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Endorsement: Reject special interest money grab Measure ULA

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Back in May, this editorial board warned Los Angeles taxpayers about a pending ballot measure from United to House LA to impose a significant new tax on high-value real estate sales.

The measure has since qualified and now it’s on the ballot in the city of Los Angeles in the form of Measure ULA.

The proponents of this measure mean well. They correctly note the obvious problems of homelessness and housing unaffordability in the city of Los Angeles.

Related: Our full list of endorsements

Their proposed solution is to raise taxes on real estate sales worth more than $5 million, raising roughly $900 million a year in tax revenue to be put toward housing and homelessness prevention efforts.

However, while this is perhaps superficially appealing to some, this is the wrong way to tackle both housing affordability and homelessness.

Los Angeles’ housing affordability comes down to the city’s long-term failures on land-use policy, byzantine bureaucracy and litany of obstacles to cost-effective housing development.

The city’s track record on building housing quickly,  efficiently and at reasonable cost has been a proven disaster. City taxpayers entrusted the city with $1.2 billion to house homeless people.

How’d that work out? According to city controller Ron Galperin, the city spent an average of $600,000 per unit of housing for the homeless and up to $837,000 per unit at one project.

Trusting a city with that track record with $900 million per year reminds us of the quote from P.J. O’Rourke, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” Further, for any public policy action, there is a trade-off.

Someone will be paying for these higher taxes and one can be sure that the costs will be passed onto consumers, small businesses and tenants.

If Angelenos are serious about addressing housing affordability and homelessness, they need to push city leaders to make it easier to build more housing and to demonstrate they can actually pull off making cost-effective housing a reality.

Measure ULA risks hitting Angelenos with higher costs in order to finance bloated bureaucracies. Measure ULA has all the hallmarks of a foolish special interest money grab, pure and simple. Vote no.


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