Imagine if Los Angeles were dealing with a food shortage. Imagine if more than one thousand Angelenos were dying of starvation every year while half the city was malnourished because a single cucumber cost $10. Now imagine there was a law from the 1960s that made it illegal to grow anything but grass on more than 70% of the arable land, and despite all the suffering the food shortage was causing, LA’s establishment politicians voted against making it legal to grow more food. Now imagine we’re talking about housing instead of food and you’ll understand why we have a housing crisis.
In 1916, residents of Berkeley, California wanted to keep people of color and immigrants out of their white neighborhood. To do this, they invented single-family zoning, blocking any development that was not a detached, single-family home. It was a way to keep property values up by intentionally limiting the supply of multi-family housing and thus pricing out any “undesirables.”
After that, cities across the country adopted single-family zoning, including Los Angeles. In 1960, Los Angeles had a zoning capacity of around ten million homes. After adopting single-family zoning across more than 70% of the city, that capacity dropped to four million by the 1980s. By the 1990s, LA was at capacity and our economy began to grow much faster than our housing stock. From 2010-2015, LA added almost five times as many jobs as units of housing. Now, in 2026, LA is one of the most unaffordable cities in the whole world and single-family zoning still covers more than 70% of the city.
The inescapable truth is that LA has a housing shortage, which our City Council has been aware of for a long time. When the city passed the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance in 2021, the first sentence stated: “The City of Los Angeles has an extreme shortage of affordable rental housing.” When the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance, LA’s rent control statute, was enacted in 1979, the first sentence read: “There is a shortage of decent, safe and sanitary housing in the City of Los Angeles…”
Despite being aware of this, LA politicians, like Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, refuse to seriously address it. In 2025, a majority of the City Council voted to oppose Senate Bill 79, a state bill that requires cities to allow for more housing near transit, and this year voted to delay full implementation of that law another four years. In 2024, the council submitted a housing element that explicitly refused to touch single-family zoning. As a result, permitting and construction of housing in LA has fallen far short of the amount needed to make the city affordable.
It is no exaggeration to say that this housing crisis is affecting everything. The shortage is not just driving up rents and causing perpetual homelessness, it’s also driving young people and businesses out, increasing fossil fuel consumption, exacerbating economic inequality, making school closures likely, diminishing California’s influence at the federal level, and making it impossible for the city to budget effectively while maintaining city services. For all the council’s talk of LA being a sanctuary city, our leaders appear unconcerned about whether members of vulnerable communities can afford to live in the city.
Defenders of single-family zoning argue that allowing for more housing in single-family neighborhoods would destroy the character of these neighborhoods and lead to the demolition of historic buildings. However, there is no way to solve the housing crisis and breathe new life into the city without allowing for more housing. If it remains illegal to build more housing in most of LA, then the character of the whole city will continue to degrade until LA has nothing to offer but history.
Single-family zoning is the anchor around LA’s neck, keeping the whole city, quite literally, down. Until we make it legal to build more housing across the city and grow up instead of out, LA will continue to stagnate. The only way to make LA more affordable is to roll back single-family zoning so that we can finally build enough housing to solve this housing crisis once and for all. I’m running for City Council because I know that we can build a brighter future for Los Angeles; we just need to make it legal to build.
Henry Mantel is a tenants’ rights attorney, former Mid-City West neighborhood councilmember, and candidate for LA City Council, District 5. He was raised in Hancock Park and now lives in Park La Brea, where he serves on the Park La Brea Residents Association.