By Robin Urevich
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES — Jamison is one of the fastest-growing multifamily developers in the city. In just 12 years, the company has accumulated a residential portfolio that includes more than 6,000 units — including both ground-up construction and office-to-residential conversions.
At least 2,500 additional units are either planned or under construction.
This is the second part of a series on Section 8 housing vouchers.
The company has benefited from L.A.’s lucrative apartment market with its low vacancy rate and through-the-roof home purchase prices that send highly paid workers into the rental market. Jamison has also been able to maximize profits by participating in the city of L.A.’s builder incentives.
Under these programs, developers can include more apartments in a building than the zoning code allows or get waivers from parking or open space requirements. In exchange, developers set aside a small percentage of apartments for lower-income renters. The company has built some 250 affordable units.
Another reason for the company’s rapid-fire growth in residential real estate is a stockpile of aging Koreatown office buildings Jamison CEO Jamie Lee’s father, David Lee, amassed beginning in the 1990s — before the area became a destination for nightlife, dining and traditional Korean spas.
“They were lucky,” said Johnny Choi, a first vice president at commercial real estate firm CBRE and an expert in the Koreatown market. “They were able to purchase property at a time when prices were a lot lower.”
Among David Lee’s acquisitions were the former headquarters of iconic U.S. corporations that pulled up stakes after once-prestigious Wilshire Boulevard lost its luster in the 1990s. The former Texaco Oil and U.S. Borax buildings are now the Crosby Apartments and the Westmore, respectively. Jaime Lee has said these conversions and the company’s other residential developments help address L.A.’s housing shortage.
But the city’s largest unmet need — according to records from California’s state housing agency — is for housing that L.A.’s poorest people can afford. Section 8 is the only program that meets those needs on a large scale.
Capital & Main conducted additional tests a few months later to see if the Roya, Sienna, Atlas House and other Jamison buildings had begun accepting vouchers as some leasing agents had previously said.
In a March 2025 call, a representative initially told a tester that the Jamison buildings she inquired about would accept Section 8, but only if tenants earned at least two-and-a-half times the monthly rent. When the tester said those income requirements would disqualify her as a Section 8 participant, the representative promised to double check on the company’s rental criteria and call her back, but she didn’t.
Capital & Main’s tester continued trying to get an answer. When she finally reached another agent, she said that none of the 15 Jamison buildings the tester inquired about were accepting Section 8 vouchers, offering the same reason as before: They were awaiting “inspections” and “city approvals.”
Leasing representatives for five other Jamison buildings said they accepted Section 8 vouchers. But three insisted all applicants, including voucher holders, meet specific credit scores. Two didn’t respond to follow-up calls. That requirement appeared to run afoul of another state housing law.
Since January 2024, it has been illegal for landlords to reject Section 8 applicants solely based on their credit history. Landlords must also consider pay stubs or other verifiable evidence of their ability to pay their share of rent.
If a large landlord turns Section 8 tenants away, “it would be a major resource that our folks can’t access,” said Carlos Van Natter, Section 8 for the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles.
Jamison proved to be an outlier among the seven companies Capital & Main tested. It was the only big landlord that categorically rejected voucher holders in many of its buildings.
At the six other companies, agents at all 44 properties said they accepted Section 8, but 22 said they would reject voucher holders for poor credit. Four would not say whether poor credit history would exclude Section 8 applicants and two others didn’t respond to follow-up calls about income and credit criteria.
On the other end of the spectrum from Jamison was G.H. Palmer Associates, which appeared to roll out the welcome mat for Section 8 tenants, despite owner Geoffrey Palmer’s Scrooge-like reputation and long-documented resistance to government mandates. A 2022 Forbes magazine profile called Palmer “the real estate billionaire who hates affordable housing.”
But in Capital & Main’s tests, only one Palmer leasing agent out of seven properties contacted would not accept alternative evidence of ability to pay rent in lieu of credit history, the highest rate of compliance among the seven companies investigated.
