LA’s Current Housing Crisis Traces Back To The Nineteenth Century
PLANNING WATCH - In an impressive review of LA’s housing crisis, in July 2025 the LA Times offered its readers a comprehensive history, The Real Story of how L.A. became the Epicenter of America’s Homeless Crisis. If you think that the current housing crisis is unique, the long article in the Los Angeles Times traces it back for 150 years. My only criticism is that the newspaper downplayed overcrowding and the role of the Federal government’s public housing programs, roughly 1937 to 1972, until the Nixon administration ended them.
While the race and ethnicity of the homeless and overcrowded have changed during this long period, along with the spread of the homelessness from the downtown to the entire metropolitan area, the housing crisis has remained constant. A few quotes from this long article should help those who still believe that the housing crisis is recent and a result of forces beyond local control.
“Homelessness is not innate to Los Angeles, like earthquakes or Santa Ana winds. It is the result of public policy.”
“While mental illness, poor medical care, substance abuse, growing income inequality, job loss, racism, or another social ill might have been the most visible trigger that put any one person on the street, the housing problem is why they had nowhere to land.”
“From the 1970s into the 80’s, L.A. lost at least 80,000 jobs in car and tire factories. Black and Latino workers in South L.A. were hit especially hard.”
“Housing prices doubled from 1975 to 1979, an extraordinary escalation driven in part by a growing population, inflation, and real estate speculation. Prices would double several more times in the coming years, as the average cost of a home rose from $25,000 in the early 1970s to more than $1,000,000 today.” (July 2025)
“The problem has proved to be too big for the City of LA, too big for LA County, and too big for the state. Even a welcome infusion of new housing, albeit temporary, in the form of unused hotel and motels during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t enough to get most people off the streets.”
What the LA Times article does not do is offer comprehensive solutions to the closely related problems of homelessness and overcrowding. Therefore. let me do what this otherwise impressive article didn’t do.
Part of the solution is the restoration of public housing programs through the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD). Another part of the solution is municipal and county control of real estate speculation, since this is a major explanation of the inflated cost of housing in the Los Angeles area. A final part of the solution is the mobilization of the public, especially through organizations like the Tenants Union, to oppose these well-organized real estate interests.
The LA Tenants Union leads struggles against county and municipal policies.
The barrier to these solutions is the hold that real estate speculators hold on local government. This is a tough nut to crack, but as long as investors control land use in Los Angeles City and County, there will not be any obvious solution to homelessness and overcrowding other than the mobilization of tenants through the LA Tenants Union.
(Dick Platkin is a retired Los Angeles city planner who writes about planning issues in LA. He is a member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
