All The Above

Last year, the Hammer Museum mounted a series of engaging panels on a topic that to some might look like a fool’s errand: how to resolve LA’s housing crisis. The concluding, late fall discussion, moderated by KCRW’s Anna Scott, laid out the staggering array of forces lined up against bridging the city’s even more staggering gap in housing units. Perhaps the most obvious, pointed out by Hamid Behdad, president of local developer Central City Development, is that “LA is dysfunctional.” Behdad, who played a major role in the Downtown resurgence in the early 2000s, ticked off every one of the byzantine, often-conflicting regulations, plans, and legislative bodies that make getting anything accomplished here a near miracle. Fellow panelist Michael Lens, associate faculty director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA, pointed to continued resistance to density,from local NIMBYs up to recalcitrant city council members, while Yasmin Tong, founding principal of CTY Housing, a local affordable housing consultant, reminded the audience of the ridiculous capital stacks and dense thicket of applications needed to get affordable housing projects off the ground. The current economic climate, with its high interest rates and overall pessimism, is no help, but there were rays of hope from the group. Many of the city’s thousands of Prop HHH housing projects are finally coming online, their numbers not too far from original estimates. State bills have forced municipalities to entitle affordable housing far faster, and new corporate players—including major local employers like Amazon and Apple—are starting to get involved. But what LA still needs, the participants suggested, is to further streamline its bureaucracy, effectively promote density and transit, and tap into every possible tool in its long-standing arsenal of innovation, from accessory dwelling units and creative adaptive reuse to prefab, modular, and even automated construction. “We landed a man on the moon. We can solve class A office conversions,” noted Behdad after the event.