May 19, 2026
Exciting news for residents of unincorporated Los Angeles neighborhoods Florence-Firestone, East Los Angeles, and the other 100+ communities that are represented by the County Board of Supervisors. Last month, Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell (SD2) and Supervisor Hilda L. Solis (SD 1) introduced a motion to develop a local preference policy for housing in unincorporated Los Angeles County. This motion will allow several key Los Angeles County agencies to begin collaborating on a reportback to establish a local preference policy for housing developments and programs receiving financial assistance in unincorporated areas.
What does a local preference policy do? When rent-stabilized housing is demolished to make way for new development, local preference policies are there to ensure the low-income renters who get displaced can afford to stay in the communities where they live, work, go to school, and have social and familial ties. Such a policy would allow Los Angeles County to set aside a subset of affordable units in nearby nonprofit, streamlined, or inclusionary developments for these renters, who would be offered similar units at rents equivalent to what they had been paying. As we noted in our 2025 report “Local Preference Policy Framework For Los Angeles,” many cities across California have local preference policies, including San Jose, San Francisco and Berkeley.
Currently, California has laws such as SB 330/SB8 that allow tenants in unincorporated areas facing displacement due to new development a “right to return.” This allows qualifying low-income tenants to claim a replacement unit in the project that displaced them once it’s built. But there is not much data on how many renters actually return, and that process can take years. A local preference policy could speed things up by making nearby units immediately available to these renters.
SAJE strongly supports such a policy, and we are looking forward to helping ensure it is informed by the needs of local community members, including tenants in unincorporated areas of the county facing displacement due to demolitions, evictions, climate disasters like the Eaton fire, and other pressures.
