LACAHSA’s board will make some key housing decisions this week. Here’s what to know

Los Angeles County residents made it clear last year that they’re willing to pay for real solutions to the region’s affordable housing crisis. 

With nearly 57% of the vote last November, nearly 2 million voters passed Measure A, which levied a half-cent sales tax tax to fund more homeless services, along with ambitious plans to build more affordable housing — and keep people housed in the nation’s most populous county.

As that money now begins to flow,  a new government agency is tasked with managing the share allotted for affordable housing (AH) construction and homelessness prevention.

Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, or LACAHSA, is specifically not a homeless services agency. 

Instead its mission is to solve a problem that’s decades in the making: building affordable housing is more complicated than it should be, which means we’re not building enough and the projects that do get built take too long and cost too much.

Its goals center on three P’s:

• Production of affordable housing, aiming to build 9,000 new units by 2030
• Preservation, aiming to retain 2,100 affordable units by 2030
• Prevention, helping at-risk residents stay in their homes rather than enter homelessness

“Having those specific goals has really focused the board on coming up with innovative solutions and not repeating [longstanding models],” said Jonathan Jager, senior attorney in Public Counsel and a LACAHSA board member. “There's very much a consensus… that LACAHSA is not simply going to pass through funds to jurisdictions to be paying for existing things, which may or may not be contributing to solving the problem.”

LACAHSA aims to focus on the “upstream” issues of increasing the AH supply of protecting existing units for residents so they can stay housed, thus reducing the number of people falling into homelessness.

The agency describes its mission as “a fresh start rooted in urgency, designed for impact, and built to bring lasting solutions home.”

“I don't know of any startup government agency with roughly $384 million at its disposal,” interim CEO Ryan Johnson said. “The challenge is really making sure everybody's voice is heard in the process. That's challenging in the largest county in America. The fact that we've been able to overcome that barrier… is a really large testament.”

LACAHSA’s 21-member board of directors is made up of elected leaders — all five L.A. County supervisors, along with several mayors and councilmembers of L.A. and a few other cities — plus experts on AH construction, housing justice, tenants rights, preservation and more.

As the agency’s board of directors gear up to hit the ground running, a pair of key votes this week will shape the future of affordable housing for millions of people across the county.

But some agency insiders and local advocates worry competing pressures among LACAHSA’s leadership could undermine the impact of the agency’s work. 

What are they voting on?

The agency’s board will decide Wednesday on two foundational plans.

First is the FY 2025-26 budget for Production, Preservation & Ownership, or PPO. This accounts for the largest share of LACAHSA’s program dollars (60%) and represents the main mission of the agency: boosting AH construction, keeping existing units affordable and providing financial assistance to make homeownership attainable to more people.

The agency projects it will receive $382.7 million from Measure A. Of that, according the the draft budget:

• $53.2 million is designated for new construction of affordable housing
• $15.6 million for “flexible” spending, which can include preservation, acquisition, or rehabilitation of affordable housing, along with rent, homeownership and operating subsidies

Just how flexible that spending is has been a point of tension among board members. But while some agency watchers say that’s worrying, Johnson said it’s indicative of the inclusive process that’s giving diverse voices a seat at the table.

“Tensions can become divisions [but] we've made sure we've had a very transparent three-month process,” he said. “We let people have significant debate at the board level. We invite that kind of… friendly battle of ideas. And that's really made this process much more transparent and robust, and I think it's allowed tensions to be released.”

That’s where the second plan comes in — transitional program guidelines which spell out the initial “eligible uses” of LACAHSA’s funding. 

Locking in the guidelines “will allow time to refine program design in collaboration with Eligible Jurisdictions and community partners,” the draft guidelines state. “The Board may elect to amend these Guidelines throughout the year and prior to the next fiscal year.”

The draft guidelines list several eligible uses under PPO:

• Direct project investments - putting money straight into affordable housing projects
• Rent & operating subsidies - “ongoing, annual payments to address expenses such as utilities, maintenance, taxes, management, as well as debt service payments”
• LACAHSA mortgage
• Impact fund
• Community land trusts
• Social housing
• Ownership products

What are these ‘friendly battles’ over?

One example: interim housing.

During an April board meeting, Los Angeles Mayor and agency board member Karen Bass asked if LACAHSA funds could be used in the production of existing housing or interim housing. LACAHSA staff at the time agreed to report back on that possibility.

Bass’s query concerned some advocates, given that interim housing is a short-term tool to shelter people experiencing homelessness — not what LACAHSA was created to provide.

Asked about the inclusion of interim housing, Johnson told Think Forward that “LACAHSA cannot be used for interim housing.” 

