Housing for All

Los Angeles cannot solve its housing challenges while responsibility is scattered across multiple departments, with no single office accountable for preventing displacement and increasing housing stability. Today, housing instability - including evictions, foreclosure, homelessness, and other forms of displacement - is managed in fragmented silos, forcing the City to react to problems after they occur rather than preventing them.

The Mayor’s Office of Housing for All will bring leadership, coordination, and accountability to the City’s housing strategy and ensure seamless partnership with LA County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA) and the LA County Department of Homeless Services and Housing. This office will align tenant protections, foreclosure prevention, Permanent Affordable housing production, and the systems that move people from homelessness into stable homes through one integrated, prevention-first system.

The Office will set measurable citywide housing stability targets; ensure responsible departments remain accountable for reducing displacement; expand permanently affordable and social housing options; and increase the number of Angelenos able to move into stable homes each year. Rae will embed the principle that Housing is a Human Right into our budget and performance metrics, ensuring every department is working toward the same goal: stabilizing, protecting, and increasing housing.

Among these duties, the Mayor’s Office of Housing for All will advance its priorities by coordinating and implementing the housing and homelessness programs described in the following sections.

As Mayor, Rae will address exclusionary barriers that prevent our City from building enough housing. A thriving city needs more density: we cannot house everyone without it. Increasing supply, especially near transit, moves us toward a more sustainable, inclusive, and affordable Los Angeles. We must especially increase supply for those at the lowest income levels.

Rae will champion the use of new models of housing production, including social housing, public ownership, and expanded programs for building permanently affordable housing on public land.

Rae plans to take the following steps to increase our housing supply:

• Support a vacancy tax to disincentivize property owners from holding potential housing and commercial spaces empty.

• Prevent displacement by requiring every affordable housing development to set aside a pool of units for local community members facing displacement, and a second set of units without that restriction (for a total of 30% of units across both categories).

• Implement SB 79’s community protections while ensuring we are increasing our housing supply.

• Support upzoning, especially of single-family parcels, in proximity to public transit.

• Expand the Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) to apply more broadly in single family zones, particularly Transit Oriented Incentive Areas (TOIA) and Opportunity Corridor Transition Incentive Areas (OC-T).

• Proactively work with developers to find underutilized commercial properties and prioritize them for commercial revitalization and mixed use development.

• Push for local and statewide reforms that make it easier to build “missing middle” housing i.e. Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), duplexes, and small-lot townhomes in places where high density housing isn’t feasible.

• Expedite Request for Proposals (RFPs) for use of City land.

• Repurpose motels into Permanent Supportive Housing.

Today’s housing instability did not appear overnight. It is the result of decades of policy decisions, including the federal government’s withdrawal from large-scale public housing investment, which led to a growing reliance on the private market to meet basic housing needs. To build a more stable and equitable system, the government must once again play an active role in ensuring housing remains accessible to working families. Social housing provides a model to do exactly that.

Social housing is publicly and community owned, and is designed to remain permanently affordable in order to provide stability for our children and grandchildren. Buildings’ units are publicly and/or community owned and managed. Each development has housing units for a mix of income ranges, from the lowest income households, to moderate-income ones who are unable to afford market rent. Residents are meaningfully included in decisionmaking about the operation and management of their housing, and have robust protections against eviction. The housing units and the land they are built on remain affordable forever.

Expanding social housing across Los Angeles will stabilize neighborhoods, keeping homes for people to live in, not investors to profit from. Rae will pursue a robust social housing ecosystem, including:

Expanding Public Housing

The Mayor’s Office of Housing for All will identify publicly owned land and partner with public housing agencies, community land trusts, and mission-driven developers to expand permanently affordable social housing across Los Angeles. Public housing must remain a cornerstone of our housing system. Rae will work to protect and strengthen it at a time when federal support and protections continue to erode. By strategically using public land, public investment, and community ownership models, Los Angeles can build and preserve housing that remains permanently affordable for generations.

Homebuyer Initiated Program (HIP-LA)

A downpayment for a home in Los Angeles can range anywhere from 3% to 20% of the purchase price. However, families who are able to scrape together a modest downpayment are competing with people offering six figure downpayments. The City currently offers loans to assist low-income and first-time homebuyers, but this doesn’t fully bridge the gap. Rae will create a Homebuyer Initiated Program (HIP-LA), to help Angelenos expand their purchasing power through partnering with a community land trust (CLT). In this arrangement, the CLT would own the land and the homebuyer would own the building. HIP-LA will help make homeownership dreams a reality.

Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act

Rae will champion the adoption of a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) in Los Angeles, giving tenants the right of first refusal to purchase their building if it is put up for sale. TOPA would also give tenants the ability to assign their purchase rights to a non-profit third-party. Similar to the Homebuyer Initiated Program, this setup provides capital to make a purchase possible. TOPA empowers tenants to control their housing for the long-term, creating stability and keeping our communities housed.

Across Los Angeles, vacant and underutilized commercial properties sit empty, and small businesses struggle to remain in their neighborhoods amid rising rents and housing costs. These properties represent an opportunity to create new homes while revitalizing local commercial corridors. The Mayor's Office of Housing for All will proactively identify underutilized commercial parcels and support their conversion into mixed-use housing with homes above ground-floor retail. This approach can increase housing availability, while introducing opportunities for small businesses to thrive alongside their customer base. We will include protections for small businesses temporarily displaced during construction.

The City will work with property owners, community organizations, and responsible developers to identify and prioritize these sites for mixed-use development. Projects will include meaningful community engagement to identify tangible community benefits for the projects to include. By rethinking how we use commercial space, Los Angeles can expand housing, strengthen neighborhoods, and support vibrant local economies.

Along with increasing housing supply, supporting our unhoused community members requires improving accessibility of case management and mental health and recovery support. Instead of pushing homeless people out of sight and further destabilizing our neighbors, Rae will champion data-backed policies that humanely address the root causes of homelessness, all while ensuring the use of City resources is transparent and accountable to the public. Rae is committed to transforming our City into one that is safe, clean, and affordable for all.

Permanent Housing, not Interim Stays

By definition, shelters and interim housing are a temporary solution for assisting with an immediate crisis. However, they can only be a transitional step, not a solution. Rae will lead with a focus on sustainable housing progress, instead of costly, short-term projects to circulate unhoused people around the City and out of sight.

Replace Inhumane Sweeps with Data-backed Service Delivery and Community-Oriented Sanitation

When LA Sanitation “sweeps” a sidewalk, they throw an unhoused person’s belongings, including their ID, their medication, their shelter, and their blankets into a grinder machine that destroys everything that person had. The City has limited storage practices meant to mitigate this, but there is no storage setup that would be logistically practical to most, and there is no way to do a sweep that isn’t cruel and violent. Sweeps regularly put people of color in the way of law enforcement, and loss of identity documents is a major barrier to obtaining housing and public benefits. Sweeps also add to the anxiety and trauma of being unhoused, creating mental health pressures that make it harder to engage with services. To end these wrongs, Rae wants to repeal Section 41.18 of the Municipal Code, and redirect budgets towards data-backed homelessness solutions, such as better service delivery.

There is a third way here: we can ensure healthy streets and sanitation, increase operations around encampments to provide restrooms, garbage disposal, and other supportive services to improve public safety, while also focusing on getting people housed.

Improve Public Infrastructure

We should not be seeking to sweep our unhoused neighbors out of sight, but focus on housing our neighbors humanely and sustainably while addressing public health and sanitation concerns on our streets. Rae will work to increase public bathrooms and water fountains across the city, as well as add public bathrooms and trash receptacles in key encampment areas. Rae will also increase sanitation at existing public bathrooms as we support our residents move into housing. The City should invest in increased staffing to keep bathrooms clean and secure, and to empty the trash.

Sustainable, Quality Care

Too often, community members staying in shelters and interim housing experience unprofessional behavior, rigid rules that inhibit their freedoms, and health and safety failures. Rae will create a performance-based pay structure for service provider contracts, and require staff to uphold standards for shelter and interim housing conditions. She will implement routine inspections to ensure compliance.

Help to the Helpers

At the same time, service providers experience frequent turnover due to the high pressures of this care-based work. The organizations serving unhoused community members are full of passionate, talented staff members, many of them with lived experiences paralleling those of their clients. Service providers need support to help them keep helping. Rae will require that contract approvals and renewals include metrics to create better working conditions for client-facing staff roles. Staff members should have standardized pay and benefits, alongside expanded training and professional development. Rae also wants to increase the budget for hiring more client-facing positions to reduce the pressures of overwhelming casesloads, with increased transparency and accountability to ensure coordination towards the common goal of placing clients in Permanent Supportive Housing.

