Evan Farrar
@evanjfarrar
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@UCLA alum, fan of urban places, downtowns, and functional housing markets
Washington, DC
Joined June 2017
At UCLA, 14,000+ undergrads live in publicly financed, high-rise buildings in a 0.15 sq mi area directly adjacent to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country. If that's not evidence that our housing crisis is a problem of political will, I don't know what is.
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behold, one of the greatest land use policy failures in the country
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It’s process over outcomes, every time
Los Angeles officials are facing a fast-approaching deadline to rezone the city for more housing. Today, the city council rejected a plan that would have allowed new apartments in some areas zoned for single-family homes. Read my @LAist piece for details:
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I took KDL's class at UCLA in 2019. It was meant for undergrads looking to get a sense of pressing policy issues in California and how to use the legislative process to create change. It was really just a class about KDL's main achievements from his decade in the legislature.🧵.
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In 2015, a UC Berkeley professor (not the eco-apartheid one) called Redwood City an "improbable villain" of the Bay Area housing crisis for allowing market-rate apartments in its downtown. As it turns out, that housing has done a lot of good for the climate and affordability.
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@houmanhemmati I think both the lack of neighborhood density directly adjacent to UCLA and the two golf courses also proximate to campus are very bad.
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This is quite literally the most mind numbing paragraph I have ever read
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The thing that scares me is not him anymore--his career should be over now--but that there will always be another KDL, someone who is ambitious, well-spoken, and comes from nothing, who is willing to throw as many people under the bus as they have to to stay in office.
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It’s kinda fun going to @ucla when all of your professors are main characters on housing twitter. all of the greatest heroes and villains all under one roof.
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“displacement isn’t happening bc of a lack of supply” says the “marxist community-based housing scholar” whose work is literally funded by j.p. morgan chase.
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I can appreciate honest critiques of YIMBYism, but what I can’t handle is the constant barrage of misinformation about vacancy and market-rate development coming from left-NIMBYs. it’s everywhere, and it’s exhausting. just stop lying.
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But I've realized since that KDL's version of progressivism was basically performance. Saying the right things in public, and working desperately behind the scenes to expand his power. Now that his modus operandi is out in the open, his plan has gone a bit pear-shaped.
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@Rafamonsta 100%. probably one of the clearest mismatches of realized vs potential value in the U.S.
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He claims progressivism but on the tapes proposed throwing Nithya Raman's district "in a blender" and gerrymander her out of office. Diminish the power of Black voters to keep himself, Nury, and Gil elected. To Kevin it was all a zero-sum game; he wins or Black Angelenos do.
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And now he refuses to step down. He can't accept that he's done all this dirty backroom dealing, and worked his way up from nothing, for this to be how it ends. So many alliances that he fought to preserve, but it could only work if all this stuff stayed private.
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I’m confused this unit looks fine.
I’m getting real tired of these “carve up a one bedroom into 2/3/4 and charge more” shenanigans. Y’all see it too right???
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So much of what Prof. Roy has to say about homelessness is spot on. But then to imply that investors buying up rental properties are directly causing homelessness is just plain wrong. The data just doesn't bear that out.
UCLA scholar Ananya Roy, who studies displacement, says this is "a time of mass homelessness" in California and elsewhere in the United States that coincides with "unregulated corporate acquisition of rental property" pushing even more people into housing precarity.
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I just wonder who those people are, and what it takes to make sure they don't get too far. .
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This is completely made up. Institutional buyers + private equity have accounted for *8%* of sales volume of small apartment buildings over the last 5 years in Chicago. Private buyers account for 87%. @mcmansionhell and @thenation need to do better.
The root of the problem is that housing is treated as an instrument of profit. The sole solution is to decouple housing from profit and make it a human right.
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“Increasing supply does not automatically reduce housing costs” … umm? but then they acknowledge that rents are whatever the market allows? what do these people think markets are?.
