Category Archives: participation

From crisis to renewal? Affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles

April 16, 2025 By in affordable housing, homelessness, Los Angeles, participation, public sector governance Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In dark times, I take inspiration from the great social scientist Albert Hirschman’s commitment to  the search for ‘a bias for hope’, for  “avenues of escape from exaggerated notions of absolute obstacles…. avenues in  which the inventiveness of history  and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors”. Viewed from this perspective, the point of departure for effective action is not some idealized vision of how things should be, but  clarity  as to how things actually are – with this clarity providing the basis for a search for practical entry points capable of setting far-reaching cumulative change in motion.  This passion for the possible has inspired my research and practice for almost a half century; it is the guiding spirit of a new  cycle of research on the Los Angeles’ region’s twin crises of homelessness and scarcity of affordable housing (AHHLA)  that I introduce in this piece.

Los Angeles’ AHHLA crisis startles. LA County is among the world’s affluent locales, with a  2023 per capita income of over $78,000, well above the American average. Yet that same year about 55,000 people were living on LA’s streets, and over 30,000 of them had been there for more than one year.  Even more startling, every year about 60,000 people become newly homeless –  a cumulative total over five years of almost 3 percent of LA County’s population of 10 million.  For those who live in Los Angeles (among whom, having moved here in 2023, I now count myself) the AHHLA crisis is existential. But its significance goes beyond the local.

As recent books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025) and Marc Dunkelman (2025) explore in depth, a broad national reckoning is underway to assess both how failures of progressive governance contributed to the rise of toxic populism, and what might be the contours of a renewed and effective progressivism.  AHHLA is ground zero of this broader crisis of contemporary American progressivism. In what ways did decades of progressive good intentions gone wrong fuel LA’s current crisis? Are there hopeful lessons to be learned from recent efforts to address AHHLA about how progressive approaches to governance can become part of the solution?

Here, to set the stage for addressing the above questions,  is AHHLA’s economic backdrop:

  • Over the past four decades, even as the affluent have thrived,  earnings have been stagnant for the poorer half of LA’s population. As of the early 2020s, 16.6 percent of LA residents lived below baseline (rent-adjusted) measures of absolute poverty – the highest percentage among California’s regions. (California is the state with the highest percentage in the USA.) In the absence of the public safety net, the LA percentage would be 26%.
  • Beginning in the 1990s, a combination of population growth, the end of the extensive margin and slow growth environmentalism/NIMBYism has resulted in an increasingly severe shortage of housing. Between 1960 and 1990, about  200,000 housing units were built each decade; between 1990 and 2020,  the decadal average was below 75,000 units. In 2023, 45 percent of the households that earn below LA County’s median income paid more than half their income in rent.
  • The unit costs of building publicly-subsidized affordable housing in Los Angeles are almost two and a half times the equivalent costs in Colorado and Texas; startlingly, within LA the total development costs per square foot are 50 percent higher for publicly-subsidized  than for unsubsidized, market rate housing built for private (self-pay) buyers.

Considered together, the combination of stagnant incomes, rising unit costs and a near cessation of new housing construction (except at the more affluent end of the market) was to make accommodation increasingly unaffordable for lower-income Angelenos. In important part, and as per the title of an influential book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem. More on all of this in coming weeks and months.

LA’s fragmented  governance arrangements have enabled the AHHLA crisis to fester. This fragmentation  is especially ill-suited to addressing homelessness – a multi-faceted ‘wicked’ problem  that calls for a multi-sectoral, multi-jurisdictional and multistakeholder  response. The roots of LA’s fragmented governance can be traced back (at least in part; racial ‘redlining’ also played a role….) to a century-long aspiration to avoid centralized, urban machine politics and cultivate instead more localized, small-town-like governance.  Some tasks are the responsibility of LA County government, and others are diffused among the County’s 88 municipalities, of which the City of LA (with a population of four million) is the largest. This fragmentation has been exacerbated by deepening commitment over the past half-century to open, often legally-mandated public deliberative processes in advance of any action, which further complicates local government’s decision-making.  

