The latest chapter of LA’s SB 79 shenanigans is all about one word: control. When we last checked in on our story in March, City Council had passed a lame plan to delay the law from taking effect in the city. They unearthed an obscure, never-before-used housing program called Corridor Transition, allowed it to be used in the areas around some transit stops, and voilà - SB 79 wouldn’t take effect in the city until 2031. As a sort of fig leaf, they instructed the Planning Dept. to update the requirements of the Corridor Transition program to try to make it usable. Last month, Planning released their update. And it shows how tightly the city wants to control the look of our neighborhoods.

The program has been redubbed Low Rise, and it uses the same basic rules as Corridor Transition - 3-4 story buildings on residential streets in wealthy neighborhoods, with up to either 10 or 16 apartments depending on the location. The big difference is that Low Rise applies to some single-family neighborhoods, where Corridor Transitions didn’t apply to any. Low Rise is really LA’s first stab - forced by SB 79 - at upzoning parts of the city where apartments have been banned for decades. It could be a big deal if they get it right! (Spoiler: they didn’t.)

To visualize where Low Rise will apply, I made a map:

Let’s start with the good news. Apartments are being legalized for the very first time in some of the city’s best single-family neighborhoods - Cheviot Hills, Rancho Park, Eagle Rock, and Beverly Grove, just to name a few. This is a potentially historic change, if anything can actually get built.

The less good news: the blue circles are all the areas around transit stations that SB 79 would have upzoned if the city had let it take effect - about 140,000 parcels total. The red and yellow splotches are the small fraction of the SB 79 areas where Low Rise applies - just 28,000 parcels, or 20% of the total. That’s all LA had to upzone in order to delay the law until 2031. As you can see on the map, this trick exempts huge swaths of the city, which will see zero benefits from SB 79 for the next five years. Most infuriatingly, the city exempted all historic districts, which takes out almost all the bungalow-filled neighborhoods around the new D Line subway stations.

Looking again at the wider map, you’ll notice a lot of the areas where Low Rise applies are in the Valley - 55% of the total. That’s because the Valley has many single-family neighborhoods near transit. But our focus should be fostering housing in the LA Basin, which has more job centers, better transit, and a more temperate climate. If Low Rise is going to work in the areas south of the Hollywood Hills, buildings need to be feasible on the smaller lots typical to the LA Basin.

If you look at the distribution of Low Rise lot sizes south of the hills, there’s a huge spike between 6-7000 square feet:

The median lot size is right around 6,250 square feet, so when thinking about what could work in Low Rise, imagine a 50’x125’ lot.

Let’s look at the most significant updates, from least controlling to most.

Letting go: Most significantly, Planning dialed back the amount of affordable housing required. That helps with feasibility, and if it means more buildings get built, more affordable homes will get built too. It’s also easier to qualify for a fourth story by including three-bedroom “family size” apartments. Corridor Transition buildings could only be three stories tall unless 40% of their apartments had three bedrooms. In Low Rise, that’s been reduced to 20%.

Maybe letting go: The most intriguing possible change is one Planning didn’t actually put in Low Rise…yet. Advocates led by ACT-LA asked the city to find a way to entice developers to include apartments for extremely low-income tenants. This is a laudable goal - opening up our city’s best neighborhoods to families of all income levels.

The best way to unlock extremely low-income homes is to allow more than 16 apartments. So Planning came up with a “Low-Rise Bonus,” which allows unlimited apartments as long as they fit into the same size building - four stories, 15’ front setback, etc. 8% of apartments would have to be dedicated to extremely low-income tenants, or 12% for very low.

Planning put their idea for the Low-Rise Bonus in a report but didn’t write it into their draft ordinance. City Council would have to amend the ordinance to adopt it. Let’s hope they do.

Weirdly controlling: One change Planning made is just plain strange. Corridor Transition provided a menu of common space options - courtyard, backyard, or “paseo” - from which builders were required to pick one. In Low Rise, they took the backyard off the menu and added options for a roof deck or a 15-foot front yard. But they also increased the required front setback from 10 to 15 feet. That means every building has to have a 15-foot front yard, and the other options on the menu are moot. What’s the point of having a menu if you have to pick the same dish every time? I’d rather go back to a 10-foot setback - almost nobody uses their front yard anyway, unless they put up celebrity hedges (boo). Then you’d have a usable menu.