Modernized Systems and Improved Coordination

Rae will pursue these goals by implementing better technology practices. We need to update and maintain client-facing portals and public dashboards to make them easy to use and mobile-friendly. On the internal and provider side, we need to improve our bed-tracking systems. Rae will also increase integration of LAHSA’s accounting and financial offices with the Los Angeles City Administrator Officer, and collaborate with the City Controller on financial audits to increase internal capacity for stricter oversight of contracts and service providers.

Los Angeles tenants have won improvements at the local level in recent years, but we have a long way to go to improve renter stability. Rae will strengthen enforcement at the Los Angeles Housing Department and work with City Council to improve access to rental units and homes, legal counsel, and rental assistance. On the state level, Rae will use her influence as Los Angeles Mayor to push for the repeal of Costa Hawkins.

Improve Renter Access to Housing

A number of technological advancements have made it harder for tenants to find an apartment and stay in their home. Landlords use algorithmic software to set rents, and consult opaque databases when reviewing applications. Some of these websites spit out a “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” recommendation without explaining why. Rae will work with City Council to ban these practices and require transparency from landlords. Landlords should have to inform a tenant why they are rejecting an application, and provide the tenant with the opportunity to submit further information to address the landlord’s concerns. Rae will also attack the underlying inequities that power these websites, by working to ban the use of credit reports, criminal records, and eviction records in the selection of tenants. These records come from judicial and economic processes rife with racial discrimination, and keep community members from finding a place to live. This dynamic even keeps many unhoused applicants from entering housing. If a tenant has the money to afford an apartment, they should be allowed to rent it.

Help Tenants Learn about Their Buildings and Landlords

The City has created a rent registry to help it track and enforce rent increase limits in rent-stabilized buildings. However, this data is only available to the public through public record requests. Tenants deserve this information about their individual landlords and about the housing landscape in our city. Furthermore, tenants deserve easy-to-access information about health and safety violations. Obtaining this information currently requires extensive digging on difficult-to-navigate websites. Rae wants to make this data accessible for tenants in one central webpage. This will help tenants select apartments where their rights are more likely to be respected, and will create incentives for landlords to comply with housing protections.

Keep Building the Right to Counsel in Eviction Cases

With thousands of tenants losing their homes to eviction every year, we need a fully-funded Right to Counsel to give every tenant the opportunity to protect their housing stability. Rae will work with City Council and local advocates to continue the multi-year effort to grow capacity to serve LA tenants. Access to lawyers in eviction court is deeply disproportionate, leaving many tenants to navigate confusing processes on their own. Tenants cannot use the City’s renter protections to defend themselves from eviction unless they can make their legal case to a judge, and their ability to do this is enormously enhanced with a lawyer.

Require Landlords to Accept Rental Assistance During the Eviction Process

Measure ULA has made significant rental assistance available to prevent displacement. However, tenants’ opportunities to use the funding is limited. State law makes clear that landlords must engage in application processes for this money. Refusal is source of income discrimination. However, when a tenant receives a three-day notice to pay rent or face an eviction lawsuit, it is impossible to complete the process and receive the money in time. And once the notice expires, allowing the landlord to file an eviction case, there is no obligation to accept this funding. Many landlords decline, sidestepping the housing stability goal of the program. Rae will collaborate with City Council to enact an ordinance removing this loophole.

Better Enforce Existing Protections

Our city has laws targeting the harassment of tenants, and regulating the removal of rental units from the market. However, landlords still threaten to report tenants to ICE, and drag their feet for years on repairs. Tenants are evicted through improper Ellis Act processes where landlords are not truly seeking to leave the rental market, just to raise rents. And rent-controlled units across the city continue to illegally host short-term rentals. In a city with such intense housing stability, we need apartments for residents, not vacationers.

