L.A. is under the gun to add housing units. The hard part? Where and how many

Los Angeles needs more affordable housing.

When presented with the problem in the past, builders and developers were able to turn lima bean fields and orange groves into row after row of homes. But the vast swaths of open land on the city’s fringes vanished decades ago.

The California Department of Housing and Community Development has said that Los Angeles should add 456,643 new units by 2029 — a number that has generated controversy. To meet those demands, the city will have to create new ways of growing its inventory — strategies that will allow the city’s established communities to welcome many more residents than they are able to accommodate now.

The big questions are, as always: where, how and how much new housing should be built.

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

The Times reached out to two sources with scenarios that challenge conventional thinking — two plans for the San Fernando Valley, which, half a century ago, provided the space for much of the city’s growth.

The first scenario proposes awakening a sleepy commercial corridor with low- and mid-rise apartments. The other focuses on 20 miles of vacant land — below electrical transmission lines that snake through the Valley.

Reseda reimagined

Like many L.A. suburbs, Reseda began as a small town center surrounded by fields.

As the West San Fernando Valley developed after World War II, those fields filled with an expansive grid of single-family homes.

Vestiges of Reseda’s small-town beginning still survive in block after block of single-story businesses like the Traders pawnbroker and jewelry store at the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way.

But snapshots of the future have begun to appear. A few blocks to the north, a five-story apartment building rises between a Thai restaurant and a used car lot.

How many more of those would be needed for Reseda, or any similar community, to contribute its fair share of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation for the city of Los Angeles?

The Times posed that question to Los Angeles-based policy think tank Center for Pacific Urbanism, which has spent years examining the causes of and solutions for L.A.’s housing shortage.

Its recent research created an equity scale to calculate targets for individual communities based on five factors: affordability, environmental quality, transit availability, past down-zoning and socioeconomics.

In the modern era, housing construction across Los Angeles peaked twice, once before the Great Depression and then in a postwar boom.

Reseda was a part of the postwar boom. Initially dominated by single-family homes, growth then shifted to medium-size apartment buildings. Construction of both types fell off precipitously by 1990, as anti-development sentiments gained ascendance. A tiny sliver representing accessory dwelling units has appeared in the last decade, part of a shift in housing topology that is just beginning.

The Reseda-West Van Nuys community falls near the middle of the city’s 34 community planning areas and will need 13,885 new housing units to meet its target. At one extreme, 14,000 single-family homes would meet the need. At the other it would take 1,400 10-unit buildings. The first is unfeasible — there isn’t that much land — and the other, a new high-rise canyon, would be unpalatable.

The Pacific Urbanism staff imagined a hybrid model that, they believe, would allow Reseda to achieve its goal with the least amount of community angst.

The plan looks a lot like a return to the building patterns of the 1970s but with a few significant differences. Like then, more than half of the new units would be provided in large and medium-size apartment buildings. But in place of single-family home construction that was already dwindling, almost a quarter of the new units would come from new housing types that did not exist then — accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and the conversion of existing commercial space into housing.

Above all, the pace of development would have to increase precipitously to reach the state’s 2029 goal.

The reimagined Reseda includes 37 buildings of 100 or more units, 73 medium-size buildings of 25 to 99 units and 484 duplex and small apartment buildings of up to 24 units. There would be 1,854 ADUs, including more than 1,000 that have already been built or permitted since 2020 and more than a thousand units in commercial conversions.

A similar result could be achieved with a different mix of housing types. But Dario Alvarez, Pacific Urbanism president, says that his organization’s hybrid scenario, based on building trends across the city, is the most feasible, if those trends persist.

Some progress has been made. Since 2019, city law has given single-family homeowners a right to build second units on their property. A raft of recent state laws provides incentives to builders and homeowners such as increased density for affordable housing and up to four units on single-family lots. And Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Order 1 streamlined the approval of affordable projects.

