Another way to do it is to allow people to live on the streets and robberies to go up. In San Diego they are allowing people to build more houses on their property which will just make it more congested.
Andy
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And one that’s totally unnecessary. Building new homes - even a lot of new homes - doesn’t mean approaching Mumbai patterns of development. LA’s existing density is only just over 8K per square mile. You could double the number of residential units, and be nowhere close to Mumbai’s ~75K people per square mile. Heck, you wouldn’t even be anywhere close to Paris…or Brooklyn, for that matter. You’d have a city with a population density closer to Madrid or London.
If you don’t want housing to be unaffordable, you have to build units to equalize demand and supply at a price that works. That means being willing to allow the density to increase in parts of your city. Most municipal and county land use regulations are set up in ways that make that very, very difficult to do - and California municipalities and counties are notoriously restrictive on that count. So very few new units get built, scarcity continues, and prices rise. But since people who already own their own homes - which is most voters and nearly everyone who shows up to a zoning board hearing - benefit when prices rise, it’s hard to push back on that.
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I like the idea of trying things around the United States. Like New York implementing a fee to drive a car into the city. Houston taking care of their homeless problems by building more housing for them. By implementing more of these types of projects then maybe California can come up with a solution. It may come down to building projects all in a row with a police station on every block. I do not know but I do know they will find a solution.
Andy
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I understood that he was using “Mumbai” as a form of hyperbole!
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I don’t think you can in any practical sense. LA was designed by the automobile, with everything dispersed and generally unfriendly to pedestrians. Double the density in LA and you will get Mumbai levels of congestion and pollution. Is there any example of a major car-dependent city transitioning to one that mostly walks and uses mass transit?
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Austin is trying that. I know someone who lives downtown and he can do a lot simply by walking. There is also the Domain on the north side that is a great mix of apartments, dining, entertainment and shopping, all walkable.
What is not good about this is that, well, it’s Austin. Why people build outdoor malls in Austin is stupefying. 
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No - but there are examples of major car-dependent cities adding a lot of new housing units without getting Mumbai levels of congestion and pollution. For example, Houston grew from 1.7 million people to 2.3 million people in 30 years.
Most of LA is detached single-family homes. You don’t need to turn those into skyscrapers to get a lot of new units (although you’ll want some new apartments). You could just start allowing areas to add smaller SFH, duplexes, quadplexes, townhouses, or brownstone walk-ups. It will still be car dependent, and there will be some delta of congestion - but it won’t be anything like Mumbai.
Remember, the issue is how much new housing would have to be built to significantly reduce housing prices. NYC is much denser than LA. Are housing prices any lower? What makes you think increasing density reduces housing costs? Aren’t the densest cities like Tokyo, London, Paris, etc among the most expensive? Unless of course one reaches Mumbai levels when the quality of life begins to decline. That’s when housing becomes more affordable.
I still believe that to significantly reduce the housing costs in LA, one has to reduce the demand. The only way I can think of reducing the demand is to reduce the quality of life. People prefer to live in LA than most other places. The more housing one builds, the more people will come. That will only stop when LA becomes a less appealing place to live, like if the congestion and pollution approaches what one sees in Mumbai.
But you’re the expert. At what density level will the demand for housing in LA be sufficiently satiated to significantly reduce housing costs? Bet it gets close to Mumbai levels.
Increasing density doesn’t reduce housing costs. Increasing the number of houses reduces housing costs. Basic supply and demand - if you build more houses (increase supply), then the price of the average house will reach a lower equilibrium.
LA, like a lot of cities, has not been approving the construction of very many new housing units over the last several decades. There are a lot of reasons for that - but the primary culprit is likely the development approval process, which contains countless “veto points” for aggrieved neighbors or other interests to stop (or materially slow) approval of new residential development.
The number I’ve seen bandied about is between 400-500K new units for LA over the next ten years to make up that deficiency. That would be an increase of about a third from current levels. Population would not increase by nearly that much - again, the point is to make up for the shortfall in housing stock relative to existing population demand - but even if it did, that would put LA’s population density at a fraction of Mumbai’s - and well below that of cities like London or Madrid.
