West Hollywood’s commitment to housing is commendable but the truth is that West Hollywood has been losing affordable and workforce housing, and new mixed use developments like the Dylan and Huxley are not, for the most part, offering housing that is affordable for people with moderate incomes.

My hope is that West Hollywood works harder to protect and enhance our existing affordable and workforce housing.

My Solution:

We need to concentrate on ways to rehabilitate the housing stock we have.  For example, give incentives to landlords to take care of their buildings, create negative incentives for converting apartments to condos unless we can provide home-ownership opportunity programs. 

We need to implement a new fee structure to discourage the demolition of affordable units. If any type of housing is being demolished for a non-residential use, we must ensure that there is a fee, which can be allocated to the Housing Trust Fund -- that way, we can replace the affordable units that we’re losing. 

Thank you for reading and if you’d like to discuss further with me, let’s schedule a coffee!