Opinion on LA's “density delusion”: Unbridled street homelessness (not single-family housing) is the true enemy
Image by Wikimedia Commons
While cities like San Jose and San Diego are beginning to crack down on dangerous sidewalk encampments, Los Angeles scapegoats low-density, single-family zoning for its rampant resident egresses. Spectator explains why LA's longstanding densification ambitions have been insufficient to solve public safety concerns (does building more downtown homes really help, if people are scared to walk and work in downtown?) or prevent locals from moving elsewhere.
Behind many wrong turns in LA’s recent history lies the apparent desire of city leaders to transform, even overturn, its basic character, always defined by scores of smaller, largely lower-density communities, what one early booster called “the better city.” Instead, starting in the 1980s, city leaders began to fantasize about aping New York. Los Angeles County spent billions on building an urban rail system, promoted denser development and dreamed about turning its lackluster downtown into a gleaming corporate, arts and entertainment center.
Even now, LA seems stuck in its density delusion. Even though it ranks near the bottom nationally in new housing construction, the city wants to authorize massive building programs for hundreds of thousands of units in two of its least attractive areas, Hollywood and downtown. Both parts of the city are plagued by large homeless populations, while fleeing businesses have emptied increasingly unused office towers. Even before the pandemic the $20 billion-plus transit system, more and more burdened by crime and homelessness, carried fewer riders than the old bus-only system did in 1985. The system’s salvation, such as it is, is that massive numbers of poor people are unable to afford cars and must rely on public transport.
Demographic trends tell a shocking tale, particularly for a city that attracted huge waves of aspiring middle- and working-class families for nearly a century. Over the last two decades, Los Angeles County, by far America’s largest urban county, has lost 750,000 residents aged under twenty-five. In the last decade even the foreign-born have been leaving: the county lost foreign-born population between 2010 and 2020, as immigrants and their families headed instead to booming cities in Texas and Florida. According to the state, Los Angeles now has fewer residents than in 2010 and is expected to shrink by an additional 1.7 million by 2060, according to the most recent state Department of Finance estimates.
This article originally appeared in Spectator. Read the whole thing here.
Read more on high-density policies here.
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