L.A.’s Twin Crises Finally Seem Fixable

Los Angeles has seen better days. Traffic is terrible, homelessness remains near record highs, and housing costs are among the worst in the country. Several years ago, these factors contributed to an alarming first: L.A.’s population started shrinking.

This is no pandemic hangover. With a few exceptions, the local economy has come roaring back. Many of its major industries proved resistant to remote work—you still can’t film a movie over Zoom—and perfect year-round weather continually drew digital nomads. The quick rebound has had the paradoxical effect of kicking L.A.’s pre-pandemic problems into overdrive, by clogging freeways, eating up limited housing supply, and forcing out residents who couldn’t afford to stay.

The city’s traffic and housing crises date back a century, when Los Angeles first became dependent on the automobile and exclusionary zoning. Ever since, municipalities across the country—from Las Vegas to Miami, and nearly every suburb in between—have followed L.A.’s example, prioritizing cars over public transit and segregating housing by income. Predictably, Los Angeles’s problems have become urban America’s problems.

In recent years, a critical mass of state policy makers, housing reformers, and urban planners understood that L.A.’s problems are reversible, and started to lay out an alternative path for the future. The city has made massive investments in transit and—partly because of pressure from statewide pro-housing laws—experienced a surge of permitting for new homes. Even though rampant NIMBYism remains a barrier, the breadth of the city’s progress is becoming clearer: Los Angeles is gradually revamping America’s most infamous sprawl.

L.A.’s quest to reinvent itself holds national implications. Savvy urban planners and policy makers are watching to see how Los Angeles addresses the issues that are intensifying in many of their own cities. They know that a congested, unaffordable future awaits if they don’t intervene.

It’s often said that Los Angeles was planned around the car. But it was actually built around what was once the largest transit system in the world. In the early 20th century, the Pacific Electric Railway stitched together hundreds of historic town centers from Riverside to Venice. The rest of L.A. was subdivided into one of the largest street grids in history, marshaling growth along a coherent, interconnected pattern.

Only in the 1930s did the city begin to redesign itself for driving. Freeways started carving up the grid, spewing pollution across Los Angeles. The railway closed. Walking and biking became unpleasant and unsafe. This transformation spawned today’s L.A., where car crashes kill more people than violent crime, and the average driver spends 62 hours a year sitting in traffic. It ended up being a model for suburbs across the country; the average American now spends an hour a day driving.

The state of housing is equally bleak. By some measures, Los Angeles has arguably the worst housing-affordability crisis in the country. If a middle-class family ever wants to own a home, they’d better go somewhere else. The median home price in L.A. is over 10 times the median household income—more than double a healthy ratio.

The many Angelenos who are locked out of homeownership are stuck paying some of America’s steepest rents. Most residents spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing; a quarter of residents spend at least half. To curb costs, many renters double or triple up, resulting in the country’s highest overcrowding rate. About 75,000 residents of Los Angeles County go without housing altogether.

The housing shortage is by design: Beginning in the 1960s, policy makers tightened zoning regulations, slashing the city’s capacity by 60 percent. As a matter of law, Los Angeles could not grow. Today, building apartments is still illegal in about three-quarters of residential areas, where most land is effectively reserved for McMansions. The situation is even worse in the suburbs, where zoning allows virtually no new housing at all. The crisis has even spread to once-affordable places like Phoenix, as local growth butts up against restrictive zoning in more and more cities.

Until recently, nearly every development in L.A.-adjacent cities such as Pasadena or Culver City entailed a costly environmental review and endless public hearings, both easily hijacked by NIMBYs. Impact fees increase the cost of a new housing unit by tens of thousands of dollars. For a long time, the number of permits issued across Greater Los Angeles looked more like it does in diminished cities like Detroit than in prosperous peers like Seattle.

The city’s recent population decline might make you think that nobody wants to live there. But, really, Los Angeles hasn’t let anybody in.

After decades of dysfunction, L.A.’s twin crises are starting to look fixable.

Take transit: Los Angeles is currently building one of North America’s most ambitious rail expansions, which will rival the top systems in the country. Thanks in part to Measure M, a half-cent sales-tax increase that voters approved in 2016, the city is scheduled to open rail service to Los Angeles International Airport by the end of the decade, as well as new trains extending from West Los Angeles to East Los Angeles. In 2023, L.A. Metro completed the Regional Connector, which linked two light-rail lines, allowing for transfer-free rides across the metropolis.

All this new rail will soon be supplemented by an expanded network of bus, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. In March, a coalition led by the group Streets for All passed Measure HLA, which will add over 200 miles of bus lanes and protected bicycle lanes, and many hundreds of redesigned, pedestrian-friendly streets in the coming decades. If officials can unlock new revenue through congestion pricing—which will nudge some Angelenos out of their cars—the city might finally be able to tame traffic.

The housing situation is turning around too, if in fits and starts. Recent experience shows that simply easing overly restrictive rules could unlock a lot of new home building. In 2022, Los Angeles issued more permits than it had in any of the previous 36 years. Although the average home price continues to hover around a million dollars, rents have fallen by about 5 percent compared with late 2023.

A range of interventions have made this possible. Since 2017, Los Angeles has permitted nearly 35,000 accessory dwelling units—homes that were largely illegal prior to state intervention in 2017. Thanks to a newly strengthened state “fair share” law, cities across L.A. County will be required to permit thousands of new homes in coming years; Santa Monica, for example, will have to allow some 1,500 new homes over the next few years, more than the city has permitted in decades. A 2022 law green-lighting the construction of affordable housing in commercial zones has prompted Costco to agree to add 800 apartments above a planned storefront in South Los Angeles. Other state laws have eliminated parking mandates, streamlined permitting, and expedited townhouse subdivisions.

Still, fixing the crisis will require much more work. By one state estimate, Greater L.A. must permit 168,000 homes each year to end the housing shortage. Even in the historically productive year of 2022, the region permitted fewer than 60,000. And in a major setback, the city council voted in December to preserve single-family zoning, which bans new apartments in nearly three-quarters of Los Angeles. (Never mind that a city-commissioned report admits that the decision will entrench segregation.)

But reform continues bubbling up locally thanks to a growing YIMBY movement. Ten years ago, the idea of rolling back apartment prohibitions in Los Angeles was unthinkable; now it seems inevitable. The Transit-Oriented Communities program, part of a ballot measure that Angelenos adopted in 2016, has facilitated the construction of tens of thousands of new apartments near transit. When Mayor Karen Bass took office in 2022, she issued Executive Directive 1, speeding up permitting processes. Combined with a generous state incentive program for projects that agree to keep rents low, the initiative has attracted applications for more than 20,000 new homes and counting. At almost any public hearing, expect to bump into an Abundant Housing LA volunteer eager to share the good news.

A century ago, Los Angeles pioneered an urban model that much of America made the mistake of replicating. Now, after many decades of strict zoning and car-centric growth, Los Angeles is figuring out what comes next. The city is starting to treat its dependence on automobiles by reintroducing bus lanes, bike lanes, and rail lines. Neighborhoods that had been locked up for a half century by zoning are finally growing again. Hundreds of urban areas across the country desperately require similar interventions.

If history is a guide, L.A.’s ambitions might once again reshape the American city—this time for the better.