A Case for Multigenerational Living in Los Angeles

Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans “will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” Indeed, this astute observation is as true to broken American housing policies as it is for wartime strategy. Many of the proposals to mitigate our catastrophic housing shortage fall woefully short of matching the scope of meaningful housing reform. What we need is to maximize space in ways that solve multiple societal challenges at once — namely the three-level townhome. 

In Los Angeles, the disappearance of the starter home has been exacerbated by decades of restrictive zoning and excessive California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) regulations. This has resulted in an affordability crisis so acute that the only way to own a home in today’s real estate market is to either make a minimum salary of 300K a year (most doctors don’t even make this) or to have bought in decades ago when economic conditions were much more favorable to first-time homebuyers. Moreover, with only 13% of Los Angeles households able to afford the average home of $1.2M, outmigration and permanent rentership edging higher and higher up the income ladder will continue to dominate the housing landscape of this highly broken market. The value of a three-level townhome can be understood both in terms of its spatial utility and its unique potential to solve several of our most pressing issues connected to our dwindling labor force and caring for our aging population. As people live longer, the need for the “sandwich generation” to both raise their children while caring for older family members becomes more acute especially in urban centers like Los Angeles with an aging population that is far outpacing inbound migration. 

As Joel Kotkin, Professor of Urban Futures at Chapman University observes, “High housing prices, relative to incomes, are having a distinctly feudalizing impact on our state of California, where the primary victims are young people, minorities and immigrants.” Further, the move toward globalization, and the economic and cultural changes that have occurred incrementally since the end of World War II have resulted in drastic changes in domestic migration patterns, leading to the fragmentation of what were once cohesive families and communities. This pattern, without significant course correction, will only increase with the extreme unaffordability of life in urban centers as well as the epidemic of loneliness that plagues much of America. In simplest terms, people are being forced out of their communities by the aggregate effects of unaffordable housing, massive student loan debt and lack of economic opportunities in once thriving urban centers. This will have devastating effects on our local economy and our ability to care for our aging parents and grandparents without significant innovation beyond the limits of the insufficient limited density projects proposed thus far.

One could argue that the image of the single-family home as the apex of the American dream has directly led to the fragmentation and loneliness that people are experiencing across all sectors of society having in effect been cut off from the nature and nurture of community. This feeling of isolation by generation has only been amplified by the Covid pandemic. By contrast, the townhome is a physical manifestation of “it takes a village” where not only are children raised in multigenerational households, but elder care is assisted by programs such as In Home Supportive Services that allow family members to care for their aging relatives reducing the need to hire external caregivers. Further, absent robust long-term care insurance, elder care can cost upwards of 10K a month. Over 10 years, the cost will significantly diminish, if not eradicate the life savings and equity that people worked a lifetime to create for their families.  

One could argue that the image of the single-family home as the apex of the American dream has directly led to the fragmentation and loneliness that people are experiencing across all sectors of society having in effect been cut off from the nature and nurture of community. 

This is not to say that multigenerational living is for everyone. I am sure that having one’s mother right there to remind you to eat your veggies or one’s father knocking on your door to fix his broken cell phone that he just forgot how to charge is less appealing than renting a swanky studio in Silverlake. However, ask anyone who has lost a parent what they would give to have that back even for one day and suddenly the illusion of the grandeur of self-reliance vanishes like the once-attainable dream of homeownership in our city.

Lisa Ansell is the Associate Director of the USC Casden Institute and Lecturer of Hebrew Language at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles.