L.A. County's Housing Goal is 179,881 New Units by 2021. Where Will They Go?

By Dan Abendschein

As part of a state required process, every eight years cities and counties must updates their Housing Element plans, which requires them to account for how they will build the enough housing to meet the estimated needs of California's growing populations.

As part of that plan, regional government organizations (in L.A. County's case, the Southern California Association of Governments) look at census data, project population growth and look at each cities capacity to build more units of market-rate housing as well as affordable housing. The results are an allocation for each city on how many new units of housing each city should strive to have built, divided by income range. Each city works on a plan for how to achieve that goal through a public process that must be concluded by mid-October.

Los Angeles as a whole has been allocated just over 82,000 units, with nearly 33,000 of those listed as low or very low-income housing. Individual neighborhoods in Los Angeles like Eagle Rock do not have allocations - how the City of Los Angeles accounts for areas of growth will be determined in its Housing Element planning process, which can be tracked on the city's website. 
However, two images above from the city's draft housing report show were residential building permits have been issued in the city since 2006, showing a likely outcome of where more housing will be built in the near future - as one might expect, downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown and elsewhere along the 101 corridor show a lot of permits, while northeast Los Angeles in general show very few.

The Southern California Association of Governments comes up with the allocations by looking at two main factors: whether the city's population has grown and whether the number of people employed in the city has grown.  If population has not grown but more people are working there, the group would see that as indication the city's housing stock should grow as well, according to Hasan Ikhrata, SCAG's executive director.

"Most cities will come to you and say they are built out but then you can look and see they are having employment growth," Ikhrata said in an interview with Patch.

Ikhrata noted it also common for cities to miss the goals set out in the housing element.  The state will be evaluating how cities have done in meeting their goals through 2013 - state reports on their progress will be released later this year, likely in November.

Those cities who did not make their goals are at risk of losing eligibility for state Proposition C funding, which can be used towards affordable housing.

The cities themselves are not required to build any of the units, but rather they are required to establish housing ordinances that would make the construction of their allotted household units possible.

How to Use the Map

The above map shows where how the governments choose to divide up the housing allocations - some cities, small and already mostly built out, have almost no units allocated to their cities, while the biggest ones have enormous assignments - the City of Los Angeles, for example, was allocated around 82,000 of the units.

Each city is color coded on the raw number of units required and by clicking on any of the cities you can see how that break down into market rate housing and low-income housing.