On May 15th, AIA|LA and Los Angeles City Planning hosted a roundtable discussion to learn more about the recently released draft Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) Ordinance–a key component of Los Angeles’ Housing Element Rezoning Program.

 

We’re grateful to LACP for their commitment and dedication to identifying proposals and programs that can address our ongoing housing challenge.  Many of us have been involved with the Housing Element update process since 2019 and it’s reassuring to see genuine progress being made over these past 5+ years.  Increasing our region’s zoning capacity (for housing) and making more housing ‘by right’ will go a long way towards creating more housing affordability and certainty for all.  LACP and its housing element team have done a terrific job balancing all of the input and delivering a draft rezoning program we can all be proud of!

 

In general, CHIP along with the Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, the Housing Elements Sites Ordinance, the Residents Protection Ordinance, (and even the upcoming Landscape and Site Design Ordinance), will help advance the ability of the ‘market’ to deliver financially feasible and equitable housing solutions.  Quick and effective adoption of these ordinances is imperative.   Especially if the ordinances help to create more certainty for communities — and help make projects less litigiously vulnerable!

The prime benefit of CHIP will be to better align (and therefore clarify) the local TOC program and the numerous State Density Bonus provisions, along with incentive programs to create more affordable and mixed-income neighborhoods.

 

However, there is a balance of mandates and incentives that need to be further fine-tuned and ’tested’ with real-world projects.  Otherwise, these policies are just ’noise’ that can never reach the light of day.  (SB 9 for instance was a loud policy that was just too complicated to implement (due to local zoning constraints) and continues to create substantial confusion and derision, even though a real-world application of how SB 9 may be able to transform neighborhoods can be found by walking the beautiful neighborhood of Angenelo Heights, with its diversity of housing types and its splendid mixture of incomes.)

CHIP has a lot of potential —but it’s still quite complicated, especially in the context of the new zoning code.  My chief concern is that all of this is just going to get more confusing, not less.  Especially to plan-check engineers and zoning administrators attempting to interpret the code, etc, as well as, to the architects, engineers, and builders attempting to implement the code.

 

A couple of areas of CHIP that deserve more attention:

 

1.  By excluding single-family neighborhoods from the CHIP program, then you accidentally (or unintentionally) exclude the ability for opportunity corridors to be buffered by ’transitional’ zones that can buffer lower-scale residential neighborhoods.  And it’s this ‘missing middle’, old-school housing typology that most people in LA love!  The low-rise courtyard apartments, etc.  By excluding the applicability of the Mixed Income Incentive Program to those single-family residential streets that are immediately adjacent to opportunity corridors and commercial boulevards, then you continue to compound the challenge we’re currently all enduring.

 

2.  Housing for Families needs to be more thoroughly ‘tested’ with developers/ funders/ lenders, etc – what will make it ‘pencil out’ so that more housing for families is built in our urban core?  As tax-payers, we cannot afford to subsidize everything, nor should the public sector always be burdened with the risk of bringing homes for families to fruition.  That’s what the private sector does best – it marginalizes and manages risk more effectively.

 

3.  If we want to encourage urban infill development (especially on the typical 50’ x 150’ lot), then we need housing policies that facilitate the small mom-and-pop ‘developer’ to build these homes (5 to 10 to 20 units) – and make it financially feasible to do so!  That is, on some of these smaller lots, it will be a disservice to neighborhoods to require affordability covenants on smaller projects – especially if those affordability covenants only result in bulkier projects built on multiple-lots, that require clear-cutting of existing buildings, etc.  Otherwise, only large-scale developers can afford to build these homes by aggregating numerous parcels together to build 100+ units at a time.  100+ units at a time are excellent to help address our supply constraints, but that housing typology continues to bloat our neighborhood streets and creates chunky block-size housing projects that only REITs can afford to deliver, rather than smaller-grained, (and in my opinion) more charming housing projects.

In general, it seems that most city housing policies are being shaped and created by lawyers, politicians, urban planners, advocates, and community-based organizations.  Those ideas have merit – but housing policy needs to be ’tested’ more comprehensively by the people who finance, design, build, maintain, and “reside/ live in” the housing.  (For instance, I’m not an architect and have never endured the slings and arrows of plan-check, nor have I built anything larger than a garden box.)

 

How do we get the unbiased and honest ‘housing’ practitioner more directly involved in shaping these ordinances, etc?

And equally as important, how do we translate into ‘action and outcome’ the diversity of each person’s unique and authentic lived experience related to what it means (spiritually/ humanistically) to live in housing, especially here in Los Angeles?

 

To me, that’s the central challenge.