Zoning in Los Angeles began to segregate by race… Study confirms that today, this pattern continues.
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Background
The impact of the current housing crisis in the City of Los Angeles is hard to overstate. Angelenos pay more of their income on housing, live in more overcrowded conditions, and have the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness of any city in the country. With housing options so limited, many Angelenos struggle to find housing options they can afford. These impacts are experienced differently across the city, often deepening inequality and segregation as well as limiting access to areas with higher resources and
opportunities.
While many factors and non-City policies share the blame for present conditions, planning and housing policies implemented by the City of Los Angeles are also intertwined. Understanding them is critical to addressing the current situation. This analysis shows that past planning and housing policies have too often prioritized the concerns of the White middle class over the marginalized, denying communities of color access to resources and excluding them from wealth-building opportunities. Exclusionary policies of the past persist today, perpetuating patterns of segregation, displacement, inequity, and exclusion.
Many experts point to a lack of adequate housing stock, particularly in higher-demand wealthier areas, as the root of the local housing crisis. Los Angeles has the second lowest number of homes per adult of all major US cities. This shortage has developed primarily since the 1980s, as population growth outpaced the creation of new housing. This occurred alongside the downzoning of Los Angeles to reduce density or scale – a process that was not equally applied across neighborhoods. Shortages of available homes benefit existing homeowners at the expense of renters and would-be homebuyers through rising prices.
Analysis in the City’s recently adopted Housing Element (June 2022) has enhanced the understanding of the relationship between zoning and social indicators of race, class, and access to opportunity. For example, more than 80 percent of the land area determined to offer the best chance for life success (areas of high opportunity) is zoned only for single-family use – the most expensive and least attainable housing type. Single-family homes have historically been, and continue to be, more expensive to own or rent than denser multi-family housing options.
Areas found to be both racially concentrated and very affluent were found to be zoned 95 percent for single-family use. Moreover, public investments in single-family neighborhoods were found to be disproportionately higher than denser neighborhoods with higher populations and thus greater needs. Understanding the roots of the current housing crisis as well as the origins of the unequal housing landscape, and how land use and housing decisions contributed to it, are the primary goals of this study.
Study Objectives and Purpose
In June 2022, the City adopted an update to its Housing Element of the General Plan called the Plan to House LA. The update is performed every eight years to reevaluate existing housing needs and establish the goals, objectives, policies, and programs that form the foundation of the City’s housing strategy.
The Housing Element lays out many proactive steps to address those factors that contribute to significant disparities in housing needs and access to opportunity. This involves both fostering more diversity of housing and integrated living patterns in higher resource areas and transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity. A set of Citywide Housing Priorities were developed to guide future actions.
These include addressing the housing shortage, advancing racial equity and access to opportunity, protecting Angelenos from displacement, and promoting sustainability and resilience through housing. A core component of the Housing Element is an equitable Rezoning Program, which will create capacity for at least a quarter million new housing units, focused in higher resource areas of the City.
As Los Angeles moves forward to implement its ambitious housing goals, it is imperative that the City considers its past practices. An understanding of how past land use and housing policies have perpetuated racial exclusion and inequity is crucial to reversing this legacy and not repeating past harms. This study outlines how the history of land use and housing policy has led to inequitable outcomes in order to better inform the development of future housing and land use planning and implementation programs. This will help ensure that future efforts consider and address these historic inequities.
This Historical Housing and Land Use Study has been prepared by Architectural Resources Group (ARG) and a team of subject-matter experts in fulfillment of the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning’s request for a study of the patterns of housing and land use policies that have historically perpetuated racial and socioeconomic disparities in the City of Los Angeles. Funded by a Regional Early Action Planning (REAP) grant from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), the study informs the implementation of the City’s 2021- 2029 Housing Element Update as well as future planning efforts.
This study explores how housing and land use policies have intersected with segregation, inequity, exclusion, and racialized processes, ultimately redistributing opportunity unequally in the City of Los Angeles. Social science, planning theory and practices, real estate practices, immigration, and popular attitudes toward race influenced the dynamics of land use and housing policies throughout the twentieth century and have continued to wield tremendous influence over the availability and accessibility of decent
housing in the twenty-first century. These factors helped establish and reinforce complex patterns of segregation across Los Angeles that have negatively impacted the city’s many communities of color and created inequitable housing outcomes.
Land use and housing policies have been influenced and reinforced by attitudes about race, both in explicit and implicit ways. Early twentieth century planners often relied on land use regulations to “protect” White middle- to upper-income neighborhoods from what they saw as negative influences damaging to the social and economic value of these areas. They viewed higher-density housing, certain land uses, and social composition – particularly the presence of people of color – as existential threats to neighborhood social and economic stability. Planning historians note that by separating housing types into different areas and excluding racially marginalized people from
land use governance and decision-making, land use planning and zoning have long been an unstated vehicle for accomplishing income, racial, and ethnic segregation. These policies served to create and consolidate wealth and privilege into the hands of White residents, a trend that intensified throughout the second half of the twentieth century, even as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction and explicit means of segregation were rendered illegal. This study evaluates how housing and land use laws and policies at the national, state, and local levels contributed to historic and present housing inequities in the City of Los Angeles.