Those changes have helped, but don’t “get us anywhere close to what’s needed to meet the target, much less in an equitable way where all communities contribute a fair share,” Alvarez said. According to his calculations, the current rate of construction in Reseda would have to increase 16-fold to meet the target by 2029.

Pacific Urbanism proposes upgrading the zoning from medium- to high-density near the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way and creating medium-density zones to replace much of what is now single-family residences and small businesses.

A review of the Reseda-West Van Nuys community plan, including the zoning, is underway and is in the consulting phase. It’s expected to be complete in a year or two.

Considering the fight that single-family communities generally put up to preserve the character of what has come to represent the “American Dream” — and the single family home and yard —there’s no guarantee those changes will be made. The state housing mandate requires the city only to create a pathway to the housing targets by adjusting zoning that is currently too restrictive.

Bury the transmission lines; build on top

If you’ve spent time in the San Fernando Valley, it would be easy to view the overhead electrical transmission lines that stretch for more than 20 miles simply as essential wallpaper of modern living. The lines help ensure that 1.6 million households and businesses across the city can turn on the lights through a mostly uninterrupted band of 100- to 200-foot tall towers on a 150-foot wide strip of land.

But what if that land, which travels through the heart of Northridge, Granada Hills, Mission Hills, Arleta and North Hollywood, could continue to power Los Angeles while also meeting the housing needs of tens of thousands of people? The idea is almost too simple: Put the transmission lines underground and homes on top.

We wish such an innovative concept was ours. But it comes from Jingyi “Jessy” Qiu, a Boston-based landscape designer who conceived of the idea while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design a few years ago. In Qiu’s vision, the project reclaims dead space in the middle of bustling neighborhoods for the public good.

Qiu calls the right of way beneath the power lines “a land of opportunity to solve the housing problem in L.A.”

The project ticks many of the boxes for what large, sustainable development in Los Angeles can be.

It’s climate-friendly. As the region becomes hotter and drier, taking down overhead power lines lowers the risk of sparking wildfires. And by building in established communities, new residents will be able to reduce their commutes for work and shopping, while existing residents will have new offices and stores nearby.

There’s a way to pay for it. At one point, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns the lines and the land underneath, told us it would cost roughly $100 million to put the lines underground. More recently, the public utility said it couldn’t provide a price tag, and that, although possible, undergrounding transmission lines is rare, complex and expensive. An optimist would respond that revenue from the new development could cover much of, if not all, the cost, especially since the land itself would be free.

It’s a lot of housing. By Qiu’s calculations, 23,000 homes could be built along the 20 miles.

Qiu modeled the project through designing superblocks that could be repeated end to end throughout each community.

Neighborhoods and topography along the route differ and so does the planned development. In North Hollywood, a denser mix of small apartments, mixed-use complexes and single-family homes with casitas fills the flatlands. In Granada Hills, lower densities fit in the highlands. In Northridge, student housing is prioritized near the state university.

Today, people who live near the power lines complain of dust, litter and loitering, and worry about wires falling in high winds and storms.

It’s not that the right of way under the power lines now is unkempt. Many nursery businesses fill the land underneath. Landscaping is maintained. It’s just that, as one neighbor put it, barren land attracts negative activity. Of all things, the right of way is dark at night.

Besides housing, the development opens up space to the broader community. There’s room for continued nursery operations while adding parks, courtyards and shared gardens. Qiu even proposes repurposing some existing transmission towers, especially in the hills, into platforms for bird-watching.

One fear, of course, is adding this many new homes to an existing area could cause congestion. But the 20-mile stretch of homes ensures that traffic would be spread out. Superblocks could tie into the current road network and add parking while also providing long and unified bike and pedestrian infrastructure — not to mention the centralized open and community space — to neighborhoods lacking it now.

A future Los Angeles that takes its housing and climate challenges seriously will have to look for opportunities to make better use of space. Fitting 23,000 new homes into the Valley by redeveloping a land now used for a relic hits that mark.