November 7, 2025
Ever since ULA’s initial affordable housing plan was passed, we’ve proudly promoted that Measure ULA was creating 795 affordable homes (under the Accelerator Plus project) and, through the construction of those homes, accelerating the creation of 10,000 jobs. Today, LAist has a long story questioning that jobs number. Here’s how that calculation came to be.
It starts with Prop HHH, the ten-year, $1.2 billion housing bond that voters approved in 2016. Last year, the city’s Bureau of Contract Administration looked at how many jobs were generated by a group of 14 different affordable housing and permanent supportive housing projects funded by Prop HHH and built under Project Labor Agreements (PLAs).
This figure was based on actual certified payroll data from these HHH projects — an exact accounting, required by the PLAs, of how many real laborers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians were employed building each affordable home. It’s important to understand that construction jobs aren’t counted by the building trades, the City or the contractor employers as permanent, full-time jobs. When a construction worker comes onto a project and does their piece, that counts as a job in the general lexicon.
And the number they came up with? 15,014 jobs.
The next part of the calculation is dividing the “total development cost” of those projects by the number of jobs. Those 14 affordable apartment buildings built under HHH cost $438 million. (Not all of that money was from HHH — affordable housing construction uses a “capital stack” that combines different funding sources.)
Divide $438 million by 15,014 jobs and career opportunities and you get a figure of 34 jobs per million dollars of total development cost.
The Accelerator Plus program included nine different apartment buildings comprising 795 units with a total development cost (TDC) of $547 million. (This was even before the current SuperNOFA, the largest affordable housing availability in LA’s history by a factor of five — we should find out how many homes that will produce by the end of this year.)
If you apply that figure of 34 jobs per million total development cost to the Accelerator Plus homes, you get a figure of 18,598 jobs.
That’s a lot! And there’s no way to be 100% certain that Accelerator Plus projects will produce exactly as many construction jobs as those 14 HHH projects. A conservative estimate of 22 jobs per $1M TDC yielded 12,034 jobs. That figure was then rounded down even further to 10,000. And that’s why United to House LA has consistently said that our current spending plan is accelerating 10,000 jobs.
(LAist reports that one April press release printed this as “created 10,000 jobs.” This was a mistake and was retracted.)
Today, of those nine buildings, one is fully open (Phoebe lives there), three are almost complete, and two more have just broken ground or are about to. When all nine are complete, we’ll have the exact job creation figures, and we’ll share the count again. In the meantime, ULA is hiring people like Tania Barragan Dolinger (see her here), who now gets to build Enlightenment Plaza to help people who are homeless today like she was years ago.
The researchers who complained to LAist about our jobs figure are either picking a fight with a retracted number or don’t acknowledge that the affordable housing built under HHH had strict job accounting. There’s not much we can do about that.
Instead we’ll keep moving ahead with the Measure ULA program: a $424.8 million spending program to build affordable housing and keep Angelenos in their homes, a right to counsel ordinance to give tenants facing eviction legal support, income support for seniors and people with disabilities, home ownership support, and the biggest affordable housing funding availability in L.A.’s history (by a factor of five). It’s going to create a lot of jobs. Stay tuned!
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ULA Resources
- LA Housing Department’s ULA Dashboards
- ULA Citizens Oversight Committee (COC)
- United to House LA Coalition
This newsletter is produced by the United to House LA (UHLA) Coalition that includes over 240 local nonprofit social service providers, community and tenant organizations, labor unions, affordable housing developers, faith-based organizations, and other groups that came together to craft Measure ULA and who have stayed together to make sure that its implementation is carried out effectively and efficiently by the City government.
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