Better Neighborhoods, Same Neighbors
Preserving LA’s Affordable Housing Through
Cross-Sector Collaboration
Los Angeles is the least affordable major city in the United States — and the crisis is worsening. While building new housing is essential, the city is losing its existing affordable housing stock nearly ten times faster than it is adding new units. Between 2010 and 2019, LA lost about 111,000 homes affordable to low-income households, while only 13,000 new units were built, resulting in a net loss of 98,000 homes (LAist, 2022).
In a city where residents already spend more of their income on housing than anywhere else in the country, this loss threatens not only homes, but the social fabric of communities.
Preservation: The Overlooked Solution
The dominant conversation about housing in LA focuses on new construction, yet preservation — keeping existing affordable housing stable, extending its life, and ensuring long-term affordability — is often overlooked.
Preservation is faster, less expensive, and greener than building from scratch, and it delivers tangible social and health co-benefits that are left out of policy and funding decisions. Retrofitting units improves indoor air quality, thermal comfort, and energy efficiency, which in turn enhances respiratory health, educational outcomes, and overall well-being, yet these benefits don’t translate into financial incentives for lenders or developers.
Unlocking this potential requires innovative financing strategies that blend philanthropic, public, and private capital.
Preservation Delivers Co-Benefits
Retrofitting and maintaining existing housing is about more than bricks and mortar:
Health: better indoor air quality reduces respiratory issues
Climate resilience: energy-efficient retrofits lower emissions and utility costs
Social stability: long-term affordability keeps communities intact
Yet, none of this happens without strategic capital deployment, and philanthropy is uniquely positioned to bridge funding gaps and catalyze action.
Why Collaboration Matters
At Retrofit LA (a collective impact cohort, powered by Sustento), we believe coordinated collaboration is the key to scaling preservation efforts. When community partners and stakeholders unite around a shared priority, create a pipeline of actionable projects, and strengthen the enabling environment, we can drive systemic change while keeping communities intact.
As Monic Uriarte from Esperanza Community Housing puts it:
“Better Neighborhoods, Same Neighbors.”
This principle reflects our commitment to preserving communities while building resilience — economically, environmentally, and socially.
Building a Pipeline and Influencing Policy
Collaboration isn’t just about meetings — it’s about demonstrating what’s possible. Retrofit LA is advancing three complementary strategies:
Convene stakeholders to create cohesion in a fragmented market
Develop a pipeline of projects to show how much capital preservation initiatives can absorb
Influence the enabling environment through multi-sector engagement and systems-level thinking to identify leverage points for broader impact
Working groups and advisory committees refine project priorities, synthesize lessons from case studies, and create compelling narratives for potential investors. By illustrating both the scale of need and potential impact, we help funders see the urgency and opportunity in preservation.
The Role of Philanthropy
Philanthropy has a unique opportunity to catalyze this work. While generous incentives for decarbonization and various other funding sources are becoming available for preservation, rehab, and other aspects of the work, these are highly fragmented, and there is a lack of funding to help housing providers navigate the project development and financing process.
Modern high-net-worth donors increasingly favor leaner, more flexible giving: fewer, larger, often unrestricted grants that allow nonprofits to innovate and scale solutions (Callahan, 2025).
Yet many traditional foundations remain top-heavy and highly restricted, limiting the ability of grantees to adapt or innovate. This is where new philanthropic engagement can make a measurable difference: funding initiatives that integrate health, climate, and social outcomes with proven capital strategies for preservation.
The Time to Act Is Now
LA continues to lose its affordable housing stock at alarming rates. While new construction is vital, preservation is faster, cheaper, and socially transformative. Philanthropy can provide the flexible funding, innovation support, and cross-sector influence needed to scale solutions that protect communities while addressing health, climate, and equity challenges.
“Better neighborhoods, same neighbors.”
This is more than a slogan — it is a call to action. Philanthropic leaders, public agencies, and private partners must step forward now to preserve our most precious resource: community.
References:
LAist. (2022). Los Angeles lost eight times more housing than it gained for its lowest income residents. https://laist.com
Callahan, D. (2025). Philanthrosaurus Rex: Why the Age of Big Foundations is Almost Over. Inside Philanthropy. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com
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