April 2, 2024

Hi All,

On the Housing Element chart we sent you, you will see that single family neighborhoods are not touched until you get to the Faith Based Program. 

The Faith Based Program is based on Senate Bill 4 that was passed last year that allows religious organizations to build affordable housing on properties they own- primarily on their main campuses.  We Opposed this bill last year because we felt that it needed to specify that only property adjacent to their main campuses should be eligible.  And although the bill passed as written, we were told that mostly the development would be on faith based campuses and the bill stated that to qualify property must be owned before Jan 2024.

Now the Planning Department has decided to change that criteria and remove the date for eligibility  completely so that anytime a religious institution buys land in any area including single family neighborhoods they can build apartments.  This is a huge work-around from what the City promised when they told us Single family neighborhoods were exempt from more density in the Housing Element.  

Tomorrow Katy Yaroslavsky has a motion to consider this new criteria for Faith Based Programs. If this gets approved, every single family neighborhood is vulnerable.   We need to speak up about this now during the comment period.  We worked with Planning to find greater density and affordable housing in each of our communities and we were told single-family areas would not be upzoned. Now, before Planning can understand the effectiveness of the Housing Element Incentive Programs they have decided to expand the eligibility of the Faith Based Programs. This now offers a huge loophole to developers to joint venture with a religious institution to buy up single family lots.

We think that is wrong.  Thank you to Barbara Broide for alerting us after she was contacted by the LA Times.  Prior to this no one had been notified by the City or any Council Office about this change. We need to get in front of this.

Tomorrow we will send you our email campaign to the mayor for her support of our Guidelines for ED 1.  But starting next week we will begin an even bigger campaign against the removal of the Faith Based criteria. 

Best,

Maria, Jeff, Cindy, Marc