Rae will work with City Council and other City offices to improve enforcement of these laws, so that tenant protections actually protect tenants. Our City Attorney should be prioritizing fighting tenant harassment. Our Housing Department should be assessing Ellis Act applications with an eye towards whether they are legitimate or a scam. And we should be enacting a short-term rental data ordinance based on the newly passed SB 346, which allows local governments to require short-term rental platforms to share host, listing, and tax information. The City can cross-reference this data with our rent-controlled housing stock, and use it to ensure we are receiving the proper revenue from legal operations.

Overhaul State Laws on Tenant Protections

Costa Hawkins has left Los Angeles frozen in time with a Rent Stabilization ordinance that cannot protect tenants in units built after 1978. That is nearly 50 years of rental properties where tenants are unprotected, in a city where nearly two-thirds of our households are renters. Additionally, bad faith landlords continue to unlawfully evict tenants under the guise of the Ellis Act, and then re-rent the unit for higher rent. As Mayor, Rae will work with state legislators to unfreeze and unlock tools so we can protect more families and increase housing stability across the City.

Corporate ownership, exorbitant prices, mortgage scams, and a history of redlining and discrimination leave families struggling to hold onto their homes. Rae will strengthen anti-foreclosure measures and support forward-looking retrofits.

Foreclosure Assistance

Collaborate with the City Council to create a centralized source of funding for foreclosure assistance, so that resources are not siloed across council districts. Foreclosure assistance will ensure support not only families struggling to make mortgage payments, but also those at risk from foreclosure by their homeowner’s association (HOA). The fund will also include a “no wrong door policy” to ensure residents seeking support can get the help they need whether they reach out to their City Councilmember or the City directly. Additionally, Rae will require quarterly reporting, at minimum, to ensure the fund is perpetually resourced and that we are able to respond to hot spot issues in a timely manner.

Equitable Home Retrofit Program

Some of our families live in older homes that don’t meet minimum safety and infrastructure standards, putting them at risk and disqualifying them from participating in energy efficiency and electrification programs. Rae will create the Equitable Home Retrofit Program to preserve older homes by proactively funding retrofits. This support will improve health and safety, and advance environmental justice.

Each year, our taxes fund billions of dollars of homelessness services, with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) coordinating most of those funds. We know that many service providers care deeply about their clients and do powerful work supporting and housing them. But we also know that service providers deeply need support, and that their organizations need concrete accountability. Too often, we have no way to know whether the system is working, no way to report when it is failing, and no recourse when it does. Underperforming service providers have faced insufficient consequences, complaints from clients and staff have gone untracked and unanswered, and basic standards of care have been inconsistently defined and even more inconsistently enforced.

This must change. Transparency is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is what the people of Los Angeles are owed in exchange for our investment. Services must be functional, unhoused and precariously housed community members must be treated with dignity, and the dollars must add up. We will require LAHSA to complete and comply with corrective action plans for service providers who are not meeting their obligations, and to implement the Active Contract Management system so that contracts are monitored in real time rather than reviewed after the damage is done. We will establish a formal, independent complaints process so that clients and staff can raise concerns and receive a documented response with clear next steps.

We will set quantifiable, measurable standards for the quality of care and the dignity of interactions that service providers are required to meet, and build those standards into how providers are evaluated and whether their contracts are renewed. We will also support service providers with improved training and with efforts to reduce staff turnover.

At the same time, we will examine how LAHSA's core functions can be more effectively integrated into existing City and County departments, ensuring that public dollars are being used to serve unhoused Angelenos rather than sustain administrative overhead. The City of Los Angeles, including our thousands of residents struggling to find or sustain housing, deserves an effective, accountable system for these services.

Los Angeles’ housing disparities are the result of deliberate public policies including redlining, racially restrictive covenants, freeway construction, urban renewal, and discriminatory land use decisions that displaced Black communities and dispossessed Indigenous peoples. Los Angeles’ Reparations Advisory Commission has documented this harm. Without structural repair, displacement and segregation will continue to compound generational inequity.

As Mayor, Rae will establish a Housing Reparations Fund providing direct housing assistance to eligible Black Angelenos harmed by historic discrimination, implement a legally enforceable Right to Return policy for displaced families, create a Racially Motivated Takings Review body, and adopt a Tribal First Right of Refusal policy to facilitate structured Indigenous land return. Repairing these historical and ongoing injustices heals generations of harm, and makes our LA a better home for us all.