An Open (Source) Letter to my HOA in Support of More Housing

My local homeowner's association sent out letters against new housing in the neighborhood. Here was my response.

A few weeks ago, I got an emailed entitled “ACTION ALERT: The Sky IS Falling” from my local homeowner’s association, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.

It was about a package of new housing bills designed to address the housing shortage in California by allowing new multifamily housing (small apartments, duplexes and the like) in areas like mine where, currently, anything but single-family homes are prohibited in large areas:

This is a letter I sent in response to it and the talking points they provided. I also joined subsequent public meetings on the topic. I felt like my letter was heard (to some extent) and leaders of the group were more openminded in subsequent meetings.

I am not publishing this letter to shame my HOA, but in hopes people can use it as a reference or even to adapt portions for their own neighborhoods. If you have any suggestions or notes, feel free to send them to me. I’ll footnote changes I’ve made.

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Hello,

I was saddened and disappointed to see this message opposing these bills.

Some of your members support these bills, as they are in line with both our interests and values.* 

Maybe this is the first time you have heard this, so I will explain, and I beg your consideration.

I was particularly surprised by the following passage in your letter of opposition:

"When Millennials have families, they will still want the “American Dream” of a single-family house in a safe neighborhood with good schools. They will be rightfully angry and disappointed if we allow the Housing Bills to bulldoze our single-family neighborhoods."

I am a Millennial, and my first child is due in October. I would love to remain in Brentwood as my family grows, but unfortunately our current condo will not be large enough forever, and currently single family homes in Brentwood are out of my price range; we may likely be forced to leave.

New housing bills allowing duplexes, fourplexes, and ADUs offer hope that options we could afford could come on the market, or it would be possible to renovate a large existing single family home with friends into a duplex or fourplex. That way, we could have enough space to comfortably raise kids while enjoying a small yard and all the reasons we love to call Brentwood home.

I have never once heard a person my age complain that they were unable to locate single family homes, which have a legal monopoly on 75% of the land in Los Angeles. What I have heard continually is that they are unable to afford a home as values have skyrocketed for decades, or that they struggle to afford rent as that has skyrocketed for decades. Indeed, this is one reason many people in my generation have put off having families as well as buying homes. It was my impression when I attended a Brentwood HOA meeting that there were not very many, if any, millennials there: there is a reason for this, and it is the incredible expense of homeownership. It is a clear problem, and it has a clear solution.

Study after study that has looked at the problem in California, including our city's own experts at UCLA, USC, and the LA Times, has found the same source: a severe housing shortage caused by a failure to build. Today, we build at a fraction of the rate that we did in the 1970s, when California's population was a fraction of the amount. Despite California's strong economy and high quality of life, we are currently 49th in housing units per capita--ahead only of Utah, where home sizes are much larger. 

By refusing to allow new housing in Brentwood, you are not preserving it for millennials; instead you are forcing them out of Brentwood. The likely consequence is we, and others like us, will have to move to another neighborhood where we raise rents and push other families out as they become less affordable. We will also likely be forced to drive farther distances to work, polluting the atmosphere our kids will breathe and inherit, giving us less time to spend with them, and increasing the traffic on our highways.

And to be clear, my wife and I are the lucky ones. We both still have our jobs, her as a pediatrician and me as a media professional. However, there are severe consequences to continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis that cause harm to people beyond us. Here are other issues that are not addressed, or are unintentionally misaddressed, in your statements.

1. The environment.

Transportation is California's single largest source of carbon emissions, lead by passenger vehicles. Single family homes produce twice as much carbon emissions as urban multifamily housing. Enabling more people to live in walkable neighborhoods--as exist in certain parts of Brentwood, to the joy of people who can afford to--is an essential step to fighting a dire problem for us and our children, not to mention communities across California and the world suffering from its effects. If the most fortunate among us, with some of the most carbon-emitting lifestyles, cannot do our part to reduce our impact--how can we expect anyone else to?

2. Systemic racism.

In the Brentwood Community Council's last call, they expressed a commitment to fighting systemic racism. Yet exclusionary zoning continues to be one of the most powerful forces of racial inequality in America; even your letter acknowledges its discriminatory roots. Throughout the development of Los Angeles, developers and homeowners associations restricted racial minorities from certain neighborhoods using tools like minimum prices for homes, as well as explicit racial covenants and at times direct violence and intimidation. Today, Los Angeles is the 10th most segregated city in America. Brentwood is one of the least diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as well as one of the least dense. Any attempt to address this racial injustice must start with not continuing to perpetuate it. Continuing to refuse development will continue to make Brentwood unaffordable except to a shrinking percentage of the top 10, 1, and .1%. Doing so inevitably increases segregation because of LA's stark racial wealth gap between white and particularly black and Latino residents whose communities have long been victimized by housing discrimination. Additionally, by refusing to build housing we push more relatively affluent people seeking housing they can afford into gentrifying neighborhoods - raising rents there and disproportionately forcing people of color away from their homes and further away from their jobs.

