Single-family zoning is the final boss of LA housing battles. It is undefeated in every major housing debate in recent years. 2023: should we include single-family neighborhoods in Executive Directive 1, Mayor Bass’ signature housing policy? Finish him! 2024: include them in CHIP, the citywide housing plan? Game over! The result is that the bungalow pictured above is still the only thing allowed on this lot on Glendon Ave. in Rancho Park, despite the fact that it’s in a great neighborhood with excellent schools, located two blocks from an E Line station. (Except of course you could build a bigger house.) And when a 1,000 square foot single-family home is worth $1.4 million, it means only rich people can move into the neighborhood.

But yesterday, with an SB 79-shaped gun to their heads, LA City Council took what could be a historic first step toward ending single-family zoning in the city. It wasn’t a courageous step, and it wasn’t a bold step, but with some help it might just be enough to defeat the final boss.

A challenger emerges

When Governor Newsom signed SB 79 last October, everyone thought that new law would be the challenger to defeat single-family zoning. SB 79 requires cities to allow apartment buildings around train stations and some bus stops, overriding whatever single-family zoning is currently in place. Suddenly our little bungalow on Glendon Ave. could give way to a building with 28 apartments, eight of which are set aside for low-income families. That’s dozens more people from all walks of life who could get the chance to live in this great neighborhood, walking distance from the train.

Except SB 79 gives cities a wide berth in how they implement the law before it takes effect on July 1st, and the devil is always in the details. Cities get three options:

1. Just let the law take effect - this is what Long Beach is doing. The city already allows apartments near its train stations, so SB 79 will have little impact there.

2. Pass a “local alternative plan” to shift the law’s upzoning around different areas, as long as the total number of new homes allowed remains the same. Our lot on Glendon Ave. could be limited to 14 apartments instead of 28, or it could be further upzoned to 56 apartments. Beverly Hills is doing this, moving tons of density to a handful of parcels near the D Line Wilshire/La Cienega station so they can cut in half the number of apartments allowed in single-family neighborhoods.

3. Totally exempt certain areas until 2030 - eligible areas include historic neighborhoods, fire zones, low-income neighborhoods, and places that already allow apartments. Glendale is doing this for the Tropico neighborhood, which got upzoned a few years ago.

What would LA do?

Last fall, when I first wrote about SB 79 implementation, it looked like Los Angeles was going to choose some version of the third option, deferring parts of the city until 2030, and then take that time to write a local alternative plan that would take effect when the deferral ended. The vast majority of the areas around transit stops qualify for deferral - pretty much everything that’s not in a wealthy single-family neighborhood, like the bungalow on Glendon Ave. The question, as I wrote at the time, was how many of these areas City Council would choose to defer.

But the smartypants staffers in LA’s Planning Dept. came up with a fourth option for City Council to choose - beating SB 79 to the punch and challenging the boss themselves. Council could defer everything they’re legally allowed to and also make those wealthy single-family neighborhoods eligible for deferral by preemptively upzoning them before the law takes effect - remember that areas that already allow apartments can be deferred until 2030. That trick would allow the entire city to be deferred from SB 79 for the next four years.

Preemptive upzoning may sound good, but there’s another twist: the city only has to allow buildings half the size of what SB 79 requires on a property in order to defer it. So if the city allows a minimum of 14 apartments on the Glendon bungalow’s lot, as opposed to the 28 apartments that SB 79 allows, that’s all the upzoning we get for now. Half the homes, in a much smaller area. Until 2030.

(If you want to dive deeper, check out this great tool Planning developed to explain SB 79 and the options for City Council.)

Planning presented their minimal upzoning and maximal delaying plan to City Council along with two others that upzoned more aggressively. Five councilmembers supported a more aggressive plan, but in the end, Council voted for the most minimal plan.

You could look at this two ways. Cup half-empty: LA discovered a workaround that allows it to exempt the whole city from SB 79 for several years, and all it had to do was allow small apartment buildings in a few neighborhoods. Cup half-full: LA just allowed apartment buildings in some single-family neighborhoods for the first time in generations, a truly historic milestone.

My take: we’re using the wrong cup.

The catch

There’s a big problem with the city’s upzoning plan. Remember how our little bungalow needs to be upzoned to allow 14 apartments for the plan to work? To achieve that, the city is using a CHIP program called Corridor Transitions that allows 4-story buildings with up to 16 apartments - what some call "missing middle" buildings. The problem is that Corridor Transitions has existed for over a year, and not one application for a building has been submitted using it. Here’s the chart of applications through CHIP’s various programs from my writeup of its first year:

In the lead-up to the vote, I called out the city’s preemptive upzoning plan because I thought it wouldn’t lead to anything getting built. The single-family status quo would be perpetuated while exempting the whole city from SB 79.

In the run-up to yesterday’s hearing, multiple organizations wrote in to City Council highlighting Corridor Transitions’ shortcomings. The advocacy had an impact - both Nithya Raman and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced amendments asking the Planning Dept. to look at beefing up Corridor Transitions so it would actually generate housing. Raman’s amendment, the one that passed, asks Planning to look at “greater density, floor area, and/or height paired with levels of deeper affordability to allow for realistic development capacity”. The “deeper affordability” is a reference to concerns raised by ACT-LA, which wants extremely low-income units in the mix for Corridor Transition buildings.

In her remarks at the hearing, Yaroslavsky explicitly took on “the elephant in the room we need to address directly”:

It’s encouraging to hear our Councilmembers talk about finding ways to actually get housing built. About revisiting their previous actions that didn’t work. Whether this rhetoric actually leads to real change remains to be seen. If Corridor Transitions gets revised into something that really does generate a lot of middle middle housing in neighborhoods like Rancho Park, yesterday’s vote will go down as a truly historic defeat of single-family zoning. If when rubber meets road, Yaroslavsky and her colleagues vote to keep Corridor Transitions a paper-only program, yesterday’s vote will have been just another delay tactic.

More rhetoric or reality?

City Council made another move yesterday that the jury will be out on for a while. Remember those local alternative plans that cities can draft by 2030 to somewhat shift SB 79 density around? Instead of waiting until 2030 to draft the city’s local alternative plan, Council voted to instruct the Planning Dept. to start working on it immediately.

This is a genuinely confusing move. Council had the chance to instruct Planning to develop a local alternative plan back in December and didn’t take it - they voted to ask for the deferral and preemptive zoning plan instead. Why the change of heart? The optimist would say Councilmembers have had more time to understand the impacts of the law and are genuinely feeling the urgency of putting a permanent plan in place. The cynic would say Councilmembers are feeling the heat from prohousing advocates and, having picked the least aggressive preemptive upzoning plan, are trying to show they really are taking things seriously.

Again, the proof will be in the pudding. Will Planning actually develop a local alternative plan quickly or get bogged down in multiple rounds of community outreach? Will Council take it up promptly or let it languish in committee for years? It will probably be many months before we’re able to know whether this move was motivated by urgency or delay.

Where is this hopefully not fake upzoning happening anyway?

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a map! The plan upzones single-family and low-density neighborhoods around 55 Metro stations in wealthy neighborhoods, carving out historic districts and high fire zones:

These are some really great parts of town where more people deserve to live - especially the Westside, where apartments could now be built in previously exclusionary neighborhoods like Cheviot Hills and Westchester, not to mention our little bungalow’s Rancho Park. Kudos to the Planning Dept. and to City Council for focusing their rezoning energy on LA’s best neighborhoods. We should be putting more housing there. More kids deserve to grow up there. If we want to see homes actually built there, advocates will have to work hard to hold the city to its promises.