Making LA More Affordable

Rents and housing costs are too high. Good-paying jobs are hard to find. And the cost of everyday expenses keeps going up, from daycare, to parking, to food. It’s hard to survive in LA on a working-class salary, especially for families.

Housing Costs

Housing costs are the largest expense for almost every family in Los Angeles. 59% of renter households in the city are rent burdened. The median house in Los Angeles costs 12x the median income, making LA the most unaffordable city in America for homeownership.

Our housing crisis is the result of a longstanding housing shortage: for decades we have failed to build enough new housing. Under Mayor Bass, this has gotten worse. Housing construction has fallen as the city has made it more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to build homes for everyday families.

As Mayor, I’ll address the root causes of the housing crisis. We’ll clear red tape, reform outdated regulations, and lower fees so builders can transform vacant lots and empty storefronts into attainable housing. We’ll open up new homeownership opportunities by bringing back the starter home and creating new programs for affordable condos. And we’ll continue to protect renters by enforcing the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, ensuring new construction doesn’t cause displacement, and creating a city-wide affordable housing waitlist.

More details on my housing plan will be provided in the weeks ahead.

City FEES AND UTILITY RATES

City government plays a role in many living expenses, including utilities and services that it provides directly.  

Since the beginning of Mayor Bass's term, the City of LA has increased electricity rates by 19%, water by 52%, trash by 54% and sewage by 60%. These cost an average household $1,223 annually and contribute to an affordability crisis that is crushing LA families. 83% of the DWP’s water rate, and 71% of the electricity rate exceed the published base rate and are automatically passed through to customers without real debate by City Council or the Mayor.

As Mayor, I will improve management and control costs in City utilities to eliminate hidden water and power rates and reduce rate increases.

Making our Communities Safer

As Mayor, my top priority will always be the health and safety of LA residents, as it was when I led LA’s Schools during the pandemic and protected hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, staff, and their families.Unfortunately, LA has become less safe under Mayor Bass.

As Mayor, I will improve management and control costs in City utilities to eliminate hidden water and power rates and reduce rate increases.

Community Safety & Policing

Under Mayor Bass, the police department solves barely 1 in 3 violent crimes and 1 in 20 property crimes, the lowest rates in a decade.

Meanwhile, officer-involved shootings are up 70%, the highest rate in 10 years. And under Mayor Bass, LAPD has stopped sharing crime data by location, preventing residents from finding out about the crime that is happening in their neighborhood. This action violates state law.

Clearly, the status quo is not working.

As Mayor, I’ll work to keep criminals off our streets. We’ll solve more crimes. But I’ll support greater transparency, accountability, and reform at the police department. No more hiding information that belongs to the public.

Emergency Response

LA’s ambulance response times have become significantly slower over the past decade and continue to get worse under Mayor Bass, putting people’s lives at risk. The national standard is for an ambulance to arrive in under 5 minutes for almost all medical emergencies. In LA, the median response time is approaching 8 minutes. Every minute delay in response to a heart attack results in a 10% decrease in the chance of survival.

We must increase the fire department’s budget to add more people, stations and equipment to handle the volume of calls.

But there’s something else we can do right away, at virtually no cost.

Firefighters tell me they’re spending as much as 20% of their time responding to calls that aren’t true medical emergencies. That's causing response times to increase for actual emergencies.

We need to change our dispatch and not send an ambulance and tie up highly trained professionals almost every time someone calls 911. We can still treat callers with care and compassion, and connect them to services and care.

This simple, common-sense approach will reduce response times 10-20%, or about a minute faster, and reduce the burden on the people working in every fire station. So help arrives on time when you call.

Improving City Services and Infrastructure

LA is filled with more broken streets, sidewalks and streetlights. It’s not just a nuisance; it's unsafe. The City is paying millions to settle claims from people who get hurt, but not enough to fix the problem. It currently takes ten years to repair a sidewalk.

Under Mayor Bass, LA stopped repaving streets 6 months ago, and has filled 7,000 fewer potholes compared to last year. Crosswalks have gotten so bad that residents are starting to paint their own. They’re taking action because LA has more traffic deaths than any other city in the nation. It's the number one cause of death for children.

As Mayor, we’ll invest in repairing the city’s broken infrastructure and deliver on city services. We’ll put in place a long-term capital improvements plan. And I’m committed to implementing the Measure HLA safety improvements that voters have approved to make our streets safer.

Connecting Schools and City Hall to Better Serve the Community

As Mayor, I’ll connect LA schools with City Hall to provide more affordable housing, park space for kids, and help low-income families.

My experience as LAUSD Superintendent will help make this possible.

During the pandemic, we transformed schools into community hubs to provide more than 140 million meals to children and their families, the largest food relief effort in the nation. We also ensured that 500,000 students and their families were provided with a free computer and internet access to stay connected with their school community and continue learning.

At City Hall, I’ll build on what we learned during the pandemic: local, neighborhood schools are often the best place to provide help to families and their children.

Increasing Access to Park Space

LA has some of the worst park access of any big city in the country, ranking 90th out of the 100 largest cities, according to The Trust for Public Lands’ Parkscore. Only 62% of LA residents live within walking distance of a park, compared with 99% in New York and 100% in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the City of LA is currently sitting on more than $100 million in unspent Quimby funds, paid by developers, to acquire more park space. These funds often go unused because of the expense of buying land to build new parks, and because of the restrictions in the state law for these funds.

As Mayor, we’ll open up school fields and gyms for kids to play in on evenings and weekends. To cover the money needed to pay people to keep the school facilities clean, safe, and properly maintained, we’ll work with the state government to change the law so that the $100 million LA already has just sitting in a bank account can be used for these expenses.

This will allow LA to open 80 school yards open on evenings and weekends across the city.  Without raising any fees or taxes, kids will get a clean and safe place to play at their local, neighborhood school.

Building Affordable Housing

LA Schools are the largest landowner in the City.

As Mayor, I will work with LAUSD to use some of this land to create apartments for school staff and the community.  

There are more than 50 public school campuses that have more than 20 acres of land. A small apartment building can fit on less than a quarter acre, using less than 2% of the land on these campuses. On schools across the city, we’ll be able to create 2,000 - 4,000 new units of affordable housing.

Services to Save Money for Low-Income Families

Many families that are eligible for government assistance programs and utility discounts aren’t signed up because they aren’t aware of these programs.

As Mayor, once we know that a family is struggling to get by, we’ll help them in every way that we can. When families are enrolling their kids at school, we’ll work with LAUSD to automatically sign them up for low income discounts for essential services, such as DWP’s EZ-Save and Metro’s LIFE programs. We’ll save tens of thousands of families money every month on utilities and transportation, just by getting branches of government to work with each other.