For Michael Miller, getting a project off the ground is usually a bureaucratic juggling act.

When building affordable housing like the 200-plus units he’s planning in Harbor Gateway and Stevenson Ranch, the president of Bold Communities said he’d typically be forced to find funding through three to five different local and state agencies.

This time around, he’s going to just one: the newly established L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency.

The agency, known as LACAHSA, bills itself as a one-stop shop for affordable housing financing with offers of construction loans, permanent loans, rental subsidies and other types of funding products. It’s betting that in doing so developers can build low-income homes quicker and cheaper in a county with a bruising affordability and homelessness crisis.

There’s some evidence this is the case. According to the Terner Center at UC Berkeley, each additional public funding source an affordable developer uses, on average, delays a project four months and increases total cost by $20,460 per unit — more than $2 million for a 100-unit community.

“We want to build housing cheaper and quicker, because that means more units,” LACAHSA interim chief executive Ryan Johnson said.

On Wednesday, the agency gave approval to just over $100 million for ten projects, including the two from Bold Communities.

The Terner Center said going to multiple agencies for needed funding adds costs because developers have to endure higher legal, staffing and compliance costs to manage additional applications and contracts.

Each process, of course, also takes time, during which developers pay additional holding costs on predevelopment loans, all the while inflation pushes up the cost of materials and wages.

Miller estimated by going through only LACAHSA, he could cut down total costs around 5% to 10%.

LACAHSA, founded through state legislation in 2022, receives its funding from the recent voter-approved Measure A half-cent sales tax to fight homelessness and build affordable housing.

Until now, the agency had awarded money only for homeless prevention efforts such as direct rental subsidies to tenants.

It’s first batch of funds to build and preserve affordable housing, approved Wednesday, will pay for 554 below market units. The vast majority will be brand new homes, while a small share will be conversions of existing market rate residential units into affordable units and extending deed-restrictions on some existing below-market units.

LACAHSA pointed to data showing that of the top performing quarter of new construction projects that recently applied for its funding, total development costs came in below the typical cost to build affordable units in the county. Savings rose to nearly 12% when project proposals relied primarily or entirely on LACAHSA funding, rather than mixing state funding with just one or two LACAHSA products.

Terner Center managing director Ben Metcalf said it’s unclear to what extent those savings might reflect that cheaper projects just happened to apply for funding from LACAHSA. But he expects at least some of the savings can be attributed to LACAHSA’s structure.

Not only does the agency offer a plethora of financial products, but LACAHSA said it ranks project proposals by their efforts to reduce costs and considers that as a significant factor when deciding to approve funding.

Metcalf, who previously served as director of the California Dept. of Housing and Community Development, said such a focus on awarding dollars based on the estimated development cost isn’t the norm among public agencies.

In part, he theorized that was because “the rising cost of affordable housing has really only become an issue of visible concern over the last few years.”

In 2022, the Times reported the cost to build just one unit of affordable housing in California routinely cost more than $1 million. Voters have also expressed growing frustration at the lack of progress in reducing homelessness and overall housing costs.

LACAHSA isn’t the only effort to simply a complicated funding process, with Gov. Gavin Newsom proposing to streamline state funding as part of this year’s budget.

Meanwhile, LACAHSA plans to approve another round of affordable housing funds in May.

To apply for that funding and the dollars approved Wednesday, LACAHSA said it required developers to be able to break ground within 12 months. Developers submitted 127 applications, seeking a total of $1.5 billion to build 11,625 units.

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who serves as chair of the LACAHSA board, argued the high interest shows it’s really a lack of “financing and operational support” holding back the construction of more affordable housing in L.A. County, rather than a lack of “sites or community will.”

“LACAHSA was built to meet this moment,” he said in a statement.

The projects that Bold Communities plans in Harbor Gateway and Stevenson Ranch are conversions of extended stay hotels into low-income senior housing.

Now that funding is secured, Miller said he expects the buildings to be full of new residents by the end of next year.

“I think these will be, honestly, pretty straight forward,” the non profit executive said.

