A recent effort by the Los Angeles City Council to upzone some neighborhoods is fine, after a fashion, and here’s hoping it does some small measure of good in positively affecting the largest problem we face in Southern California — the lack of housing — which affects everything from the ongoing homelessness crisis to the ability of even middle-class families to be able to afford a decent place to live.

May the effort help as we grapple with the issue in this new year of 2025.

But the plain reason it can only ever be hoped to do a small amount of good is that the rezoning doesn’t affect fully 72% of the residential neighborhoods in the city — those designated for single-family homes.

Rather than doing the right thing in the face of new state mandates to rezone the city of Los Angeles in order to allow over 250,000 new homes, as LAist reports, “Ten of the council’s 15 members rejected a proposal that would have allowed mid-sized apartment buildings in some neighborhoods zoned for single-family houses. Instead, they decided to incentivize new, larger apartment buildings in already dense urban areas.”

The effort is not going to cut it, and the council majority merely put off for political, electability reasons an issue that is inevitably going to come back before them.

“It will come up again because the need for housing is so intensive and our shortfall is so extreme,” Councilwoman Nithya Raman said in an interview with LAist after the vote. “Looking at the moment of crisis that we’re in, I think the people of Los Angeles are ready for change … City Hall has to catch up.”

Raman put forward the proposal to allow more apartments spread throughout the city. Without opening up at least some of those areas to new development, we’re “not going to see affordable housing being built in the city of L.A. sufficient to meet the need,” Mahdi Manji, director of public policy with the Inner City Law Center, said.

The city must by state law create strategies that allow for more than 456,000 new housing units before 2029. “You will not solve our housing problems ... if you leave single family neighborhoods completely untouched,” says UCLA’s Shane Phillips. They are problems that need to be solved.