Tricia Crane stands at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and 26th Street in Santa Monica, a few blocks from her home, pointing out a stretch of businesses that will be replaced with a 170-unit apartment building.
A Starbucks has already closed; a store selling chairs and mattresses is still open, but not for much longer. This block just 2 miles from the beach is scheduled to be redeveloped in January.
Facing a budget crisis and a state mandate to create more housing, members of the City Council, she says, are “just doing whatever they can” to get more units built.
Why We Wrote This
One answer to an affordability gap in housing, experts say, is building more units to try to ease the pressure on prices. That can mean changing laws that regulate where and what kinds of housing can be built.
The eight-story building will stand out among its mostly one-to-three-story neighbors. It’s one of a half dozen developments that will add over 1,000 units to this coastal city of 91,000 people next to Los Angeles.
Average monthly rent is about $3,500 here, among the highest in the United States. Ms. Crane is concerned that the addition of these market-rate units in the highly desirable beach community won’t do anything to bring prices down. “We are losing our middle class,” she says.
But these are the type of projects that pro-housing advocates hope to see more of, and California is making them easier to build. Over the past few months, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slate of laws aimed at eliminating a deficit of 2.5 million housing units. In support of more and denser housing, lawmakers relaxed the state’s landmark environmental rules, cleared the way for multiunit housing near transit hubs, streamlined building permits, created new funding programs for developers, and increased tax credits for renters.
The laws are, in part, designed to promote units that are affordable – generally defined as costing no more than 30% of a family’s income. They move California in the right direction, says Sherri Lawson Clark, a cultural anthropologist at Wake Forest University who studies housing and poverty. If California – where midtier homes cost more than twice the nationwide average – can narrow the affordability gap with an influx of new housing, then it could “perhaps be a blueprint for other states and localities,” she says.