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It was the first and only time he taught undergrads at UCLA. He was preparing for his council run and looking for something to hold him over after his loss to Feinstein in 2018. He was likely broke, so a temporary teaching job to stay afloat probably seemed pretty ideal.
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absolutely unsurprising yet sad fact: a thousand more people live in 11 blocks of westwood than in literally ALL of bel air
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I remember one particular seminar where he split us into teams and made us mock-debate the merits of California's cap-and-trade system (which a TA explained for the class). I was assigned the team of oil and gas lobbyists. After class, he told me to consider lobbying (lol).
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It was a seminar; 3 hours long. And he would go for the full 3 hours, every time, start to finish. Tangents about how he got SB 100 over the finish line, his mother's background as a housekeeper, and his support for single-payer because it was "the right thing to do.".
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I've been thinking a lot about this class since the City Council scandal broke because I think it was the first time I spent more than just a few hours with a relatively prominent elected official who self-identified as a "proud progressive".
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And this isn't even taking into account how bringing renters downtown has helped make Redwood City a vibrant, urban place where people actually want to be. Far cry from the "Deadwood City" it was 8 years ago.
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Not coincidentally, this development happened after the city implemented its Downtown Precise Plan, which had the stated goals of providing "just enough" parking and creating a "distinctly urban" character. The city wanted this to happen, rezoned accordingly, and so it did.
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@ArmandDoma fun fact, a ex bruin republicans board member is now in prison for 3 years for storming the capitol.
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If I was a developer answering this survey I would probably be inclined to weight the issues I have encountered working on actual projects. Projects that, by definition, are legal because I am doing them.
According to YIMBY’s, zoning reform is everything. According to real estate practitioners surveyed by Urban Land Institute, labor, materials & regulations are more important. Immigration > Zoning Reform?. *Yes, land costs and state & local regulations are related to NIMBYism*
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As new apartments in Redwood City delivered to market, they filled up very quickly, but rent growth actually stayed pretty low pre-pandemic relative to peer cities (e.g. Palo Alto, where rents grew between 6-10% each year that no new apartments came online).
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I'm not going to pretend these new apartments aren't expensive -- studios go for $2,800 per month -- but the point is that Redwood City allowed high-earning renters to live downtown, sustainably, and rents grew at a healthier pace, which is indisputably a win!.
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“When cities permit more multifamily development developers build more market rate.” Yes. That’s literally the whole point. Thx for acknowledging.
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a dirty little secret - in every deliverable that I worked on during my real estate consulting job (multifamily) we included a chart of annualized vacancy rates vs. rent growth in the submarket the developer was interested in.
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LA should do away with single-family zoning ASAP. But the fact that this issue is sucking up all the air in the room means that advocates are missing a bigger problem: the City has proven that CHIP won't work, isn't going to produce any new housing, and they've chosen not to care.
After a full-day, eight-hour hearing L.A.'s City Planning Commission followed a city staff recommendation not to allow low-income and multifamily housing in single-family-home areas. They expressed openness to the idea but punted to the City Council
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@criticalurban Green open spaces that cost many thousands of dollars per year to enjoy and most of which have a single use—golf?.
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@NelsonDaly UCLA is bounded on three sides by a single-family neighborhood, another single-family neighborhood, and a commercial historic district with ~no housing. it is a major job center and university with not enough housing nearby for the people who need to be there every day.
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I find this kind of discourse from housing justice scholars really strange as someone who left school a few months ago and now works with real estate industry professionals every day. It's almost like these academics have no desire to even understand how the industry works.
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just had an in-class discussion about SB 9 and i feel like the most obnoxious human alive.
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"The Hill" is UCLA's on-campus residential community. It's vibrant, dense, and a student can access essentially anything that they could possibly need (food, friends, a gym, green space, school supplies) within five minutes walking distance from where they live. *Very* few drive.
