RAND just put real numbers on Measure ULA's tradeoffs — and the verdict lands 14 days before the city's new thresholds kick in. If you're just joining, Measure ULA is L.A.'s transfer tax on high-dollar property sales, approved to fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. The fight now is over the permanent program guidelines, United to House LA's oversight role, and whether the money actually stays aligned with the ballot measure's housing-justice goals as the city moves from framework to real-world results. This is L.A. Politics and Urbanism Daily. After three days of asking who checks the math — somebody finally did. Let's read it. So here's the test today: on Thursday, Manville's Lewis Center number had high-end sales down fifty percent. RAND ran its own independent assessment of ULA's effects on economic development and municipal finances. Two institutions, two methods — do the pictures match? Exactly — RAND gives you something cleaner than a campaign memo. An independent third party is putting hard numbers on the distortion. If their modeling shows suppressed sales swamping the revenue gains, the June 12 threshold tweak was rearranging deck chairs. And it lands at the worst possible moment for the revenue math — the new thresholds take effect June 30. RAND's municipal-finance findings drop right on top of that deadline. Here's the part nobody's wanted to say out loud — the tax was sold as a mansion tax. But RAND's scope covers multifamily deals. If apartment buildings stop trading hands, sellers don't take the only hit. Renters feel it, because they're waiting on the units those deals would've built. Right. The tax sold as housing justice may be throttling the exact pipeline it was supposed to fund. And RAND just handed me the receipt. Hold the gavel a second. Suppressed sales don't automatically mean the capital vanished. A big commercial or multifamily deal that skips L.A. can reroute instead of disappearing altogether. You're about to make this a traffic story, aren't you. It is a traffic story. Capital reroutes around a tax the way drivers reroute around a closure on the 10 — it just lands in Burbank or Culver City instead. RAND helps us sort out how much actually left versus how much got delayed. Fine — but delayed or relocated, L.A.'s fund doesn't see the dollar. And remember where that dollar was supposed to go: through LAHSA and the city's housing apparatus — the same machinery that can't get a $177 million contract signed and just took a federal freeze. That's the escalation here, and we should be precise about it. The week opened with accountability for money already spent. RAND shifts us to whether the source of future money is structurally sound. So even if the tax math worked perfectly — and RAND's about to tell us if it does — the delivery mechanism's compromised. The fund's getting squeezed three ways, and now the suppression piece has a number attached. Here's Jason M. Ward; Lizhong Liu; Elizabeth Selby; Phoebe Rose Levine at RAND Corporation:
Measure ULA has raised $1.2 billion for affordable housing and tenant assistance but has reduced high-value real estate sales by 31% and housing production by over 9,000 new units through early 2026. Forgone revenue to Los Angeles and associated agencies totals $452 million. Targeted reform could generate $823 million in municipal revenue over 10 years, produce 19,000 new housing units, and preserve 72% of current ULA revenue.
RAND put a number on it. Thirty-one percent drop in high-value sales, and over nine thousand units that didn't get built. Nine thousand. The housing tax throttled the housing. And it's independent — RAND, not the coalition, not the Lewis Center. Their 31% lands in the same neighborhood as the 50% sales drop we weighed Thursday, but the mechanism they describe is different: less pure suppression, more rerouting. Rerouting where? Burbank. Culver City. The deal skips town and files paperwork one zip code over. Capital doesn't sit there and take the ticket; it finds the next off-ramp. And here's the ULA wrinkle: RAND pegs forgone revenue to the city at $452 million. That's the same revenue pipeline heading into a threshold change two weeks out. $452 million the city never collected. So when people ask whether this tax is a net win, RAND puts the math in black and white. Mansion sellers aren't the ones living with that nine-thousand-unit gap. Renters are waiting on apartments that never broke ground. Measure ULA was pitched to voters as a tax on mansion sales that would flood money into affordable housing — but if the big deals just stop happening, or move to other cities, does the math still work? That's exactly the tension researchers have been digging into, and the numbers are sobering. Measure ULA took effect in April 2023: a 4% tax on property sales from five to ten million dollars, and 5.5% above ten million. RAND found the tax cut multifamily real estate investment by 46% and that revenues fell well short of their goals. Then an April 2025 report from Michael Manville and Mott Smith found that, after ULA kicked in, the odds of a Los Angeles property selling above that threshold dropped by as much as 50% — with the steepest declines in non-single-family transactions, down 30 to 50%. On production, a companion report by Shane Phillips and Jason Ward found multifamily permitting has fallen sharply since 2023. They do point to other market forces too, but they still flag ULA as a meaningful drag. And Cato Institute researchers add another piece: when big property sales don't happen, the city also misses property tax revenue tied to those transactions, so the hit compounds across tax streams. So if the city tries to fix this by carving out exemptions for developers — doesn't that just hollow out the revenue the tax was supposed to generate in the first place? That's the trap city officials are staring at now. A study presented to the council committee reviewing proposed changes estimated that aggressive carveouts — especially ones backed by Councilmember Raman — could cut ULA revenue by 35%, or about $177 million. At the same time, total apartment permitting in L.A. last year was still down 34% from 2019, according to city building department data. So the housing crisis the tax was meant to solve may be getting worse, not better. Watch the committee process closely: the carveout fight will tell us whether ULA gets reformed into something workable, or stays a case study in good intentions and bad incentive design. If you follow Los Angeles politics, you may also like California Governor's Race — daily 2026 race coverage on candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
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That’s Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.