The LA City Council’s ad hoc committee on United to House Los Angeles (Measure ULA) held its final hearing on Friday, May 29. By 2-1 it set aside a proposal from Councilmembers John Lee and Marqueece Harris-Dawson to put a mansion-tax cut on the November ballot, advancing instead a narrower five-year pilot that would reduce the rate to 1.5 percent for newly built affordable housing projects.1 The committee dissolved on Sunday, May 31.
That was the smaller of the two fights. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has now qualified a statewide ballot measure for November that would effectively repeal Measure ULA in its entirety. A separate coalition of developers, union locals, and advocacy groups calling itself “Mend It, Don’t End It” is pushing the city to make exemptions and reforms. The political center is organizing to roll the program back. The political left is fighting to defend it in its current form, which it should. But defense is not the same as expansion, and a defensive posture is not the same as asking what ULA could become.
Since taking effect in April 2023, ULA has raised $1.1 billion from 1,633 real estate transactions, funded roughly 800 new affordable units, and helped stabilize thousands of renters facing eviction. The city projects about $500 million in the coming fiscal year, roughly half what proponents initially promised but still the largest pool of independent public housing capital Los Angeles has produced in a generation. Measures like it rarely survive contact with organized capital. Seattle’s 2018 head tax, a far smaller levy on large employers meant to fund homelessness services, was repealed less than a month after passage under an Amazon-led pressure campaign; the tax would have cost Amazon ten million dollars a year against a single quarter’s net income of $1.6 billion.2 ULA passed by ballot and has held for three years. That endurance is what November now puts to a vote. The Rent Stabilization Ordinance has been tightened in parallel: just-cause protections extended to nearly every rental unit, the annual rent-cap formula pulled lower, tenant anti-harassment enforcement finally given teeth. Each of these was a fight tenant organizers spent the better part of a decade winning.
Rent stabilization holds the line. ULA secures the funding. Neither, on its own, redraws the segregated geography we inherited.
Los Angeles still likes to think of itself as a progressive city. It elects democratic socialists to its council. It passed a mansion tax by ballot when the state legislature would not. It builds, at least rhetorically, in the direction of decommodification. And yet a child born this year in Crenshaw lives in a fundamentally different city than a child born this year in Westwood. The schools they will attend, the medical care they will access, the wealth their parents can build, the police force that will engage them: each of these tracks to within a few square miles of where their parents could afford rent. This is not a market accident. It is the visible footprint of decades of federal and state housing policy that was, in Richard Rothstein’s exact phrase, de jure segregation by design.3
Rothstein's central claim in The Color of Law is that the racial geography of American cities is the deliberate product of explicit state action: federal redlining, FHA underwriting standards that subsidized white-only suburbs, exclusionary zoning enforced as state policy, public-housing siting that confirmed rather than dissolved the color line. In his closing chapter, "Considering Fixes," he draws the corollary. Because segregation was built by state action, only equally explicit state remedies can undo it.4 Markets did not produce these walls. Markets cannot dissolve them.
I’m pondering what an LA-specific remedy might look like. The federal path Rothstein contemplates, which includes direct subsidies for descendants of redlined families to buy into formerly exclusionary suburbs, is politically and judicially closed. The California path is narrower than it should be, in part because Proposition 209 forecloses race-conscious targeting. But the city has, for the first time in a generation, a permanent and independent revenue stream in Measure ULA. The municipal Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) is legally empowered to acquire property. The argument here is that those two facts, used together, make possible a municipal program of structural integration through class- and geography-targeted public acquisition, and that this is the most consequential housing fight in front of LA voters and our City Council right now.
the political imagination has to be able to conceive of remedies proportional to the harm before it can negotiate down to what is achievable
Rothstein's most provocative proposal, set out in section VI of his concluding chapter, is a federal program that would purchase fifteen percent of the houses coming up for sale in Levittown, NJ each year at market rates and resell them to qualified African American families at the price their grandparents would have paid had they not been illegally excluded.5 He grants immediately that no presently constituted Congress would adopt this and no presently constituted court would uphold it. He offers it anyway, because the political imagination has to be able to conceive of remedies proportional to the harm before it can negotiate down to what is achievable.
Los Angeles has its own Levittowns. Lakewood, the postwar San Fernando Valley tract developments, the curated subdivisions strung along the foothills: these were the engines of mid-century white wealth formation, built with FHA-insured mortgages systematically denied to Black Angelenos. Mike Davis traced this geography in City of Quartz with the precision of someone who understood that the suburban grid was a political artifact, not a market outcome.6 What looked like a housing market was an engineered transfer of public wealth into private white hands, with Black families locked into renting or into the small ring of neighborhoods that redlining maps would tolerate.
