Inside LA City Planning: Vince Bertoni on Housing, Rezoning, and Trade-Offs

Vince, when we last interviewed you, LA was rezoning to meet its RHNA target of 486,000 new households by 2025. Over a year later, where does that effort stand?

I’ll begin by bringing us up to speed on where we are with our Housing Element. As you’ll remember, it looks forward over an eight-year period—how many homes you need to provide to meet not just future demand, but also unmet demand from the past. The number assigned to us by the state, through SCAG, was over 456,000 homes. 

For perspective, the City of San Francisco has a little over 400,000 homes total.

We looked at whether our existing zoning could realistically accommodate that number within eight years. Based on economic modeling and past performance, we came up short, so we knew we needed to rezone for roughly 255,000 units. We did this through the Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) and through two community plan updates—Downtown LA and Hollywood. Altogether, this increased realistic capacity to over 560,000 units.

If you strip out the “realistic” filter and just look at gross capacity, the rezoning added about 2 million units citywide. That’s like adding a city the size of San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle within LA’s existing footprint. The goal was to remove zoning as the primary barrier, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other barriers. Zoning shouldn’t be the limiting factor.

We also streamlined approvals and centered affordability. In the first 10 months, CHIP produced over 26,000 proposed units, 37% deed-restricted affordable. For comparison, the first 10 months of the City’s Transit Oriented Communities program or “TOC” produced about 7,600 units, 19% of which were affordable. About 58% of CHIP projects are in high-resource areas, places with better schools, parks, and amenities that historically haven’t absorbed much housing growth, and roughly 90% of these projects are ministerial or by-right, meaning they can move directly to Building & Safety with minimal planning review. 

We're seeing that housing entitlements remain strong, and we're processing them much more quickly. I’m excited for the results. This program just started in February of 2025, so projects have to go through the entitlement process before construction, and we have to see what actually gets constructed as part of that.

Before moving on, the counterpoint arises: with high interest rates, labor shortages, elevated construction costs, and rising insurance premiums, aren’t these significant impediments to meeting the City’s supply targets?

That’s an important question, but we’re addressing zoning. 

Land, labor, and materials are the three major development costs. Zoning doesn’t directly affect labor or materials, and indirectly affects land—by increasing supply.

Interest rates and insurance are outside local control, and re-zoning alone doesn’t guarantee development. There are other impediments.

Vince, from last year’s budget hearings to today, what has changed within the Department in practical, day-to-day terms?

The budget originally proposed a 30% cut to the department, which would have resulted in the laying off of about a quarter of our staff. We worked really hard through the process and got to a point where we didn't lay anybody off, but we still had cuts, and what happened was we had to move things. 

Within our department, we’ve shifted staffing to maintain as much of our services as possible, but this also meant moving priorities around. 

Could you elaborate on what was lost with the reshuffling of priorities? 

As part of the budget changes, we did lose several important planning efforts. We lost the update to the Environmental Justice Element of the General Plan. The environmental justice program that was cut focused on communities that are underserved, and that have historically been burdened by adverse land uses such as industrial facilities and oil drilling. 

We also lost the Wildlife Pilot Study Program, otherwise known as the proposed Wildlife Ordinance, including the future expansion to the Rim of the Valley, which examined how to protect wildlife corridors in the hillsides of Los Angeles. Those corridors are essential to the city’s natural environment and are closely tied to climate efforts, including greenhouse gas emissions and the need for an urban canopy in Los Angeles.

At the same time, we added other programs. We added work on the Van Nuys Airport Area Specific Plan, and the Office of Forest Management was transferred from the Board of Public Works to City Planning. We are excited to have that expertise within the department. 

We also added a new zoning review program, which was transferred from Building and Safety to Planning, allowing us to better integrate zoning review with planning policy and implementation.

With respect to zoning review, 42 staff were relocated from DBS to Planning. How is that transition working, and what problems was the City trying to solve?

Most cities in California conduct zoning reviews in the planning department. Los Angeles is different. Zoning review was done in Building and Safety by plan check staff. They reviewed both the structural portion of a plan—how a building is constructed—and the zoning. Those are two different ways of looking at a development project or a home.

Over the last few years, we worked collaboratively with Building and Safety on transferring the zoning portion. This was not done overnight, and the goal was to make it as seamless as possible.

We started in Building and Safety. I want to give credit to their General Manager, Osama Younan. This was his idea and vision. He had the expertise to take a close look at plan check, where zoning review existed, and slowly peel zoning review away from plan check. They did this by project type—starting with affordable housing projects, then apartments, and continuing until zoning review was fully separated from plan check. That separation now applies to everything except fire rebuilds. That process has been underway for some time.

As of January 20, 2026, the zoning review officially moved to Planning. 

We are creating a new bureau that combines zoning review with our Development Services Centers, which are our primary customer interface. This includes the Office of Zoning Administration, which administers and has the authority to interpret the  zoning code, and specialized services such as affordable housing, wireless facilities, home sharing, restaurants, and beverage services. This also brings zoning back into Planning and allows it to be integrated, creating a stronger connection between staff developing zoning and staff implementing zoning. That work now comes together.

There are future phases still to come. One involves case management, which is a specialized service. We also need to address the transfer of public-facing Development Service Centers and, eventually, fire rebuilds. Those are later phases.

