How will LACAHSA's renter protection efforts work? Leaders decide on Wednesday

More than 90,000 eviction notices were filed in the city of Los Angeles alone last year, according to data from the L.A. Housing Department. Through August of this year, 53,000 notices have been logged. Researchers say 40,000 to 50,000 eviction cases — when a landlord acts on a notice — are typically filed countywide each year. 

The Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, or LACAHSA, was created with a voter mandate to help reduce those figures as part of its broader efforts to tackle the region’s affordable housing crisis.

LACAHSA’s goals center on three P’s:

Production of new affordable housing, aiming to build 9,000 new units by 2030

Preservation of existing affordable housing, aiming to retain 2,100 affordable units by 2030

Prevention of residents losing their housing and experiencing homelessness

Board members last month approved guidelines for its Production, Preservation & Ownership (PPO) programs. During their next meeting on Sept. 17, they’ll aim to lock in initial guidelines related to the third ‘P’ — responding to people at high risk of homelessness with programs that help them stay housed.

This month’s meeting marks “one of the final steps to having all of the programmatic elements solidified and in place,” said Jonathan Jager, senior attorney in Public Counsel and a LACAHSA board member.

“Then we can move forward with spending the money for the renter protections and issuing [social] bonds to amplify our affordable housing production,” he added (more on that below).

LACAHSA projects it will receive $382.7 million from Measure A for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Thirty percent of that pot — about $114.8 million — will be designated for Renter Protection & Homelessness Prevention (RPHP).

The transitional guidelines agency leaders are set to discuss and decide on will chart the path for how exactly that money can be used to help low-income tenants across L.A. County. 

“A large part of what's being considered… was dictated by Measure A,” said Natalie Knott, a supervising attorney with the eviction defense unit at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and LACAHSA board member. “The voters decided, with consultation with experts, what tenants need to be able to stabilize their housing and stop falling into homelessness.”

That includes legal assistance for tenants facing eviction, renter education, emergency rental assistance, flexible financial assistance and short-term income support for low-income residents struggling to make ends meet.

After monthslong public comment and listening sessions, agency staff made some key edits to the guidelines. Among those:

• Financial assistance cannot exceed $36,000 per household within a 24 month period
• Short-term income support up to $2,000 a month per household
• 20% of funding must be allocated to legal services
• 40% of funding must be allocated to emergency rental and flexible financial assistance
• Added language making it clear that “RPHP funds are not intended to provide support and services to people experiencing homelessness or to households that own a home or have a mortgage.”

So how does Knott, the LACAHSA board’s resident expert on renter protections, view the guidelines? She has mixed feelings, she explained. 

On one hand, she is “heartened” that elected officials — the city councilmembers and county supervisors that make up the majority of the 21-member board — support giving tenants more money through financial assistance and making programs more flexible, because often rigidity means that certain people get locked out of assistance and help.” On the other hand, she voiced concerns that the funding is “seen as the catch-all within the county.”

 “Unfortunately, it's a pretty small pot of money, considering how many tenants there are in Los Angeles County,” she said, “and I am concerned that the program is trying to grow in too many directions, and we're going to not be able to help as many people as we could if we narrow the scope of our help a little bit.”

Meanwhile, advocates from the Our Future LA coalition have called for a few additional tweaks to the guidelines. Those include:

• Increase the minimum allocation for Legal Services and Renter Education from 20% to 33% when the board makes the program guidelines permanent next year
• Remove the provision allowing for the reallocation of unspent legal services funds. Advocates argue that the current uncertainty over the fate of those funds “makes it very difficult to budget, plan for, and scale eviction defense throughout the county”
• Reduce the allowable total assistance from $36,000 over a 24-month period to $20.000 over an 18-month period

Expect more movement on social bonds

The board is also set to further its consideration of creating social bonds to augment its program dollars, specifically for its construction and preservation efforts.

If that plan gets approved, which could happen toward the end of the calendar year, the agency would issue bonds to sell on the open market.

Agency staff projects that selling social bonds could nearly quadruple LACAHSA’s PPO budget for this fiscal year, taking it from about $68.8 million to roughly $264.8 million.

But this month, LACAHSA staff is asking the board to approve funding “to secure a team of professionals that can advise on the issuance of the social bond.”

“These experts will provide the specialized expertise needed to advance feasibility analysis of a social bond as a financing tool to achieve LACAHSA’s Measure A metrics for goals,” staff wrote in their agenda report.

For Jager, the prospect of the bonds is exciting and he appreciates the board’s incremental approach to exploring their feasibility.

“We haven't necessarily committed ourselves to something if we find out that it's not the right choice,” he said. “But I think given we're in an environment where land is expensive, materials are expensive, there's so much uncertainty — given tariffs… the more we can lock in and within the next year be certain of what housing is going to get produced, pulling a lot of that money to the first year through the bond, I think is a really smart decision for the agency.”

Want to observe this week’s board meeting?

LACAHSA’s board is set to meet Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 1 p.m. at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Headquarters, 700 N. Alameda Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

To view the meeting remotely, click this link. You’ll need these codes:

Event number: 2531 445 1080

Password: lacahsa091725

You can also listen in over the phone by calling (213) 306-3065. You’ll need to input the following:

Access code: 2531 445 1080

Password: 52224720