The compounding effects of that transfer are not historical. Rothstein notes that about one-third of middle- and upper-income Black families currently live in neighborhoods bordering severely disadvantaged areas, while only six percent of similar-income white families do.7 In Los Angeles, this means a Black middle-class family in Inglewood or View Park lives a different distance from concentrated poverty, from over-policed corridors, from underfunded schools, than a white middle-class family in Mar Vista or Sherman Oaks at identical incomes. The walls did not come down with the Fair Housing Act. The mortgage interest deduction has, for sixty years, quietly subsidized the descendants of those who got in. The scale of that subsidy deserves a pause. Even after the 2017 tax law cut the deduction's cost roughly in half, the federal government still spends on it a sum equal to about half of everything it spends on low-income housing support, through a single program whose benefits flow only to households wealthy enough to itemize.8
How are these walls maintained today? Not by signs at the city limits. They are maintained by zoning. Single-family-only districts, minimum lot sizes, square-footage floors, parking minimums, design review processes calibrated to make multifamily development economically unworkable: these are the descendants of the restrictive covenants the Supreme Court struck down in Shelley v. Kraemer, preserved in the language of the building code.9 When Rothstein argues in section VIII for banning exclusionary zoning outright, he is naming the mechanism honestly.
The federal route he sketches in section IX, John Boger’s proposed Fair Share Act, would penalize homeowners in non-integrating jurisdictions by stripping their mortgage interest and property tax deductions.10 The proposal is elegant. It is also beyond municipal reach, since federal tax code cannot be amended by city ordinance. But California has its own version of leverage. The state's Regional Housing Needs Allocation already assigns each jurisdiction a numerical share of regional housing need by income band. The independent enclaves embedded in LA County, Beverly Hills, Calabasas, San Marino, are subject to those allocations and have repeatedly failed to meet them. The state's response has been mostly procedural. It does not have to be.
The model worth studying carefully is Montgomery County, Maryland. Its countywide inclusionary zoning ordinance requires developers in even the wealthiest communities to set aside between twelve and fifteen percent of units for moderate-income families. Then, crucially, the public housing authority purchases a third of those set-aside units for rental to the lowest-income families.11 The county is not merely a regulator. It is an active buyer in its own most exclusive markets. Rothstein notes the measurable result: significantly higher educational outcomes for low-income Black children attending school in the county’s wealthiest suburbs. The mechanism works because the public authority moves the housing from a commodity in a private market to a unit of public provision in the geography where private markets would otherwise exclude.
This is the move Los Angeles has not made.
The seventy percent of ULA revenue not statutorily locked for homelessness prevention is the most important pool of public housing capital LA has generated in fifty years. The question is how it gets spent. The default trajectory, the one institutional inertia will pull toward without organized pressure, is to fund affordable-housing developers building where they already build, which means South LA, the eastern Valley, the periphery of downtown. The pilot the council committee advanced last Friday, a reduced ULA rate on newly built affordable housing projects, runs in exactly this groove. It is a subsidy to the existing affordable-development pipeline. It will produce real units. It will not produce integration. It will deepen the existing geography rather than redraw it.
Anyone proposing to spend housing money in Los Angeles also has to answer for Proposition HHH. Voters approved $1.2 billion in 2016 to build ten thousand units of supportive housing over a decade. Three years in, by the accounting in Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern’s Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the most rigorous recent empirical study of the American crisis, one percent of those units were ready for occupancy. Per-unit costs projected at $350,000 to $414,000 had reached a median of $531,000, with the bond covering roughly a quarter of each unit’s cost and the remainder assembled from the usual stack of tax credits and debt.12 The lesson of HHH is not that public housing money fails. The lesson is that pushing public money through the private construction pipeline is the slowest and most expensive way to turn dollars into homes. ULA’s first three years, roughly 800 units funded, echo HHH’s pace for the same reason: the pipeline is the same. Acquisition is the fast path, and the pandemic proved it at scale. When governments bought hotels and motels outright to house people during COVID, they added habitable units in months rather than years and at a fraction of new-construction cost, a model the state of California formalized as Project Homekey.13 An acquisition-first ULA strategy, aimed at high-resource neighborhoods, is how the city avoids running the HHH experiment a second time under a new name.
The alternative, then, is to direct HACLA’s acquisition program, which already exists and already buys property, toward the “high and highest resource areas” mapped by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee: West LA, the coast, the wealthier parts of the Valley, the foothills. Pair that with a municipal acquisition quota on new multifamily development in those areas, modeled on Montgomery County’s, set somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent. Target eligibility by Area Median Income rather than race, which keeps the program inside the constraints of Proposition 209 while in practice reaching the working-class families most cut out of those neighborhoods.14 Bundle the housing placements with the social infrastructure that makes integration livable: transit subsidies, childcare networks, school stabilization funding for new arrivals, partnerships with the public-health system. Without that layer, integration is just expensive relocation. With it, it becomes the spatial expression of a universal right to the city.
