Make California Post a Preferred Source A Los Angeles councilwoman is blasting City Hall for sitting on billions of dollars in property while some lots sit vacant and others remain underused.
Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents parts of LA’s Westside, where city-owned land is among the most valuable in Los Angeles, wants LA to create a development agency to hunt down city-owned sites that could bring in money, jobs and housing, as the city faces financial woes.
“The City of LA owns billions of dollars of real estate,” Yaroslavsky said. “Some of it sits vacant, but most is just underutilized: one-story maintenance yards, parking lots, low-slung facilities. We should be following New York’s lead and start putting our land to work.”
Her office pointed to a Westside maintenance facility staffed by roughly a dozen employees. “The prime Westside land could potentially hold housing or businesses alongside the city operation,” the office said. “It could generate a ton of revenue.”
But no one at City Hall is charged with looking across LA’s sprawling property holdings for opportunities like it, Yaroslavsky told The Post.
“Nobody is looking at whether that land could be put to better use,” the councilwoman said.
“That’s not a criticism of those departments,” she said. “Real estate is not their job. Economic development is not their job. But it should be someone’s job.”
The city owns about 7,500 properties inside city limits, according to the controller’s office. It once put the figure at nearly 9,000.
The city has never published a total value for any of it.
“It’s very hard to come up with value, since value is based on how a property is zoned,” former City Controller Ron Galperin told The Real Deal in 2019. “I was stunned that the city didn’t even know what it owns.”
Galperin’s office combed through properties that the city’s own database listed as vacant.
It found 26 sites, together covering roughly 1.7 million square feet, about 39 acres.
The largest was nearly 400,000 square feet on South Clovis Avenue in South LA. Five parking lots in Lincoln Heights added about 200,000 more.
Even when the city decides it doesn’t need a piece of land, getting rid of it moves slowly.
A May 2026 report to the City Council shows the General Services Department is still working from a list of 248 properties identified in a 2018 review.
So far this fiscal year the city has sold three properties, for about $302,000 in General Fund revenue, with a fourth expected to close.
The same report recommends declaring 24 city-owned lots in Council District 11 surplus, also on the westside, calling them “the most valuable City properties.”
Staff estimates the sales would bring in about $5.85 million.
Yaroslavsky wants LA to take a page from New York City, which has an economic development corporation that works on city-owned property.
New York is now advancing a plan to replace an aging government headquarters with nearly 4,000 homes, including about 1,000 permanently affordable apartments.
Yaroslavsky’s office says an LA agency could identify sites, negotiate with developers and assemble projects that individual departments would not pursue.
They said some could pair market-rate apartments with affordable homes, using the former to help finance the latter.
The city’s budget office projects that its most economy-sensitive taxes will grow 3.3% next year, below their historical average of 3.8%. Last fiscal year, revenue came in $160 million below what the adopted budget assumed.
“It is imperative that we maintain the City’s long-term fiscal health at the forefront of our discussions,” City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo wrote this spring in his budget review.
In 2016, Galperin mapped the city’s properties, flagged about 500 as underused and called for a chief asset manager. In 2019, he proposed a municipal development corporation after finding that responsibility for city real estate was scattered across departments.
Now Yaroslavsky’s office says it is working with Galperin on a new proposal.
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