Moving towards more top-down governance (of varying degrees of draconianism) offers one possible response to fragmentation.  But widening the distance between citizens and local government risks worsening what already is a crisis of civic alienation from government in many countries (not least of which the USA) the world over. Might there be a third way, one that finesses the traps of top-down governance accompanied by citizen alienation, or civic participation plus ineffectual governance? 

In recent conceptual work (see here for an introductory overview), I have explored the potential and limits of this third way. The articles delineate three distinct channels through which ‘socially-embedded’ approaches to public governance might simultaneously  counter fragmentation, encourage participation  and enhance effectiveness:

  • A collective effort to enhance clarity as to goals;
  • Streamlined, transparent  and participatory approaches to performance monitoring; and
  • Collaborative, multistakeholder arrangements for service provision.

Recent initiatives in LA to reduce homelessness incorporate all three channels. Why these initiatives were adopted,, and whether they will continue to unfold in ways that contribute to reducing homelessness is the focus of an ongoing research project in collaboration with  the University of Southern California’s Professor Yan Tang (an eminent scholar in the tradition of Elinor Ostrom’s work on collective action). As our research will explore, one key to success is whether the protagonists in the LA efforts will be able to craft a credible way of sharing gains and burdens within a framework that can advance the collective interest. What follows will hopefully whet the reader’s appetite for the research project.  

Strikingly, at least since the early 2010s,  momentum for scaling-up and reshaping how LA responds to its homelessness crisis has come less from government than from civil society. The efforts have unfolded in two phases. In a first phase, political and civic leaders championed a series of ballot measures that successfully raised billions of dollars to address AHHLA. However, by the late 2010s, there was a dawning realization that the magnitude of the challenge went way beyond earlier perceptions. Not only was further financing required, effectively addressing the twin crises called for better  co-operation among multiple stakeholders – something that the region’s fragmented institutions were not well placed to achieve.  A 2021 report commissioned by civil society champions took stock of the governance challenges, and proposed a menu of reforms. Partly in response to this report, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors  established a Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness Governance  and subsequently adopted its recommendations.

Since mid-2024, there has been an extraordinary burst of energy and  reform aimed at aligning LA’s multiple stakeholders  around a coherent governance platform for reducing homelessness. Major initiatives include:

  • The creation by LA County’s Board of Supervisors of a robust, formally-empowered multistakeholder platform, with a mandate to “help align the region’s approach to homelessness and provide critical accountability and oversight to ensure more meaningful results”.  
  • The  development and official adoption of specific, measurable targets for reducing  homelessness.  
  • The initiation of work by  the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), established in a 2022 resolution of the California State Senate to increase the availability and affordability of housing in LA.
  • A radical restructuring (currently at an early stage, but on an accelerated timetable)  of the lead public  LA County and City agencies responsible for overseeing and implementing the LA region’s response.
  • A new effort to specify performance standards for each of the many elements that go into the homelessness response – as a necessary basis for both resource allocation and accountability.

The hope is that the above initiatives will together finally provide the coherence and momentum needed to make real inroads into  homelessness – and thereby  break a longstanding corrosive cycle of overpromising and then underdelivering.  Whether this will happen remains uncertain,  but if it does  LA could go from being seen as a notorious example of the failure of well-intentioned progressivism to effectively address urgent social challenges, to  becoming an exemplar of a renewed, legitimate and effective 21st century progressivism. What happens next thus matters well beyond LA itself.  Watch this space for further updates. 

The public domain and the quest for renewal

January 9, 2024 By in adaptive, bureaucracy, inclusion, legitimacy, participation, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Changing times bring changing questions. For decades, my work has focused on incremental ways to improve development and governance  in the midst of messiness. Now, though, in many countries these are times of decay and rage.  When and how the fever will break is unknowable. So for now I choose to look beyond incrementalism  and explore the broader challenge of better understanding – and fostering – renewal.

In exploring renewal, I take inspiration from the work of the great twentieth century social scientist Albert Hirschman. (See here,  here and here.) Hirschman   identified  three distinct phases in a (repeating) cycle of political, social and economic change:  a phase of vibrancy, underpinned by hope;  a phase of disillusion, anger and conflict; followed (if a continually deepening downward spiral can be averted) by  a phase of renewal. In  recent papers, I explored how this Hirschman cycle has played out in recent decades in South Africa and in  the USA. In both countries, the cycle was driven by changes in two sets of  perceptions – in the tolerance for inequality, and in perceptions as to the legitimacy of the public domain. Citizens  have become increasingly skeptical as to the public sector’s effectiveness, and increasingly question whether the purposes the public sector pursues are ones for which it has a mandate, and are in the national interest. 

