The lack of affordable housing for middle-class workers in Los Angeles is weighing on the minds of the region’s real estate agents.
Southland Regional Association of Realtors, a local trade group for brokers, plans to address the issue at its Housing Our Workers Forum on Feb. 8 at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys. Various stakeholders will be on hand, including officials from L.A.’s Department of City Planning and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Developers, a Fannie Mae executive, and neighborhood activists will join them to discuss ways to spur the construction of affordable housing for middle-class workers in California and keep businesses from leaving the region.
“There are no government programs or market forces working in your favor to assist in the development of (middle-class) housing,” said Paul Habibi, a lecturer in real estate and finance at UCLA.
The trade group defines middle-class workers as those with an annual household income between $60,000 and $120,000 a year. Affordable housing for the middle class in Los Angeles would cost $500,000 or less, according to Mel Wilson, of brokerage Mel Wilson & Associates in Northridge and government affairs director of the Realtors association.
The median county home price in December was $545,000, according to Redfin, compared with $267,000 nationally.
Wilson said businesses often opt to move out of state when they can’t find enough workers in their area.
“They’re in this bubble where they make too much to qualify for subsidized housing but they don’t make enough to afford market-rate housing,” Wilson said of L.A.’s middle class.
“A number of other states are aggressively marketing to attract businesses from California for a whole host of reasons: the regulations in California, the cost of doing business in California, and the housing costs,” he said.
It has worked in several cases, as large employers have moved their headquarters out of California, citing lack of affordable housing as one of the reasons. Toyota Motor Corp. announced plans to relocate its Torrance headquarters to Plano, Texas, in 2014. Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. also has plans to move its headquarters from Pasadena to Dallas by the end of 2019 and cut its local staff by more than a third.
Wilson argued bringing down housing costs requires an increase in supply, noting that community members should have more opportunities to offer input to the Department of City Planning regarding the future of their neighborhoods.
That would mitigate the type of backlash against future developments that has resulted in Measure S, he said, referring to a March ballot initiative that would impose severe restrictions on new developments in the city of Los Angeles for two years.
The Housing Our Workers Forum will be co-hosted by the National Association of Realtors, Valley Economic Alliance, and BizFed Institute.
