by Vanguard Staff
Los Angeles’ housing crisis is often framed as a problem of scale: too many people, not enough land, too much density already straining the city’s infrastructure. But housing advocates argue that this narrative obscures a more uncomfortable truth. The city’s shortage is not the product of physical limits or technical incapacity, they say, but of decades of political hesitation embedded into law, bureaucracy and culture.
Housing group YIMBY Action recently distilled this argument into a blunt formulation: “Los Angeles doesn’t have a housing capacity problem; it has a yes problem.”
That framing draws heavily on a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed by Jesse Zwick, Southern California director of the Housing Action Coalition, who argues that Los Angeles’ failure to build housing at scale is the predictable outcome of political choices dating back more than half a century. The city, Zwick writes, has repeatedly acknowledged the need for more housing while declining to fully commit to the policies required to produce it.
The consequences are visible in stark numbers. In 2025, Los Angeles issued just 8,714 residential building permits, keeping housing production near a 10-year low despite a growing population and a worsening affordability crisis. By comparison, cities such as Austin, Texas, have approved new housing at far higher rates on a per-capita basis. Over the past three years, rents in Austin have fallen 21 percent and returned to pre-pandemic levels, while rents in Los Angeles have increased 28 percent since March 2020.
For residents, that divergence often translates into radically different outcomes: stability in one city, displacement in another.
The housing shortage persists despite near-universal rhetorical agreement among city leaders that Los Angeles needs more homes. According to Zwick, the problem lies in the fine print. Support for housing is routinely conditioned on constraints that sharply limit what can actually be built: projects must not strain infrastructure, must not cast shadows, must not reduce parking, must not alter neighborhood character, and often must be entirely affordable. In a city where roughly 72 percent of residential land is zoned for single-family housing, these qualifications drastically narrow the space in which new development is politically acceptable.
Zwick traces this dynamic to the late 1960s and 1970s, when anti-growth sentiment became intertwined with progressive politics, environmental fears and anxieties about urban density. A nationwide consensus emerged that limiting growth would prevent social and environmental harm. In Los Angeles, that consensus translated into a series of ballot measures and zoning decisions that steadily reduced the city’s potential housing capacity.
Under leaders such as former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Proposition U and similar measures sharply restricted allowable development, cutting the city’s theoretical housing capacity from roughly 10 million people to about 4 million. The population, however, continued to grow. Jobs multiplied. Migration into Southern California accelerated. The result was a widening gap between demand and supply.
As housing production lagged, rents rose. Homelessness surged. Lower-income families were pushed farther from the urban core, relocating to places such as Bakersfield, Victorville, Las Vegas and Phoenix, often severing social ties and lengthening commutes.
City leaders eventually began acknowledging the housing shortage — but, Zwick argues, without confronting the structural causes behind it.
Today, Los Angeles’ housing approval system reflects what Zwick describes as deep institutional ambivalence. Even projects that comply fully with zoning and building codes face multiple layers of discretionary review, appeals and delays. The average housing unit in Los Angeles takes approximately 1,784 days — nearly five years — to complete. That level of uncertainty, housing analysts say, raises financing costs and deters investment.
Zwick points to a Rand Corp. analysis identifying regulatory risk and delay as a major reason housing costs roughly 250 percent more to build in California than in Texas. Investors demand higher returns to compensate for risk, and those costs are ultimately passed on to renters and buyers.
The city’s own efforts to accelerate housing have struggled against this institutional inertia. Executive Directive 1, the mayor’s flagship initiative to fast-track affordable housing approvals, was curtailed after it began producing homes more quickly than existing systems were designed to accommodate. In Zwick’s telling, this response revealed a bureaucracy structured to prevent disruption, even when that disruption aligns with stated policy goals.
As management theorist Stafford Beer once wrote, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Zwick uses that maxim to argue that Los Angeles’ housing system functions exactly as designed: to slow, shrink and discourage new construction.
He identifies three interlocking barriers. First is artificial scarcity created through zoning that restricts growth in high-opportunity, high-demand areas, driving up land prices. Second is regulatory uncertainty, which increases costs and timelines even for compliant projects. Third is a punitive fee structure that treats new housing as a liability to be taxed rather than a public good to be encouraged.
Instead of broadly funding infrastructure and affordable housing through collective mechanisms, Los Angeles relies heavily on impact fees, transfer taxes and inclusionary mandates imposed on individual projects. The result, Zwick argues, is a system that demands housing builders solve social problems while simultaneously making construction financially infeasible.
Cities that have made progress on housing, he contends, have done so not because their residents are more compassionate or innovative, but because political leaders were willing to declare housing production a priority and align public institutions accordingly. Austin, Denver, Raleigh and Nashville all expanded housing supply by simplifying approvals, legalizing denser housing and reducing uncertainty.
Los Angeles, by contrast, continues to hedge — acknowledging crisis conditions while preserving systems that perpetuate scarcity.
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“As management theorist Stafford Beer once wrote, ‘The purpose of a system is what it does.’”
The same can be said of Measure J and its stranglehold on housing in Davis.
Los Angeles should have restricted sprawl a long, long time ago.
It was probably a pretty cool place to be (up until about the early 1950s). But it was probably at its peak during the 1920’s – the early days of the film industry.
Things likely started going downhill when they took water from the Owens Valley – an example of how a city has an impact that’s far greater than it’s own geographical boundary. (The latter of which is apparently ALREADY enormous.)
Paradise Lost