![\"Placeholder\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/placeholder.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Los Angeles\n <\/p>\n
With Los Angeles\u2019 mayoral primary coming in June, the crowded pool of candidates and\u00a0narrow margins in early polls<\/a>\u00a0mean the position is very much up for grabs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Commercial real estate groups and leaders hope to see a candidate who will reverse the decline in confidence among investors and push for changes to the city\u2019s quality of life.<\/p>\n \u201cI don’t think this election is about politics,\u201d\u00a0Concord<\/a>\u00a0CEO\u00a0Reuben Robin<\/a>\u00a0said. \u201cIt’s about whether LA becomes investable again, and that’s really what it comes down to.\u201d<\/p>\n Although LA metro real estate sales volumes across all property types\u00a0grew year-over-year to $37.3B<\/a>\u00a0at the end of 2025, that figure remains $14.1B below the $51.4B in sales the area reached at the end of 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n Robin said his company, which owns multifamily properties, began in Los Angeles and in 2014 started buying in about a dozen markets outside of California in search of better yields. By late 2022, Concord began buying in LA again. It has about 1,000 units under contract in the city now.\u00a0<\/p>\n Robin\u2019s investors are skeptical. They’re sticking with him as he brings capital back to LA, but they aren’t as sure as he is that it’s a safe bet.<\/p>\n Many industry experts who spoke with Bisnow mentioned in some way that regulations\u00a0create\u00a0unpredictability that makes some investors balk at putting money into the city, especially when there are more stable municipalities right next door. \u00a0<\/p>\n Things like\u00a0Measure ULA<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0caps on rental increases<\/a>\u00a0come quickly and have major impacts on the value and desirability of property in LA, they said. Measure ULA places a 4% tax<\/a> on real estate transactions starting at $5.3M and a 5.5% tax on deals of $10.6M or more.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLA doesn’t have a demand problem,\u201d Robin said. \u201cIt just has a policy execution problem.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While most of the policy is dictated by the city council rather than the mayor, the city\u2019s top elected official\u00a0does have power<\/a>, through executive directives, to streamline approvals\u00a0and generally galvanize the public for or against issues. CRE leaders said there was a lot of room for improvement on all these fronts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regulations such as Measure ULA, which many in commercial real estate say\u00a0negatively impacts the construction of new apartments<\/a>, or those that affect multifamily owners, such as rent increase caps, were examples of issues that CRE leaders said a mayor can’t fix alone but can certainly help to direct opinion on.\u00a0<\/p>\n And with a substantial homeless population in Los Angeles, the impacts of the shortage of housing that Angelenos can afford are on display every day and bleeding into multiple aspects of life and work in the city.<\/p>\n \n Mayor Karen Bass in 2023, with Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is also running for mayor, to Bass’ right\n <\/p>\n \u201cThere are obviously a lot of issues LA is facing, and how those get managed \u2014 from\u00a0our budget crisis<\/a>\u00a0and beyond \u2014 are obviously important,\u201d\u00a0California Landmark Group<\/a>\u00a0principal Ari Kahan said. \u201cBut at the end of the day, I think that if we’re able to actually start building, we could fix the housing affordability crisis in a way that allowed our city to properly grow in the way that it did 10 years ago.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Industry professionals see the creation of new housing units, affordable and market-rate, as a critical element to the city\u2019s success and key to a politician\u2019s success in the role.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEven [Mayor Karen Bass<\/a>\u2019] ED 1 \u2014 sorry, great intentions, but intentions don’t equal outcomes,\u201d Thomas Safran & Associates Director of Housing Parisa Roshan said at a Bisnow event in mid-March.<\/p>\n In her first move as mayor in December 2022,\u00a0Bass\u00a0sought to speed up approvals for 100% affordable housing projects through Executive Directive 1. As of December, 490 projects totaling more than 40,000 units had been proposed through ED 1, but\u00a0only 44 projects<\/a>\u00a0accounting for about 2,500 units were under construction, the Los Angeles Times reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to stop rewarding politicians who say, \u2018Well, we permitted this number of units\u2019 or \u2018We approved this number of units,\u2019\u201d Roshan said. \u201cAsk them how many were actually built, and if the answer is closer to zero, vote them out and ask them why they failed.\u201d<\/p>\n The latest University of California, Berkeley and LA Times poll\u00a0projected Bass was supported<\/a>\u00a0by 25% of voters, with Councilmember\u00a0Nithya Raman<\/a>\u00a0earning 17% of voters\u2019 support and reality TV star and Pacific Palisades resident Spencer Pratt capturing 14% of the vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n Broadly, quality-of-life basics like public safety and trash cleanup were concerns for property owners, who are well aware of the reputational harm the city has faced since the pandemic. The Downtown core is still very much struggling with this, especially in the run-up to the\u00a02028 Olympic<\/a>\u00a0and Paralympic Games.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe need some strong, business-minded person to run for mayor,\u201d\u00a0Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles<\/a>\u00a0CEO and Executive Director\u00a0Daniel Yukelson<\/a>\u00a0said. Yukelson hoped The Grove owner and businessman\u00a0Rick Caruso<\/a>\u00a0would run, but he didn’t, and the deadline passed to declare candidacy. Caruso\u00a0ran for mayor<\/a>\u00a0against Bass in 2022. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnybody who’s business-minded is really going to focus on public safety and finding a real solution,\u201d Yukelson said.<\/p>\n He\u00a0said that AAGLA is looking to move out of its offices in Koreatown and into an office in a smaller adjacent city in the hopes of avoiding some of these quality-of-life issues, which included a break-in at the association\u2019s offices while\u00a0an employee was there alone.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have Los Angeles in our name, and we’re looking to move outside of the city of Los Angeles,\u201d Yukelson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles With Los Angeles\u2019 mayoral primary coming in June, the crowded pool of candidates and\u00a0narrow margins in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[103574,109435,109437,391,12262,4132,48,52,51,47,50,49,80054,109436],"class_list":{"0":"post-244170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-apartment-association-of-greater-los-angeles","9":"tag-california-landmark-group","10":"tag-california-landmark-group-ari-kahan","11":"tag-concord","12":"tag-daniel-yukelson","13":"tag-karen-bass","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-la-headlines","16":"tag-la-news","17":"tag-los-angeles","18":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","19":"tag-los-angeles-news","20":"tag-nithya-raman","21":"tag-reuben-robin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n