One structural caveat has to be named here. Article XXXIV of the California Constitution, a relic of the 1950 real-estate-industry backlash to public housing, requires majority voter approval before any “state public body” may develop “low-rent housing.” HACLA acquisitions can be structured to fall under the provision’s effective threshold through mixed-income financing, and the city has, when it has chosen to, placed pre-authorization measures on the ballot to clear large-scale acquisitions in advance. Article XXXIV is a real constraint. It is not a fatal one. It is one of the few openly segregationist artifacts in the state’s foundational law still doing daily work, and a serious municipal acquisition program is, among other things, an argument for finally repealing it.15
This is what an active public buyer looks like. HACLA stops being the operator of last-resort housing. It becomes the city's instrument for breaking commodified geography.
Three objections will come, and each is worth taking seriously.
The first is that integration policy disrespects the communities Black and brown Angelenos have built. South LA, Boyle Heights, Pico-Union: these are not zones of disinvestment. They are neighborhoods with deep institutional memory, civic networks, churches, mutual aid traditions forged precisely because the rest of the city excluded them. To treat integration as an automatic good is to repeat a paternalism this city already has too much practice in. The right response is to refuse the framing. The proposal is not to empty those neighborhoods. It is to fund them at full strength while also giving a working-class family a real choice. Stay in a Crenshaw or a Boyle Heights finally invested in commensurate to its residents’ contributions to the city, or move into a publicly owned unit in Westwood near jobs and well-funded schools without facing a rental paywall. The first is reparation through investment. The second is reparation through access. Either is a form of self-determination. Neither requires the other to be displacement.
The second objection is that municipal housing funds belong exclusively to permanent supportive housing for the chronically unhoused, and that anything else is misallocation. The objection deserves to be met at its strongest, because in Los Angeles it carries the force of what everyone can see. Three quarters of unhoused Angelenos sleep unsheltered, on sidewalks, in vehicles, in the parks; in New York, which operates under a legal right to shelter, the figure is under ten percent.16 LA’s crisis is the most visible in the country, and a visible crisis produces an intuitive policy: direct every public dollar at the people in front of you.
But the visible crisis and the causal structure point in different directions. Colburn and Aldern’s core finding is that rates of homelessness across American cities track two variables, rents and rental vacancy, and are not explained by poverty, addiction, mental illness, weather, or the generosity of local welfare. Detroit and Cleveland are far poorer than Los Angeles and have a fraction of its homelessness; Seattle’s per capita homelessness rate runs four times Cincinnati’s.17 Individual vulnerability determines who loses their housing. The housing market determines how many people must lose it. In their image, an injury may explain why a particular player loses at musical chairs, but only the number of chairs explains how many players end up standing. The encampment is the output of a machine whose intake valve is the rental market, and a city cannot shrink it by serving only the people already inside.
The ULA ordinance already directs roughly thirty percent of funds to homelessness prevention, which is the appropriate floor. The remaining seventy percent should be deployed where it breaks the inflow, which means stabilizing the rent-burdened workers one missed paycheck from the street. Bus drivers, school aides, hospital techs, line cooks: the “missing middle” of the LA workforce is what the next wave of homelessness will be made of if we wait. Social housing, understood as a universal workforce good rather than a residual program for the most destitute, is the upstream intervention that makes the downstream programs sustainable, and the empirical conclusion matches: no scale of shelter investment can end homelessness without permanent affordable housing on the far side of it.18 Vienna did not build the largest social housing system in Europe by treating it as charity. It built it by treating housing as infrastructure.19
The third objection is the most strategically serious. Aggressive public acquisition quotas, opponents will argue, will trigger a developer strike, with private capital fleeing to Orange County, Ventura, or the Inland Empire, shrinking total supply and pushing rents higher across the region. Rothstein anticipated the structural version of this in section IX when he warned that single-jurisdiction inclusionary zoning fails because developers simply build next door. The answer there, as here, is regional and state enforcement: California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) mandates with real consequences for non-compliance, state-level penalties on independent enclaves that absorb fleeing capital, a coordinated regional approach rather than a city-only one. There is also a more honest socialist answer worth saying out loud. If private developers refuse to build housing unless they can extract margins incompatible with public provision, they have admitted that the private market cannot guarantee shelter as a human right. This is not a conclusion confined to socialists. Colburn and Aldern, who write with no ideological commitments beyond the evidence, grant that developers are right about their own incentives, that profit-seeking capital will not supply housing at the bottom of the market, and conclude that housing must therefore be decommodified, because shelter "demands a different treatment than iPhones."20 A strike by capital is not a reason for the city to retreat. It is a reason for the city to step in directly. ULA funds can capitalize public construction, fund land trusts, contract with union builders, and bypass the private development pipeline entirely. The threat of a developer strike is meant to be an argument against decommodification. It is in fact the argument for it.
