This Article was Posted on Westchesterparents.org by westchester dad

A commentary piece in this week’s LA Business Journal (subscription) by Mary Leslie, president of the Los Angeles Business Council, cites an interesting statistic from the Los Angeles Housing Department: “Last year… more than 14,000 housing units were built in the city. Twelve thousand of those units were priced for people making $90,000 or more per year. Unfortunately, in the same period, only 1,300 of the 8,000 units needed for people making between $29,000 and $90,000 per year were built.”

Aside from the affordability..

14 thousand new housing units built? I suspect 2 cars each, that’s 28,000 vehicles at a minimum 56,000 new vehicle trips a day on our city streets. Looks like we’ll need to convert Wilshire Blvd to a one way street now like Pico and Olympic?

Those new units will also need an additional requirement of 5,102 acre feet of water to sustain those new residents or about 1% of the cities total supply.

1% doesn’t sound like a lot but.. doesn’t the mayor want us to reduce our water use by 10 percent? Then why did they add more housing? Now we have to reduce even further to 11% just to make ends meet.

While Mayor Villaraigosa and city policies under him have added 14,000 new housing units thus raising demand for water by 1% this year alone, U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger on December 14th, ordered cuts of up to 1/3 normal deliveries to Southern California beginning as early as late December.

A 1% increase might not be such a big deal if it were not for the cities urgent plea that we cut our consumption by 10%. While housing inventories are on the increase the question is.. cut our consumption, for who and why? Is it our own quality of life or the benefit of elected officials and developers who envision a city growing to 5.6 million residents? Under this new scenario we may see the City of Los Angeles’s water supplies drop 100,000 acre feet to 570,000 next year unless (a) the MWD can cajole the agricultural sector into fallowing more of their industry thus crimping the supply of more agricultural products going to stores (and lowering California’s gross income) and (b) the Los Angeles Aqueduct can miraculously deliver record new yields. Last year the LAA only delivered 278,000 acre feet.

The 100,000 acre feet loss is enough to supply 570,000 people for one year at today’s rate of consumption.