It only seems like that because every other type of housing is literally banned.

If apartments, even small buildings, were legal in LA, they'd be building them everywhere and they'd immediately fill up.

The Mayor, Karen Bass, accidentally screwed up and made affordable possible to build, as in allowing it to get through the gauntlet of approvals. This resulted in a massive amount of extremely costly affordable housing to get built, merely because the approval couldn't be stopped arbitrarily:

https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-h...

Ift that sort of project approval was opened up to not only affordable housing, but also for-profit housing, there would be a massive shift in the type of new housing in the area.