Can California boost home building without supercharging gentrification?
LOS ANGELES - Along a stretch of South Los Angeles near the Expo light rail line, investment dollars are pouring in.
Landlords outfit vacant apartments with stainless-steel appliances to lift rents, flippers list renovated bungalows for sale at twice what they paid. And as long-term tenants are forced out, development companies build new apartments in a predominantly working-class area that they long shunned.
It's a story that's playing out in many California neighborhoods amid a major housing crunch. The solution to displacement of longtime residents, economists say, is to build more homes. But many advocates for lower-income and minority communities, such as those in South Los Angeles, fear that new market-rate buildings will only accelerate gentrification.
A proposed state bill tries to thread that needle. Senate Bill 50 would remove local development restrictions but establish different rules for wealthy and poorer neighborhoods and bar developers from using the bill's incentives on land where tenants lived for at least the previous seven years.
The proposal, scheduled for a committee vote Wednesday in Sacramento, comes after opposition from low-income community groups helped kill a version last year that zoned for higher-density
