The best way to help an unhoused person is to give them a home. That forehead-smackingly obvious insight is the guiding principle for Housing First, California’s officially adopted approach to solving homelessness. For Cirilia Morales, Housing First meant getting the keys to her own private room at The Dalton, a building in South LA. In a moving video interview, she says that homelessness has led her in and out of her three kids’ lives. “I don’t have one picture with all three of them together, and I’m looking forward to that picture.”

Ms. Morales has that picture to look forward to because of an innovative Housing First program called master leasing, in which an agency rents out an entire apartment building and then sublets individual units to formerly unhoused people, often providing them with Section 8 vouchers to cover the rent. In the case of The Dalton, LAHSA’s master lease enabled 27 people to move from encampments and RV parks to permanent supportive housing.

How many apartments does The Dalton have for 27 people? Trick question - it’s actually two big single family homes, one in front of the other. The front house has seven bedrooms and bathrooms, with an attached three-bed/bath ADU. The back house has 18 (!) beds/baths. That’s 28 total bedrooms and bathrooms in three “units”.

Not just for students anymore

The Dalton is a co-living building. Like similar buildings that have sprouted up in the neighborhood around USC in the last decade, it was designed for college students. The majority of USC’s nearly 50,000 students live off-campus, creating a ton of pressure on the rental market in the surrounding neighborhood. Developers responded to this demand by building hundreds of co-living buildings in the area. One developer alone, Tripalink, owns dozens of them and operates a free shuttle to campus for its tenants.

Co-living buildings are like a small dorm where every resident gets their own bedroom and bathroom, sharing the living room and kitchen with their roommates. These rooms tend to rent for $1000-$1200/month, much cheaper than a studio apartment, which currently averages $1600/month in the USC neighborhood. In fact, rent for a co-living room is not much higher than the $975/month a low-income person pays for an income-restricted affordable studio in LA.

It turns out that the relative affordability of co-living also makes it a great tool for getting unhoused people off the streets. According to my research, in the last few years, homeless service agencies have master leased at least 12 co-living buildings with over 300 rooms, bringing roughly that many people into permanent supportive housing. (I am withholding specific information on the projects out of respect for people’s privacy.) Kris Freed, LAHSA’s Chief Executive Strategist, explains why these buildings are so well suited to the master leasing program:

LAHSA loves co-living buildings because they are (a) affordable, (b) the right size, and (c) good for people’s mental health.

Down with cheap housing!

Unfortunately for LAHSA, the massive amount of new development around USC has led to a backlash. Local tenant advocates point out that many low-income tenants of color were displaced when developers demolished older homes to build co-living projects. (There’s an irony here, in that before the building boom, the same advocates worried those low-income tenants would be pushed out of older homes by landlords who preferred renting to students with no other options. Displaced by no construction, displaced by construction.)

In response to these complaints, the local City Councilmember, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, instructed the Planning Dept. to amend local zoning rules to address “the loss of affordable housing and the overconcentration of student housing” in the area. Translation: kill co-living.

This is a story LA has seen before. Developers start building naturally cheaper homes, people freak out, and the city restricts that type of building. It happened with cheaper single family homes - they were made possible by the Small Lot Ordinance in 2005, the backlash began as projects were built in places people didn’t like, and they were severely restricted in 2017. Then it happened with cheaper apartments - they were made possible by Executive Directive 1 in 2022, the backlash began as projects were proposed in places people didn’t like, and they were severely restricted in 2024.

With co-living, developers hit on a more affordable model of development without any new ordinance or executive order. In fact, according to an excellent Mercatus Center report on co-living buildings published today, developers started building co-living buildings because the city severely restricted another kind of development: McMansions.

The humble double duplex

For a long time, McMansions were one of the few kinds of home that was feasible to build in LA, and developers built a lot of them. In 2016, after a backlash, the city severely restricted them, putting many developers and contractors out of work. In response, starting in the mid-2010s these builders pivoted to building McMansions for roommates.

Co-living buildings are a natural fit for McMansion builders because they are essentially townhomes, not apartments. Take 1345 S. Ogden, the building pictured at the top of this post. It’s two buildings, one in front of the other. One has three townhomes (technically a duplex plus an attached ADU), and the other has two - a total of 21 bedrooms in what builders call a “double duplex”. Duplexes are built using the same residential building code as McMansions. Anything bigger bumps you up to commercial code, which requires a whole different skill set. Also, like McMansions, duplexes don’t require approvals from the Planning Department (they’re “by right”), and they get assigned one inspector from Building and Safety instead of the multiple inspectors that a building with more units would require. All this streamlining leads to a faster process - the Mercatus report finds that the average double duplex in LA takes about half the time to build than other apartment buildings (444 days vs. 801 days).

