Bass Defends L.A. Housing Record After City Posts Worst Affordability Score in New Ranking
LOS ANGELES — Mayor Karen Bass is pushing back against a new ranking that places Los Angeles dead last among the nation’s 100 largest metro areas for housing affordability, arguing that her administration has moved aggressively to clear regulatory obstacles and bring more homes within reach.
The scrutiny intensified Wednesday with the release of the 2026 Realtor.com Metro Report Cards, which gave Los Angeles an F and the lowest overall score in the rankings, a combined measure of affordability and homebuilding. The city scored 12 out of 100, with an affordability component score of just 0.9 and a homebuilding component score of 23.1.
A bruising report card
In a statement to Realtor.com, Bass, who is running for re-election in November, said her administration has been working since she took office in 2022 to accelerate affordable housing production “after decades of inaction.” Her office said the city remains “laser-focused” on cutting red tape so more homes can come within reach of buyers.
Bass’s team points to Executive Directive 1, which streamlined approvals for nearly 47,000 units of 100% affordable housing. About 6,000 of those units are currently under construction. Her office also cites what it calls the largest local rezoning program in modern history, creating capacity for 500,000 new homes along major corridors, near transit, and in neighborhoods where people already live and work.
California law requires cities and counties to plan and zone for denser housing to meet the needs of residents at all income levels, and it penalizes those that fail to comply. Bass’s office says other steps include updating the Rent Stabilization Ordinance for the first time in 40 years, expanding the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance citywide to convert vacant office buildings and parking lots into housing, and issuing Executive Directive 19 to simplify how the city processes building applications. That last move, a Bass representative said, responded directly to barriers identified by applicants, developers, and contractors.
Shortage meets political pressure
Even so, Los Angeles remains caught between a severe housing shortage and an acute homelessness crisis. Those twin issues have become central to the mayoral race, where Bass faces City Councilmember Nithya Raman, and to the contest for California governor. Realtor.com reached out to Raman for comment and is awaiting a response.
Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has campaigned on accelerating construction to alleviate the housing deficit. Earlier this year, she proposed a ballot measure that would exempt newly built multifamily, commercial, and mixed-use buildings from Measure ULA, commonly known as the “mansion tax,” for 15 years. She argued the tax was slowing housing production.
The scale of the challenge is steep. Under the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment, Los Angeles must plan for more than 456,000 new homes between 2021 and 2029 to keep up with demand. That translates to roughly 57,000 new units a year. In 2025, however, only 18,000 units were permitted. By May 2026, the city’s pipeline had expanded to an annualized 28,500 units, but even that accelerated pace remains less than half what is required to hit the target.
“We really need to open up more inventory, and we can’t build our way out of the problem fast enough, especially since the development and permitting process is so slow here,” Victor Currie, a real estate agent at Douglas Elliman Real Estate in Los Angeles, told Realtor.com.
The math behind the F
The Metro Report Cards lay out the problem in blunt terms. Los Angeles, an ultraexpensive and critically undersupplied city, received 12 out of 100 points. Its affordability component score was the worst in the class at 0.9. Its homebuilding component score was 23.1. By comparison, Des Moines, Iowa, the top performer, earned an A+ and a total score of 83.4, with affordability and homebuilding component scores of 88.3 and 78.4, respectively.
Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner said the city’s poor showing comes down to how far homeownership has drifted out of reach for all but the very wealthy. In Los Angeles, the median earner must spend 84.4% of their income to afford the mortgage payment on a median-priced $1.12 million home, assuming a 10% down payment and a 6.5% 30-year fixed mortgage. That is nearly three times the 30% typically recommended to set aside for housing needs.
Put differently, a typical income earner cannot afford the typical Los Angeles home unless they can offer a massive 68% down payment amounting to roughly $768,000. The city’s other weak spot is its permit-to-population ratio, which measures how many homes are being built relative to the metro’s population. At 0.47, Los Angeles is building less than half the national average of homes per resident. Given those metrics, Berner said Angelenos should not expect supply-driven relief on housing prices anytime soon.
Los Angeles is one of 13 large, mostly coastal metros that flunked on affordability and homebuilding, with California claiming seven of them. The other F-grade recipients are Providence, Rhode Island; New York City; Honolulu; Boston; Oxnard, California; San Francisco; Worcester, Massachusetts; San Diego; Stockton, California; San Jose, California; Miami; and Riverside, California.
How the rankings work
The 100 largest metros by population were ranked on a 100-point scale based on two criteria carrying equal weight: housing affordability and homebuilding. Affordability, which accounts for half the final score, measures how accessible homeownership is for typical earners and takes into account the Realtors® Affordability Score. The remaining half is determined by homebuilding activity. Eighty percent of that score comes from the permit-to-population ratio, while the remaining 20% comes from the new-construction premium—the extra market cost of buying a brand-new home versus an existing one. Each metro receives a total score out of 100 and is assigned a grade from F to A+. The 13 cities at the bottom of the ranking earned an F and each scored lower than 30 on both the affordability and homebuilding components.
For Bass, the report lands in the middle of a reelection campaign and could sharpen scrutiny of her record on housing and homelessness. Her administration says the policies now in place are designed to pay off over time, but the latest numbers show how difficult it will be for Los Angeles to build its way out of a crisis that has been decades in the making.