SCALING UP Equitable Housing on public land in Los Angeles

Lessons from the Field
In 2016, HCIDLA created a Land Development Unit to build affordable housing on land transferred from the
former redevelopment agency. The team has worked closely with the City Administrator’s Office, the City
Attorney, the Chief Legislative Analyst, the Mayor, and Council Offices to expand development
opportunities and streamline the housing development on public land. In five years, HCIDLA’s Land
Development Unit has negotiated development agreements on 36 sites, placing more than 1,800 units into
the City’s affordable housing in the development pipeline.
Despite these successes, this system cannot be scaled to meet the need. There is no strategy to the land
selection process. The land disposition rules are overly complicated and the approvals process is
cumbersome —it takes five trips to City Council to go from site selection to project development. There is
no funding for infrastructure, yet many public sites have built in costs, such as replacement parking,
contaminated soil, and obsolete buildings with asbestos that need to be removed. These problems often
cost more than the value of the land, so the projects get stalled out looking for subsidies. Tax Credits and
funding programs are highly competitive and not guaranteed. So, after jumping over numerous
administrative, logistical and funding hurdles, we typically end up with a 49-unit project that took seven
years to complete and costs close to $600,000 per unit. If we keep doing public land development this
way, we will fail to produce affordable housing at the necessary scale.
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