UCLA has constructed enough housing to provide all incoming freshman a four-year housing guarantee, making it the only UC to do so.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ housing initiatives have been unsuccessful at stimulating development in Westwood. The LA City Council has also failed to make meaningful reforms.
Students concerned about housing availability and affordability in Westwood should direct their complaints toward the city government’s excessive regulations around housing development, not the public school undergoing budget struggles.
The university recently announced plans to build an apartment complex with room for 1,130 undergraduate students, projected to open in Fall 2029. The project is part of UCLA’s efforts to expand student housing availability. In 2022, the university opened four more university apartments with the same goal.
The City of Los Angeles cannot say the same.
Mayor Bass’ dual housing initiatives – the Citywide Housing Incentive Program and Executive Directive No. 1 – were meant to incentivize new housing developments and cut down on the bureaucracy constraining private construction.
However, only two developments have been approved in Westwood between the programs so far. That lack of growth is a reflection of LA’s antiquated city planning system.
“The bureaucracy in LA is very deep, it’s very extensive, it’s very disorganized,” said Jackson Olson, an assistant in the LA City Planning Department. “The system was never designed to be efficient.”
Students shopping for private housing in Westwood every year feel the impact of that disorganized housing bureaucracy.
Westwood has long ranked as one of the most expensive housing markets in California, an outcome of the neighborhood’s strict zoning coming in conflict with consistently increasing demand for housing from the growing student body.
“There’s just a lot of hurdles that a developer would have to go through to get that housing permitted and then finally approved for occupancy,” said Michael Manville, the chair of the urban planning department at the Luskin School of Public Affairs.
There are not enough apartments to meet the demand from students, said Kristian Suazo, the president of the UCLA chapter of the Student Homes Coalition, a student housing advocacy organization. Suazo, a fourth-year labor studies and political science student, added that he believes the city should serve as a partner to the university as it tries to house as many students as possible.
It is true that loosening zoning laws to promote housing development could lead to hazardous conditions associated with less oversight.
But there is a middle ground between unregulated chaos and suffocating bureaucracy.
Housing availability and affordability in Westwood is a serious – and worsening – problem. If students want to combat this issue, it’s time we direct our efforts at the local government, not our university.
UCLA might be an easy target for student grievances, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct one. Students must shift their complaints to our elected officials and the broken system they maintain.
Comments are closed.