LA County tapping into grant to speed up affordable housing construction

LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell (2012 file photo by Dean Musgrove, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

LOS ANGELES — A new county agency aimed at addressing the homelessness crisis received a $660,000 grant to develop and launch a plan to ramp up how affordable housing is built, officials announced Thursday.

The L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency received the grant from the Southern California Association of Governments. The funds will help the agency establish a plan to guide operations, attract private investment capital and prevent homelessness in the process.

“This is such a big moment, a new era toward making housing more affordable for all of us,” Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who began her term this year as LACAHSA’s first board chair, said in a statement.

According to Mitchell, there’s a frustration among county leaders with how “difficult and expensive” it is to break the logjam in the housing crisis.

“LACAHSA is our first-ever regional approach to making housing more affordable across the whole county,” Mitchell said. “The award is like rocket fuel to help get us off the ground and make the first projects possible to accelerate how we produce and preserve affordable homes and prevent people from falling into homelessness.”