But it appears there should be an asterisk with that statement. Johnson added that board members voted to allow the flexible PPO funds “to get used to initially create interim housing, but with a guarantee (via covenant) the interim housing is converted within 5 years to permanent.”

Some advocates argue that LACAHSA needs to stay focused on the upstream issues it was created to address: making it easier to build affordable housing and protect existing AH for residents so they don’t lose housing and enter homelessness to begin with. 

Another concept that will require more buy-in from some board members is social housing.

With this approach, the goal is to build or redevelop projects that are required to house residents at all income levels and empower them to self-govern key aspects of their community.

Alfonso Directo Jr., advocacy director at the Alliance for Community Transit - Los Angeles (ACT-LA), defined it this way:

“[It’s] a modern approach to living in California that's permanently affordable at all income levels and run by residents who live there.”

It’s a relatively new concept in Southern California, so Directo and other advocates point to Vienna as a model of what’s possible. The Austrian capital has roughly 220,000 apartments owned by the government or nonprofits, where residents pay a fraction of the housing costs incurred by tenants in other European cities. Many such communities are designed for walkability and convenient access to transit, grocery stores, retail and other amenities.

ACT-LA has been championing the idea, noting that it can also be designed to provide tenants a pathway to owning their housing units. That’s something LACAHSA’s draft guidelines also note as an opportunity where “feasible and desirable.” With the agency’s funding structure, it could take on social housing directly, but individual cities across L.A. County could also use allotted program funds to launch their own local projects.

Directo said current tensions around social housing are “more about lack of familiarity with it than any kind of real opposition to the model.” He said he feels “pretty optimistic” about the possibilities — though time is a factor.

“It feels like there's like one window closing, but there's still a big window of final program guidelines that LACAHSA is due to adopt in 2026,” Directo said.

And there have been efforts to get more familiar with the concept; several board members traveled to Vienna to see its social housing first-hand. That included Johnson, who called the experience “eye-opening.”

“I think social housing can come together to bring us a much more diverse living situation that we don't have under the current system,” he said. “I think that's the role we hope it'll play, and that's why it was prevalent in our budget.”

One more point of contention is forming around affordability covenants. Typically, when developers agree to include a certain number of affordable units in a project, those units remain affordable for an agreed-upon number of years — sometimes 30, but more recently 55. But at some point, that de facto affordability warranty expires. A growing number of housing advocates and elected leaders want to change that by extending affordability covenants in perpetuity. 

Jonathan Jager said this would be a game changer in the preservation space.

“If there are buildings where covenants are going to expire, LACAHSA can now play a really outsized role in making sure that that doesn't happen,” he said, explaining that the agency could step in to acquire properties or tack on more subsidies for units that are about to lose those covenants.

But for now, ending the sunset on affordability covenants has not been codified. Per LACAHSA’s draft program guidelines:

“For rental new construction, acquisition, or rehabilitation projects, the minimum period of affordability shall be 55 years. For ownership housing, the minimum period of affordability shall be 45 years.”

Jager said he thinks jurisdictional leaders and developers are open to the idea.

The tension has been in “just figuring out technically, how LACAHSA can do that when we're going to be mixing this money with potentially other [funding sources] that might have different rules,” he said.

Directo said much of the contention on these key issues comes down to certain people “who are attached to a particular model because of just how their careers developed.”

“We're proposing something a little different for good reason that they can also see, but just in a way that hasn't yet played out in Los Angeles,” he added. “It takes a little bit of imagination [and] receptiveness to a new way of doing things in order for us to get past this current barrier.”

A coalition of advocates for housing justice and affordability are weighing in as well. The Our Future Los Angeles Coalition sent a letter to LACAHSA leaders last week, suggesting several tweaks to the agency’s transitional guidelines. Those include making affordability covenants permanent, committing to directly funding the construction of social housing and clarifying “that interim housing is not an allowable use of LACAHSA funds.”

Another key ‘differentiator’ in the works: social bonds

LACAHSA’s board will also decide this week whether to advance a plan to activate even more funding to achieve its goals. That would happen via social bonds, as in selling bonds on the open market and using the proceeds to augment funding for construction, preservation and other agency programs.

Johnson said that would be “a differentiator for LACAHSA” that allows the agency to “tackle the problem at scale.”

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.

“Every year you wait,it gets more expensive to do a project that's affordable, attainable or market rate,” he said. “So if we're able to bring forward borrowing, that's a significant advantage.”

Want to attend this week’s board meeting?

LACAHSA’s board is set to meet Wednesday, Aug. 20 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: 2544 957 3892

Password: lacahsa082025

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

Access code: 254 495 73892

Password: 52224720