May 15, 2026
After bond discussion turns into live mic fiasco, Housing Department explains the costs of slashing Measure ULA per Raman motion—Mend It proposals would be even worse
With only two items on the agenda, the Friday, May 15 meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on United to House LA showed the wheels coming completely off the wagon of the real estate lobby’s movement to slash Los Angeles’s affordable housing and prevention funds.
First, a presentation on bond financing was revealed to be a polemic of “Mend It Don’t End It” talking points, resulting in the committee chair expressing sharp disappointment (listen here). Next, a department presentation showed for the first time just how deeply Measure ULA’s programs would have to be cut if tax waiver proposals were to go through.
“The evidence has shown that ULA is working well, that waiving it will change the market for extremely little housing, and that technical fixes to make it work better can be done without going to the ballot,” said Joe Donlin, executive director of the United to House LA coalition. “Today, we saw that the waivers as proposed in an old council motion would devastate programming for those who need it most. As suggested at the table, our city government has lots of ways to make it easier and faster to build housing of all types in our city. It’s time to stop pretending that throwing away our affordable housing funds is one of them. In light of the clear evidence from surging multifamily housing construction starts in Los Angeles, there is absolutely no reason to weaken the city’s greatest asset for housing affordability.”
Here’s how the LA Housing Department report describes the projected annual cuts:
Based on the current programmatic outcomes, each year, this reduction in revenue would result in approximately:
- 350 fewer new affordable housing units
- 1,500 fewer homes preserved
- 950 fewer low-income renter households receiving rental assistance
- 1,200 fewer low-income senior/disabled households receiving income support
- 2,100 fewer low-income households receiving full scope legal representation to avoid eviction.
Additionally, due to the reduction in funding for new construction, this would also have an impact on the creation of high quality jobs, as described in this report.
These are based on a 35% reduction in funds. The motion introduced by Councilmember Raman would account for 29% of that by repealing ULA for multifamily, commercial and industrial buildings that were built or substantially rehabilitated within 15 years. However, this does not include the additional waiver of most of the tax proposed by the Mend It, Don’t End It coalition for all multifamily, commercial and industrial sales, no matter how new.
As Ted Chandler, senior adviser to the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, said to the committee at the May 8 hearing, “To think that the way we can solve an affordable housing construction crisis is to cut the funding for affordable housing construction makes no sense whatsoever.”
The first item on the agenda was a discussion of the potential to guarantee bonds using revenue from Measure ULA. Unexpectedly, speaker Kathleen Brown did not offer technical insight, using her time instead to blame Measure ULA for Los Angeles’s development climate (largely disproven) and tout the amendments that LAHD showed would slash affordable housing and homelessness prevention.
“It was misrepresented to me that you were going to speak about bonding,” said Councilmember Jurado, who chaired the meeting. “I think it’s a logical fallacy that it’s causation being explained here on the floor when it’s correlation… using ULA as singular blame for what’s happening in the market. And I find that kind of infuriating.”
The chair also called attention to Brown’s use of the term “redlining” to describe investors’ stance towards Los Angeles. “Redlining was a choice by banks,” said Jurado, “to not fund in communities of color. And the continuing use of that term by developers indicates to me that that choice holds now… Racism has evolved so that they don’t have to say, point blank, you’re black, we don’t have to invest in you. They shield it in different ways. And that’s how market analysis has been used for a long time. Redlining is not inevitable. It’s based on individuals’ choices.” Audio can be found here.
“Observers of the bonding conversation locally know that LACAHSA took the time to study the feasibility of bonding against Measure A revenue, and similar pathways are available to Los Angeles, including bonding against the City’s own Measure A revenue,” said Donlin. “But the bonding conversation that was agendized today was nothing of the sort. Instead, it showed that the interests that say they want to amend ULA want to use bonding as a Trojan horse to get it to the ballot and slash it. Instead of talking about the technical requirements or fiscal opportunities of a bond measure as promised, their representative repeated talking points, and it sounded like the committee lost patience.”