3. Neighborhood Aesthetics.

In your letter entitled "The Sky is Falling," you present residents with the specter of having their single family home next to an apartment building. Yet it's worth noting that this is already the reality on many streets in Brentwood, and not only does the sky remain stubbornly aloft, it is a completely normal sight the vast majority of people would never take notice of. These streets remain pleasant places to live--perhaps more pleasant, since having more people enables local businesses to thrive nearby within walking distance. On the other hand, many single family homes in Brentwood are the size of the small apartment buildings whose prohibition would be lifted by this bill, and are either visible from the street or hidden behind enormous privacy hedges with no unique aesthetic value. It's unclear why modest apartment buildings are a threat to a neighborhood already full of large structures of varied architecture. Perversely, restrictive zoning also means prohibiting iconic Southern California housing styles like bungalow courts and classic duplexes in favor of the more generic options we see aplenty in Brentwood now.

4. Property values.

The language in the letter implies that building is a thing done without consent: bulldozing your neighborhood, putting up ominous skyscrapers in your backyard. Yet in truth these bills grant individual homeowners valuable rights: to sell their properties at a premium to developers to build more than one home at a time demand for new homes vastly exceeds supply, or to build Accessory Dwelling Units to house family members or even rent out themselves. In fact, a study in Chicago found upzoning near transit spots increased the value of the land for particularly that reason - land is more valuable when you can potentially do more with it.

5. Affordable Housing.

When you think about it, it's odd for neighborhoods that have artificially inflated the value of houses by prohibiting building desperately needed housing to simultaneously lament the lack of affordable housing. By underbuilding for decades--not to mention drawing out the permitting process with red tape and lawsuits to raise the cost of what does get built--we find ourselves with a housing market so broken that people feel free to say "building more won't fix it tomorrow" as an excuse for inaction. This is obviously true, and yet is a poor excuse for not beginning to reverse the damage. 

It's important to remember "market rate" is only equated with "unaffordable" because the situation has gotten so bad. The apartment I got when I moved to LA in 2011 was a generic 2-bedroom in Valley Village, with a very affordable rent of $1300; it's now nearly twice that, despite no meaningful improvements or changes to the neighborhood. It was initially affordable not by some specially funded program, but simply because there was more housing and less demand; as construction failed to keep pace with natural growth in the economy and population, that changed. 

While "affordable" and "unaffordable" housing are often treated as a binary, it's less distinct for most citizens. As rents and housing prices increase, most households simply bear the burden in their bank accounts, and LA is now the third most rent-burdened city in the nation. Reducing the growth of housing prices incrementally means relatively more money in the pockets of working people and families. While Brentwood will in all likelihood maintain its upscale status, taking measures to keep it affordable for people who can currently live here - or who earn similar salaries to homeowners who moved here decades ago - helps its residents, preserves the character of the people who live in the neighborhood (rather than associating "neighborhood character" with vague, inconsistent architectural guidelines), and avoids continuing ripples of displacement and increased rent burdens throughout the city. 

Specifically built affordable housing, which is mentioned offhand in the letter, is an important part of the solution. However, as the letter acknowledges it is often unprofitable to build: it costs an average of $500,000 a unit to construct, and can go over $1 million and take decades in the face of lawsuits and roadblocks built by the same residents who oppose housing in their neighborhoods in general. If Brentwood genuinely desires more deed-restricted affordable housing, I will welcome motions by the Brentwood Homeowners Association to identify sites in the neighborhood for building its share of the estimated 516,000 units of affordable housing LA would need to abate the housing crisis, as well as motions to endorse tax increases that would undoubtedly be required to fund it at speed. But the reality is that it is not a genuine solution for the overwhelming majority of Angelenos who will continue to live in market-rate housing. For them, program-affordable housing means an interminable waitlist or a lottery ticket for the right merely to live in housing that costs approaching what housing actually should. Additionally, middle-class people who don't qualify for this tiny trickle of subsidized housing, but who would benefit from exactly the type of naturally affordable small-apartment housing that these bills provide, are left in the cold by continuing to allow runaway inflation of rents and home prices without any mitigation accessible to them.

I could go on but I don't want to belabor things. I'm happy to set up a meeting or phone call if you wish to discuss it further.

In summary, I strongly urge you to reconsider and withdraw your opposition to these bills.

Additionally, please let me and the other members of the HOA know when you will be deciding to support or oppose important bills like this. Your current position is contrary to the interests and values of at least some of your members, and they can provide missing critical perspective and context that you should have before you speak on their behalf.**

Thank you,

Toby Muresianu

* Corrected from: “Not all of your members oppose these bills, as they are not in line with our interests or our values.”
** Corrected from:  “They are contrary…”