Ringo Chiu via AP
A homeless man rests near City Hall in Los Angeles, May 6, 2021.
As anyone who lives there, and many who don’t, can attest, my hometown—Los Angeles—is in trouble. The gap between housing costs and household income is higher in L.A. than it is anyplace else. Median-income families can afford only 11 percent of L.A. homes, and nearly half the city’s renters spend half or more of their income on rent and utilities. That’s the primary reason why the city is home to more homeless than any other, by a wide margin.
In today’s New York Times (which has more digital subscribers in California, by the way, than it has in New York), Michael Kimmelman reports on the results of a design contest commissioned by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office that asked architects to come up with creative and generally nifty designs for multi-unit housing. The designs are indeed nifty, but the problem isn’t one of design; it’s one of acute and chronic NIMBYism. The residential areas of the city, as Kimmelman notes, are overwhelmingly zoned for single-family homes, and persuading the Angelenos in those homes that the sky won’t fall if the city council votes to upzone their hood to create affordable multi-unit housing is no easy task. Which is why that city council has consistently resisted any such proposals.
Still, for whatever very small role nifty design may play in shifting homeowners’ opinions, Los Angeles actually has a proud history of affordable architectural gems—indeed, of affordable architectural-gem public housing. During World War II, Paul Williams (the African American architect who was a particular favorite of movie stars) and Richard Neutra (California’s greatest residential architect) designed one such housing project for defense workers in southern L.A. County. A few years later, Neutra designed a stunning high-rise public-housing project set to be built in Chavez Ravine (since 1962, the site of Dodger Stadium), but McCarthyism—reactionaries’ opposition to both public housing and the very progressive city housing director, Frank Wilkinson—made sure it never advanced past the drawing boards.
Frank Gehry, the greatest L.A. architect since Neutra, is a progressive guy who’s active in L.A. civic improvement (see, for instance, his plans for L.A. River development). Such is his cachet that if he came up with a few dozen plans for affordable housing across the city, it might help the cause of upzoning in various neighborhoods—well, help a smidgen. I suspect it will only be when the homeless are camped on every L.A. street that homeowners will permit the construction of multi-unit housing in their neighborhoods. Homeowners may be an immovable object, but for that very reason, the escalating growth of homelessness is an irresistible force.
