Late last month, Lester Holt of NBC News interviewed Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti about the city’s growing homeless population. In response, Garcetti pointed to the city’s increased level of spending on efforts to house the homeless, including $5.6 million for a 39-unit tiny home project. When Holt pressed him on $144,000 per unit price tag for the project, an extremely high amount for tiny homes and higher than the median home price in most US counties, Garcetti defended himself by saying, “Everybody can point to the cost of building things, I point to the cost of not building things.”

Mayor Garcetti is right when he suggests that the costs – both moral and economic – of not addressing homelessness are unacceptable, but, with due respect to Mayor Garcetti, he vastly oversimplifies the choices when he suggests that those of us who advocate for more judicious use of taxpayer money seek to obstruct solutions altogether. Garcetti is ignoring the regulatory hurdles and inefficient management that blocks too much affordable housing for Angelenos. Simply throwing money at the crisis, without addressing the underlying issues, benefits neither taxpayers nor the homeless.

While many elected officials and media observers portray homelessness as a function of mental health or substance use issues, the reality is that for most people experiencing homelessness, inability to afford housing costs played a part in their becoming homeless. With median rent for a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles at over $1,500 as of May 2021 compared to about $1,000 nationwide, according to ApartmentList, it’s clear that the cost of housing is a problem for many Angelenos, and that for some, the unattainably high cost of housing leads to homelessness. Los Angeles, through the Measure HHH bond issue and the state-funded Project Roomkey, has expanded its capacity to house homeless Angelenos, but these programs do not address the fundamental cause of homelessness: decades of underproduction have led to an estimated shortage of 3.5 million homes statewide, and with housing as in any other market, a shortage leads to high prices. The government’s efforts to build subsidized housing have not even provided a band-aid fix to this problem: as the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority stated in a 2020 presentation, “L.A. housed more people than ever, yet our housing affordability crisis drove a net rise in homelessness.”

Mayor Garcetti himself seems to understand this mismatch between Los Angeles’ crisis and the means being used to address it. Later in his interview with Holt he said, “We’re actually exceeding the goals on what we’ve set out to build, but that doesn’t mean that homelessness necessarily goes down in America. It’s like being in a boat and getting bigger and bigger containers to bail the water out.”

Mayor Garcetti’s boat metaphor is an apt one. Our advice to him: when your boat is taking on water, start patching the leaks.

What this means for housing is to make policy changes that allow for more housing production, rolling back the shortage and lowering prices. Government zoning regulations are perhaps the single biggest driver of housing underproduction: beyond density-based zoning like single-family only zones (which account for three-quarters of Los Angeles), minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and time-consuming approval processes all inflate the cost of new housing in Los Angeles and the rest of California. Relaxing these regulations has led to some of Los Angeles’ biggest housing successes, through the Transit Oriented Communities program, which has helped Los Angeles more than double the number of affordable housing units it produced. The upshot of this is that if relaxing strict housing regulations in some areas is such a success, why not relax these regulations city-wide?

The good news is that these policy changes would not only have a negligible cost to taxpayers, they would even help control the cost of subsidized housing and make outlays of taxpayer money on these programs more efficient. For example, relaxed regulations under the Transit Oriented Communities program allowed a development of full-size homes for previously unhoused people at a lower per-unit cost to taxpayers than the tiny home project that Mayor Garcetti highlighted.

As of January 2020, when the most recent data was recorded, Los Angeles County had just over 63,000 homeless residents, of whom about 46,000 (72%) were unsheltered. With Measure HHH’s goal to produce 10,000 housing units, and the state’s Project Roomkey having secured about 2,400 hotel rooms in Los Angeles, these spending programs simply do not match the size of the problem. To be clear, more housing options, along with mental health and other services, will be necessary for serving homeless Angelenos, specifically for helping those who are already homeless. But to ensure that these programs are an efficient use of taxpayer money, and to prevent the size of Los Angeles’ housing crisis from expanding even further, Los Angeles needs to update its strict zoning regulations and allow more housing construction.

To solve the homeless crisis in Los Angeles – and California as a whole – is going to require policies beyond a big checkbook.