This article reviews the post-World War II mass production of houses in Los Angeles and the roots of today’s housing shortage. Even with a high production rate, minorities and low-income Angelenos have experienced racial barriers and displacement. Today, L.A.’s homeless population is disproportionally Black, while home ownership is disproportionally white. The article concludes with four proposals for responding to today’s shortage of affordable and racially equitable housing.

The State of California’s main tool for housing planning is legislation mandating a “Housing Element” as a component of all cities’ and counties’ comprehensive plans. Each local jurisdiction must demonstrate how it can meet the state’s calculated “Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The article traces the roots of this state requirement from an earlier Regional Housing Allocation Model (RHAM), which was merely a guideline. To ensure compliance, the legislature barred courts from intervening in the RHNA process. Nevertheless, it has taken four decades for California’s local jurisdictions to adopt legally adequate Housing Elements.

This article analyzes the early records of Mission San Gabriel to conclude that the missionaries replaced native identities with new categories of gentile and neophyte , based on religious criteria, and blurred the racial-social distinctions brought by the colonizers from Mexico into one California frontier class, the gente de razón , based on their roles in colonization and their adherence to Catholicism. The consequences can be measured in the 1769 explorers’ depictions of Indigenous, in native resistance, and most clearly in the mission register of baptisms, confirmations, and marriages. Christian Indians from Baja California who participated in the colonial enterprise complicated the frontier class distinctions. The early practice at Mission San Gabriel became the model for later mission practice.

The 1870 Pico House luxury hotel on Los Angeles’s historic Plaza has always been associated with Pío Pico, the last governor of California in the Mexican Era. Based on historical evidence in the Archive of the city’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and further research, archives manager Michael Henderson traces the proprietorship of the hotel from its first conception as a partnership between Pico and Antonio Cuyas, through successive management and legal cases to its eclipse and the deaths of its original proprietors in the 1890s.