Gentrification doesn't happen
because people build new buildings,
gentrification happens because people don't.
- [Presenter] This is a video about housing in LA.
but it relates to a lot of cities in North America.
It's about the cost of buying a house.
I basically wanted to know if me or my friends,
anyone in the middle class,
if we'd ever able to afford a house in a city again.
But this whole thing, it actually started out
with a much simpler idea for a video.
LA Teachers react to LA Housing Prices.
I mean, don't you think it's common sense that teachers
should be able to afford houses in
the communities where they teach?
So I brought in all these teachers,
and I had them look at how much house they could afford,
using these basic online calculators.
- OK, so it says I can afford a $257,000 house
with a mortgage payment of $1,301.
- Wow. OK.
Well, I could purchase land but not a house.
- So it's basically, like, in the armpit
of two freeways.
- Yeah.
- Yeah
- [Presenter] So one bedroom, one bath.
- Well, the bedroom is part of the living room, looks like.
- Ugh, ugh!
- OK, let's say I could afford this.
I'm also gonna get cancer.
It's about 30 feet away from power lines.
So that probably explains the slightly lower price.
- [Presenter] All that video really illustrated was that
houses do, indeed, cost too much.
Teachers are, indeed, not paid enough
and it was just kind of a bummer.
- It's kind of depressing
(laughs)
to see what's out there in our price range.
- [Narrator] So the real video starts now.
I talked to all these academics, and they broke it down.
It comes down to supply and demand.
- The big challenge is when
there is a vibrant economic space,
how do we accommodate new migrants into that city?
- I mean, the idea is housing lasts for a really long time
A hundred years for a housing unit.
And you build your housing stock one year at a time,
you can't build too many in any one year,
and so if you have 10 years in a row
where you don't build much,
it creates a real hole in the housing stock for the future.
Because there's a housing shortage,
it means that upper middle class people move into
what are traditionally working class neighborhoods
in order to afford a home
and that ends up making it difficult for
the traditional residents of those neighborhoods
to afford a place to live in their own community.
- So what we've ended up is the
middle class housing has been converted into
rich people's housing and the working man's housing
has been turned into middle class housing
and then the poor people's housing has kind of been erased.
And it's actually important to note that
the gentrification Professor Myers is describing
generally means it's communities of color
that are being displaced.
To see what that looks like firsthand,
I met up with this super cool real estate agent.
Her name's Rose Garcia,
and she works in all these developing neighborhoods.
She showed me around them,
and we looked at these houses that,
you know, five years ago would have cost $100,000
and are now going for three or four times that.
- This home, it's like less than 1,000 square feet.
I think it's like 1,100 square feet.
It's for sale for $305,000.
And the problem is that it's a total fix up,
and not to mention, even though it has a nice lot size,
again, you're up against an alleyway.
So this is the last kind of home
that the standard, average, you know,
city employee, teacher, anyone that makes
around $65,000, $60,000 a year,
this is what you're getting.
You're getting an extreme super fixer upper
in an area that's in the bud,
the budding of its gentrification.
- [Presenter] Oh, and another thing about this neighborhood.
- There's wild chihuahua packs that just run
frivolously in the street just, like, attacking people.
It's crazy.
- [Presenter] You don't have that on the list ad.
- No, they don't.
Well, welcome to east L.A.
(laughs)
I'm born and raised in Highland Park.
Born in '74, lived in Highland Park my whole entire life.
I still live there now.
And, you know, it's amazing to me as an agent,
I've been in this business 16 years,
that people are paying, you know,
upwards near $700,000 for a house
where I know people who've gotten shot at.
I mean, it's crazy.
That's part of what's happening in
not only in L.A. but in the nation.
Like I said, we own homes there.
I'm happy that it's happening.
It's just, it's happening really fast.
And, you know, by the blink of an eye,
I'm like, "What happened to my city?"
It's just so different.
- [Presenter] And so the question I asked is like what
can we do as a society or the city?
Or what me, just as a dude who cares about these things,
how can we make it better?
- Government really has to allow more housing to be built.
And then also to make sure those who have the least
amount of money can still afford housing.
- It just takes too long to get projects planned
and get 'em approved and get 'em built.
- In terms of general policy,
to help create more housing in Los Angeles
the number one thing I think is like, is upzone the city.
And by that we mean, like if you look at any piece of land
right in Los Angeles,
there's gonna be rules from the zoning code,
how much units of housing can you do there.
And that's the restriction that's really keeping us
from creating enough housing in Los Angeles.
So we need to really think, hey are we a city
that actually wants a lot of people to be here?
That wants to be diverse?
That wants to build transit?
That wants to let people have walkable communities?
And if so, let's let there be a little of density
in a few other places other than just
downtown and, like, Hollywood.
Another obstacle to housing is that every time you
build anything in Los Angeles,
you have to put in a certain number of parking spaces,
whether you need them or not.
- In a lot of cases, there are two
parking spots required per unit built.
- And that kind of stuff drives up the cost of construction
and it makes it harder to meet our needs for more housing.
- [Presenter] So I met up with a guy.
His name's Mott Smith,
and he calls himself a social developer,
and he really echoed that.
He took this old bungalow court,
and he turned it into town homes
that were kinda like condos
but were classified as single-family homes,
and for some kinda arcane reasons,
were much cheaper to develop.
- We're a developer doing socially conscious projects
in Los Angeles.
We like to do things that are regulatorily innovative.
And so,
Jane Blumenfeld, the planner in the city of Los Angeles,
said, "Why is it that everything has to be a condo?"
And so she worked for a couple of years
to craft something called the Small Lot Ordinance,
which actually lets you develop townhouse-type buildings,
like that kind of density,
on small lots, so using land much more efficiently.
And simply by doing this,
it's allowed developers like me
to cut our costs to the point
where we can afford to build
at a price that more people can afford to buy.
It doesn't solve the affordability problem
by any stretch of the imagination,
but when we did this project,
this was still the lowest priced
new-quality single-family housing in the area.
The future's not finding a way
to do cul-de-sacs and 5,000 square foot houses
on 10,000 square foot lots and somehow make that affordable
to the world.
I don't think that's a winning strategy.
I think the future is coming up with new ways
of building housing,
new ways of being in the city,
and using all of our resources more efficiently.
- [Presenter] And that's just one example
of a rule changed to city laws
that let the developer build more for cheaper.
So we definitely need to encourage the city
to make it easier to build.
But overall,
we as a generation just need to pay a lot more attention
to the health of the housing stock in our cities.
Most people are just kinda in it for themselves.
As long as they can afford to buy a house or rent a house,
the overall housing stock doesn't matter to them.
But the truth is,
If you actually wanna live in a city
that is a cool, diverse, interesting place,
this is, like, one of the main things
that you should pay attention to
in, like, the politics of your city.
And that's why I made this video.
(Jazz trumpet music)