a 49-Unit Complex Is Taking 17 Years to Complete

• For decades, California has struggled with a persistent affordable housing shortage.
• A WSJ report detailed how one LA housing project was unable to get off the ground for over 15 years.
• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has made it a priority to obtain project approvals in a timely manner.

Los Angeles has long attracted new residents with its warm weather, abundant outdoor amenities, and the lure of opportunities in the media and entertainment industry.

But the state of California has also become widely known for its severe housing crunch, with affordability being the leading issue that has driven many natives and longtime residents to inland communities and lower-cost states.

According to The Wall Street Journal, California’s complex regulations have played a major role in delaying the construction of a 49-unit apartment complex known as Lorena Plaza in the Boyle Heights neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles.

In 2007, A Community of Friends, a local nonprofit organization, was given land to build a small affordable housing development, but construction on the project only began roughly a year ago.

The project was slowed down by the need for various approvals from politicians and commissions and higher construction costs caused by multiple delays, the Journal reported.

The city wants to build 450,000 new units of housing by 2029, according to The Los Angeles Times.

But the absence of housing remains a significant obstacle for many Angelenos right now. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, in their 2023 report, estimated that roughly 46,000 people in the city are experiencing homelessness on any given right.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a former congresswoman who this month completed her first year in City Hall, said last December that the glacial pace of progress regarding Lorena Plaza was emblematic of policies she sought to reshape as mayor.

“How on earth could we expect to house 40,000 [homeless] people if we continue to do business as usual?” the mayor said at the Lorena Plaza site at the time, per The Journal.

Bass has prioritized projects that only contain affordable units, but there’s still a need for more subsidies to build additional buildings, per The Journal. And there’s also the issue of some cities in California carefully scrutinizing projects to such a degree that long construction delays are inevitable if the projects even get off the ground.

According to a UCLA and CSU-Northridge analysis of building permits from 2010 to 2022, constructing an apartment building in California took an average of four years during that period.

According to the analysis, 36% of the projects awarded permits in the state during that timeframe have yet to be finished.

“Thinking about building in a city like Los Angeles and dealing with the politics, navigating the bureaucracy, it’s the last place I want to be,” Pacific Companies CEO Caleb Roope told The Journal.

A 1970s-era state law permitting an appeals process for environmental reviews further halted construction at the Lorena Plaza project before it was revived.

However, Bass has pushed for major changes in Los Angeles that would seriously limit the sort of delays that previously plagued the Lorena Plaza project, per The Journal.

And Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slew of laws in October to help ease the state’s housing crisis, according to Business Insider.

Environmental appeals can no longer drag on for a year or more, and hearings must be conducted within a 75-day timeframe. And the zoning approvals for affordable housing projects are occurring more swiftly, sometimes within a few months, as part of an executive order signed by Bass.