After Los Angeles suffered some of the most devastating wildfires in the city’s fire-prone history earlier this year, there has been a flurry of activity aimed at a rapid recovery.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass declared that LA would “aggressively” rebuild, and signed city ordinances to stop landlords from price-gouging displaced renters and ban evictions of survivors for a year. Through his nonprofit Steadfast LA, failed billionaire mayoral candidate Rick Caruso offered prefab homes to survivors who can’t afford to rebuild. Building permits are also being speedily approved. After Governor Gavin Newsom nearly immediately slashed environmental regulations, some reconstruction has already begun without testing the soil for toxic substances.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, in tandem with UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, recently released a 175-page recovery plan that touches on everything from clearing debris to rebuilding infrastructure in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods, where an estimated 12,500 housing units were burned down.
Yet one of the most obvious answers to the city’s deepening housing crisis remains absent from plans and political promises: public housing.
The omission is a worrying error. Research shows that natural disasters lead to rent increases that can last decades, creating widespread housing affordability issues that affect entire communities, not just those who suffered direct damage. Los Angeles already has massive housing affordability and homelessness issues. Cal Poly Pomona associate professor Anthony Orlando, one of the researchers behind a report for the Brookings Institution that looked at two decades of post-disaster rent…
Auteur: Natasha Hakimi Zapata
