This report is a follow-up to Los Angeles Employer Assisted Housing Handbook, a 2009 report issued by the Los Angelis Business Council (LABC) that proposed several strategies that employers might adopt to lessen the extent of the region’s affordable housing crisis. In the intervening years, the crisis has not lessened. Rather it has become even more acute. This section details the nature of the crisis in housing affordability, and then introduces the subject of this report – a survey of employers regarding their views on how the high costs of living and of housing are affecting their ability to do business.

The lack of affordable housing is a national problem. In 2014, 11.4 million households paid more than half of their income for housing, a record number for a single year (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2015a). Data from 2013 show that over 24 million families with incomes under $30,000 paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing (Dreier and Bostic, forthcoming). Importantly, having a job does not inoculate families from facing housing affordability challenges, with many workers who are employed full time still not earning enough to afford prevailing market rents.

The housing affordability crises in California and Los Angeles are direr than what the national picture shows. A California Legislative Analyst Office report on the state’s housing markets shows that renters in California metropolitan areas on average devote a larger fraction of their incomes for housing than the average fraction spent on housing nationally (California Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2015). Moreover, the high cost of housing is a statewide problem. Green (2014) estimated housing burdens for every California metropolitan area and found that housing costs exceeded 30 percent in virtually everyone.

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