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With the year coming to an end, I wanted to highlight some work I'm proud of from 2020, and explain some of what went into producing it. A while ago, we wanted to understand why it costs more to build low-income housing in California than anywhere in the country.
The high cost to build is a big reason why California can't meet its housing needs despite voters continuing to approve billions in new funding. So over months, @bposton put together a database of all the low-income housing projects funded by the state in the past decade.
We crunched the numbers and were able to quantify some of the major reasons — local/state bureaucracy, parking requirements, environmental and labor rules — behind the high costs. And we found one project that's likely the most expensive in the country to build: $1m per apartment
Here's our story on why it's so expensive to build low-income housing in California and what can be done to fix it so that more people who need homes can get them: https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2020-04-09/california-low-income-housing-expensive-apartment-coronavirus
After the police killing of George Floyd, we wanted to understand better how law enforcement interacts with housing. I recalled a recent lawsuit filed by the federal Department of Justice against a SoCal city alleging a law that discriminated against Black and Latino tenants.
We quickly learned that the law in Hesperia was a version of a "crime-free housing" program that empowers landlords to evict or exclude tenants with criminal histories or new arrests/brushes with law enforcement. We wanted to see how widespread such laws were in California.
So @julia_p_barajas and I read the municipal codes of all 539 cities and counties in the state and scanned police department websites and found more than a quarter of local governments in California had a version of a crime-free housing program.
We also found, with @bposton's help, that an overwhelming number of cities with growing Black and Latino populations in California have such a program. And where we were able to get eviction data, we also found a disproportionate impact on people of color from the programs.
Our research led us to city council meeting tapes and police training that revealed disturbing and racist justifications for crime-free housing policies. Our story highlighted a Black family that's struggled to find housing for years because of these rules https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2020-11-19/california-housing-policies-hurt-black-latino-renters
This is a long way of saying that deep, substantive reporting on issues underlying California's housing affordability crisis take lot of time and resources to produce. I hope you will consider subscribing to the @latimes to support our journalism https://www.latimes.com/subscriptions/subscribe.html?pid_campaigns=8926_MTRDigitalWB2,8927_MTRDigitalWB2,8928_MTRPrintMixWB2,8929_MTRPrintMixWB2,8930_MTRPrintMixWB2&int_source=on_site&int_medium=december_acquisition_subscribe_vanity_landing_page&int_campaign=digital_test
