In August 2020, Pactriglo published its Nexus Study between the location and timing of Ellis Act cases and reports of homeless encampments nearby Ellis Act sites.
Is the Ellis Act part of the problem?
Los Angeles has a severe housing crisis.
Tens of thousands of people sleep outside in the second largest city in the United States. It is impossible to not feel the suffering of people living in homeless encampments.
While less visible than homeless encampments, a million Angelenos or more struggle every month to afford their place to live.
Critics of proposals for new market rate real estate development often point to the Ellis Act
existing rental units and convert them to condominiums for sale as something. Why? Because, in their view, using the Ellis Act causes displacement of rental tenants and potentially the permanent removal of rent-stabilized units from the market.
Yet would-be buyers point to condominiums as the last remaining option for middle class home ownership in Los Angeles. Their perspective is that when they move into a condo, that will free up their existing rental unit for return to the market.
Our research explores this issue by examining the relationship between two sets of data Ellis Act cases supplied by HCIDLA and reports of Homeless Encampments data.
Our geo-temporal research examined two questions:
1) Co-Location Analysis: Is there a statistically significant relationship between the location and timing of Ellis Act cases and reports of homeless encampments nearby Ellis Act sites?
2) Variable Analysis: Is there any statistically significant relationship between Ellis Act cases and reports of homeless encampments?
OUR FINDINGS
1) There is no statistically significant relationship between the location and timing of an Ellis Act case and subsequent reports of homeless encampments in that vicinity.
2) There is no statistically significant relationship between Ellis Act cases and reports of homeless encampments.
SUMMARY
There is no nexus between Ellis Act cases in the City of Los Angeles and reports of homeless encampments in the City of Los Angeles.
SOURCE DATA
Our Ellis Act data was sourced directly from the CIty of Los Angeles’ Housing + Community Investment Department.
Data on reports of homelessness encampments came from the City of Los Angeles 311 Call Center data reported to the City’s Open Data portal.
METHODOLOGY
Created a Space Time Cube in ESRI’s ArcPro desktop by aggregating points into a netCDF data file. Colocation Analysis performed to measure the degree of association (or lack thereof) between two variables. Exploratory Regression using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) models by exploring all combinations of candidate explanatory variables.
