LA Promised Affordable Housing. RAND Says the Mansion Tax Killed Apartment Construction Instead.
- -1,910Units per year of multifamily housing production LA lost to Measure ULA — an 18% drop vs the 2020-2022 baseline among 20+ unit projects. RAND EP-70917 study.
- -50%Drop in high-redevelopment-potential parcel sales since ULA took effect April 1, 2023. UCLA Lewis Center analysis.
- 55%Below FY23-24 budget that ULA actually collected — $270M against $604M projected. LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (D) revenue forecast.
- 63-138%Range of ULA revenue offset by lower future property-tax revenue (Harvard / UC study). Net fiscal impact may be negative.
- $473MFY25 LA homelessness budget that went unspent. The dollars that arrived weren't deployed. Controller Mejia, March 2026.
- $1.03B+Cumulative ULA revenue raised through December 2025 — well below the $600M-$1.1B/yr proponents promised voters.
In November 2022, Los Angeles voters passed Measure ULA— a documentary transfer tax of 4 percent on real-estate sales above $5 million and 5.5 percent on sales above $10 million — with the promise that the revenue would fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. Proponents projected $600 million to $1.1 billion a year. Voters were told this would help solve LA's housing crisis. The measure took effect April 1, 2023.
Three years later, the RAND Corporation has published the data. Jason Ward and Shane Phillips' April 2025 study for the UCLA Lewis Center, RAND report EP-70917, finds that Measure ULA reduced multifamily housing production in LA by roughly 1,910 units per year — an 18 percent decline from the 2020-2022 baseline. Apartment-building sales of properties with 20+ units are down. High-redevelopment-potential parcel sales have fallen by approximately 50 percent. The mechanism is straightforward: most new apartment buildings in LA sell at prices above the $5 million threshold, the transfer tax therefore lands on every transaction that would create new housing, and developers respond by building less.
The revenue side of the bargain is also under-performing. LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (D) documents that in FY23-24 the city collected $270 millionagainst a $604 million adopted-budget projection — a 55 percent miss. Cumulative ULA revenue passed $1 billion in December 2025, which is real money, but well below the trajectory voters were promised. A Harvard/UC analysis cited by Manhattan Institute's Shawn Regan estimates that between 63 and 138 percent of ULA revenue is being offset by lower future property-tax revenue as the same suppressed transactions stop producing the reassessments those sales would have triggered. The net fiscal position may be negative.
The RAND/UCLA study did not assume the answer. Ward and Phillips used a difference-in-differences design comparing LA City to the surrounding LA County jurisdictions where ULA does not apply, on a quarterly basis, before and after the April 1, 2023 effective date. The methodology controls for the broader interest-rate environment, post-COVID multifamily-construction dynamics, and statewide California housing trends — all of which depressed building everywhere. The portion that is specifically attributable to ULA is what shows up only inside LA City lines and only after April 2023.
“Our results establish a robust causal linkage between Measure ULA and a reduction in multifamily housing production in the City of Los Angeles.”
Jason Ward & Shane Phillips · RAND EP-70917, April 2025
The ironic policy result: ULA was sold as a tool to fund affordable housing, but its empirical effect is to suppress the construction of new apartment buildings — the class of multifamily housing that, even when market-rate, houses the largest number of working-class Angelenos.
Voters were promised $600 million to $1.1 billion a year. Per the LA City Controller, the actual collections are:
- FY 2022-23 (partial year, April-June 2023): $15.6M
- FY 2023-24:$270.3M actual against $604.6M budgeted — a $334M / 55% miss
- FY 2024-25 (projected):$271.1M — roughly flat
- Cumulative through December 2025: $1.03B+ raised
The Real Deal's April 2026 analysis of LA Office of Finance data found that commercial properties (office buildings, retail, industrial) accounted for 55.5%of total ULA revenue at $635.2M; the single-family-residential mansion sales that gave the tax its name accounted for just 41.3% / $472.6M. The political framing — rich people in Bel-Air paying their fair share — is true at the margin. The structural revenue base is mostly commercial real-estate transfers in a high-rate environment in which those transfers have collapsed.
LA Controller Mejia's March 2026 analysis documented a separate problem: of the FY25 homelessness budget of $1.1 billion— which includes ULA revenue alongside HUD Continuum-of-Care money, Prop HHH bond proceeds, and General Fund allocations — the city spent $516 million and encumbered an additional $119 million. That leaves $473 million sitting unspentin FY25 alone. Per the LA Housing Department's own dashboard, ULA has ‘advanced’ 795 affordable housing units— less than half the units RAND estimates were lost to construction suppression.
“The city doesn't know how much it is paying, and for what.”
Alvarez & Marsal · Court-ordered LA homelessness-spending audit · February 2025
The ULA coalition was a who's-who of LA progressive officials: Councilmembers Nithya Raman (D-LA, CD4), Hugo Soto-Martínez (D-LA, CD13), and Eunisses Hernández (D-LA, CD1) were sponsors and public defenders. Mayor Karen Bass (D-LA) supported the measure during her 2022 campaign and as mayor. Three years later, the political position has shifted noticeably.
