we saw the largest population decline in the country, losing 54,000 residents, and that’s a continuation of an ongoing trend, not an anomaly. We all see what’s been happening. No matter how many beach pics we post on twitter, we all know that people are fed up with this city and they are leaving. But the more important detail that got lost in the headline is…if people are fleeing LA, that means we have thousands of vacancies, and they’re not being filled.

So why is the rent still so damn high, and how do we fix it? Can we? Before we default to the lazy answer and simply blame the “greedy landlords”, we must address ALL of the line items on property owners’ balance sheets if we want to lower housing prices. We cannot simultaneously mandate that owners provide housing for below-market prices, while also forcing them to shoulder the financial risk of intractable squatters who can quickly become a $100K legal albatross, due to the city and state’s absurd “squatter’s rights” policies.

Take South LA property owner, Jose Casares. In 3 years, he evicted squatters from 3 units. One family broke in, stayed nearly a year, and walked away only after sheriff lockout. Damages and lost rent? 6 figures. Another building owner in Huntington Park dropped $100,000 fixing fires, stripped AC units, and trashed property while the city shrugged. Just a few weeks ago, squatters burned down their home while cooking meth. The fire also burned down the neighbor’s home, with their pets trapped inside. The neighbors had been repeatedly pleading for the LAPD and the city to do something about the squatters, but Karen Basura did nothing, and the poor couple had to watch 3 of their beloved dogs burn alive.

These aren’t outliers. After 30 days in California, squatters gain full tenant rights, and they can hold your apartment hostage for a ransom. Professional squatters now demand $15K–$35K “cash for keys” just to leave. This is theft.

When a tenant decides to steal an apartment, the property owner is not only losing money on lost rent payments, but they are forced to rack up legal expenses as they navigate an onerous eviction process that is fundamentally stacked against them. The result of this broken system is that many housing providers would rather lose money by leaving an apartment entirely vacant, than risk the costs of dealing with a delinquent and unscrupulous tenant.

This creates an artificial scarcity of housing, and an intractable financial burden for the landlord. If every housing provider must factor in a $100K legal “squatter removal” fund with every unit, no amount of housing construction can remove that financial pressure on the supply side, and these costs will be passed down to the tenants, in perpetuity. We cannot expect property owners to provide housing at a loss.

Furthermore, if we want to increase the development of new housing, we must make it more feasible and enticing for developers to build, and we must protect their investment. Developers do not want to risk hemorrhaging capital while being stuck in regulatory purgatory for years on end. Additionally, investors have to trust that the neighborhoods in which they build will not die completely due to blight, homeless drug zombies, and unenforced crime; it is the city’s responsibility to provide visibility for their investment that can be trusted.

If we want to ease the housing “shortage”, we must first eliminate the artificial scarcity by securing this anarchic business landscape for property management. We must eliminate the regulatory speed bumps caused by overbearing government, and we must make LA a cleaner, safer place where businesses thrive, so developers can have faith in their investments, and reallocate their “squatter removal” funds toward capital improvements on the properties that are increasingly falling into disrepair.

Squatting is both trespassing and THEFT. When I am Mayor, I will direct LAPD to treat unauthorized occupants as criminal trespassers. I will partner with the City Attorney for 72-hour expedited removals via streamlined unlawful detainer courts, and we will eliminate the menace of professional squatters.

As for new construction, the YIMBY cultists and Sacramento housing evangelists have penned SB79 as their gospel. This legislation, well-intentioned as it may be, has one fatal flaw; it predicates housing development on proximity to public transportation. This is folly. You must orient your housing development around COMMERCE. If you are going to jam a high-rise with 5,000 people, you need restaurants, and stores, and JOBS for them to go to. If you build high-density housing near bus stops without jobs, all you’re doing is building slums…near bus stops. Economic development must be the priority and prerequisite for any housing development, not simply transit. Sure, taking a train to work is cleaner than driving, but taking an elevator to work is even cleaner than that.

They botched this legislation because they muddied it with climate change initiatives. Their real priority was to reduce carbon emissions for climate change activism. The thought was simple: let’s build the housing right next to mass transit, so they don’t need cars and won’t add more carbon to the air. Predictably, when you’re focused on carbon, you’re not really fixing housing, after all.

If you want more housing development, you need more economic development. And if you want more economic development, you need to clean the streets, enforce the law, and make it faster and cheaper to cut through the bureaucratic logjams that slow down development. When you drive through thriving metropolises like Nashville, Austin, Miami…you see something that you don’t see at all in Los Angeles…cranes. Cranes are a totem of a thriving, developing community; a beacon of git-r-dun. You only get cranes when you cut red tape.

I happen to have a bit of experience with this in my own rebuilding purgatory in the Palisades, so I know a thing or two about what trips up housing construction. When I am Mayor, I am fast-tracking construction. I will cut approval times for all projects under 4 stories. I will reallocate budget to hire 300+ plan checkers/inspectors for faster reviews. I will roll out a citywide program allowing licensed architects/engineers to self-certify code compliance on qualifying projects, as the Federal government has done for the Palisades. I will also push to repeal the counterproductive Measure ULA that places an onerous tax burden on real estate transactions. It has effectively frozen the market, as nobody wants to trigger a taxable event.

I will require full online permitting with concurrent departmental reviews and auto-approval penalties for missed deadlines. I will adopt standardized low-rise designs and enforce Permit Streamlining Act 30/60-day rules across all departments. I will explore converting surplus city parcels into 2-3 story family/affordable housing via fast-track public-private bids. I will issue an executive directive (building on ED1) mandating 60-day by-right approvals for all SB 423/SB 9/ADU/missing middle low-rise projects. Having worked closely with HUD Secretary Turner, I know these measures would dramatically increase the velocity of development in the city, and I would leverage my relationship with HUD to maximize federal investment in LA, and take advantage of their vendor program for affordable prefab structures.

Ultimately, LA’s problems are all the same…they can be fixed, quite simply; we just need to stop misdiagnosing the problem. We cannot continue to treat issues like carbon emissions and call it a “housing fix”. The indelible criticism of us Angelenos is that we’re all fake…and to a certain degree, we have to wear that; there is a lot of Fugazi deception and misdirection in LA. That’s show business! You can hang on to the filler and fake tanner, but when it comes to our city’s real problems…we’ve gotta ditch these fake solutions. The rent is too damn high.