Anyone can tell you that Los Angeles has serious affordable housing needs. From homeless families to highly-educated singles, people are struggling to pay rent and purchasing a home has become laughable. But just how much affordable housing do we need? And how are we doing at reaching that goal?

To find out how much affordable housing we need, we look to the City of Los Angeles’ Housing Element, a section of the City’s state-mandated General Plan. The Housing Element determines how much affordable housing is needed using RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) numbers produced by SCAG. Based on the last RHNA, covering housing needs for 1998-2005, the City of Los Angeles determined that it would need to build 28,406 affordable housing units during the same period.

So how did we do? It turns out that this question is more easily asked than answered. Because affordable housing production is recorded in seven different databases, it has been hard to get an exact number of affordable housing production until now. USC students Jackie Koenig, Tomohiro Kamiya, and Quinn Ryan have compiled the information from the seven databases into one database. It turns out that 20,150 units, or 71 percent, of the city’s needed affordable housing units were produced from 1998-2005.

The Process of Integrating Databases

Affordable Units Produced in the City of Los Angeles,

1998-2005, by Affordability Level

Affordable Housing Production by Program,

City of Los Angeles, 1998-2005

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