By Rob Eshman | The New York Times
Los Angeles is a city historically segregated by race and class. But in our slice of the city, multimillionaires in newly built villas live side by side with the affordable apartments of the people who clean their pools, watch their children and cook their El Pollo Loco orders.
My family’s neighborhood may be an outlier — or moving inexorably toward full gentrification — but at least for the last three decades, it has also served as vibrant proof that the notion that affordable housing lowers property values is overblown, if not flat-out wrong.
That enduring belief has contributed to widespread not-in-my-backyard opposition that makes building affordable housing in higher-income areas so difficult.
“It is total NIMBYism,” said Adlai Wertman of USC’s Marshall School of Business. “It’s ‘I want to help poor people, just not in my neighborhood.’”
Our neighborhood provides plenty of anecdotal evidence that mixing housing and income levels doesn’t sink property values. In a four-block area, low- and moderate-income apartment buildings and multifamily units are sprinkled among six mega-mansions and older, middle-class single-family homes like ours, which was built in 1924. The lower-income units are not government-subsidized.
In the mustard-colored building, Marin Ceja, a self-employed pool technician, pays $2,000 per month for his two-bedroom apartment, more than $3,000 less than the average for a two-bedroom rental in Venice. Assuming Ceja’s across-the-street new neighbors financed their home with 20% down, they’ll be paying $20,000 per month.
The presence of lower-cost multiunit buildings hasn’t driven down the resale value of homes. The average sale price of homes in Venice has increased by a million dollars in the last 10 years. In the last year, while home prices have declined by 7% countywide, in our neighborhood they rose over 4%.
Numerous studies show our corner of Venice, east of Lincoln Boulevard and north of Venice Boulevard, is not unique. Low-income housing has a positive impact, or no impact, on neighborhood house values, according to a majority of studies reviewed by A-Mark Foundation, the research and policy nonprofit I lead. Two studies concluded that low-income housing had negative effects on property values in some specific cases.
One 10-year study that looked at property values in the least affordable housing markets in the U.S. — 45% of which were in California — found that newly built low-income housing had no effect on state property values.
That’s been the experience of affordable housing builders too. Loren Bloch, who spent decades developing affordable housing in Southern California, told me that when he insisted on building 22 low-income housing units along with 37 market-rate units in Oxnard in 2001, other developers thought he was crazy.
“But people sucked them up,” he said, “and they lived side by side together.”
Oxnard real estate prices around Bloch’s development have risen by double digits since then.
Tom Safran spent four decades convincing wary, lawyered-up residents that mixed neighborhoods work for everyone, so long as the building quality is high.
After finally winning city approval for 154 affordable units in Del Rey on Culver Boulevard, Safran faced off against a handful of neighbors whose lawsuits delayed construction two and a half years, before they settled on 124 units — which more than 1,800 people applied for in 2013.
His company faced similar opposition to his Thatcher Yard development in Venice, despite bringing in Steve Giannetti, who designed Lady Gaga’s Malibu spread, as architect. Residents fought to scale back the project from 160 units to 98, overruling Safran’s contention that as long as valuable Venice land was available, it should house the most diverse kinds of units, and the largest number of them, that was reasonable.
“Communities work best when they have a range of incomes,” Safran told me. “When people who teach school or do policing or work behind the counter in the dry cleaners don’t have to drive an hour and a half, it creates a more successful society.”
Rob Eshman is chief executive of the A-Mark Foundation.
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