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**JUNE 22, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

L.A.: Home to More Homeless Than Anyplace Else

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.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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