Can this progressive YIMBY fix one city’s ludicrous housing prices?
She lost her bid for reelection this week to Nithya Raman, an LA City Council member, rising progressive star, and nationally prominent YIMBY.
Key points
- How best to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, she said, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” Even given LA’s relatively weak mayoralty, Bass’s failures on housing were often a matter of political choice.
- She has gained a following in housing reform circles over the last few years with her brisk, direct-to-camera social videos explaining how LA’s housing shortage drives up rents and criticizing city policies that make it so difficult to build more homes (perhaps it’s no surprise that she has plenty of friends in Hollywood).
- Elected mayor of LA in 2022, Bass campaigned on promises to solve the city’s homelessness and housing affordability crises (which are really part of the same underlying crisis).
It has a highly suburbanized and car-oriented fabric, like much of the rest of the country — all of which makes it a kind of proving ground for whether America’s sprawling cities can build their way out of their housing shortages.
Additional details
- | Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images It’s notoriously hard to govern Los Angeles, a city that gives its mayor less direct authority over the government than in a city like New York or Chicago.
- As The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff put it, “Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.” Where she did go out of her way to wield her influence, it was often to stop denser housing from being built.
- Some of her bewildering housing policy choices while in office include: Days into her term, Bass signed her first executive order, known as ED1, to fast-track housing developments where 100 percent of the apartments are affordable.
- After he signed SB 79 into law anyway, Bass worked with LA’s city council to delay much of the law’s most ambitious upzoning until 2030, while permitting smaller apartment buildings near some transit stops.
- She then spent her term undermining her own administration’s affordable housing policy and fighting the state of California’s efforts to compel cities to allow more housing production.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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