By Chelsea Kirk, Director, Policy and Advocacy 

August 31, 2026

In mid-August, CalMatters published “California tool to encourage low-income rentals may suppress new apartment construction,” reporting on a new study by UC Irvine economist Noah Kouchekinia. The study claims inclusionary zoning mandates—policies requiring developers to set aside a certain share of units in new market-rate projects as affordable housing—can suppress housing construction overall. It is another salvo in an increasingly familiar supply-side argument over California housing policy that deems regulations intended to produce affordability ultimately cause housing to be more expensive by burdening development, reducing project feasibility, and constraining overall supply. In Kouchekinia’s telling, affordability mandates are effectively a tax on new construction, and the better solution is to remove barriers to private development and rely more heavily on expanded market-rate production and direct public subsidy for affordable housing.

Unsurprisingly, deregulatory housing groups have seized on the study to reinforce that argument. California YIMBY’s popularization of the research goes considerably further than the study itself, presenting the findings under a blog post, “California Cities Wanted Free Affordable Housing. Turns Out There’s a Huge Cost,” that argues that inclusionary zoning forces market-rate renters to absorb the cost of affordable units, suppresses overall housing production, and can ultimately make housing less affordable by restricting supply. Kouchekinia’s study is considerably more nuanced, though. It finds that the estimated effects vary dramatically with the stringency of the mandate, with the largest effects concentrated among the most stringent policies.

But there is an even more basic problem when this argument is applied to Los Angeles: we do not have the kind of citywide inclusionary zoning mandate described in Kouchekinia’s study. California YIMBY nevertheless opens its article by explicitly grouping Los Angeles with San Francisco, San Diego, Dublin, and Irvine as jurisdictions that “require private home builders to set aside a portion of the homes they build at below-market rents.” That is incorrect. Los Angeles has no citywide inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring market-rate residential projects to set aside a prescribed share of their units as affordable housing. The city has considered such a policy, but has not adopted one. What Los Angeles does have are incentive-based programs through which developers can voluntarily obtain additional density and other development benefits in exchange for providing affordable units.

In Los Angeles, a developer who could build 100 units under existing zoning but chooses an inclusionary zoning incentive program that allows him to build 150 units is not being “taxed” by a requirement to make some of the original 100 units affordable. In fact, the city is allowing substantially more development in exchange for an affordable set-aside. And, according to a 2026 report by Circulate Planning and Policy, California’s density bonus law, AB 2345, which allows developers to exceed density and other development restrictions if they reserve some units for low-income tenants, is creating the most new housing units, and is now the state’s most most widely used housing development tool.

Demonizing inclusionary zoning may make for a cleaner ideological argument against affordability requirements, but it is a poor reading of both the research and Los Angeles housing policy.