Century City/ Westwood January 10 – 23, 2020
NEWS CenturyCity-WestwoodNews.com
State Rent Control Law Too Late for Westwood? California rent control law in effect By Sam Catanzaro With the new year, a sweeping rent control bill has taken effect in California offering much-needed relief for Los Angeles residents where rent has increased by over 60 percent the past decade. For some Westwood residents, however, where average rent is approaching $5,000 a month, this may be too little too late. According to a recent study from Rent Cafe, rent in Los Angeles increased by 65 percent to $2,527 a month in the past ten years, the greatest increase in the United States. In addition, LA’s average home sale price increased by 96 percent over the decade to $774,000. These jumps in rent and
home prices outpaced the increase in average income in LA, which only increased by 30 percent ($64,036) within the same period. To address the rising rents in cities across the state, the California rent control law that went into effect January 1 sets a 5 percent annual cap on rent increases while requiring landlords to provide a just cause for eviction. In Westwood, where rent is the highest of anywhere in California averaging $4,944 a month, the past decade of rent increases have been felt especially hard. Particularly impacted by rising rents have been UCLA students. In November, the North Westwood Neighborhood Council passed a resolution asking UCLA to create safe parking for homeless students in the face of a City of Los Angeles law banning people from sleeping in their cars overnight.
In November, Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz who represents Century City and Westwood called for the creation of an Emergency Renters Relief Program to protect renters against rent-gouging as a means to evict ahead of the State’s affordable-housing bill, AB 1482, which went into effect January 1, 2020. According to Koretz, $10 million in funding will prevent individuals from losing their homes immediately. To that end, Koretz joined Councilwoman Martinez in co-authoring an amending motion calling for $2.937 million from the funds for the Right to Counsel program, to protect those individuals in immediate danger of losing their units. “We need to help people who are facing constructive eviction to stay in their homes,” Koretz said. “That is why this emergency renter’s relief will be put to
Photo: Sam Catanzaro
work immediately to prevent hundreds of individuals from being forced out of their apartments while we actively work to combat the bad behavior of some greedy landlords. We already have far too many homeless Angelenos on our street.”
UCLA Study’s on Homelessness Prevention Nearly half of instances of homelessness predicted in study By Sam Catanzaro Researchers at UCLA recently were able to accurately predict nearly half of instances in which subjects in a study became homeless using predictive analytics and now county lawmakers may use Measure H funds to launch a data-driven homelessness prevention unit. With data from seven Los Angeles County agencies on services provided to residents between 2012 and 2016 — names and personally identifiable information were omitted — researchers from the California Policy Lab at UCLA and the Poverty Lab at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy developed a model to predict which 3,000 residents were most likely to become homeless in 2017. When compared against county records, they found that 46 percent of the individuals predicted by the model to be at risk for first-time homelessness or a repeat period of homelessness did experience homelessness at some point in 2017.
“Bringing together data from multiple county agencies gave us a more nuanced understanding about what’s happening to people right before they slip into homeless and how services can be better targeted to prevent that from happening,” said Till von Wachter, a UCLA economics professor and co-author of the report. According to researchers, effectively serving the 1 percent of County residents who are at greatest risk of a new homeless spell would prevent nearly 6,900 homeless
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spells in one year saying the highest risk individuals are interacting with multiple agencies. Based on this research, a county led-plan was submitted to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on December 16 that recommends that the county use predictive models to intervene with adults who are identified as having a high risk for homelessness before becoming reaching a crisis point. The plan, which is expected to receive $3
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million in funding during 2020 from Measure H, also proposes a multidisciplinary homelessness prevention unit with representatives of the county’s departments of mental health, health services and social services and the sheriff and probation offices. The unit would take referrals from the risks lists generated by the predictive models, identify which services would be most beneficial and then reach out to individuals to connect them to those services. In September, a scathing report was released showing the agency tasked with tackling homelessness in Los Angeles County failed to meet many of its goals despite the fact that the number of outreach workers doubled between 2017-2019. Therefore officials are hoping a more data-driven approach will lead to more effective results “Last year, despite providing housing to tens of thousands of people, we saw more and more individuals and families becoming homeless,” said Phil Ansell, the director of the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative. “The county is focused on using strategic approaches to preventing homelessness, and these groundbreaking models will make it possible to reach those who need us the most before they reach the crisis point and fall into homelessness.”
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