My new research, introduced in this post,  focuses on the ways in which interactions between citizens and the public sector shape perceptions of legitimacy – in particular whether  “socially-embedded bureaucracy” might help turn around disillusion with the public domain.  As defined here (and elaborated in this accompanying paper)  a socially-embedded bureaucracy (SEB) is characterized by:   

“problem-focused relationships of co-operation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside of government, including governance arrangements  that support such co-operation”.   

At least on the surface, initiatives that strengthen SEB seemingly have the potential to help renew the legitimacy of the public domain by cultivating trust – and thereby reinvigorate society’s capacity to  achieve win-win outcomes to mixed motive bargaining challenges – not only at the micro-level, but systemically as well.  

Notwithstanding its surface plausibility, the case for championing SEB is far from open-and-shut.  On the one hand, among protagonists of SEB, enthusiasm all-too-easily outruns both the empirical evidence and conceptual clarity. On the other, SEB is inconsistent with mainstream conceptions of public sector governance; as a result  its potential is all-too-easily dismissed.  My new work  aims to help put the empirical and (especially) conceptual platform of SEB discourse on a sounder footing. The work addresses two inter-related questions:

  • At the micro-level: Can SEB help improve public sector performance?
  • At the systemic level: Insofar as SEB indeed can help improve public sector performance, might it also transform perceptions more broadly, and in particular help renew the perceived legitimacy of the public domain?

To begin with the micro-level,  as the figure below highlights, the contrast is stark between SEB and conventional notions of  how public bureaucracies should be governed.  In the conventional view, governance is organized hierarchically, with a focus on ‘getting the systems right’  Citizens engage upstream in the chain via their selection of political representatives who oversee both policymaking and implementation. The tasks of public officials are defined by legalistic, rule-bound processes, which also insulate public bureaucracy from political interference. Civil society’s  governance role is to bring pressure from the demand-side to help ‘hold government to account’.  By contrast, SEB is problem- rather than systems-oriented; it incorporates horizontal as well as hierarchical governance arrangements; interactions (both within the bureaucracy and at the interface with civil society) are less legalistic and more adaptive, oriented towards  deliberation and fostering initiative.

These distinctive characteristics potentially enable SEB to improve public sector performance via three channels which are unavailable to insulated bureaucratic hierarchies:

  • SEBs potentially can foster synergistic gains from co-operation between public bureaucracies and non-governmental actors;
  • SEBs potentially can  transform the governance arrangements for monitoring and enforcement from a morass of red tape to trust-building interactions between public officials and service recipients; and
  • SEB potentially supports developmental alliances among reform-oriented public officials and civil society actors – thereby enabling an unambiguous focus on the (developmental) public purpose, while obviating the risk of capture.  

(See the accompanying ‘microfoundations’  paper for more details.)

The above is not intended to imply that SEB necessarily is superior. Social embeddedness risks  adding messiness in contexts where the priority task is to enhance bureaucratic coherence; it risks enabling new modes of predatory capture of public resources. But, as recent syntheses of the empirical evidence underscore, it does suggest that it is, at the least,  premature to be dismissive of SEB’s possibilities. Don’t risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

At the systemic-level,  a very different (and again controversial) case for SEB emerges. As the background paper explores, social learning and an associated cultivation of ‘pro-sociality’ is central to the micro-level argument. Might such learning  cascade upwards to the systemic level, and  help buttress citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain? Answering this question calls for careful unbundling of interactions between public effectiveness, trust, trustworthiness, social cohesion and legitimacy  – a task I will take on in a subsequent blog (and accompanying background paper).   For now, what can suffice to make the key point is to contrast two contributions, fifteen years apart, by Margaret Levi, former president of the American Political Science Association.

