A Los Angeles City Council motion filed this month calls for putting Measure ULA amendments before voters in November, but the proposal doesn’t go as far as California Apartment Association has asked.

Motion 26-0782, introduced by Councilmember John Lee of the 12th District, proposes reducing the ULA transfer tax rate for multifamily and mixed-use properties to somewhere between 2% and 3.5%. The motion also calls for removing barriers to revenue bonding, expanding public reporting, and broadening ULA fund uses to include street homelessness response, pending a council vote to advance it to the ballot.

Missing from the motion are the two changes CAA has formally requested: a full exemption for multifamily properties, and a rollback of the right-to-counsel provisions that direct ULA revenue to tenant legal-services programs.

In a letter to the Measure ULA Committee, Fred Sutton, CAA’s senior vice president of local public affairs, urged the city to fully exempt multifamily properties from the tax. Sutton said those funds should go to direct rental assistance for tenants, not litigation.

Measure ULA, approved by Los Angeles voters in 2022, taxes high-value property sales in Los Angeles to fund affordable housing and homelessness-prevention programs. The current rate is 4% on sales above roughly $5.3 million and 5.5% on sales above $10.6 million, applied on top of the city’s base 0.45% transfer tax. Though often called a “mansion tax,” the tax hits multifamily and commercial real estate transactions as well.

CAA’s position hasn’t changed: exempt multifamily properties entirely, and put right-to-counsel money into direct rental assistance instead.