Housing Affordability, It’s Our Biggest Problem

Paavo Monkkonen is an associate professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

LOS ANGELES—California is experiencing a housing affordability crisis. While the issue has fueled fervent finger-pointing debates in communities across the state, Paavo Monkkonen, an associate professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that the affordability crisis is a fundamental supply-demand imbalance. In a recent economic letter published by UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, Monkkonen explains that democratized public participation in the planning process is the solution to the state’s affordability woes.

“The politics of density are so dominated by homeowners. One of the things that we should be talking about more is increasing density,” Monkkonen tells GlobeSt.com. “Condos are cheaper than single-family housing per-square-foot, in general. There is a problem in all of California, but Los Angeles is acute because much of the land is zoned for single-family homes. That made sense in the 50s, when the metropolitan area is half the size that it is today, but as the metropolitan area grows, we need to increase the density in the central areas.”