The simpler residential building code and faster building process also make it cheaper to build double duplexes, allowing landlords to charge lower rents and still make a profit. The Mercatus report compares rents for rooms in co-living buildings across the city to studio apartments in the same zip code and finds that co-living rooms - in brand new buildings - average $320 cheaper rent than studios in any building, no matter how old or dilapidated.

Co-living buildings are also good for the development industry. With a lower bar than other projects, they allow smaller outfits to jump into the development game. If all that can be built is bigger apartment buildings, developers need to be able to navigate political approvals, meet stricter regulations, and raise more funding - something mom and pop builders aren’t always set up to do. Co-living buildings give small builders an opportunity to thrive, creating more competition among all developers, which leads to a healthier market.

It’s a townhome

How many co-living buildings have been built? Housing activist and development consultant Joseph Cohen May recently mapped all the development in the USC neighborhood since 2011. It’s a lot. This glut of new buildings has tilted the balance of power toward tenants - something Kris Freed of LAHSA is taking advantage of:

Too many buildings for students? Good for solving homelessness! But not all these buildings are going to be master leased - what will happen with all the other co-living buildings that can’t cater only to students any more?

To get a better sense of how the market for these buildings is evolving, I spoke with Xio Sandoval, a real estate agent who serves as a liaison between developer and property manager for about 60 double duplexes. She says they are renting to fewer and fewer students over time, as there is too much competition from other buildings, and students aren’t reliable tenants.

Their fastest growing kind of tenant is families. Often multigenerational ones, such as parents with adult children who outgrew the house they grew up in, or two adult siblings each with their own family. The same kinds of households that were living in the old houses that got torn down. Except the households that move in get a new building with air conditioning, a nice kitchen, and a bathroom for every adult. And each double duplex has room for four such households instead of one.

One indication that developers are shifting away from the student model is that double duplexes are being built all over the city - West LA, Atwater, Van Nuys - far from where college students would want to live.

Once families are living in double duplexes, we can stop calling them co-living buildings. They’re townhomes for rent. Family-size units. Which is a kind of housing city leaders have been begging for! They talked about it when legalizing single-stair buildings earlier this year. Councilmember Nithya Raman:

Separately, the City Council also instructed the Planning Dept. to create a density bonus that rewards developers for including more three-bedroom apartments in their buildings - something that was incorporated into CHIP, the citywide rezoning program passed earlier this year.

But in reality, developers didn’t need this recent flurry of regulatory changes to enable building tons of family-size rental homes. They have been doing it for nearly a decade, right in front of our eyes.

Stop the killing

To recap: LA developers came up with a new kind of building that started as much-needed housing for students. Hundreds of this kind of building were built, especially around USC. And the city’s response was to try to kill it. Meanwhile, the buildings are gradually morphing into other much-needed uses - housing the unhoused and giving families larger rental options. Will the city change its tune?

I doubt it. I suspect a big part of the backlash to double duplexes is not who lives there but how they look. They remind people of a kind of housing almost everyone hates - McMansions. Councilmember Harris-Dawson’s motion requesting changes to zoning rules around USC focuses on the loss of affordable housing and doesn’t mention anything about aesthetics, but the Planning Dept’s report back is loaded with phrases like “incompatible with the established neighborhood scale and design” and “concerns related to new infill development and its impact on prevailing neighborhood character”. NIMBYism runs deep in the city’s culture, and people have a visceral reaction to boxy buildings that don’t seem to fit in with what’s around them.

Perhaps the best way to think of double duplexes is like another common kind of missing middle, naturally occurring affordable housing killed by the city over aesthetic concerns: the dingbat. In an LAist article from 2015, Jen Carlson wrote:

The dingbat, once hated, is now an icon of our city. Who knows - maybe in 50 years people will wax poetic over double duplexes the way they do over dingbats today. In the meantime, let’s set aside our aesthetic judgments and recognize that they’re an important tool in addressing our homelessness and housing crises. Double duplexes have become the predominant way to build missing middle, family-sized housing in LA. They also happen to be great for getting the unhoused off the streets. Instead of killing this new kind of building, we should embrace double duplexes and make them even easier to build.