Housing Is the Biggest Challenge to L.A.’s Future Growth

Los Angeles has seen tremendous growth this cycle, but housing and affordability issues could derail more growth in the future. The ULI Emerging Market report highlights the maturing real estate market this cycle, and Los Angeles has been a major beneficiary of that maturity. This cycle, Los Angeles has invested in mass transit and innovative businesses to drive growth.

“The Los Angeles region has taken multiple intentional actions to ensure its continued growth, which have resulted in the market weathering the Great Recession and emerging as a stable, growth-focused market,” Clare DeBriere, chair of ULI Los Angeles, tells GlobeSt.com. “Among those actions were to continue and to grow the significant investment in mass transit, to actively encourage our economy from a heavy aerospace focus to once much more evenly distributed to media, entertainment, technology, education and innovation based businesses, and we really capitalized on how we market and sell L.A.—from the active promotion of our sports teams, to our various neighborhoods, and active pursuit of high visibility tenants into our market.”

While this has all boded well for the Los Angeles market, housing is a substantial challenge for the market, and it could derail or stall future growth. “For all of the good that we have on our side of the ledger, there are some significant challenges that we face.  We are great at bringing new businesses into our cities, but we cannot house their employees.  We have a housing crisis of enormous proportions,” says DeBriere.