On a special episode (first released on January 30, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As wildfires continue to erupt across greater Los Angeles, the urgency of the housing crisis is front and center for Angelinos. With thousands of homes gone, the various issues that have plagued the real estate industry since the ’80s are just that much more urgent. Where will people live and at what cost? Peter Dreier, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College, joins The Excerpt to discuss the worsening situation and what it means for the people who call L.A. home.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, January 30th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.
As wildfires continue to rage across Los Angeles, the urgency of the housing crisis is front and center for Angelenos. With thousands of homes gone, the various issues that have plagued the real estate industry for decades now are just that much more urgent. Where will people live and at what cost? Here to help us dig into all of it. Now we’re joined by Peter Dreier, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College. Thanks for joining me, Peter.
Peter Dreier:
That’s my pleasure.
Dana Taylor:
Los Angeles, like much of the country, was already in the middle of a housing crisis before the fires destroyed so many homes. Can give me a lay of the land here? How dire is the housing issue in LA right now, and how did we get here?
Peter Dreier:
Well, you’re right, long before the fires hit Los Angeles, the city and the region had probably the worst housing crisis in the country. And by that I mean that not only were there 75,000 homeless people in the county of LA and about 50,000 homeless people in the city of LA, city of 4 million people, but housing costs were astronomical. The typical rent for a two-bedroom apartment in LA was about $2,500 a month. Very few people in Los Angeles could afford that. According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a renter in Los Angeles had to have an income of about $48 an hour just to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment. And very few renters in LA had anything close to a $48 an hour income.
So the city really had a dire problem. The new mayor, Karen Bass, had a program to try to get people off of the streets into hotels, and then eventually to permanent housing. And that worked a bit. Over the last year, nationally the homeless numbers went up about 18%. In Los Angeles, they came down about 3% or 4%. So progress has been made, but not fast enough and not comprehensive enough to make a big difference. And so in almost any neighborhood in Los Angeles, particularly in the commercial areas where those shops are, you can find lots of homeless people on the streets.
Dana Taylor:
Peter, I know you’ve written a lot about the LA housing crisis. There are a lot of conflicting interests here and a huge wealth disparity between some of the stakeholders. How has this issue played out on the ground?
Peter Dreier:
Well, it plays out on the ground in a number of ways. One is that there’s a dire need for more affordable housing, more rental housing. And the city is under a requirement by the state to add about half a million new units of housing in the next decade, of which about a third or a half should be affordable to low-income people and working-class people. And by that I mean teachers and nurses and hotel workers and hospital workers. And the problem is that in the middle-class homeowner neighborhoods, there’s a real NIMBY problem, a not-in-my-backyard problem, which means they don’t want rental housing, they don’t want working-class people in their neighborhoods. The Pacific Palisades, which is one of the areas that was hit the hardest by the fires, the typical house is worth about $2 million.
And so they and many other neighborhoods, when a developer would propose to build a two-story or a four-story or six-story apartment building with maybe 20 to 50 units, they had organized to get their city council member to try to stop it. And so there’s been a real lag in the number of units that the city needs. The city needs to build at least 50,000 units a year just to keep up with the demand. And over the last decade or so, it’s only built an average of about 10,000 units a year. So every year, Los Angeles…
Read More: L.A.’s wildfires intensify city’s decades-long housing crisis