Imelda Padilla Accidentally Told The Truth About Local Control

Yesterday Jon Lovett from Pod Save America released an interview he did with State Senator Scott Wiener and Los Angeles City Council member Imelda Padilla about a proposed state law that would legalize apartment buildings near train stations. You can watch the whole thing here:

This conversation touched on a few important points about local government and how we do urban planning for housing in California. I want to highlight those points and add some context.

If you think about urban planning at all, and most normal people don’t, you probably think the process goes something like this: planning departments figure out how much housing we’re going to need, then they do public outreach and decide where housing growth is going to go, then they set the zoning rules that control how those homes get built. When someone comes along and wants to build those homes, they draw up a plan that follows the rules and get the permits they need from the planning department. If the home builder needs special permission to ignore one of the rules because of weird conditions on the site, they go to the planning commission and city council and get it.

This is how zoning is supposed to work in theory. It is EXTREMELY not how it works in practice.

In reality, city councilors try to keep the zoning as restrictive as possible, so that it’s basically impossible to actually build anything viable while following all of the rules. They do this because when it’s impossible to build anything without special permission, local elected officials get the power to personally approve or deny every single proposed project.

In cities like LA where council members are elected by specific districts, each member usually gets to be in charge of what gets built in their district. This is why Councilmember Padilla says “I generally believe that a council member's number one job description, especially in the city of Los Angeles, is land use decisions.”

That system sets up a dynamic where the council member gets to make all kinds of demands as a condition of approving the project. Sometimes these demands are for good things: Councilmember Padilla talks about how she negotiates for outdoor play space for kids and shaded space for seniors:

Just as often, the demands are for bad things. Later in the interview, Councilmember Padilla brags about how she cut the height of an affordable housing building in half, so it will house a lot fewer poor people who need homes, and got more parking built at the project even though it’s across the street from a high quality transit stop:

Often, this leads to straight up corruption: former LA City Councilmember Jose Huizar is in federal prison right now because he demanded thousands of dollars in cash and favors as a condition of approving projects in his district.

And like, I get it. If you’re a local elected official, having rich developers come to you and beg for permission to build something is probably pretty fun, and using your power to demand changes to the project feels like you’re making big deals and driving a hard bargain for your people. Taking that away probably does feel like losing a huge part of your job.

But no matter what the specific outcomes we get on any specific project, this is not good governance. We should have clear rules about what you can build and where you can build it instead of this highly politicized and capricious system where the zoning on paper has no real relationship to what actually gets built because politically-connected developers can bend the rules, while regular people have no idea what is going to get built in their neighborhoods. Not only does this way of doing things create incentives for corruption, it erodes public faith in government and motivates growth revolts.

This is also a terrible way to do housing policy. When the system is set up so that you can’t build any new housing unless you kiss the local elected official’s ring, you get a major housing shortage. And when you have a housing shortage, you get high rents, high home prices, and a lot of homelessness.

The solution here is just basic good governance and the rule of law for housing. We should gather public input and set clear rules about where we want housing to get built and what it should look like, then actually let people build the housing we’ve decided we want. If we want new housing to include green space for kids and space for seniors or whatever, we should just write that into the zoning code. If someone wants special permission to build something different, they should be able to get it; but the default setting has to be “you can build if you follow the rules.”

While the details of each individual law are complex—shout out to the land use lawyers, we love you—the basic thesis of YIMBYism is very straightforward: we should plan for growth in the places people want to live by setting clear rules about what you can build, then actually build those homes.

And if this makes being an LA City Council member less fun and exciting, well, “the council members’ jobs might become less fun and interesting” is pretty far down on the list of public policy problems in Los Angeles, the city with the least affordable housing, the worst household overcrowding in the country, and where two homeless people die on the streets almost every single day. I’m sure the council members will find something else to do with their time.