Now for the most controlling part of all. Planning is requiring all parking in Low Rise projects to be either underground or behind the building. No ground-level parking allowed under the apartments. This leaves developers with two bad options if they want to provide parking for tenants. Digging an underground garage is often too expensive for small buildings. Putting a surface parking lot in the back and a driveway to get to it takes a huge bite out of the building’s footprint, which can make it too small to be financially feasible. Look at the difference between no parking and just four spaces in the back on a 50’x125’ lot:

A 42% smaller building for four measly spaces! A driveway wouldn’t be necessary if the parking could be accessed from a rear alley, but those are rare in residential neighborhoods.

I am honestly baffled by this requirement. It makes it impossible to provide parking in many cases. Of course, buildings with no parking can be great, especially when they are walking distance from near a train station. But they are still a niche product in the world of LA development, and forcing builders to build with no parking means a lot less housing will get built. The city should give builders the option to provide ground-level parking for their tenants inside Low Rise buildings. Abundant housing with some parking is better than perfect urbanism with fewer homes.

To make sense of all these changes and figure out what could actually get built, I sat down with Jesi Harris, who is a land use consultant by day and a West Hollywood Planning Commissioner by night. She told me that since land in these wealthy neighborhoods is expensive, Low Rise projects will only work if developers can build a lot of apartments. The ten-home limit, especially coupled with no parking, is going to be challenging in the areas where it applies - that’s all the yellow in the map, over half the Low Rise parcels.

There is one kind of ten-home building that could work - condos, which tend to be more profitable to build than rental apartments. Lots of three-story, single-stair, ten-starter-home buildings near transit - sounds great! But condos are very hard to build in California for bizarre liability reasons, and until that gets fixed, they are mostly a pipe dream.

One possibility that appeals to Harris is the Low Rise Bonus - the option that would allow an unlimited number of apartments in four floors in exchange for setting aside some of them at a more deeply affordable level. She thinks builders would prefer that option to qualify for a fourth story instead of providing family-sized apartments. If City Council ends up including this alternative pathway in Low Rise, expect lots of developers to choose it, which will result in buildings with lots of small apartments as opposed to fewer bigger ones. Haven on Amherst, an almost-finished ED 1 project on the Westside, is a perfect example of what could be built - 38 affordable, one-bedroom apartments in a four-story building on a 50’x125’ lot.

Why is the Low Rise program so controlling about what can get built? Why does it seem set up to fail? Why not allow ground-level parking inside the building like every other housing program in the city? Why not allow 16 apartments everywhere? Why not let builders provide a back yard that could actually get used instead of a front yard that will just be for show? Why not, god forbid, allow five-story buildings?

Perhaps Low Rise was designed defensively, with grumpy neighbors in mind. Neighbors who might complain about having to see cars parked in a ground-level garage outside their dining room window. Who might whine about how a building crowds the street. Who might throw a fit if a building is “too tall”. Plenty of successful housing programs in the city have had to be dialed back after a NIMBY backlash, and it’s only natural that Planning would try to limit the next uproar.

But I wonder if if the issue is deeper than just defensiveness. Our city has uplifted the single-family neighborhood above all others for so long that it has become an integral part of how we visualize the city. We literally grew up seeing the image on TV.

Interrupting that image - the sun-kissed Spanish revival house, the hedges, the perfect grassy front lawn - with a boxy apartment building has to produce a subconscious response in many of us: Hang on!

The impulse to shape change, to mold it, is strong. It’s built into how planners think. But even those of us who embrace change have to face this controlling impulse. It’s natural. Nostalgia is powerful. But nostalgia doesn’t pencil.

If the city wants Low Rise to work, if the program is more than just a bunch of legal hand waving to keep SB 79 at bay for a few years, our leaders are going to have to let go a little more. Stop trying to control so tightly how the buildings in our neighborhoods look. Because that controlling instinct will lead to the same result we’ve been facing all these years - a crippling housing shortage.

Instead of trying to solve for a particular size of building or kind of parking structure, let’s solve for the kind of vibrancy we want to see in our neighborhoods. Do we want more kids? More working people? Do we want more butts in seats in schools, houses of worship, and community centers? Do we want shops and restaurants to have enough customers to thrive? More people walking and biking to the train? The kind of buildings being built should matter less than the kind of community being nurtured.

A community is not its buildings, but buildings dictate the community. LA’s longstanding controls over buildings have given us tent encampments, empty storefronts, under-enrolled schools, and an aging population. To build thriving communities, we have to learn to let go of the buildings.