Westside LA Workforce Housing Strategy
Westside Coalition of Governments, including the Cities of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood | |
BAE led a landmark study for five cities on the “west side” of Los Angeles County to address the need for more workforce housing.
These cities cooperate through a sub-regional Council of Governments (elected officials) and a concurrent Westside Working Group (city staff). Due to the gap between high housing prices/rents and employee household incomes, the area faces the serious challenge of providing sufficient housing affordable to the bulk of area’s job-holders, resulting in excessive in-commuting, traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Lack of workforce housing challenges not only teachers and city workers, but a broad range of employees working in firms which serve as the area’s economic engine (e.g., film producers, medical centers, universities, hospitality/tourism firms, and banking / finance firms).
BAE led an extensive year-long process to assess needs, analyze data, interview employers, profile solutions, and recommend new workforce housing strategy options. For the Study’s first phase, BAE helped the Working Group define workforce housing as affordable to households earning from 80 to 180 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). BAE also provided data describing workforce housing needs, the mismatch of incomes to existing housing prices, and each city’s jobs-housing imbalance. BAE also reviewed Housing Element and parking/zoning regulations, and prepared a series of pro forma financial analyses to illustrate the effects of reduced parking requirements, use of publicly-owned land for development, and factors which could create feasible projects. BAE also interviewed the area’s largest 50 employers to gauge private sector interest in collaborating on workforce housing.
The Study’s second phase profiled numerous local, regional, statewide, and national initiatives and “best practices” to promote workforce housing development, including expanded inclusionary ordinances, reduced parking requirements, mixed-income and occupation-targeted projects, and refinements to attract the development community to available sites and funding programs. The Study was hailed as a major step in sub-regional collaboration, and the COG directed staff to formulate a work program to implement key initiatives.