Thirteen days from now, ULA's thresholds change — and the city still hasn't told us who actually holds the pen once the new money starts moving. If you're just joining: Measure ULA was sold as a dedicated stream for affordable housing and tenant help, and RAND pegs it at $1.2 billion raised. That same research says it's cut high-value sales by 31%, knocked out more than 9,000 units of housing production, and cost local agencies $452 million — which is why the fight is over whether reform can keep the revenue without the damage. Welcome to LA Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: a new ULA floor with a date attached, a small-business loan workaround for immigrant owners the feds froze out — and who, exactly, is signing the checks. Hope, start with the FAQ. Right — the Office of Finance FAQ. New thresholds take effect after June 30, 2026. That's a hard deadline now, not an abstraction. $5.4 million is the new floor, effective July 1. So who voted on that? Because a higher floor reads a lot like a quiet exemption for mid-market multifamily deals. And it scrambles the behavioral picture. Manville's Lewis Center work found the odds of a property selling above the threshold dropped up to 50 percent. Move the number, and sellers who sat on their hands might re-enter — or the avoidance cliff just slides to a new price point. Either way, the distortion doesn't vanish; it moves. And the city's still selling this as a success story while a peer-reviewed 50 percent suppression number sits right there. The place I want to land today, though, is governance. The ULA Coalition wrote program guidelines back in June 2023, drafted by service providers, nonprofits, labor, renters' groups. Before a dollar came in. And those guidelines name SAJE and SCANPH as the contacts for the expenditure process. Not the Mayor. Not the Controller. So the answer on the checkbook is: a coalition of nonprofits with their own program priorities. That's the clearest structural answer we've had all week — but the money still flows into the general fund and gets allocated through an annual expenditure plan. So which document governs when those two disagree? Exactly the question nobody's making the city answer. They built the machine in 2023 — now line that founding document up against what City Hall's actually doing with a billion dollars. And hold Raman's carveout against it. Her proposal could cut revenue by roughly 35 percent — about $177 million. Now you can measure that against what the coalition said the money was for, not just RAND's projection. $177 million carved out, a $5.4 million floor that exempts the middle — add those up and the 'unprecedented funding' the coalition promised starts to look a lot more precedented. One more thing to pull on — the guidelines name affordable housing production as the purpose. But if ULA puts units onto a street grid we never upgraded, two reform tracks are working against each other. Sure, but I'll take the infrastructure problem of too much housing any day. Right now apartment permitting's still down 34 percent from 2019. We don't have the units to stress anything yet. Fair — the permitting collapse and the sales suppression are two different mechanisms, but they're both pointing the same direction. The June 30 change is the test of whether the new thresholds reverse either one. And quickly — the other story today. The Trump administration is restricting SBA loans to immigrant business owners, and LA Local has the Koreatown impact. So someone's building a private credit workaround. That's the tell. When a federal door closes on working owners, the patch shows up at the neighborhood level — and LA Local got the reporting on it first. Koreatown small businesses figuring out their own lending while the city argues over who holds a billion-dollar checkbook. Put those side by side and you hear it. If you want to keep up with Measure ULA implementation and impacts, tap follow so the next episode lands in your feed. LA Local, with Hanna Kang:
The Trump administration’s decision to restrict a vital loan program for small businesses to U.S. citizens has left some immigrant business owners searching for alternatives. The Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, KAFLA, recently partnered with the Jewish Free Loan Association to connect small business owners with interest-free loans of up to $50,000 that can be used for startup costs, rent, payroll, inventory, equipment and other business expenses.
The SBA quietly rewrote its eligibility rules back in March — businesses now have to be fully owned by U.S. citizens or nationals. Lawful permanent residents — green card holders — are cut out. Green card holders. People who file taxes, sign leases, hire on the block — told their money's no good at the federal window. In Koreatown, that's not a footnote. That's main street. And the LA Local reporting puts a real number on the hole: nearly 40% of California's small businesses are immigrant-owned, per the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. You don't replace that with goodwill. So who steps in? The Korean American Federation teamed up with the Jewish Free Loan Association — interest-free, up to fifty grand. Two community institutions patching a federal hole with their own balance sheets. Fifty thousand covers rent, payroll, inventory. It's real, but it's a fraction of what an SBA-backed loan can run. It can bridge a gap; it doesn't replace SBA capital. Right — and credit where it's due, LA Local found the actual partnership and the rule-change date instead of running a sad-storefront photo. That's the story: who got shut out, and who's covering for Washington. Measure ULA has now crossed a billion dollars in revenue — so who's actually holding the checkbook? And what's stopping this from turning into another slow-moving slush fund, with the money steered by whoever has the best City Hall connections? Great question. Short answer: it's more complicated than the ballot measure's architects probably wanted. The money runs through the city's general fund structure, then gets allocated in an annual expenditure plan the full City Council votes on. So your fifteen council members have a say right away. The most recent plan — approved for fiscal year 2025 — came in at nearly $425 million, which Commercial Observer reported is more than double what the council allotted the year before. That's a real number, and most of it is aimed at affordable housing construction and homelessness prevention. The tax itself has generated over a billion dollars in under three years, per that same reporting. On the administrative side, the Los Angeles Housing Department — LAHD — is the main pipeline manager. They run the Affordable Housing Managed Pipeline, with a competitive Notice of Funding Availability process. Developers apply, get scored, and loans go out through that open process instead of a back-room handshake. That's a structural safeguard. The concern critics raise, though, is that the City Council still sets the top-line categories in that annual vote. Political priorities can shape where the buckets land before LAHD ever scores a single application. So the council controls the buckets and LAHD controls what goes in them — but if the council is already under pressure to tweak or even repeal the tax, does that annual vote become a pressure point where the money gets redirected or frozen? That's the vulnerability to watch. A newly formed City Council committee is already taking steps toward potentially reshaping Measure ULA, and a ballot measure to overturn the tax entirely is heading to voters in November — so every annual expenditure vote between now and then carries extra political weight. For reformers, the oversight chart matters less than whether the council holds the line on those buckets when the tax itself is under electoral threat. This one's from Los Angeles Office of Finance:
Effective for transactions closing after June 30, 2026, the new ULA thresholds will be $5,400,000 and $10,900,000. Transactions greater than $5,400,000 but less than $10,900,000 will be assessed a 4% tax, and transactions of $10,900,000 or greater will be assessed a 5.5% tax.
