New LA Mayor Bass' Housing Agenda Cutting Approval Times, Red Tape

An announcement earlier this month that the city of Los Angeles, along with the city attorney, successfully placed the Skid Row Housing Trust into public receivership was the latest step of many taken by Mayor Karen Bass in her first months on the job to house more Angelenos, an effort that affordable housing developers would like to see continue.

The city took steps to place the 29-building portfolio of the Skid Row Housing Trust into public receivership following the news that the 34-year-old organization was in financial trouble and couldn't continue operations. 

“We approached this crisis from the stance that failure is not an option,” Bass said in a statement. “Losing nearly 2,000 units of housing would be devastating to Skid Row, would be felt citywide, and, undoubtedly, people would have lost their lives.

“As we scale our programs to house more Angelenos, we need to ensure that we make more housing available.”

In the roughly four months since Bass took office, she has made affordable housing production a central focus, underscoring its role in helping address the city’s homelessness crisis.

In December, she signed an executive directive aimed at speeding up approvals and reviews for affordable housing, permanent supportive housing and temporary shelters. In February, she issued another, ordering an inventory of city-owned property that could be used for housing for formerly homeless Angelenos. 

Affordable housing providers are thrilled that Bass has made these strides in speeding up the construction of their projects. They also hope there is more help to come. 

Community Corporation of Santa Monica Executive Director Tara Barauskas said she has already seen results from the directives. Her organization had been trying to get the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to sign off on some equipment it needed for the electrical system on a 102-unit permanent supportive housing project in Westchester. 

“We were not getting anywhere in terms of getting the approvals we needed,” Barauskas said.

Then leadership heard about an LADWP program called Project Powerhouse, which was created by the LADWP commission to align with the mayor’s directive to speed up affordable housing projects. The new policy charges the department with coming up with ways to “cover the substantial cost of public right-of-way power infrastructure upgrades for 100% affordable and permanent supportive housing developments in Los Angeles,” as well as streamlining the way the department identifies and addresses these projects’ power needs.

CCSM reached out to the program contact and rapidly got the approvals it needed. 

“It sounds like little things, but they're really big things to us,” Barauskas said. 

Timely approvals can mean the difference between financing deadlines being met or lapsing, plus speedier construction, which, as in the market-rate world, means money saved.

That money is at least partly public, and Barauskas said that at a time of increased awareness around the rising cost per unit to build housing for low-income and formerly unhoused residents, speeding up the timeline is a benefit to everyone. 

The mayor’s efforts so far have “done something I've not seen in my time developing affordable housing, this level of proactiveness to get us through all our deadlines,” Barauskas said.

Decro Corp. CEO Ted Handel said his organization has also received a boost from the renewed urgency the mayor’s initiatives have given to the departments he needs to coordinate with to get projects built. Handel credits the mayor for speedy inspections by the housing authority — a process he said could normally take weeks after receiving a temporary certificate of occupancy. Instead, it was done less than a week after Decro received its TCO in December for a 100% affordable project in Historic Filipinotown.

"It's certainly opened up new lines of communication," Handel said. "That's going to be absolutely pivotal." 

Beyond existing directives, it isn't clear whether the mayor will introduce initiatives to speed up or prioritize the construction of all housing. The mayor’s press office didn't respond to requests for comment about the mayor’s plans for housing broadly in the city.  

One thing that could help all kinds of housing and development in the city is improving the efficiency of obtaining building permits, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate Director and Chair Richard Green said. And it’s something that is within the power of a mayor to do. 

While these existing directives put affordable housing “at the front of the line, the problem is the length of the line,” Green said. The process shouldn't take several months or longer to complete, and the fact that it does “means there's fundamentally something wrong with how that process is designed and managed,” he said. 

Urging a broader focus on multiple types of housing is something many in the affordable housing world also advocate. Speaking at a Bisnow event in Downtown Los Angeles, Weingart Center Chief Operating Officer Tonja Boykin applauded the mayor’s December emergency homelessness declaration as a critical step to removing barriers to getting Angelenos off the street but went on to say that ultimately, “we don't believe that it's just interim housing or it's just permanent supportive housing — we need varieties of housing.”

These directives have only been in effect for a few months, so it isn't surprising that there is still work to be done, even within the scope of the existing directives. At least one provider indicated that while the directive about streamlining approvals is supposed to apply universally to the departments that need to sign off on these projects, not all the city departments are yet achieving this goal.

Handel hasn't yet interacted with a post-Project Powerhouse LADWP but said he was "cautiously optimistic" about whether it would be able to speed up approvals and other needed reviews. If it does what it claims to, he said it would be a significant boost to his projects. 

Handel and others were quick to note that the mayor of Los Angeles is not an all-powerful position. Additionally, efforts to generate more housing are undoubtedly running up against the same challenges that many market-rate ground-up projects, housing or otherwise, are facing.

“The mayor is to be commended” for her efforts, Handel said. But citing the high-interest-rate environment and the costliness of new projects because of it, “there are a lot of external forces that are going to make it difficult,” he said. 

Speaking at the press conference to announce the city’s efforts to rehabilitate the Skid Row Housing Trust portfolio, the mayor expressed confidence. 

“We are going to be just as bold when it comes to preserving housing as we are about building housing,” Bass said.