It also addresses the varied public and private mechanisms which arose to enforce segregation, and how these changed over the course of the twentieth century in response to organized and unorganized political resistance, including multiple instances of civil uprising. It examines the different policy areas that have impacted the disparate experiences of various racial and cultural groups in Los Angeles, including land use planning, zoning, transportation planning, public housing policy, affordable housing policy, urban renewal, and housing enforcement, among others. Organized chronologically, the narrative charts major periods and land use trends in five chapters, titled as follows: Land Use Management and Segregation: Origins and Context; The Origins of Zoning in Los Angeles, 1908-1932; The New Deal and Housing Policy, 1933-1964; The Homeowner Revolution, 1964-1992; and The Recent Landscape: Zoning and Land Use in Los Angeles after 1992.
Key Findings
In the early twentieth century, City leaders believed Los Angeles could serve as a model of a different kind of city, one that rejected older urban models in favor of a low-density “city of homes.” Developing new city planning and zoning tools was key to balancing the desire for growth and protection of property values, particularly in higher class districts in high income residential districts. Los Angeles was a pioneer in developing zoning tools such as base zoning districts, including single-family only zoning and use requirements like parking. However, land use and zoning regulations were rooted in the racist and classist exclusionary practices and prejudices of the time.
Early land use and housing restricted access for marginalized communities, and many mostly single-family neighborhoods in Los Angeles were open only to White communities through the use of race restrictive covenants. Many of the same actors who helped spread segregation in Los Angeles worked to develop and promote early Los
Angeles exclusionary zoning laws.
Despite pioneering the use of a single-family only zoning district, until the 1930s most land area in Los Angeles allowed dense new multi-family housing, which allowed housing to largely keep pace with the tremendous population growth experienced by the region.
As the legal architecture supporting segregation began to be eroded and migration into Los Angeles County increased significantly in the 1920s, cities more fully embraced another tool for creating legally enforceable rules of population control and segregation: exclusionary zoning laws.
In the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was instrumental in promoting these exclusionary zoning laws through its mortgage insurance policies, calling them one of the “best artificial means of providing protection from adverse influences.”
- Diverse neighborhoods became uninsurable in favor of the largely single family (and White-only) communities in the San Fernando Valley that were constructed after
World War II.
In the 1970s, zoning capacity was cut dramatically from more than 10 million to approximately 4.1 million over the next twenty years, in a way that privileged wealthier, White single family neighborhoods. - Planning practices of the late 1970s and 1980s were less explicit in their exclusionary motives but have often continued to perpetuate patterns of exclusion and inequality. The housing market became increasingly unequal due to a variety of forces, including a shifting economy and widening economic inequality, rising regional housing prices, and decreasing availability of low-income housing. The government stepped back from its role of providing low-income housing, and other agencies stepped in to fill the need, with mixed results. Zoning continued to favor low-density housing, which hindered the city’s potential to produce affordable and adequate housing. Homeowners’ associations continued to exercise power in the planning process in the 1990s through mechanisms such as Community Planning. All of these factors have contributed to a repressed housing capacity which has produced minimal housing development over the last 40 years. As a result, Los Angeles is experiencing its most significant housing crisis, one that has culminated in unaffordable housing costs and epidemic levels of homelessness. Twenty-first century legislation sought to reverse decades of discriminatory housing and zoning policies.
Conclusion
This document has explored how housing and land use policies have intersected with segregation, exclusion, and racialized processes to create unequal access to opportunity and housing in Los Angeles. The unequal housing landscape is the result of more than a century of land use policy and private sector forces that, influenced by prevailing racism and classism, marginalized and disenfranchised communities of color.
Despite fair housing initiatives that have aimed to legally level the playing field, and despite activism on the part of communities of color themselves, for much of the century, political influence remained largely in the hands of a White, middleclass and affluent, home owning population who sought to maintain the status quo.
City planning and homeowner activism have long promoted the ideal of Los Angeles as a suburban city, dominated by low density residential construction. Detached single-family residences cover a disproportionate amount of the land zoned residential. This has resulted in an unaffordable housing market due, in part, to a pervasive lack of supply and the fact that single family homes are more expensive than multifamily residences. Los Angeles has some of the highest housing costs in the country as well as
the second lowest vacancy rate (and the lowest of US major metropolitan areas), indicating that demand outweighs supply.
At the same time, Los Angeles remains a city characterized by its diversity and housing inequalities that continue to disproportionately affect communities of color. Household income levels remain unequally distributed throughout the city, with lower income households concentrated in places historically occupied by people of color. The combination of high housing costs and lower incomes leaves people of color more “cost burdened” and at risk of being unable to afford housing or losing it altogether. This has resulted in chronic issues including overcrowding and a substantial population of unhoused people – problems that disproportionately impact people of color.
These issues remain linked to historic patterns of housing discrimination and and racialized land use policies.
This study has sought to lay out the factors which have contributed to Los Angeles’ complex and inequitable housing market that persists today.
Historic land use and planning policies have too often prioritized the concerns of White privileged communities and interests over the marginalized, denying communities of color access to resources and excluding them from access to housing and wealth-building opportunities. While the study highlights the exclusionary policies of the past that fueled patterns of segregation, displacement, inequity, and exclusion, it also makes us keenly aware of their impacts today. Though numerous barriers to inequality have been removed through the course of the twentieth century, unequal opportunity, racism, and their legacies continue to affect communities of color throughout the city. This study is meant to serve as a resource to inform housing and land use policies that positively transform these historic patterns for a more equitable and inclusive Los Angeles.