In 2007, Levi (with co-authors Karen Cook and Russell Hardin) argued that  a pre-occupation with relationships of  trust between civil society and public bureaucracy is at best a distraction – and  at worst a way of weakening rule-boundedness and increasing the risk of capture. Their critique is captured vividly in the title of their  book, Co-operation Without Trust.  Championing institutionalism, they determinedly push back against a too-easy extrapolation from micro-level success stories of co-operation to the systemic level:

“When we are assessing the reliability of governments and politicians, what we ultimately put our confidence in is the quality of the institutional arrangements within which they operate…. At the personal level, relational trust makes our day-to-day lives richer and more manageable. More often, however, and in many varied contexts, we co-operate without trust.”

The above argument is eminently plausible in contexts where institutions are strong and stable. It holds up less well, however, in contexts where a downward spiral of accelerating distrust in the public domain is underway, with institutions increasingly under threat. For one thing, institutional guardrails have turned out to be more fragile than many (myself included) might have hoped. Further, as I explore in a forthcoming paper with South African civil society activist Mark Heywood,  in contexts of declining state capability a pre-occupation with ‘holding  government to account’ can have the unintended consequence of making public officials feel increasingly beleaguered and reluctant to experiment, while fueling civic disillusion.

Once disillusion and institutional decay have taken hold, the necessary first step in fostering reversal is not yet-another -round of institutional engineering, but rather to find ways to renew hope in the possibility and desirability of achieving collective gains through co-operation,. In that spirit, and in contrast to the 2007 book, here is what Levi and Zachary Ugolnik argued in  2023 in the lead article of an ambitious 2023 exploration of pathways to “creating a new moral political economy”: 

“A new moral political economy….[will be centered around]….some form of sociality and cooperation….It demands attention to the governance arrangements that facilitate, even generate, prosocial behavior”.

There are, to be sure,  many ways to foster pro-sociality that have little to do with the interface between public officials and non-governmental actors; nothing in Levi and Ugolnik’s  2023 argument makes an explicit case for SEB. But, especially in light of the micro-level positive potential of SEB,  the notion that sustained efforts to foster pro-sociality  at micro-level might cascade upwards into systemic change should,  at the very least, not be dismissed out of hand. At the systemic level, too,   it is premature to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

Finally, returning to the two questions posed earlier, insofar as the answer to both is “yes” – “yes, SEB improves public sector effectiveness” and “yes, SEB can also buttress systemic-level legitimacy” – a third question naturally arises: Might problem-level SEB provide a platform for a systemic-level transformation of the interface between citizens and public officials? Here (as a prelude to further work, some already underway…..) are four places where one might look for answers:

  • Bottom-up: The accretion of experience and learning at the problem-level might inspire others to initiate similar initiatives. Over time, multiple small initiatives might add up to more than the sum of their parts, with  a new set of ideas, offering a new vision of what is possible, taking hold. (I plan to explore this via a new round of empirical research, focused on responses to the twin affordable housing and homelessness  crises in Los Angeles County.)
  • Inside-out: Fostering deliberation and SEB within bureaucracies by championing changes in overly-rigid and overly-hierarchical rules, and in organizational culture. (Efforts to foster relational governance within the rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy of South Africa’s Western Cape province comprises an intriguing example.)
  • Outside-in: While some civil society activists might respond skeptically to SEB as counter to a perceived mission of holding government to account, others might shift from a confrontational to a more co-operative vision, centered around building cross-cutting problem-solving-oriented coalitions, including with reform-minded public officials. (The forthcoming paper  with Mark Heywood explores this possibility.)
  • Top-down – via political and social mobilization, with  micro-level SEB successes preparing the ground  for new transformational acts of both social and political leadership. 

Might forward-looking political leaders embrace an electoral and governance platform centered around a vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors?  And what are the prospects for myriad concrete, deliberative and problem-focused civil society initiatives serving as potential building blocks for a broader social movement?  Mobilization centered around deliberative problem-solving would be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses which thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature. But, as Robert Putnam explored in his 2020 book, The Upswing,  it has happened before, and might happen again:

“A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship…Progressive Era innovations were a response – seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety……[Similarly], our current problems are mutually reinforcing. Rather than siloed reform efforts, an upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’,  [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild….”

There is work to be done………….