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PLANNING WATCH - LA is suffering a major crisis of homelessness and overcrowding, especially among families. Is the cause static incomes colliding with sharply increased housing costs or is the culprit a housing shortage “addressed” by State Senator Scott Weiner’s legislation? His latest bill. SB79, permits the construction of tall apartments by up-zoning lots near transit lines.
The up-zoning arguments come from developers and their supporters, like Senator Wiener and Abundant Housing. On the other side are neighborhood associations and a few urbanists. They argue that LA has more than enough vacant and underutilized parcels to theoretically solve homelessness and overcrowding. To permit more housing on existing sites, while ignoring increased poverty, makes the housing crisis worse.
The underlying causes of the housing crisis: A quick look at most homeless and overcrowded people reveals they don’t have enough money to rent or buy existing vacant housing. To upzone parcels -- the approach of Wiener’s SB79 -- expecting it to create new apartments does not alleviate the real barrier, the lack of money among the homeless and overcrowded to rent or buy vacant housing.
This graph above reveals that between 2000 to 2025 the cost of housing in Los Angeles increased much faster than incomes. Most Angelenos were trapped by their flat incomes and rapidly rising housing prices. This, not a shortage of zoned capacity for housing, explains the dramatic rise of homelessness and overcrowding in Los Angeles.
L.A. County also has the nation’s highest rate of overcrowded housing: Overcrowding, measured as more than one person per room, is severe in Los Angeles, where the overcrowding rate is four times the national average. In 2022 Los Angeles was the most overcrowded city in the United States. In 2025 this trend was made worse by January’s wildfires, which destroyed over 10,000 homes and apartments.
While current statistics on local homelessness and overcrowded are hard to find, The Vacancy Report, about five years old, remains the best study of LA’s housing crisis. It reported:
“Rampant speculation has resulted in a housing system that works in the interest of a few, to the detriment of the many, along lines of race and class . . . With more than 36,000 unhoused residents, Los Angeles simultaneously has over 93,000 units sitting vacant, nearly half of which are withheld from the housing market. Thousands of luxury units across the city are empty, owned as second homes or pure investments. At a time when the city should be doing everything in its power to house people, over 22 square miles of vacant lots are owned and kept vacant by corporate entities. The power of finance, which has brought 67% of the city’s residential units under its control, is also manifest in the ability of speculative developers to remake neighborhoods to fit their own vision. The pattern of development occurring all across Los Angeles further contributes to the vacancy and houselessness crises, as new units are priced beyond the reach of most Angelenos, leading to an excess supply of high-rent housing that fails to lease and therefore fails to house people, coupled with a crisis of unmet need for for the most vulnerable.”
Since the publication of this report, many measures of homelessness and overcrowding have gotten worse. The latest 2025 data documents that Los Angeles now has 44,000 homeless people, 8,000 more than when The Vacancy Report was published a few years ago.
LA’s closely linked crises of homelessness and overcrowding are getting worse – despite statewide upzoning legislation to permit the construction of more overpriced apartments. The situation is ripe for change, but that will require LA’s City Council to renounce upzoning as its response to growing poverty.
(Dick Platkin ([email protected]) is a retired LA city planner, who reports on local planning issues. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
