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THE VIEW FROM HERE - Los Angeles’ core problem is one of stupidity. We are not applying stupid to regular Angelenos, but to politicos and land use experts. As professionals, they have a duty to master a much higher degree of education and experience just as doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. must have a better understanding of their fields. For Los Angeles politicians like Councilmember Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass as well as those seeking public office like Spencer Pratt, the level of hogwash and blatantly and false information, with which they inundate us daily, must be due to extreme stupidity or a malicious desire to intentionally deceive Angelenos. Like stupidity, one cannot fix maliciousness.
Reality: The Homeless Crisis Was Not Caused by Failure to Build
For decades, the politicos and their experts have pushed the Big Lie that Homelessness is the result of not building enough. No one becomes homeless because there is not enough new construction. When RSO (rent controlled) apartment complexes are torn down, the prior tenants have trouble finding a new place to live. Why? Because under Los Angeles rent control ordinance, there is never a RSO unit for rent. All rentals start out at market rates. Thus, someone paying $500/month rent for an RSO unit cannot all of sudden pay market rate $1,100 per month for a new apartment. Those evicted people with poor education, lower IQ, disability, drug addiction, mental health problems find it harder to pay higher rent and they become homeless, whereas formerly their social security check was sufficient for food and basic necessities. Only a very stupid person thinks that poor person in an RSO apartment magically because homeless developers did not build lots of new homes. Since 2001, developers were on a building craze which would have had no impact of the poor people in RSO units, but for the fact that developers were also destroying tens of thousands of RSO units and replacing them with luxury complexes.
Politicos fail to explain tell Angelenos about the connection between increased density and higher housing costs for everyone. Let’s go back over 100 years and look at increasing the density of land. When one comes upon a urbanizing area like 1900 Los Angeles, adding density means building modest homes were there had been only sage brush and tumble weeds. There comes a point where an urban area becomes sufficiently dense that adding more population seriously reduces the quality of life. Giving a malnourished person food is beneficial, but continued eating more and more leads to obesity which threatens the person’s life. There comes a time for human beings and a city that more is bad, very bad.
When vacant land becomes scare, its value increases until a city reaches a point, where more density makes land so expensive that the price of anything built upon it exceeds the income of the potential buyers. In a free market system, the correct price for products, and homes are products, is set when a willing seller and a willing buyer agree on the price. Hidden within the key word “willing” is the buyer’s ability to pay. Buyers have some flexibility (elasticity) in their ability to pay. While paying 30% of income may have been traditional, many will pay 40%; none can pay 90%.
We notice the extent to which poor peoples’ inability to pay high rent because these people become homeless. Homelessness itself becomes a crisis when so many tens of thousands of RSO units are destroyed that the limited supply of apartments means an increasing number of people are unable to afford the cheapest apartment. The more politicos allowed developers to destroy poor people’s homes the worse the homeless crisis became. Politicos not noticing the correlation between tearing down RSO units and increased homelessness is due to either stupidity or malice.
Because Nithya Raman has a bachelor's degree in political theory from Harvard University and a master's degree in urban planning from MIT, she is clearly malicious, whereas Spencer Pratt can argue that his "Get Help or Get Out" solution is due to stupidity and not malice. When it comes to SB 9 (mandates ADU’s), Pratt becomes smart. When it comes to SB 549, which allows the government to purchase property within the Palisades Fire Zone in order to increase multi-unit Affordable Housing projects, he is very smart. SB 549 commodifies some of property in the Palisades. Bass and Raman and DSA members know about commodification. Pratt sees the folly in both SB 9 and SB 549, which makes one wonder why he is smart to recognize bad legislation when it harms him but promote it when it hurts poor people.
The Middle Class Exodus
Politicos refuse to admit that the only way to keep Los Angeles affordable for the middle class is to halt densification, and if possible, de-densify until land values are reasonable for the middle class.
People uneducated in economics and naive about political trickery think that density makes apartments cheaper. The more apartments which a builder is allowed place on a parcel, the more over all rent the owner can realize. What people fail to understand is that as soon as land may be used for multi-unit dwellings, its profit making potential zooms up. Densification increases the cost of land which can make the multi-storey projects so expensive that only the wealthy can afford them. Furthermore, construction requirements for high raises are higher than for a single-family home; plus developers have to pay for common areas plus off-street parking. In fact, each apartment can cost as much to build as a detached house.
The politicos then tell us that Affordable Housing should be built in TOD’s, Transit Corridors, where land prices are already the highest. If constructing Affordable Housing results in apartments which only the wealthy can afford, how can poor people live there? Telling the developer to set aside a certain number of apartments for low rent people, means the rents of the other units must be higher which means fewer people will rent there. As a result the projects have too many vacancies.
To make matter worse, the rate at which LA destroys poor peoples homes is many times faster than new Affordable Housing can match. Thus, prices increase, the Family Millennials are priced out of the market, the Homeless Crisis gets worse, as the city goes broke, spending a $ 1 Billion per year on homelessness.
Maybe, Los Angeles is suffering less from a bad case of stupidity than from never-ending political maliciousness.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a former Los Angeles-based attorney, an author, and political commentator. A long-time contributor to CityWatchLA, he is known for his incisive critiques of City Hall and judicial corruption, as well as his analysis of political and constitutional issues. Abrams blends legal insight with historical and philosophical depth to challenge conventional narratives. A passionate defender of civic integrity and transparency, he aims to expose misuse of power and advocate for systemic reform in local government. You may email him at [email protected])
