Los Angeles requires Pacific Palisades rebuild to have low-income housing: report

A law in Los Angeles could require the Pacific Palisades to include “affordable” housing to replace older buildings destroyed in the Southern California Wildfires, and for newer buildings where owners cannot prove that their rental units had no low-income tenants in the last five years.

According to The Washington Examiner, the new Resident Protections Ordinance (RPO), which will go into effect shortly, requires that “in Higher Opportunity Areas and Moderate Opportunity Areas, units deemed or presumed to be occupied by persons or families above the lower income category shall be replaced with low-income units.” The ordinance applies to housing “subject to a form of rent or price control through a local government’s valid exercise of its police power.”

In LA, which includes the Pacific Palisades, which has been designated a “High Opportunity Area," all apartment buildings built before October 1978 are subject to the city’s rent control ordinance. Therefore, all units in those buildings would need to be replaced with “affordable” housing units and lower-income renters would move in, replacing those renters that might have a higher income.

For all buildings constructed prior to 1978, owners have to prove that over the last five years before the fire’s destruction, that the tenants had a high income. If not the city will apply “the percentage of Extremely Low Income, Very Low Income, and Low-Income Households in the same proportion as their share of all renter households within the City of Los Angeles.”

According to the Examiner, this means that “affordability” will likely be determined based on citywide median household income, which is 50 percent of the median income in the Palisades.

Los Angeles Housing Production Institute director Joseph Cohen posted on X, “Under the Resident Protections Ordinance, in most cases, landlords will be required to replace apartments burned down in the Palisades with low-income units. Displaced residents will then find themselves ineligible to return because they won’t meet the income requirements.”

During a recent interview on CNN, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said property owners in Pacific Palisades won’t be allowed to rebuild their homes as they were before, and added that they need to consider “science” and “climate reality” in reconstruction.

“We have to wake up to this reality. We cannot be in denial about what’s going on with mother nature, again, around the globe,” Newsom added.