Building Community Housing in Northeast LA

Affordable housing and homelessness

Other

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Northeast Los Angeles is facing a deepening housing crisis.crisis. Working-class families, primarily Latinx and Asian immigrants, are being pushed out by rising rents, speculative development, and a housing market that treats homes as commodities.. These residents are the cultural and social fabric  of their neighborhoods, yet have little power in the changes reshaping them. Displacement here isn’t just about housing—it’s the loss of intergenerational care, cultural continuity, and economic stability. Traditional housing solutions often move too slowly, rely on public subsidies, or fail to center community voice. Without bold, community-rooted intervention, Northeast LA will become unaffordable to the very people who have made it home for generations. We need new models that preserve housing now, build community ownership, and elevate resident leadership as a long-term strategy for neighborhood stability.

This grant will help LA Más expand a community-rooted housing model designed to preserve affordability, support resident leadership, and strengthen local infrastructure for long-term stability. With support from LA2050 funding, we acquired our first two community-owned properties in the past year—demonstrating what’s possible when public investment aligns with community vision. Now, we’re working to grow that impact—scaling from two properties to 12 by raising $12 million for community-owned housing.
This next phase builds on the leadership and organizing already underway through the Northeast LA Community Housing Alliance (NELACHA), where residents are co-creating solutions grounded in lived experience and collective priorities. We’ll continue this work by supporting tenant-led governance, securing additional sites, and refining a replicable model to remove homes from the speculative market and return them to community stewardship.
This is what affordable housing can look like when it’s led by the people most impacted—and rooted in dignity, stability, and shared power.

If successful, this project will preserve housing for dozens of working-class families and equip residents with the tools to shape solutions in their own neighborhoods. Long term, we aim to build a model that other community organizations can follow, one that proves housing can be preserved outside of traditional public subsidies, and instead through deep trust, shared governance, and community stewardship. By scaling this work across Northeast LA, we’re creating pathways for families to stay, thrive, and lead in the places they call home.