In January 2026, Raman — who is now running for mayor against Bass — introduced a motion at LA City Council asking for a 15-year carveout exempting new multifamily, commercial, and mixed-use developments from ULA, plus an exemption for properties in the Palisades Fire zone. Raman's public framing acknowledged that ULA had produced ‘unintended consequences’ that ‘stall housing production’ and ultimately ‘undermine the very goals voters asked us to achieve.’ The motion was sent to committee and has not advanced.
Mayor Bass, in her February 2026 State of the City address, conspicuously did not defend ULA, did not attack it, and asked state lawmakers to delay a separate Sacramento-level reform bill that would have exempted new apartment developments. The Real Deal's coverage of the speech noted the omission directly: the mayor who had backed the measure declined to take a position on the carveout her own challenger had introduced.
Mayor: Karen Bass (D)— elected November 2022, in office during ULA implementation.
City Controller: Kenneth Mejia, CPA (D)— the ULA-revenue and homelessness-spending auditor of record.
City Council: All 15 of 15 seats held by Democrats. The Democratic supermajority that passed ULA also controls its reform.
LA Housing Department GM:Ann Sewill (Bass appointee) — the agency that operates ULA-funded affordable housing programs.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles filed suit against ULA in December 2022. Newcastle Courtyards LLC and the Mani Benabou Family Trust joined as plaintiffs in January 2023. LA Superior Court Judge Barbara Scheper dismissed both challenges in February 2023, ruling that LA voters had constitutional authority to enact a property transfer tax via ballot initiative. The California Court of Appeal subsequently affirmed; HJTA's appeal was dismissed.
Having lost the courtroom track, the Howard Jarvis camp pivoted to the ballot. The Local Taxpayer Protection Act— a statewide California ballot measure that would cap municipal transfer taxes and require supermajorities for local tax increases — qualified for the November 2026 California statewide ballot. HJTA President Jon Coupal's pitch to donors and CalMatters: “No more Measure ULAs.”
The national-cable coverage of LA's housing failures tends to focus on the visible street-encampment piece rather than the policy mechanics of why new housing stopped being built. Gutfeld's commentary on Mayor Bass is part of that political-pressure backdrop. The RAND study is the harder editorial accountability fact: a measurable causal mechanism, in peer-style research, that traces affordable-housing failure not to absent funding but to a tax structure that broke the construction-finance math.
AUDIT: PATHWAYS TO PERMANENT HOUSING. In a 5-year period for City-funded shelters: 1 in 4 beds went unused. Cost of unused beds: $218M. Only 1 in 5 people in shelters got permanent housing. Over half returned to homelessness or unknown destinations.
There has never before been an uncomplicated way for anyone to look up years' worth of code violations by address. Our dashboard centralizes over 10 years' worth of housing complaint and violation data into a single database open to the public.
Mejia is one of the few elected Democrats on the LA ballot building a public-record case againsthis own city's spending pattern. The dollar figures he publishes are the dollar figures cited above.
ULA is a city-level tax, not a federal program. The DOGE-Watch editorial frame applies because the deeper LA pattern — $24B+ spent on homelessness since 2018, $608K-$837K per Prop HHH unit, ULA suppressing construction, $473M FY25 unspent — is being subsidized at the federal level too, through HUD Continuum-of-Care grants and the broader federal-state housing-finance system. President Trump's June 2025 executive order on street homelessness has begun to reorganize that federal piece; Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) sued in November 2025 and partially blocked the EO under a federal-court injunction in April 2026.
They want to build a low-income housing project right in the middle of everything in Palisades, and I'm not going to allow it to happen.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Trump remark on Pacific Palisades low-income-housing siting, sourced to ABC7 LA coverage of the cabinet meeting. The quote is reproduced here for context on the federal-LA housing pressure track; rendered as a buttonless static QuoteCard.
State and local jurisdictions that produce zero housing while collecting federal subsidies will not be receiving additional federal dollars under this administration. Show us the units.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Broader administration framing on conditioning federal housing funds on actual unit delivery. Paraphrased here from public statements on the BEAD/housing reform track; rendered as a buttonless static QuoteCard.
Promised: $600M-$1.1B/year for affordable housing, funded by taxing mansions and luxury sales.
Delivered:~$271M/year. 795 affordable units ‘advanced.’ 1,910 units/year of new apartment construction lostper RAND's measurement — more housing destroyed than built.
Audit findings:$473M of the FY25 homelessness budget went unspent. The court-ordered Alvarez & Marsal audit found $2.4B in cumulative LA homelessness expenditures could not be reconciled. 63-138% of ULA revenue is offset by foregone property-tax revenue.
Who's in charge: 15 of 15 Democrats on City Council. A Democratic mayor. A Democratic controller documenting the spending failure. The Democratic supermajority that passed the measure has not reformed it; the Democratic mayor who endorsed it now avoids discussing it; the Democratic councilmember who sponsored it now runs against the mayor on a carveout platform.
The 2026 California ballot will let voters decide, statewide, whether the LA experiment in funding affordable housing by suppressing its construction should be repeatable in any other California city.