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who's gonna tell urban outfitters that urban renewal is probably not the best name for their vintage line LMAO
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crucially, we can make that development more affordable by making it easier to develop, not harder. abolishing parking requirements is a good place to start.
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The Hill demonstrates that (1) we can (and should) build dense, mixed-use communities everywhere; (2) the state can (and should) help, not hinder, this process; and (3) building this way can increase access to high-quality, opportunity-rich neighborhoods in expensive cities.
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It just strikes me as deeply wrong that someone can get away with saying "it's the industry's fault!" and then make zero effort to understand WHY multifamily acquisitions are ramping up, WHY investors think multifamily is a good bet in the long run, etc. Just no substance at all.
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And. the young people that live on the Hill LOVE IT! It's a paradise for anyone looking to make friends. No wonder we consistently rank as one of the schools with the happiest students—the built environment facilitates a fulfilling and enjoyable student experience.
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without fail, vacancy was inversely related to rent growth. but more importantly - declining vacancy makes the submarket *more* attractive to the corporate developers that people love to dunk on. anti-developer sentiment and vacancy trutherism work to opposite ends!!.
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Maybe this is a good time to remind my fellow progressives:. The idea that developers, not the government, should be financially responsible for making housing affordable contradicts how we think about basically every other essential good/service.
Seeing more affordability than required in large scale private projects like Innovation Queens is positive, but not if it means the public sector has to allocate scarce resources they rely upon to implement their broader affordable housing agenda.
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new rhetorical trick is to claim that demand for housing from more households matters, actually
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🚨IF YOU ARE A UCLA STUDENT IN WESTWOOD🚨 call Isaac Bryan’s office NOW to demand that he support SB 9 (aka the *bare minimum* for supporting density and affordable housing in LA and statewide)!! His position is TBD and he needs to know how important this is for us!.
I think Asm @ib2_real has the opportunity to be a turning point in the LA caucus's leadership on the issue of housing. His decision to side with his rent-burdened constituents on his SB 9 vote could be transformative for that bill and many more to come. 1/2.
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sure, your response could be “well, that’s the evil of the markets, decommodification is the solution” and my response would be, actually it’s a good thing that developers are looking for supply-constrained areas to build in.
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it's truly amazing how in "expertise"-based professions you can become so confident in your priors that you end up spouting nonsense that any reasonable person could dispel with two seconds of critical thinking, and you sound dumber than the typical person without the credentials
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Bel Air's West Gate is right across the street. Bel Air (exclusively single-family) is one of the richest neighborhoods in not just all of Los Angeles, but the entire country. AND, Bel Air and the Hill coexist, as neighbors, as if this spatial arrangement is completely normal.
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People are rightfully upset that Council did not vote to extend CHIP into single-family zones. But the bigger and much less widely discussed problem with CHIP is that the incentives it does offer won’t do much. From @WSCarpenters analysis released yesterday:
No votes to LA residents: “You’ll rent a loud arterial apartment or buy a 1 mil+ SFH on a side street and like it” . Memorize the names next to the No votes - these are the people *literally* responsible for your continued unaffordable cost of housing until the next RNHA cycle.
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So yes, we should legalize multifamily housing everywhere, we should plan our cities to reflect people's actual wants/needs, and there are examples of rich and vibrant communities (even in the most unlikely of places) that can serve as inspiration—we just need the political will.
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*hundreds of peer-reviewed studies on the housing shortage, years of advocacy, lived experience*. “YIMBYs learned this from Sim city”.
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I have no issue with their work being funded by jp morgan chase by the way. but I do find this very funny.
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@DeanPreston @sflabor Dean, market-rate housing is unaffordable to 94% of workers in SF *because* your city has not prioritized it.
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@yhdistyminen In hindsight, I feel the most ironic thing about the YIMBY-Sim City thing is that creators of Sim City had to paper over all of the problematic aspects of central planning (e.g. figuring out parking) because they quickly realized the game would be terrible if included.