(This is Part 4 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

It’s 1937. One year before Ettore Majorana vanishes. He is sitting with Dirac’s framework — the precise, picture-perfect vision of quantum mechanics — and doing what very few people in history have been capable of doing: going toe-to-toe with it.

He asks the kinds of questions nobody else is even thinking of asking. Does everything HAVE to work this way? Does a particle HAVE to have a distinct antiparticle?

He discovered that the answer is no. It’s not mandatory. It’s optional. It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that the universe, in all its infinite wisdom, made for electrons and quarks and every other charged particle we know. But neutrinos have no charge. Do they absolutely 100% HAVE to follow the same rules?

Majorana said “eh, maybe not.” And then disappeared.

These are what we call Majorana particles, as opposed to Dirac particles.

All Dirac particles have charge and have an antiparticle partner. All Dirac particles flip-flop between the two hands, but the universe doesn’t really care. Maybe neutrinos aren’t Dirac particles. Maybe they’re Majorana particles. Maybe their opposite partner doesn’t have opposite charge — it has opposite handedness. And the “charge” is the part that nobody cares about. Which is true, because neutrinos don’t have charge.

This means that neutrinos might be their own antiparticles.

Consider this: remember when 3D movies were briefly everywhere? Those work because light comes in two handednesses — left-circularly polarized and right-circularly polarized. One lens filters one out and passes the other, giving each eye a slightly different view. The photon is its own antiparticle. A left-handed photon and a right-handed photon aren’t particle and antiparticle of each other — they’re just the same particle with different handedness. The photon gets away with this because it carries no charge. Nothing forces the particle/antiparticle distinction to exist.

The Majorana idea is just: maybe the neutrino does the same thing. For the same reason.

In the Dirac picture we have four options. Left-handed neutrino — we see it. Right-handed antineutrino — check. Right-handed neutrino — invisible. Left-handed antineutrino — never seen. Two observable, two permanently hidden.

In the Majorana picture, we collapse that. The right-handed antineutrino and the right-handed neutrino? Same thing. The left-handed antineutrino and the left-handed neutrino? Same thing. Just two particles instead of four.

Most particles care about charge but not about handedness. Neutrinos might be the kind of particle that cares about handedness but not charge.

The Dirac picture asks us to believe in four kinds of particles when we only ever see two, and explains the missing two with “they exist but interact with literally nothing, deal with it.” The Majorana picture says: maybe there are only two particles. Maybe the universe isn’t hiding anything. Maybe we were just overcomplicating it.

But nature doesn’t care about elegance. You can have a beautiful, perfect, logical, completely wrong theory.

Watching Atoms Die

So how do we test it? How do you look at a neutrino and ask: hey buddy, are you your own antiparticle?

One option is to watch atoms die.

There’s a process called double beta decay. Sometimes two neutrons in a nucleus decay at the same time, producing two protons, two electrons, and two antineutrinos. We’ve seen this happen. It’s rare, but it’s real.

But if neutrinos are Majorana particles, then there’s really no such thing as “neutrino” versus “antineutrino” — they’re the same thing. And that changes what can happen inside the nucleus when the reactions go down. Instead of two antineutrinos coming out, you have one coming out of one neutron and going straight INTO the other. What comes out is two protons, two electrons…and nothing else.

We call it neutrinoless double beta decay. And right now, in deep underground laboratories that are absolutely not evil lairs, shielded from cosmic rays, surrounded by tons of carefully chosen isotopes, experiments are running and watching and waiting for exactly this signal.

We’ve got nothing.

That’s not a no. But it’s also not a yes. It’s just…not yet. The signal from neutrinoless double beta decay would be extraordinarily faint — neutrino masses are so vanishingly small that even if the process exists, it almost never happens. The non-observation just tells us it’s rare. It sets limits. But it’s not the final word.

Nobody knows what happened to Ettore Majorana. Some said it was suicide — that letter he sent wasn’t exactly the epitome of mental health. Some said he faked his death and fled to a monastery. There were reported sightings in South America, years later. Unverified, of course.

A lot like his namesake particle. A case that hasn’t been closed.