Better policy won't fix Imelda Padilla

Much digital ink has been spilled in the last week over LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla’s embarrassingly honest appearance on Pod Save America debating SB 79, the proposed state bill that would require cities to legalize apartment buildings around train stations. For those out of the loop, on the podcast Padilla argued that the bill would take away her ability to influence development in her district, which she called her “number one job description”. She gave the example of a proposed affordable housing project across the street from the G Line station in Lake Balboa that local homeowners were very angry about. They wanted her to kill it. But instead, as she proudly explained, she negotiated with the developer to reduce the size of the building from six stories to three and add more parking. She portrayed this “compromise” - making three stories of affordable housing vanish into thin air to appease NIMBYs - as a success of local control that SB 79 would take away.

It’s tempting to say Padilla inadvertently made the case for the bill. That the state should bypass city councilmembers’ control over development because that control is what got LA into the housing crisis in the first place. I agree, but I don’t think it’s enough. The reason is that, in the case of the Lake Balboa building, local control had already been taken away.

The building was proposed using Mayor Bass’ Executive Directive 1 (ED 1) program, which requires the city to approve affordable apartment buildings within 60 days. One way ED 1 speeds up approvals is that no one other than bureaucrats gets to weigh in on the building - no community meetings, no Planning Commission hearings, no City Council votes. If the building follows the rules, it gets approved.

But with the Lake Balboa building, Padilla decided to helicopter into the process anyway, even though “by law I really have no jurisdiction any more because it’s an ED 1”, as she said on the podcast. She asserted local control onto a process designed to take it away from her.

Why did the developer make concessions to Padilla when they could have ignored her? They build a lot of affordable housing in LA and often need City Council to approve funding for their projects. The Lake Balboa project’s funding was approved just last month with a motion put forward by…Imelda Padilla. Whether or not Padilla’s negotiation with them was an explicit quid pro quo, the developer can’t afford to burn bridges with a councilmember who has such leverage over them.

Even developers who don’t need public funding often look to councilmembers’ help with navigating city bureaucracies and other boring stuff. And if they don’t need it on their current project, they might need it in the future. More broadly, LA City Councilmembers are some of the most powerful politicians in the country, with a history of going to outlandish lengths to block housing, and when one of them makes a fuss about a developer’s project, it’s risky for the developer to ignore them.

Padilla knows she will always have leverage over developers, so she knows that even if a project technically bypasses her, she can still exert influence over it if she wants. This is not a problem that can be fixed by better policy. More streamlining, less local control, more by-right approvals - it’s all necessary, but utlimately, a power-hungry councilmember is going to insert themselves into the process whenever they want. Meddlers gonna meddle. SB 79 won’t fix this - if it passes, the first time a developer proposes an SB 79 project in Padilla’s district, you can bet they will get a call from her.

The only way to change this dynamic is to change what Padilla fears. Right now, there is a cost to Padilla if she lets a building proposed in Lake Balboa sail through approvals. The cost is NIMBY anger. Check out the first two speakers in this clip from a recent City Council meeting. As I was writing this piece, they filed a recall petition against her.

What does it cost Padilla if she forces the developer to chop three stories off their building? Nothing. (It only costs the rest of us.) In fact, she regards it as a victory.

Padilla’s decisions will change when her calculus of power changes. If she had to worry that furious constituents would come to City Council meetings to protest that she made dozens of affordable homes disappear, she might think twice about doing it. If she was forced to keep top of mind that 62% of voters in her district support building more housing in their own neighborhoods, she might lean toward letting that housing move forward. If the prohousing movement was more politically powerful than the homeowner movement in Lake Balboa, there would be no question for Padilla about whether affordable housing should be built there.

When the prohousing movement gains power, local control can actually be a good thing. In Santa Monica, where a prohousing majority was elected to City Council last November, the new council loosened some of the state-imposed limits on SB 9, the duplex law, making it possible for developers to split a lot in two without the original homeowner living in one of them. This tweak will enable more small starter homes to be built and sold in Santa Monica, unlocking homeownership there for tons of people who can’t afford it now. That’s just one of many reforms passed by the new City Council that will eventually allow many more people to call Santa Monica home. All thanks to years of on-the-ground organizing and building the power of the prohousing movement in Santa Monica.

Most of my work in the prohousing movement has been in policy. Most of what I write about is related to policy. But we activists shouldn’t forget that this is also a movement, and movements need to build power. One way to build power is to pass legislation, which we are getting better at. But true change will only come with the slow, unglamorous work of organizing and building up the movement until every politician is forced to answer to it.