By Bill Fulton, FAICP, Co-Director, Center for Housing Policy and Design, Professor of Practice in Urban Studies and Planning.
Last month, I represented the UCSD Center for Housing Policy and Design at the Casita Coalition’s annual “Build The Middle” convening up in Pasadena. It was an eye-opening experience – especially when we went out into the field and checked out how Altadena is recovering from last January’s horrific wildfires.
We talk constantly in San Diego about the crisis of housing supply and affordability – and rightly so. We don’t have enough housing and the rent, if you will, is too damned high. But housing is a complicated issue, and the Casita Coalition event highlighted – for me at least – that there is no single “either/or” solution. Attacking housing is a “both/and” solution.
For example: when I focus on possible solutions to the housing supply problem, I often focus on multifamily rental housing. Both home prices and rents are sky-high and people are falling into homelessness because they get priced out of basic apartments. So to me, building more basic apartments for people to rent is a fundamental part of the solution to the problem of housing supply and affordability.
The Casita Coalition, on the other hand, is focused on home ownership – especially for the kind of small “starter” homes that used to be common but today are not. So there was a lot of talk at the Casita Coalition event about all forms of smaller houses that can be owned: accessory dwelling units that can be condos; duplexes and triplexes that can provide home owners with additional income from renting the other units; and, quite simply, smaller houses on smaller lots. (I spoke, based on knowledge gleaned from my days at the Kinder Institute at Rice, on how Houston’s decision to reduce minimum lot size set of a boom on townhome construction).
But ensuring an ample supply of rental housing and creating more home ownership opportunities are not separate problems. Because the housing market is really one giant market, they’re interconnected. If there aren’t enough home ownership opportunities, then families get stuck in apartments, meaning those apartments are not available for other families with more modest incomes. (And, as Yoni Applebaum pointed out in Stuck, if you don’t build step-down housing for older folks, they are stuck in big houses, meaning those houses are not available for families on the way up).
All this became abundantly clear when we went on our field trip to Altadena, where more than 6,000 houses burned down in the January fires. Altadena as a community has an interesting history. It’s an unincorporated community – meaning it’s not its own city and is governed by Los Angeles County – immediately adjacent to the traditionally affluent community of Pasadena. And for a variety of reasons, historically it was one of the best places in Los Angeles for middle-class black families to seek home ownership. Most of the community was built decades ago and many if not most of the houses were modest in size and, traditionally, in price as well. (Altadena was not immune to the recent price run-up in L.A. and median home price now tops $1 million).
Most of the fire debris has now been cleared from Altadena, but the landscape is still devastating to look at: block after block after block of vacant lots where houses once stood. Meaning thousands of homeowning families who have – perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently – been thrown into the fierce rental market in the Los Angeles area. As is the case with many longtime homeowners, many Altadena residents were underinsured, so they are selling their lots and leaving L.A for good. The wildfires created a hothouse case study of how the different components of a housing market are connected and how a lack of housing in one part of the market – in the case, ownership housing in Altadena – can put pressure on other parts of the market, such as rental apartments.
There are some glimmers of hope. The Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning has moved quickly to streamline permitting processes so that families wanting to rebuild “like-for-like” can do so quickly. We also saw preapproved housing designs that the county is planning to allow in streamlined fashion. Ironically, it took a disaster to get these streamlining efforts moving.
There are debates in Altadena over what happens when property owners want to build something other than what was there before. Under a state law, SB 9, all single-family property owners have the right to split their lot in two and build two units on each lot. There is concern that investors will purchase lots from underinsured homeowners and pursue this course. Gov. Gavin Newsom has temporarily suspended SB 9 in Altadena and L.A. County has now followed suit. Not surprisingly, YIMBY housing advocates are getting ready to sue, saying more housing is needed.
But all this disagreement does not deter from the underlying message I saw over and over again last month: The housing crisis requires a both/and solution. So often in the political battles over housing in California, I see contestants on all sides pursuing either/or solutions: We want affordable housing only, not market-rate housing, NIMBYs will say, while YIMBYS will say, we don’t want any brakes on the housing market at all. But the fact of the matter is, we’re way past the either/or stage. We need to build all the housing we can – affordable and market rate, rental and ownership, and housing of all sizes – to get out of this mess.
