September 11, 2025
Dear Mayor Bass:
In your backroom deals to create exemptions for Measure ULA, you sold out the majority of Angelenos who voted for you in favor of appeasing special interests. Your actions will needlessly harm Los Angeles’s efforts to ease our affordable housing and homelessness crises—a promise you campaigned on. We the undersigned individuals and organizations, who represent affordable housing developers, labor unions, homeless services providers, tenant rights organizations, environmental justice organizations, and others, are writing to express our anger and disgust at your administration.
In November 2022, Los Angeles voters passed Measure ULA with 58% approval because they understood the necessity of creating a permanent funding stream to solve our affordable housing and homelessness crises. Over two years, ULA has raised more than $800 million to build affordable housing, preserve affordable housing, expand homeownership opportunities, protect tenants from displacement, provide income support to seniors and people with disabilities, and prevent homelessness. An initial phase of ULA spending has kept 10,000 Angelenos in their homes through rental assistance, funded the start of construction on 795 affordable homes, and accelerated the creation of 10,000 union construction jobs. Last week, the Los Angeles Housing Department released an unprecedented $387 million for affordable and social housing projects—more than five times what LAHD typically allocates to affordable developers—the majority of which is revenue from ULA.
Now you have squandered this progress by cutting a deal with Sacramento politicians to appease the real estate industry. Since ULA passed, these corporate interest groups have been determined to sabotage ULA by identifying loopholes, filing lawsuits, and introducing bad-faith legislation to repeal it. By working with them to amend ULA to exempt so many of the properties it would have applied to, you have guaranteed it will generate only a fraction of possible revenue moving forward. This means Los Angeles will not only see fewer units of affordable housing built, we will also have less money for emergency rental assistance, eviction prevention, income support for seniors and people with disabilities and other ULA programs that are preserving existing affordable units and keeping tens of thousands of Angelenos housed.
Beyond eliminating Los Angeles’s best hope of addressing the housing crisis, your tampering with ULA represents something even more harmful: undermining the right of voters to decide how best to solve their own problems. A majority of Angelenos passed ULA in 2022 because they wanted a bold solution for their city, on their terms. It is profoundly undemocratic to aid and abet special interests in undermining the electorate’s decision.
ULA isn’t just essential to solving Los Angeles’ housing crisis, it’s one of the few bright spots in the country where progressive housing policy is turning the tide on homelessness and is therefore a model for the nation. You staked your career on solving Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis, but your recent actions demonstrate you cannot be trusted to do so.
Signed,
SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy)
BASTA Universal
Ryan Bell, Member, Pasadena Rental Housing Board
Community Power Collective
DSA-LA
Eastside Leads
Ground Game LA
I Love Lucile Avenue Tenants Association
KIWA (Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance)
LiBRE
People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER)
Southeast Asian Community Alliance
Tenants Together
Jessica Melendez, T.R.U.S.T. South LA
