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HOUSING - Los Angeles faces a housing shortage so severe it pushes families into poverty, fuels homelessness, and undermines the city’s future. This crisis wasn’t inevitable. It was engineered by decades of policies that blocked new housing across much of the city.
The results are clear. More than 1.5 million Angelenos are rent-burdened, spending over 30% of their income on housing. Teachers making $80,000 a year can’t find an affordable apartment near their schools. Instead, they face an impossible choice: pay most of their salary for rent or move hours away and pour thousands into gas and car payments.
This shortage exists because Los Angeles bans apartments on nearly three-quarters of its residential land. Those restrictions forced generations of lower-income and Black and Brown families into overcrowded housing. Today, Los Angeles and Orange Counties contain more than half of the most overcrowded census tracts in the nation, including Pico Union and Historic South Central.
Meanwhile, new development remains concentrated in the same neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of overcrowding. Affluent areas—often with the best schools, parks, and taxpayer-funded transit—continue to wall themselves off from working families.
The consequences ripple citywide: the median home price has soared to $900,000, and families priced out of central neighborhoods are pushed to the Antelope Valley or the Inland Empire, forced into traffic-clogged commutes. At the same time, billions of dollars in new rail lines sit underused because the very people who need them most can’t afford to live nearby.
A new path: SB 79
A proposal in the state legislature, SB 79, would change this dynamic. For the first time in decades, it would require cities to allow apartments near high-quality transit stops, creating housing opportunities in the very neighborhoods with the greatest access to jobs, schools, and services.
The benefits are straightforward. Families who live near transit save an average of $13,000 a year on gas, insurance, and car payments—money that can instead be spent on rent, healthcare, or education. When working people can afford to live near trains and high-quality bus lines, ridership goes up – and transit agencies avoid the fare hikes and service cuts that result from empty trains.
And by spreading growth beyond already dense, lower-income neighborhoods like Koreatown and Boyle Heights, SB 79 ensures that wealthier communities with parks, good schools, and fire stations also play a role in housing the region’s workers – including the workers those wealthier areas rely on themselves.
Affordability and renter protections
SB 79 pairs new housing with affordability requirements and tenant safeguards. It mandates that 7–13% of apartments in new buildings be reserved for families earning between $30,000 and $90,000. It prohibits demolition of larger rent-controlled buildings and guarantees displaced tenants up to $108,000 in relocation assistance, along with the right to return to their new apartments at their old rent.
Cities will still set design standards, collect fees, and oversee permitting. What they will no longer be able to do is ban all apartments near the $120 billion in transit infrastructure taxpayers have already funded. Instead of debating whether working families deserve to live near good transportation, communities will have to plan how to accommodate the teachers, bus drivers, and nurses who keep Los Angeles running.
A decisive choice
The Assembly’s upcoming vote on SB 79 is about more than zoning. It is about whether Angelenos can afford to live near their work, their schools, and the neighborhoods they serve—or whether they will continue to endure three-hour daily commutes while train stations sit empty.
The answer should be obvious. If Los Angeles wants to end homelessness and make life affordable again, it must allow homes near the transit that residents have already paid for. The people who care for our children, staff our hospitals, and run our businesses deserve to live in the communities they sustain. The best way to end homelessness is also the simplest: build homes for our neighbors.
(Mahdi Manji is the Director of Public Policy at Inner City Law Center.)
