Column: Spending $800,000 for a single unit of homeless housing is a red flag for L.A.

temporary car insurance - #1:Column: Spending $800,000 for a single unit of homeless housing is a red flag for L.A.

 

 Way back in 2016, when I voted for the $1.2-billion housing bond known as Proposition HHH, I expected a different picture than the one we’re looking at now.
We all knew it would be impossible to erect 10,000 units overnight and bring immediate relief to the city’s homeless multitudes. In fact, a 10-year timeline was laid out.
But HHH, sold as a centerpiece of the strategy to end homelessness, has underdelivered so far.

“It isn’t what Angelenos voted for six years ago,” said former city and county executive Miguel Santana, who cited multiple bureaucratic hurdles and worried that public frustration will make it difficult to win needed support for future investments in housing for homeless people.
More than five years after Mayor Eric Garcetti and other public officials celebrated victory, only 1,142 units have been completed, homelessness is on the rise, only about 8,000 of the promised 10,000 units are on the books, and the cost per unit of new housing keeps soaring, as do developer complaints about beastly permitting and inspection delays.
City Controller Ron Galperin’s latest audit of HHH progress, and lack thereof, reads like an indictment.
“While 54% of projects are currently in construction, nearly a third are still in pre-development,” Galperin found. “Projects in the primary HHH pipeline are taking three to six years to complete, with most set to open between 2023 and 2026.”
The average per-unit cost of projects under construction — originally estimated at $375,000 — went from $531,000 in 2020 to just shy of $600,000 last year.
As Galperin summed it up:
“The costs are too high and the pace is far too slow to address the tragedy on our streets.”
And then there’s this jaw-dropper:
“At least one project in pre-development is estimated to cost nearly $837,000 per unit.”
HHH got 77% approval, but if people knew how slowly the wheels would turn or that there’d come a day when a single unit would go for more than $800,000, it would have gotten buried.
For all of this, HHH was a good idea in theory, even if the execution has been less than sparkling. Los Angeles was and still is way short of the supportive and affordable housing it needs, and the 8,000 HHH units will end up housing 10,000 or more people who might otherwise languish or even die if left on the streets.
When it comes to high prices, L.A. is not alone. A Times report in 2020 put California at the top of the heap in the cost of government-subsidized housing complexes, and the story laid out details of a Solana Beach housing project that topped $1 million per unit.
In a written response to Galperin’s audit, L.A. Housing Department chief Ann Sewill scratched back.
She argued that tweaks suggested by Galperin have already been implemented, that HHH isn’t the only housing initiative, and that HHH progress has been “anything but sluggish." She also said that despite challenges and market forces, HHH “will over-perform on its goals.”
That’s a rosy assessment. Sewill also argued that the financing model involves the leveraging of funds, so that, say, only $140,833 of HHH money is needed to build a $659,600 unit because HHH leverages funding from multiple other government sources.