Letters to the Editor: Landlords sparked L.A.’s overcrowding crisis. They got an assist from leaders of business.
L.A. is a city of renters. In fact, according to a study done by the Los Angeles Community Economic Development Corporation, L.A. has one of the fastest-growing rental markets in the country. In L.A., as in other cities, the problem is that the supply of housing is being met with a growing mismatch between supply and demand.
The gap in demand for housing is at the root of the crisis of L.A.’s housing crunch. While millions of people left Los Angeles in the past two decades, a lot of them, from the baby boom generation to young professionals, turned to the suburbs, which have a shortage of housing units to meet their needs.
But in suburbs, the city is finding itself facing an influx of young professionals who want to be in L.A. and want to be near their jobs, yet the city is not able to handle the influx. What’s more, in the past few years, L.A. has been trying to attract enough houses to meet the demand — with no luck.
This imbalance, as it has been growing for years, is causing significant pressure on L.A. — and creating a perfect storm of problems.
A recent report showed that L.A.’s population is already 2.2% above its peak. To accommodate residents who are leaving, it says, the city needs 1.5 million more housing units.
In the next 20 years, the demand for housing in Los Angeles will grow by 15 percent, the report shows.
One solution, says the report, is to build more housing. But, “The reality is, the supply of new housing units in Los Angeles is not sufficient to accommodate the population growth.
“The question many policy makers and community activists are asking now is: ‘How are we going to meet the demand that we have, which is going to be so high for the next 20 years?’
“There’s the question of how much is enough? Do we have a plan to build more housing? And how far will we build them? Because the plan can’t be to build more housing, which is the opposite of what cities do as they grow. Rather it’s to
