To the editor: It’s gratifying to see a front-page article announcing new affordable housing (“Downtown L.A. World Trade Center to become affordable apartments,” June 30). But “affordable” needs to be clearly defined.
These will be affordable for the Department of Housing and Urban Development category that is approximately twice the federal poverty level. But, according a November 2025 transmission from the Los Angeles Housing Department to the City Council and census data, there are more than 180,000 poverty households in Los Angeles. Half of those households are spending more than 90% of their income on housing because virtually no poverty-level housing has been built in the city in the past 25 years.
Plus, if we base future projects on the math of the L.A. World Trade Center project: It will cost $200 million for 512 apartments, so nearly $400,000 per unit. Adding enough affordable units to address the 90,000 poverty-level households spending most of their income on housing would cost roughly $36 billion.
Any new low-income housing should be celebrated, but there does not appear to be a plan to address the poverty-income housing shortage commensurate with the scale of the problem.
Tom Rosenthal, Santa Monica
..
To the editor: Kudos to the firms Jamison and Kennedy Wilson for their projects to convert existing office buildings to housing. This is a sensible solution to the need to increase the inventory of additional housing rather than inserting multi-family housing into traditional single-family neighborhoods that do not have the infrastructure to accommodate the density.
Susan Stevens, Pasadena