Mayor Bass' Latest Executive Directive Focuses On Speeding Up Production Of All Types Of Housing

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday signed her seventh executive directive, this one aimed at making housing of all types, even for-sale housing, more affordable in the city of Los Angeles. 

"I hear all over the city, 'What are we going to do to make housing more affordable?'" Bass said Wednesday at a signing event for the directive. "While the high cost of housing obviously is most extreme in the 46,000 people who are on our streets every day, but people who are housed or who are graduating college and want to live in the town they grew up in are consistently priced out." 

The directive instructs city departments to take a number of actions, including reducing processing time for mixed-income housing projects, cutting bureaucracy for adaptive reuse conversions to housing, incentivizing the addition of more affordable units to projects of all types, and identifying and removing congestion points for housing unit delivery. The directive also tasks city staffers with examining specific processes, such as site plan review for certain projects, and eliminating reviews where they may be redundant. 

Bass also emphasized that any suggestions or proposed changes will be made with input from Angelenos and affected communities. All elements of the directive are aimed at speeding up the delivery of housing across all income levels for renters and potential owners. 

"As I have talked to developers around the city, they say one thing: 'It takes too long to get projects done, and every time there is a delay, it increases the costs,'" Bass said Wednesday. 

Although LA has long set goals of building more housing, it hasn't met them. LA has reached less than half of its goal for both low- and very low-income units and less than 10% of the moderate-income housing units it is supposed to build based on the last regional needs housing assessment, Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rachel Freeman said at the event. 

The multidepartment approach is reminiscent of the tack that Bass took with her first executive directive, aimed at speeding up approvals for 100% affordable projects. That initiative has helped in approving thousands of units in less than a year. 

"ED1 showed us that developers value predictability and that we can actually incentivize the creation of deeply affordable and much-needed housing in Los Angeles," Council Member Nithya Raman, chair of the council's Housing and Homelessness Committee, said at the event. "What’s exciting about today is that ED7 takes us another step forward."