Returning to the top, Friday’s committee vote was a defensive win. The Jarvis repeal effort is a defensive fight already in motion. The “Mend It, Don’t End It” coalition is organized to negotiate ULA’s edges. None of this, taken together, asks what ULA could become. The energy on the local political map is on preservation, not expansion.
The view from Sacramento is no better. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee, is running a serious housing platform, but it is not a structural-integration argument. He promises to use the powers of the attorney general's office, which he has held, to sue non-compliant cities into meeting their RHNA obligations, and to fund a stabilizing program to keep at-risk families housed. The one genuinely structural idea raised in this year's gubernatorial forum, Tom Steyer's roughly $22 billion split-roll proposition to fund municipalities directly, left the race when Steyer did, in the June primary.21 Becerra is running, fundamentally, on the proposition that the California housing crisis is a supply problem to be solved by helping the market produce more and by making cities permit more. The structural question of public ownership in high-resource neighborhoods, of integration as an explicit aim of public investment, of Article XXXIV as the artifact it is and the obstacle it remains, is simply not on the table.
That gap is the reason the LA municipal case matters now. If structural integration is going to happen anywhere in California in the next decade, it is going to happen because a city does it. The state legislature will not lead. Becerra, the likely next governor, is not proposing to. The federal government has no plans. The path runs through HACLA as an active buyer in the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, capitalized by ULA, structured around Area Median Income (AMI) targeting to survive Proposition 209, bundled with the social infrastructure that makes integration livable, and disciplined by a regional enforcement regime that prevents capital flight. None of this is conceptually new. Montgomery County has been doing a version of it for forty years. What would be new is doing it in Los Angeles, at the scale ULA now makes possible, and naming it for what it is: a program of spatial reparations.
To call it that is to insist on the connection Rothstein insisted on, between the deliberate construction of segregation and the deliberate construction of its undoing. The walls of this city were built by design. So will the doorways.
Aaron Schrank, “LA City Council committee sidelines ballot measure to cut ‘mansion tax’ rate,” LAist, May 29, 2026. The committee voted 2-1; the original Lee–Harris-Dawson motion was referred to the Council’s rules committee and may still move forward. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s statewide repeal measure has qualified for the November 2026 ballot. Revenue and unit figures are from the LA Housing Department, as reported in the same article.
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 189-190.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017). The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is the organizing argument of the book.
Rothstein, The Color of Law, ch. 12 (”Considering Fixes”).
Rothstein, The Color of Law, 202-203.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990). On the FHA’s role in shaping the postwar Southern California suburb, see ch. 3.
Rothstein, The Color of Law, 203.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 182.
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
Rothstein, The Color of Law, 206. The proposal originated in John Charles Boger, “Toward Ending Residential Segregation: A Fair Share Proposal for the Next Reconstruction,” North Carolina Law Review 71 (1993).
Rothstein, The Color of Law, 206.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 183. Their figures reflect HHH’s record through roughly the end of 2019; the program’s later completions do not change the per-unit cost picture or the pace of its early years.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 200-201.
California Constitution, art. I, § 31 (Proposition 209, approved 1996). The provision forbids race-conscious preferences in state and local public programs. AMI-targeted programs are unaffected by it.
California Constitution, art. XXXIV (adopted 1950). The provision was the product of the real-estate industry's backlash to federal public housing expansion under the Housing Act of 1949 and has remained one of the most consequential structural barriers to non-market housing in the state.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 40-41. The figures are from the 2019 point-in-time counts: roughly 92 percent of New York City’s homeless population was sheltered, while more than 75 percent of Los Angeles’s was unsheltered.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 10-11, 14-15, 28-29. The musical chairs image is theirs.
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 192, 198-199.
For an introduction to the historical Vienna model, see Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
Colburn and Aldern, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, 172-173.
"California Gubernatorial Candidates Housing Forum Moderated by Ezra Klein," hosted by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, The New York Times, San Francisco Foundation, and Housing Action Coalition, May 8, 2026, https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/blog/california-gubernatorial-candidates-housing-forum-moderated-by-ezra-klein/. Becerra's positions on RHNA enforcement and a stabilization fund for at-risk renters were stated in response to questions on state-local relations and homelessness prevention. Steyer's $22 billion split-roll proposition, which targeted a commercial real estate tax loophole, did not advance past the June primary.