A recent story in the Wall Street Journal (reposted on Realtor.com) says that in Los Angeles the hottest game in town is building affordable housing – thanks to a policy that promises to streamline the approval process by cutting the previous wait time from about a year to 60 days. According to the report, this might just change previous thinking by developers that building all-affordable housing complexes rarely makes financial sense. Indeed…
Since the city implemented the policy in December 2022, plans for about 42,300 units of affordable housing have been submitted to the city under what is known as Executive Directive 1, or ED1, according to the mayor’s office.
The new process cuts out public-hearing periods and City Council votes on housing projects in which on balance all the units are for tenants who make no more than 80% of the city’s median income.
The policy is even attracting developers who specialize in market-rate apartments and have never built affordable housing before.
“Efforts like ED1 show that there’s plenty of appetite to build nonluxury apartments by market-rate developers,” said Jason Ward, co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness. “You just have to create the circumstances to do that.”
Click here to read the full story at Realtor.com
Click here to read the full story at the Wall Street Journal.