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The @OfficialNWWNC and other Westwood stakeholders strongly favor heavy rail with a direct stop at UCLA. Here’s why (and how to make it happen).
Public comment period for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor environmental study begins today.
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if you are pro-housing and you live on the Westside, there is no one better than @scottforla in the race for CD5
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Side note: I wonder if comparatively low rates of homelessness in those cities had anything to do with, I don't know, BUILDING HOUSING??! Anyways. .
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@the_moral_abc if you think about the state of our housing and land use policies, for one, I think it’s pretty effective. obviously calling/writing is just one tactic. but shows who is in the ear of politicians in general.
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oh my god hahahahaha.
Looks like UCLA has scrubbed all reference to Kevin de Leon from its website, including deleting the 2019 announcement that he has joined the Luskin School of Public Affairs as a distinguished policymaker-in-residence and senior analyst.
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@DavidCamposSF @MattHaneySF Savvy landlords would back you if your goal is to prevent market-rate housing construction.
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@TJH314 If the purpose of land use policy was to maximize the value of the land it would not look like this at all, all of the neighborhoods adjacent to UCLA would be far denser.
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with the endorsements of @AbundantHousing and @streetsforall, @scottforla has firmly established himself as THE choice for folks who care about affordable housing and public transit in CD5.
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I still think about this tweet every day.
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Lots of money spent acquiring rentals did not mean that metros experienced higher rates of homelessness vs. the national average. *Especially* if you exclude NYC and LA, the two outliers.
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thought that I would have ethical issues with my real estate consulting job but it is SO informative just to learn how developers think about markets. and to cut through the noise of toxic housing discourse and understand that yes, supply and demand do actually matter lol.
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Re the whole big investment firms-as-landlords discourse, there's one thing that really bugs me about how these firms are portrayed in the media, and that is how their investments in single-family rental are labeled as a massive gamble. They are doing anything but gambling.
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There are plenty of metros that experienced a TON of acquisitions from 2012-2017 but outperformed the country in terms of homelessness rates. Dallas is one. Houston is 7th for transaction volume, but has a homelessness rate that's 40% of its fair share. Top 10 by transaction vol:
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To get that data, I looked at the Top 50 MSAs by avg annual transaction volume for apartments between 2012-17. Then used Anton Dekom's data on homelessness by metro in 2018. Couldn't find any more recent MSA-level data.
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@benecoleman All the more reason to build a lot of housing near where they’re putting in the purple line and where a lot of your residents wouldn’t need to drive since they work at UCLA.
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@NelsonDaly Density drops off as soon as you go off of Wilshire — one of the most stark density gradients in the City, and one that doesn’t make any sense given that this is some of the most valuable and well-located land in the City.
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Tonight the @OfficialNWWNC passed motions in support for a UCLA Metro station, amendments to the archaic @WestwoodVillage Specific Plan to allow for more student-friendly businesses, and changes to city-wide rent stabilization to protect tenants. Love serving on this council ❤️.
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A reminder that twice as many people live just on the Hill than in all of Bel Air, and yet the Bel Air Association thinks they should have the final word on heavy rail vs. monorail
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how is single family zoning pro-family if it prevents your kids from being able to afford to live close to you early in their careers?.
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we’re really good at providing free housing for cars everywhere, if only we did the same for people.
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@PippengerHarlo because you don’t cheer on more private housing, which the vast majority of people live in.
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actually household formation is made up! those households are fake! the government and real estate industry and the gentrifiers are all colluding. they have monthly zoom meetings to figure out what the household formation numbers should be.
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@MenTremendous @nytopinion @johnnywharris well, given said housing crisis is directly caused by a housing shortage, i think we could develop our way out of the crisis, actually.
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The City hired AECOM and paid them hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for them to turn around and tell them, basically, "this only works where you can get crazy market rents, and even then, it's no better than what's already on the books" and the City has done *nothing*
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