In Los Angeles, Million Dollar Listing isn’t just a reality show about high-end houses. It’s now the typical cost of a home for sale.
L.A.’s average home price is nearly $1 million — up 40% in just five years, which is unwelcome news to the 75% of L.A. renters who wish to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, nearly three-quarters of Angelenos under 35 have considered moving away, largely due to high housing costs.
Many of L.A.’s millennials and young families are being forced to vote with their feet. Since 2012, the median age in L.A. County rose 50% faster than the national rate, largely due to younger families moving to regions with lower home prices. This pattern has accelerated post-COVID; since 2020, L.A. County’s population of children under five has dropped 14%.
Young families leaving L.A. is a disaster in the making for all Angelenos. It saps our local economy’s dynamism, as companies struggle to hire and new businesses are formed elsewhere. Our schools suffer from lack of enrollment, and a shrinking tax base degrades our public services.
To reverse this trend, we need to address the fundamental reason for L.A.’s eye-watering home prices: a severe lack of new housing.
In well-functioning housing markets, growing demand for homes is met with new supply, which moderates costs. This once described Los Angeles. According to economist Edward Glaeser, L.A.’s housing stock grew at a rate of 2.2% per year during the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, in 1970, the median owner-occupied home cost about $200,000 in current dollars.
During the first half of the 20th century, homebuilders met burgeoning demand with both single-family homes and multifamily housing. As author Max Podemski has noted, the city’s beloved Spanish-style fourplexes, bungalow courts, and stylish apartment buildings like Hancock Park’s El Royale are a product of a time when L.A. homebuilding was relatively unrestricted.
But starting in the 1970s, L.A. started amassing a thicket of restrictions on new housing, especially apartments. A witches’ brew of downzoning, reductions of allowable building height and density, and a byzantine permitting regime radically reduced housing production. Since 1970, housing production has been slashed by two-thirds, to just 0.7% per year. L.A. built fewer homes during the 2010s than in the 2000s and 1990s. As in many cities where land use was heavily restricted, L.A.’s housing costs surged.
Today, apartments are de facto banned on over 75% of the city’s residentially-zoned land, particularly in many of L.A.’s highest-opportunity, job-rich neighborhoods. It’s illegal to build even modest townhomes and condos – homes that provide an entryway to homeownership for many first-time buyers – exactly where they’re most in-demand. L.A.’s families are left to outbid each other on a relatively fixed stock of aging houses, like a bad game of musical chairs.
Other cities, like Houston, have created a playbook for more abundant, affordable housing and a growing, youthful population. Unlike most American cities, Houston allows apartment construction on most of its land. In the late 1990s, Houston passed a series of zoning reforms that reduced the amount of land required per home on a lot, effectively legalizing townhomes in more neighborhoods. Researcher Emily Hamilton estimates that the reforms spurred the production of over 80,000 homes, mainly in the already-developed center city.
As a result, Houston’s home prices have remained below the national average, even as the city has added over 300,000 people since 2000. Houston also has the lowest median age of any major American metro area, indicating some success at attracting and keeping younger families. Houston is doing today what Los Angeles did decades ago.
To bring down costs and retain young families, L.A. needs a building boom of townhomes, condos, accessory dwelling units, and yes, apartment buildings. As in Houston, these homes must be legalized in neighborhoods where there’s demand for them, not just in a few limited areas.
Unfortunately, Los Angeles is about to miss an opportunity to promote housing abundance. In 2021, L.A. adopted a housing plan (the “Housing Element”) that would accommodate over 450,000 more homes by the end of the decade. Among other things, this Housing Element would legalize mid-rise apartments in some transit-adjacent areas where they’re currently banned, potentially adding over 200,000 homes citywide.
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State law gave L.A. three years to implement the Housing Element. With the clock ticking, the city now proposes to adopt a watered-down plan that leaves single-family zones untouched. Housing advocates have argued that this would make L.A.’s housing growth goal impossible to achieve, and would effectively declare the city’s most opportunity-rich neighborhoods off-limits to new families.
It’s disappointing that Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council have consistently buckled under pressure from a small, vocal NIMBY minority – even though a substantial majority of L.A. voters support more apartment production.
L.A. is required to pass a rezoning plan by February, giving City Hall only a few months to decide whether to finally side with young families seeking homeownership in our city, or to double down on broken housing policies. Members of L.A.’s pro-housing majority must make their voices heard to our elected officials.
Because Los Angeles is facing a critical choice: more homes, or more U-Hauls?
Anthony Dedousis is a Los Angeles-based board member of YIMBY Action, a national pro-housing advocacy organization, and CEO of Revival Homes, a marketplace for accessory dwelling units (ADUs).