Palmer owns thousands of apartments in the Santa Clarita Valley and the Inland Empire, and is perhaps best known for a collection of hulking faux Italianate apartment buildings in downtown L.A., some of them hugging busy freeways. In contrast to other companies whose leasing agents couldn’t immediately respond to testers’ questions about Section 8, G.H. Palmer’s were knowledgeable and responsive.
Palmer, a prolific donor to Republican Party candidates, earned his anti-affordable housing bona fides by winning a court battle against the city of L.A. over a requirement that developers in downtown L.A.’s Central City West area include affordable apartments in their market-rate buildings. The California Court of Appeal ruled in Palmer’s favor in 2009.
But more Section 8 tenants moved into Palmer buildings in Los Angeles between 2021 and 2024 than any of the six other companies Capital & Main investigated, even those with far more units, city housing authority records show. And in other areas of L.A. County, G.H. Palmer had more Section 8 renters in its buildings than the other six companies, according to county housing authority records covering the same years.
Palmer did not respond to Capital & Main’s questions about the company’s participation in the Section 8 program.
“He’s not going to talk to you,” said a staffer at Palmer’s Beverly Hills office.
Palmer’s Section 8 stance may be a straightforward case of scrupulous adherence to the law. But it could also be a matter of economics. Unlike Jamison with its portfolio of newer buildings, many of Palmer’s buildings are older and covered by state rent caps. So the need to obtain housing authority approval for annual rent hikes might not threaten the company’s bottom line.
It could be that tenant stability and on-time rent payments are a greater priority for Palmer’s business model. Jay Lybik, a real estate expert who until recently was the CoStar Group’s National Director of Multifamily Analytics, noted that Section 8 tenants tend to stay in their apartments longer than unsubsidized renters. And the lion’s share of their rent is reliably paid by the federal government.
Whatever the reason, Palmer’s welcoming response to Section 8 applicants was unusual among the large property owners Capital & Main investigated.
The typical experience for tenants is far more frustrating and obstacle-ridden, according to housing authority data that shows it is difficult for Section 8 voucher holders to find landlords who will accept their vouchers.
“I had so much discrimination,” said Jennifer St. Jude, a Section 8 voucher holder and social work student at USC, who finally landed a four-bedroom house in the Santa Clarita Valley with her two adult daughters.
“It took me a year and a half, and I not only got lucky, I killed myself to get this house,” St. Jude said.
In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, Van Natter of the L.A. city housing authority reported that about 40% of Section 8 voucher holders failed to find housing before their subsidies expired — even after languishing for years on waiting lists. The program gives participants 180 days to find a landlord who will accept their vouchers before they must return them to the housing authority.
Yukelson with the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles argued that part of the problem is landlords have a hard time getting rent increases approved and with customer service at some local housing authorities.
“You need to be like a dog with a bone. You need to be aggressive,” he said.
City and housing authority officials have tried to increase Section 8 usage with financial incentives for landlord participation and regular informational seminars.
Last year, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass met with property owners to urge them to give the program a try.
“We have so many people on our streets with vouchers in their hands,” she said at the public event. “They just need somebody willing to give them a chance.”
A spokesperson for Bass had no comment on Capital & Main’s findings and did not respond to an interview request.
But Kevin Kish, who heads the California Civil Rights Department, the state’s fair housing enforcement agency, said Capital & Main’s findings “highlight a need for more education, more outreach and more enforcement.” Statewide, a single attorney and three investigators enforce anti-discrimination laws that protect people who use rental assistance, Kish said.
“I think that we’re using all of the tools available to us,” Kish said. He added: “That’s the hard limit on what we can do. Those are the resources we have to conduct enforcement.”
But as Capital & Main’s testers learned through dozens of calls, emails and texts, housing laws on paper don’t necessarily make it easier for Section 8 tenants to get to yes, especially when it’s in big landlords’ financial interest to say no.
Robin Urevich is a reporter for Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is republished here with permission. Reporting for this series was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
