How Corporate Media Let Real Estate Industry Define Housing Crisis in Southern California
By the end of three years, local news about an LA mansion tax had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that it "reduced housing development” and needed "to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
Billionaires in California are pushing to sink the wealth tax proposition on this fall’s ballot in California, which would levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on those California billionaires, with the scary—and empty—threat that they’ll leave the state and ruin the economy.
Appeals to appease the wealthiest—lest they take their money and bolt—are a common plea in California, even when society’s least wealthy are the ones most afflicted. Consider, for example, the ongoing resistance of wealthy developers to Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” and the ability of their grievances to dominate a sympathetic news media.
In 2022, Los Angeles voters approved Measure ULA to create a dedicated, long-term funding source for solutions to homelessness in LA, including funding the construction of affordable homes and preventing homelessness by helping low-income tenants stay in their homes. The funding comes from a new tax on the most expensive real estate transactions in LA, affecting fewer than 4% of property transactions, and is one of the most ambitious measures ever taken by a US city to address the problem of homelessness and the related housing crisis.
The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
But, by the end of three years of local news coverage about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist, two of LA’s largest news organizations, the news about Measure ULA had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that “ULA reduced housing development” and “ULA needs to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
At the same time, local stories about what Measure ULA was doing to reduce homelessness and support affordable housing, and the people who were aided by its programs, were exceedingly rare. For example, of the 97 reports about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist over three years, only 7 stories included any sourcing of people who were homeless or who were helped by a tenant program to stay in their home. And, over 30% of the stories didn’t even mention the words “homeless” or “homelessness.” This is based on my research in a study of news stories of Measure ULA in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com from April 2023 (when the law went into effect) to March 2026.
The news coverage of Measure ULA has wide political impact. Today, those negative news frames about Measure ULA have informed the positions of local politicians (including the mayoral battle between incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman), have helped to put a statewide measure on the ballot to make approving local taxes more difficult, and have been adopted unproblematically by the national news media as the official story of the shortcomings of LA’s so-called mansion tax. A May 20, 2026 story in The Wall Street Journal, for example, completely encapsulated the dominant narrative set by the Los Angeles news media. The WSJ headline read: “Los Angeles Tried to Tax Mansions. Apartment Construction Tanked.”
Yet, the LA news media got it wrong, and it has warped how Southern California and the nation think about homelessness and the housing crisis.
The LA news media of this study unquestionably accepted the commercial building industry’s idea of “filtering,” which posits that building more market-rate housing will ultimately increase low-cost affordable housing by increasing overall supply. The news media popularized the trickle-down notion of filtering (without using the term) in the Los Angeles housing environment despite the existence of ample expert counterevidence.
For example, researchers at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California wrote in 2020 that “filtering can no longer be taken for granted as a ‘naturally occurring’ source of affordable housing. For one thing, the shortage crisis has caused all housing to be unaffordable, consuming a larger share of occupants’ incomes—even in the middle class—than deemed acceptable.” Similarly, a Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality study in 2026 concluded that the “market” alone doesn’t solve the problem for affordable housing, and that “public investments are necessary for the production of income-restricted, affordable housing.”
The news media’s commonsense acceptance of this business-oriented filtering mindset to housing development ends up undermining the ability of Los Angeles—and other cities across the country—to adequately respond to the need for public investment in affordable housing. The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
Meanwhile, after getting delayed by lawsuits and resistance from the real estate industry, Measure ULA has started to work: Homelessness dropped significantly in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related stories from the Los Angeles Times or LAist noted this. Although homelessness increased slightly in a 2026 report, it is still down 5.6% overall in LA since 2023. Moreover, by May 2026, the city reported that a round of $360 million in ULA funding supported 80 projects for “5,241 affordable housing units—1,528 newly constructed units and 3,713 units preserved or stabilized.”
The news media—and all of us—need to better understand the relationship of affordable housing and homelessness, and not let powerful developers and real estate interests insist that less taxation and more market-rate development will solve the problem. It won’t.
