June 7, 2026
by
Christopher R. Martin
University of Northern Iowa
Executive Summary
▪ At the end of three years of local news coverage about ULA from the Los Angeles Times
and LAist, the news audience was left in early 2026 with two dominant news frames –
that ULA reduced housing development in Los Angeles and ULA needs to be reformed.
▪ These two dominant frames – based on flawed studies – survived in the Los Angeles
news media reports despite several subsequent studies that demonstrated that ULA had
not reduced housing development in Los Angeles and did not need to be reformed.
▪ The national news media, local and state politicians, and a statewide ballot initiative
repeated the same two faulty dominant news frames, with no additional analysis or
questions.
▪ The study analyzed news stories from the first three years of Measure ULA being in
effect, from April 2023 to March 2026, in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com.
▪ Using the terms “Measure ULA” or “mansion tax” to search each news organizations online
stories from April 2023 through March 2026 yielded 97 stories – 71 from the Los Angeles
Times and 26 from LAist.
▪ Stories about ULA reducing homelessness dropped off the news. Of the 97 stories
reviewed from the Los Angeles Times and LAist over three years, only 7 stories (7.2 % of
stories) included any sourcing of people who were homeless or who were helped to stay
in their home by a tenant program. Six of those 7 stories were in 2023 or 2024.
▪ Of the 97 ULA stories over three years, 30.9% (30 stories) did not even have the word
“homeless” or “homelessness” in the story.
▪ The study found 7 major narrative frames about Measure ULA over the three years.
Frame 1 (“ULA helps reduce homelessness”) was the only major narrative frame with positive valence or sentiment for Measure ULA. Frame 1 was in 43 of the stories. Frames
2 through 7, which told stories about things that are bad, deficient, or to be avoided
about Measure ULA, appeared 138 times.
▪ News media unquestionably accepted the commercial building industry’s idea of
“filtering,” a trickle-down theory that posits building more market-rate housing will
ultimately increase low-cost affordable housing by increased overall supply. The news
media popularized the notion of filtering (without using the term) in the Los Angeles
housing environment despite the existence of ample expert counter-evidence.
▪ Although the Los Angeles news media attended to the concerns of major developers, an
entirely difference narrative was possible on the homelessness front. Homelessness
dropped significantly in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related
stories in the study sample noted this