"Major Research Flaws Undermine Authors' Bold Claims: Unpacking the Debate on Measure ULA"
Greg Bonett, Jan Breidenbach, Scott Cummings, Peter Dreier, Regina Freer, Joan Ling, Deepika Sharma, Chris Tilly, Madeline Wander | September 2025
Since it passed with strong voter support in November 2022 and went into effect in April 2023, Measure ULA has helped tens of thousands of Angelenos through rental assistance, development of new affordable housing, creation of new construction jobs, education on tenants’ rights, and innovative new programs to make housing in LA fair for all. Despite these successes, in April 2025, the UCLA Lewis Center released a report — Taxing Tomorrow: Measure ULA’s Impact on Multifamily Housing Production and Potential Reforms by Jason Ward and Shane Phillips — claiming that the Measure ULA tax is hurting the Los Angeles real estate market. This paper finds that Taxing Tomorrow relies on questionable methodology, limited data, and flawed analysis to draw broad, premature conclusions and call for changes to Measure ULA with unaddressed fiscal impacts. The authors identify a number of flaws in Ward and Phillips’ methodology, data, controls, and assumptions, which combine to raise significant questions about the conclusions of the report.
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