Most of Los Angeles’ huge San Fernando Valley could easily take quadruple the density is now has, and parts of the valley already are dense with no problem. Turning the Freeways into congestion priced tollways would be the crucial move making that possible.
david fb
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The Hawthorn area of LA has a pop density of under 14000 per sq/m with a total pop of 84k
The Cicero area of Chicago has a very similar density and total pop (14600 and 86k).
Median home price in Hawthorn is 850k
In Cicero, it is just 240k.
It would seem that density is not the driving force behind home prices if two cities of very similar density, total population, and even land area (5.8 vs 6 sq miles) can very this widely in home prices.
#7 and #8 on this list:
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It is supply and demand. If housing units are expensive, the solution is to build more units.
It should be noted that upzoning takes time to have an effect. New units are built slowly in comparison to the amount of existing stock, and builders prefer to construct high end units. But eventually high end becomes medium, and medium becomes low.
Ideally, this should accomplished in concert with transit options, and it is a good idea to allow a small bit of retail in residential areas too.
All these are big lifts. Seattle has upzoned a lot in the last couple years, with varying degrees of success.
I’ve found it difficult for some to understand that if they cannot make money, building new apartment/condo complexes, they just won’t be built. High materials cost, higher labor, equipment costs all figure into it. There has been a no, slow growth policy here in this area, 35 miles N od SF, for many years, but in the last several years, quite a few projects were approved, but then Covid hit, they were postponed. Now they are all going ahead, so many new complexes are in progress. But they won’t be cheap, as the supply is still tight. And now come the whiners, complaining about all the expected traffic, on top of it, right now, many repaving projects all over town, so, complaints about traffic, potholes, traffic just go on and on…And the homeless camps continue to have their problems. Police, firemen are understaffed, so a bit of a mess in some areas… Eventually it will sort itself out, but for now, pretty messy…
Choosing between Cicero and Hawthorne is like choosing between deer piz and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Hawthorne is near but not on the surf line, and was the birthplace of many of my surfer buddies.
david fb
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In some ways NYC. And now again in another way NYC. But that is a very small land mass.
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Agree - Lots of pedestrians, bikes, and mass transit riders…
Friekin’ people everywhere 
'38Packard
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A bit lawyerly don’t you think. Increasing the number houses in the LA metropolitan area increases the population density of that area. We are talking about the same thing.
That assumes the housing market is elastic. It probably is in Oklahoma City but I doubt that it is in places like LA or SF. Too many people want to live along the CA coast. Demand is too high. My guess (and that is all it is) is that the amount of housing required to get to the point where LA housing prices significantly decline will lead to a reduction in the quality of life. In the LA coastal cities it is the quality of life that is really determining housing prices, not supply.
It is like demand for the Tesla Model Y. Tesla quadrupling Model Y production from 100,000 to 400,000 had no impact on demand and the selling price. It’s not until they were making over a million of them that there was any evidence the supply was impacting price.
Makes my point. London population density is much higher than LA’s, yet the cost of living is equally high. So why believe that moving LA to London’s level of housing is going to significantly lower costs when it hasn’t for London (or Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or Paris)? I don’t see any evidence for the world’s popular cities that increasing urban density corresponds to lower housing costs, at least not until you get to the Mumbai level.
It has been ever thus - the CA coast held charms for people in the 1990’s as it does today. But housing affordability issues have skyrocketed in recent years. What’s changed is that housing development has slowed to a trickle in many areas. In areas where development has continued apace, housing prices have remained more reasonable.
I picked world-famous cities that anyone would be familiar with, to show that high densities don’t necessarily mean Mumbai levels of pollution and congestion. I could have picked Newark or Hialeah instead.
Cities always have higher housing costs and higher costs of living than rural and exurban areas. There’s no argument there. But there’s still a vast spectrum of cities that run the gamut between the insanely unaffordable metros of SF and NYC and more reasonable costs like OKC or Houston. What’s happened is that the former metros clamped down on developing new residential units to keep up with demand, while the latter have allowed continued growth to balance that out.
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That assumes demand is static as supply increases. It’s not entirely clear that is the case with some parts of the country, like California. People like to live on the coasts!
More housing raises the cost of living. It produces more wealth and therefor more inflation in the area. People bid things up.