It's buried in a note on the Office of Finance FAQ, but there it is: transactions closing after June 30 face new ULA thresholds — $5.4 million and $10.9 million. That's thirteen days out. So the abstraction just became a calendar entry. The 4% rate now kicks in at five-four, the 5.5% at ten-nine. Fewer deals get caught. Hold on — who voted on this? A floor that quietly rises to $5.4 million is exactly the kind of move that hands mid-market multifamily deals a free pass at the very price point where you want units built. And it lands right on top of the behavioral question. The Lewis Center found odds of a property selling above the threshold dropped by as much as 50%. Move the cliff, and the sellers who held off may just re-enter — or the avoidance moves with the number. Either way, the city's treating a billion in revenue like a success story while the threshold's getting jiggered in a footnote. Show me who's expecting which dollars under the old number versus the new one. Here's the source:
Since Measure ULA was enacted, the odds of a Los Angeles property selling at a price above its tax threshold have fallen by as much as 50%. In raw terms, this sharp decline occurred across all types of properties, but his strongest evidence suggests it was particularly pronounced for commercial, industrial and multifamily residential transactions.
Manville's Lewis Center work, posted last April — odds of an LA property selling above the ULA threshold down as much as 50%. And here's the part that complicates the 'mansion tax' label: the steepest drops are commercial, industrial, multifamily. Multifamily. So the housing transfer tax is freezing trade in the exact buildings you'd renovate or redevelop into more housing. Manville lined that up cleanly. What makes this sharper today — the Office of Finance FAQ we just touched moves the floor to five-point-four million after June 30. That's thirteen days out. So Manville's 50% number was measured against the old cliff. Right, and nobody's saying whether the new threshold fixes the suppression or just slides the avoidance to a new price point. You don't un-distort a market by drawing a fresh line in the sand. Here's United to House LA:
These guidelines will ensure that every dollar spent through Measure ULA closely follows the ballot measure’s language and the original intent of this coalition, providing a clear path forward to address the immediate housing needs in our communities and create a long-term, transformative vision for housing justice in Los Angeles.
This is the June 2023 program guidelines doc — drafted by the ULA Coalition before a single dollar was collected. Service providers, affordable housing nonprofits, labor, renters' groups. Points of contact: Joe Donlin at SAJE, Jackson Loop at SCANPH. So that's a partial answer to the checkbook question we chewed on yesterday. The spending setup has names on it — they're just nonprofit names, not the Mayor's office, not the Controller. Right, and say that out loud: SAJE and SCANPH are the listed contacts for the expenditure process. That's a coalition of nonprofits with their own program priorities holding the pen. Nobody's made the city defend why that's the right structure. And here's the timing problem. They wrote 'unprecedented funding stream' in 2023 — before the Lewis Center found odds of selling above the threshold dropped as much as 50%. Those targets were set against revenue that the suppression data says may not show up in full. Which puts the June 30 threshold change right in the crosshairs. Thirteen days out, the new $5.4 million floor lands — and these guidelines never anticipated the number moving. So do the program promises still pencil against a shifted threshold? That threshold bump is exactly the kind of quiet adjustment that functions like an exemption for mid-market multifamily. Who voted on it, and does it fix the suppression or just slide the avoidance cliff to a new price point? Lay these two documents side by side — what 140 organizations promised in 2023, what the expenditure plan actually looks like now past a billion in revenue. That gap is the accountability story, and nobody's run them against each other on air. Got thoughts on today’s briefing, a story idea we should chase, or a correction we need to make? Send us a note at ladailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We really do read them.
Next up, we’re watching transactions closing after June 30th, when updated Measure ULA thresholds of 5.4 million dollars and 10.9 million dollars kick in.
As always, we’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so you can dig into the ones you want to read more closely. That’s Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.