Eventually, we want to avoid late hits for applicants so zoning rules are interpreted consistently from the beginning through the end of the process, not one way early and a different way later. That said, we’re in the process of working on a more seamless pathway for zoning overall.

Pivoting to your Missing Middle LA initiative, elaborate on its goal to expand housing options in ‘high-priority’ zones.

Our housing implementation under CHIP focused on corridors—main streets and areas around transit, where metro rail and high-frequency bus lines converge, and areas that already had apartments and duplexes. It did not move into single-family neighborhoods. The Missing Middle LA program addresses areas outside commercial corridors and higher-density residential zones. It looks at areas with single-family zoning as well as duplex and triplex zones.

The goal is to expand housing options, including homeownership. It looks at single-family areas and how to expand opportunities through accessory dwelling units, which have been very popular in Los Angeles. LA has been a leader in that, and it also looks at areas between single-family and multifamily housing—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes—and how to provide more housing in those areas.

This reflects LA’s earlier housing patterns, courtyard apartments, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts, which are all housing types that were common in earlier periods of the city’s development. The program looks at the ADU ordinance and updates the small-lot ordinance, which is similar to row houses, townhouses, bungalow courts, and cottage courts seen throughout Los Angeles. 

We are also adopting objective design standards for ADUs in Historic Preservation Overlay Zones. Under current state law, we can no longer apply qualitative design standards to ADUs, which created issues in historic areas.

Overall, this effort focuses on lower-scale, smaller housing types distributed throughout the city.

Given that single-family zoning remains largely intact in LA, are you grappling with any of the greater supply-side constraints?

Yes. When we produce our plans—whether it is the Housing Element, Housing Implementation, community plans, or the Missing Middle—we conduct feasibility studies to look at the market and determine whether these plans are buildable.

That is part of how we develop our plans. We look at the issue at a macro-level to determine whether the zoning we are providing can actually be built; and then we look at zoning capacity from that standpoint. We really want to see small-scale development and more pathways to homeownership.

As part of the strategy, we are looking at for-sale ADUs. The state provides a pathway where an ADU can be created and sold as a separate homeownership unit.

Isn’t that inconsistent with the original justification for ADUs?

I think it's an evolution of an ADU.

Moving on, a recent Bloomberg piece asked why so little affordable housing is being built despite a pro-housing legislature in California. From your vantage point, what continues to separate policy intent from on-the-ground production?

Zoning plays an important role, but it is not everything when it comes to getting homes built. There are other factors that limit production. We mentioned some of those earlier. Interest rates, construction costs, and labor costs are outside the realm of local government control.

Turning to SB 79, which the City officially opposed, how are you approaching implementation, and could you address the role of complementary local action in translating legislation into outcomes?

The goals of SB 79 align with the city’s goals, which are to build around transit. The city has leaned into that approach for at least the last ten years, going back to the Transit Oriented Communities incentives adopted in 2017. And we’ve seen this approach work - a USC study showed those incentives increased housing production in Los Angeles.

Our Housing Element and Housing Implementation programs are fundamentally about building more housing around transit. SB 79 mandates upzoning near certain transit in the city of Los Angeles. Implementation is still being shaped at the state, regional, and local levels, and there’s a role for the Department of Housing and Community Development, for SCAG, and for Metro. Metro determines rail lines and service levels, and SCAG produces the official maps.

SB 79 does not go into effect until July 1, but the bill allows cities to pause implementation in certain instances until the next RHNA cycle in 2029. It also allows cities to adopt a local implementation plan and that's what we’re working toward. We presented several options to the City Council. One option they asked us to dig deeper on is a combination of pausing implementation in certain areas and rezoning in other areas. That means that, when SB 79 takes effect on July 1, areas would either be paused or governed by a local zoning plan instead of SB 79. Right now it looks like 150 stations in the city, but we are still waiting for the final map from SCAG.

We are conducting analysis based on our assumptions about the map to understand zoning capacity and rezoning options. We hope to return to the City Council in the next few months and have a plan adopted by July 1. 

I’ll just say this: Implementation is fast-moving and requires detailed analysis. The bill includes parameters that limit what can and cannot be done. 

Some areas may qualify for pauses, including lower-resource communities, certain high fire hazard severity zones, and some historic preservation areas. These pauses last until 2029, meaning rezoning would be revisited during the next Housing Element cycle for 2029–2030.

As Los Angeles prepares for LA28, the Mayor’s Games for All agenda calls for an ordinance streamlining planning review for certain Olympic and Paralympic projects. Outline your approach and speak to Planning’s broader role in preparing the city for the 2028 Games.

With the Games for All initiative and the streamlining ordinance, it is important to note that although this was a no-build Olympics, no-build meant no major new infrastructure. The major infrastructure was already in place. The stadiums were already built or under construction, and rail lines were already built or under construction.

That does not mean there will be no construction. There will be construction around venues, including temporary and potentially permanent interventions. These include temporary outdoor seating, food concessions, restrooms, and fan zones— elements needed to support a viable Games and the Mayor’s Games for All vision, which is that everyone has access to the Games, whether or not they enter a venue. That includes access through fan zones and surrounding public spaces.

Recently approved by the City Council, the ordinance creates a streamlined pathway for certain temporary projects and for some projects that may ultimately become permanent or legacy improvements. It provides a process to identify those improvements and apply streamlined planning review, and we are excited to move forward with it.