Jaime Lee on L.A.’s Housing Cliff, Bottlenecks and the Power of Grit

Jaime Lee has left an indelible mark on the Los Angeles skyline. During her tenure as CEO and now as a senior advisor of the Jameson Group, her firm became one of the most active multi-family developers in the city, bringing nearly 7,000 apartment units to market and driving a massive cultural and residential renaissance in Koreatown.

In this episode of Business Innovators Unplugged, Lee shared a candid look at the systemic hurdles paralyzing L.A.’s housing market, the “missing middle,” and the leadership grit required to thrive in commercial real estate.

The 2026 Housing Cliff

Despite the Jameson Group’s massive development pipeline, Lee issued a stark warning for Angelinos: the city’s housing supply is poised to fall off a cliff in 2026. Currently, Los Angeles is experiencing its lowest construction starts in 13 years.

When asked what is driving this freeze, Lee pointed to a perfect storm of sustained high interest rates, risk-averse financing, and labor-restricting immigration policies. But the biggest hurdle remains local government.

“It’s really, really hard to build in LA. There’s so much red tape. There’s so much bureaucracy. There are too many departments that have too much control over the process.”

With ground-up construction effectively stalled, the Jameson Group has strategically pivoted toward adaptive reuse, focusing heavily on converting vacant office buildings into multi-family housing to create new units out of existing infrastructure.

The “Missing Middle” and the Mobility Pipeline

To solve the housing crisis, Lee argues that cities must build all types of housing, not just capital-A “Affordable” housing, which often comes with restrictive, ongoing bureaucratic oversight for tenants.

She also notes that policies like Measure ULA (often called the “mansion tax”) unintentionally choke the housing ecosystem. Real estate relies on a chain of upward mobility; if buyers aren’t upgrading to luxury homes, they aren’t vacating the mid-tier homes, which in turn freezes the starter-home market.

“We have to create this pipeline of upward mobility... we’ve lost the starter home and we’ve lost this middle ground of real estate. It’s either these big multi-family buildings or it’s a single-family home which is out of reach for the vast majority of people.”

Lee advocates for better policy incentives to build town homes and small-lot subdivisions that allow professionals to live closer to work, cutting down on L.A.’s notorious long-haul commuter traffic.

The ROI of Rejection

Reflecting on her journey as a female executive in a historically male-dominated industry, Lee acknowledged the misogyny and toxic behavior prevalent before the #MeToo movement and the cultural shift sparked by books like Lean In.

However, she emphasizes that young professionals still need to build thick skin and resilience to succeed, particularly in sales and brokerage. Her advice for building that grit is to actively court rejection.

“Make your goal to get 200 people to say no, to slam the door in your face, and I guarantee you you’ll get a bunch of deals done before you get to the 200.”

Whether she is navigating a frozen construction market or mentoring the next generation of real estate leaders, Lee’s approach is a masterclass in resilience: adapt to the roadblocks, find the hidden opportunities, and never be afraid of a “no.”