Plan Calling for More Lower-Cost Housing Backed : Council: Panel suggests 200 programs and 56 strategies to provide units for families. The document is needed to qualify L.A. for more than $100 million in federal aid.

A Los Angeles City Council committee on Tuesday endorsed a comprehensive strategy for providing more lower-cost housing, but assured homeowner group critics that the document was merely a “talking paper” that should not be feared as unalterable.

The document, which is needed to qualify the city for more than $100 million in federal housing aid, already had been amended in reaction to an outcry from homeowners.

Several proposals in earlier drafts that called for increasing housing density--construction of condominiums or apartment houses in areas of single-family houses, for example--had been eliminated.

But many critics nonetheless asked the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee for further revisions, contending that the document would give bureaucrats a license to run roughshod over the city’s normal land-use planning process.

The 171-page document, called the Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy, suggests more than 200 programs and 56 strategies for providing more housing that could be afforded by families with incomes up to $50,000 annually. It goes now to the full City Council for consideration, which has a federal deadline of Nov. 15 to approve it.

Gordon Murley, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., denounced the document, which was written by the city’s housing department. He called it “an effort of rhetoric, trying to lay blame” on homeowner groups’ anti-growth sentiments for the widening gap between population and housing, which the report says is growing by 14,000 units annually.

“This document, as it is, should be sent back, and most of it removed,” Murley said.

But Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the committee, told Murley not to worry that the document commits the city to any course of action.

“What is before us is merely a report we’re required to give to the federal government,” Bernson said.

Gary Squier, the city’s housing chief, said the housing crisis is worsening at an alarming rate. He said 200,000 families are doubling or tripling up with other families to be able to afford apartments, 42,000 families live in unsafe garages and other illegal dwellings, and 150,000 families and senior citizens spend more than half their income on rent.

But he sought to allay homeowner fears of his department’s strategy for dealing with it.

The plan “does not recommend increases in density,” he said flatly. “The CHAS,” as the document is known, “is about preserving neighborhoods.”

Instead, the document establishes as priorities increasing housing along transportation corridors, setting goals for building low-income housing in all areas of the city and speeding up the city’s processing of plans for new housing.

The plan also urges the city to subsidize rents and home purchases and to preserve and rehabilitate the city’s existing housing stock, while exploring new home building projects in commercial zones and in areas no longer needed by industry.

Squier acknowledged that some critics think of the report as only a prescription for building low-income apartments that they believe will add to congestion and other urban ills.

Instead, he said, “this plan is . . . about buying your first home. It is about having a decent place to bring up your kids. It is designed to complement what we value about Los Angeles--single-family neighborhoods, good jobs, security” as well as to contribute to solutions to air pollution, overcrowding, traffic congestion and homelessness.

Homeowner activists, however, were not convinced. Sylvia Gross, president of the San Fernando Valley Federation, a coalition of homeowner groups, said the plan failed to address the need for mass transit, schools, additional sewage-treatment facilities and other demands placed on the city’s infrastructure by growth.

“This is nothing more than a Band-Aid,” she said.

The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the plan from homeowners caused supporters of the affordability study to lash back.

Bonny Matheson, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., said her organization supported increasing housing densities and said homeowner groups were “losing their clout” because of their constant naysaying.

“When housing is so expensive, it’s very difficult for major corporations to bring in talent,” which is why the lack of housing is of concern to businesses, she said.

The document was endorsed unanimously by the committee after making several deletions of language interpreted by homeowner critics as attacks on them for their efforts--in the courts and through lobbying the city Planning Department--to manage growth and development.

Those same efforts had been cited by city planners as a cause of the problem when they projected last summer that the city would run out of room for new housing within six years.

But Maya Dunne, a senior analyst who helped develop the housing strategy report, said planners now have backed away from that projection and are restudying the city’s capacity to build more housing.

As a result, the housing affordability report was revised to remove many of the elements that homeowners had opposed. Instead of seeking to change zoning in order to dramatically expand the amount of housing that could be built in the city, she said, the report’s new goal is to preserve the current capacity for new housing.

The latest version of the report also abandons proposals for lowering the required minimum size of new apartments, zoning residential areas for greater density and exempting more projects from a full city review. The report also abandons a plan to allow apartments to encroach into areas now zoned for single-family houses.