State awards $196M for multifamily housing projects in Los Angeles

The state is awarding a combined $196 million to multifamily housing projects across Los Angeles County, officials announced Thursday.

The funding is part of an effort by the state to overhaul the process for housing grants. The state announced more than $825 million in funding to 58 communities, which is expected to build 9,550 homes. The projects are expected to benefit around 187,500 people in total.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — who was alongside California Secretary of Business, Consumer Services and Housing Lourdes M. Castro Ramírez when the announcement was made on Thursday — thanked Gov. Gavin Newsom and Ramirez for “locking arms with Los Angeles to increase the speed and lower the cost of affordable housing constructions.”

“With more than 40,000 Angelenos living unhoused today, the time to clear bureaucratic delays at all levels of government is now,” Bass said. “We all must act with urgency, and that’s what the state is doing with this initiative.”

Newsom’s office called the application process for housing funding through the state “needlessly complex.” But Assembly Bill 434 now allows the state to combine multiple housing applications into one process.

“As we demand more housing to be built at the local level, it is incumbent upon the state to reimagine and modernize our own approval process,” Newsom said. “State applications that were once redundant and overly bureaucratic are now streamlined to ensure projects are not stalled in an endless bureaucracy that favored process over production.”

The new application process, which resulted in what is called the Multifamily Finance Super Notice of Funding Availability, has received more than $3.5 billion in requests from developers, according to Newsom’s office.