Susie Frio has lived happily in Westchester for many years, but recently she is becoming frustrated because of a new luxury retail and living development to be built in her neighborhood that promises to bring in big business, and with it more traffic from commuters and new residents.

“I’m worried that this new complex and others are going to cause traffic tie ups at the intersection of 74th and La Tijera. The new development is just going to cause problems,” Frio said.

This luxury development is among other recent builds that are a result of an eight-year-old state law that gives bonuses to developers in exchange for the construction of affordable housing. But because of unclear guidelines, developers are easily able to convince city planners to approve blueprints that do little to contribute to affordable housing in the city. They have been taking advantage of the law for years by building luxury apartment buildings with the least amount of affordable units possible or by paying a fee instead of building housing.

“The problem with the law is that there’s dozens of ways around it so any developer can just pay a fee to the city, and there’s no guarantee that that money is going to go to building affordable housing,” Rick Caruso, CEO of real estate development firm Caruso Affiliated, said.

While developers say that they are simply doing business and they are not doing anything that the law clearly prohibits, Westside residents fear that longtime manipulation of the law is damaging the integrity of their neighborhoods and putting affordable housing at risk. Now, they say, is the time for change.

David Evans, another Westside resident, believes that the buildings they are putting up are out of character for his part of the city and the city needs to change the way buildings get approved before the neighborhood is changed for good.

Residents and city officials are pushing for reform of the lenient evaluation criteria of building proposals by city planners so that developers must actually offer more affordable options to receive a bonus. Some also feel that the fee payment option should be removed, or a strict use policy put in place to ensure that the money paid by developers would go to affordable housing projects.

Until enough commotion is made to spur reform to the law at the state level, Westside residents continue to work locally to voice their concerns to their neighborhoods and to the city.

Recently, West Los Angeles resident Kimberly Fox contacted her neighborhood council and gathered 300 of her neighbors to petition against the 140-unit apartment and retail complex on La Tijera Boulevard in Westchester after the Los Angeles City Council approved the plans.

“If we could preserve one intersection on La Tijera, that would make a big difference in traffic [for the neighborhood], but this building changes that,” Fox said.

Fox hoped to persuade planners to either halt or downsize the proposed building, which would be very close to her home and would cause traffic problems due to the business that the retail shops would generate. Additionally, Fox felt compelled to speak out because the new development would fail to give low or middle-income families a place to live nearby.

“I will be watching them all, even at the neighborhood council level, I hope the attention on the bill makes them ask deeper questions of developers in the future,” Fox said.

While the petition did not stop city planners from approving the plans, Fox’s effort did catch the attention of Councilman Mike Bonin and other Los Angeles council members who fear that affordable housing is suffering in their neighborhoods.

“Instead of creating more housing that is affordable for lower- and middle-income families, SB 1818 has become a grab-bag of incentives, littered with loopholes that create more density and traffic, without increasing our affordable housing opportunities for those who need them," Bonin said in a letter to the city.

Bonin and other city councilmembers are advocating for a reform bill that would clarify the existing law and create affordable housing projects in areas that they make sense on the Westside and in other parts of the city.

"Bonin is working with his colleagues on the council and Westside representatives in the state Assembly and state Senate to correct and clarify parts of the state's affordable housing density bonus law in order to protect affordable housing from loopholes that are leading to the decimation of affordable housing opportunities for working families."

Los Angeles officials like Bonin want to make enough noise to take reform to the state level. They feel the city would benefit from reform to the law by increasing the availability of affordable housing in areas across Los Angeles instead of just concentrated in a few locations, while also maintaining the overall characters of the city’s neighborhoods. To do so, they are urging members of the California State Legislature to approve a new bill that would provide corrections and clarifications to the existing law and legally change the way it is implemented statewide.

Making an amendment to the law that would be applicable to everyone would make implementation at the city level easier, and officials are hopeful that when the state Legislature considers the bill in May they will pass it. Representatives from the state Legislature could not be reached for comment on the bill’s progress.

Developers say that they have a vision for the future of Los Angeles and that reforming the law would actually help to improve the planning and execution of housing projects in the city.

“The law as it exists now doesn’t work. Developers like me want to build in Los Angeles but we won’t if there are so many restrictions,” Caruso said.

Caruso said that the guidelines are so vague and the restrictions are so complicated that the law scares developers away from the idea of taking on an affordable housing project. He also feels that the law fails to consider what makes sense from a city planning perspective and does not have realistic expectations.

“I don’t agree with the law in that it requires affordable housing to exist within a complex alongside more expensive options. That does not make any sense from a planning standpoint,” Caruso said.

Developers like Caruso feel that at the most basic level their goal is to build new establishments and to conduct a successful business, so the state needs a law that creates financial incentive to build affordable housing.

“I would suggest that the city offer incentive packages like tax breaks to builders for affordable housing. Then the builder would get a tax break, say on the land tax where the complex would be build, and the city would get the affordable housing it needs,” Caruso said.

The issues with affordable housing law in Los Angeles are taking a toll on the city’s neighborhoods and residents, city officials, and even developers are ready for change. While it will be some time before reform to the law can happen at the state level, the city remains hopeful that it will eventually receive the guidance it needs to enforce laws that will ensure affordable housing is built.

To speed things up however, residents are ready to make sure their voices are heard downtown, and all the way in Sacramento.

“[They need to] scale down the project, mitigate the traffic, and increase city services before anything else in my neighborhood,” Frio said.