Almost four years after Karen Bass took office as the 43rd Mayor of Los Angeles and immediately declared a state of emergency over the homelessness crisis, the US metropolis is once again facing a change in leadership. On 14 December, progressive local politician Nithya Raman will assume office. Raman has already announced that her first 100 days will focus entirely on reviving construction activity in order to tackle the acute housing shortage.
The challenges facing urban development are immense. Alongside structural issues and protracted planning approval processes, Brookfield's recent withdrawal from the 600-million-dollar luxury residential high-rise The Beaudry underscored institutional players' lack of confidence in Downtown Los Angeles. A pre-election poll by U.C. Berkeley and the L.A. Times showed that affordable housing was the third-highest priority for voters, behind homelessness and public safety.
Planning expertise against deadlock
Raman, who holds degrees from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes herself primarily as an urban planner. In the past, she has openly advocated aggressive densification and the statewide legislative initiative SB 79 to promote construction near public transit hubs, a stance that clearly set her apart from her predecessor Karen Bass, whose voter base lay primarily in single-family residential neighbourhoods.
For the property industry, the balancing act now lies in how Raman will reconcile ambitious densification plans with the expansion of tenants' rights. Industry representatives regularly warn that while regulatory interventions might facilitate planning permissions, they could make managing existing portfolios more expensive. Joshua Baum, managing partner of research firm Hilgard Economics, stressed that Raman must above all be judged on tangible progress. The city, he noted, must signal reliability, temporal continuity and economic understanding to property developers.
Accelerating planning permission processes
- —Introduction of binding processing deadlines for municipal authorities and planning departments
- —Reform of building inspections and utility connection approvals
- —Approval of more compact building designs such as single-stair access and missing-middle housing concepts
Gary Benjamin, founder of consultancy Alchemy Planning + Land Use, stated that fixed deadlines for municipal decisions would provide the development sector with desperately needed planning certainty. He noted that this was a crucial lever to keep investors in the market and alleviate fears of a four-year standstill in construction activity across Los Angeles.
