Hundreds of affordable housing units funded by new L.A. County agency
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For Michael Miller, getting a project off the ground is usually a bureaucratic juggling act.When building affordable housing like the 200-plus units he’s planning in Harbor Gateway and Stevenson Ranch, the president of Bold Communities said he’d typically be forced to find funding through three to five different local and state agencies.
This time around, he’s going to just one: the newly established L.A.County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency.The agency, known as LACAHSA, bills itself as a one-stop shop for affordable housing financing with offers of construction loans, permanent loans, rental subsidies and other types of funding products.
It’s betting that in doing so developers can build low-income homes quicker and cheaper in a county with a bruising affordability and homelessness crisis.There’s some evidence this is the case.
According to the Terner Center at UC Berkeley, each additional public funding source an affordable developer uses, on average, delays a project four months and increases total cost by $20,460 per unit — more than $2 million for a 100-unit community.“We want to build housing cheaper and quicker, because that means more units,” LACAHSA interim chief executive Ryan Johnson said.On Wednesday, the agency gave approval to just over $100 million for 10 projects, including the two from Bold Communities.
The Terner Center said going to multiple agencies for needed funding adds costs because developers have to endure higher legal, staffing and compliance costs to manage additional applications and contracts.Each process, of course, also takes time, during which developers pay additional holding costs on predevelopment loans, all the while inflation pushes up the cost of materials and wages.
Miller estimated by going through only LACAHSA, he could cut down total costs around 5% to 10%.LACAHSA, founded through state legislation in 2022, rece...