An article from today's LA Times that, unfortunately, focuses more on the negatives of "displacement" (i.e. people willingly selling their bungalows for $1.1M) than on the beneficial increase of a housing typology that serves the needs of both university students and,
apparently, the formerly homeless:
How student housing around USC is transforming a historic Black and Latino neighborhood
Doug Smith, Angie Orellana Hernandez
Los Angeles Times
March 20, 2024
Only a year ago the little gray and yellow house on 35th Place was nestled among similar early 20th century homes interspersed with a few postwar apartments.
Today it is flanked on one side by two four-story buildings and on the other by three buildings under construction.
Scenes like that are playing out on almost every block in the neighborhood west of the USC campus. A building boom is transforming a historic Black and Latino neighborhood into a village of modern student housing, unchecked by planning constraints that were enacted
more than a decade ago specifically to hold off such a boom.
Similar development occurs over large portions of South Los Angeles where small firms have learned to max out the area’s underutilized multi-family zones that allow much more density than the single-family zones that are the bedrock of the city’s suburbs.
. . . .