8 ms·

the fact that any housing is getting built is frankly a refreshing turn of events. for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry

the fact that any housing is getting built is frankly a refreshing turn of events. for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-figure increases in equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price. when legislators typically try to address the very same landed gentry's cries for relief from the homeless, they wind up collecting windfall bond measure revenue. as they gain momentum and start striking ground, most communities put up fierce NIMBY opposition and mire whatever initiatives that are approved in court. the city in turn eventually gives up, settles, and uses the remaining funds to quietly continue sanitation and cleanup efforts of camps, occasionally running the homeless away for a day or two. for the city to bemoan rising costs and slow pace is a bit ironic as well. when LA decided to give up on property taxes it had to find a way to make up the difference. hence a league of esoteric inspections and byzantine permitting started popping up for new homes. it means contractors sit idle and watch the price of lumber skyrocket while your self-licking ice cream cone melts in the sun.

sevenf0ur 5y ago
Liberal policies is why Los Angles has been dealing with a homeless crisis for so long. Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Day1 5y ago
  It seems insane because it is insane. Unfortunately, we already started down this path long ago and it will only get worse until catastrophe. I.e China takes over.
- spicyusername 5y ago
  > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane I don't think it was known, in advance, that this would be the resulting cost, assuming that figure is accurate. I don't think any rational person would put forward such a program and that $837,000 to build a single studio house seems insane to everyone, not just non-Californians. I think the point OP is trying to make is that the skyrocketing cost is partly caused by a certain class of privileged Californian's continuing to fight the effort to build more housing.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > $837,000 That's not what is happening. Per the article: 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost $837,000 per unit.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      This is a meaningless nitpick. Spending "over $700,000" to house an individual is just as insane as spending "up to $837,000". Its embarrassing and ridiculous either way.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        It's not meaningless. 86% cost less than 700K.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  It's nothing to do with liberal policy. It was pure corruption that happened right under the noses of voters. The sales tax ballot measure to fund housing had an innocent-looking line which restricted the contractors eligible for the jobs. The contractors had to have experience building this type of housing. The problem with this is that there were only two contractors that met the requirement, and as a result they could charge whatever they wanted since it was practically a no-bid contract. Los Angeles could've spent dramatically less, and housed more people, had they simply purchased housing on the open market with the money. These prices are pure graft.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    God. And it was Democrats who pushed for it too IIRC. Corruption deep on both sides of the aisle.
    - mullingitover 5y ago
      To be fair, the republican party trashed its brand so thoroughly that it essentially doesn't exist in California, so we're under one party rule. There is no other side of the aisle. It's a shame because Schwarzenegger gave the party a winning formula when he was governor, but the party swung so far off the rails that his centrism makes him a bolshevik to the party as it exists now. One party rule isn't good, but we don't have any sane alternatives here.
      - myfavoritedog 5y ago
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > It's a shame because Schwarzenegger gave the party a winning formula when he was governor Yes, but “find a political cypher of a celebrity, run in an irregular election leveraging a crisis created by Republican state and federal policies, and appoint an listen to a lot of establishment Dems as advisers while ignoring Republican Party insiders and donors because you don't need them once you have the dual advantages of celebrity and incumbency and don't care about the party as such” isn't really a structurally-repeatable strategy.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Liberal policies Do you have any evidence of that? > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country. That's not what is happening, in any meaningful way.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    > Do you have any evidence of that? This is a totally valid question. Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that. Good points. First, what do the outcomes depend on? Policies of California state and local government are only limited factors. They do not create the economy, migration, weather, real estate development, etc. etc. (though they some limited effect on all of them). There are many other powers in the world. The government's power to control events is pretty limited. Second, do we see any correlation between California government and these outcomes? Homelessness has existed worldwide probably for all time. A fundamental question is, with what is increased homelessness correlated? Third, we don't know what the outcomes would be without the policy or with other policies. Negative outcomes don't indicate bad decisions - things could be worse. If you are dying of terminal disease, you don't assume the doctor's decisions are the cause, and therefore we'd be better off without healthcare. We are dealing with a difficult problem. Finally, not all decisions and policies are partisan; people and publics are not politically consistent anwyay, and make policies for all sorts of reasons. And California has had Republican government on and off for a long time, and anything effects of government policy you see now are the outcome of decades of governance.
      - muaytimbo 5y ago
JJMcJ 5y ago
> curtail rising taxes That, of course, was Proposition 13, a ballot initiative. The fallout was exactly what people predicted. Prop 13 did two things. It capped property taxes, though there have been a variety of ways of getting around that. The other thing was it capped increases in property taxes. Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. Imagine, here in the SF Bay Area, 100,000 apartments magically appeared tomorrow morning. I don't think we'd see rents going up 15% a year after that.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. If you means test things, it can work better. If you're an artist or a retiree in san francisco, and then someone goes and invents the internet, prices will go way way up around you. If you don't want to force the artists and retirees to learn to code to keep up with housing catering to newcomers, something like prop 13 helps. But then if they do go and learn to code, taking advantage of the new skyrocketing job market, then they don't need prop 13 protections. Prices went up but their income kept pace, so they don't need the protections. A lot of these kinds of issues seem to come back to lack of means testing or poorly implemented, non-holistic, perverse incentivizing means testing.
  - rcpt 5y ago
    Retirees and the disabled have the California Tax Postponement Program to protect them from rising taxes. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary for them. Artists? They can cash out for enormous windfall profits if they can't sell enough art.
    - JJMcJ 5y ago
      That's if they are property owners. Renters have little protection in most communities.
- zamfi 5y ago
  > Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. Sure you can, you just also need to build new housing. The key is that the new housing has to be higher density than the old housing — the value is primarily in the land, not the house. If a developer could legitimately and easily build a 4-plex where any single-family home exists right now, the prices of SFHs would likely stay high — they are still a luxury, and become more so as they become rarer, raising prices further — while the units in a 4-plex (still housing!) are more affordable. Everyone wins. Except we can’t do that, because we can’t build denser housing in basically any of California.
Dig1t 5y ago
I think you're talking about this in pretty black/white terms and the partisan framing doesn't do much. Prop 13 is a double edged sword IMO. It does have the problem you describe of landed gentry not getting hit with high property taxes, but also it does protect middle class people from getting kicked out of their homes due to the popularity of the area they live in. My parents are the perfect example of this, my dad is a plumber and my mom is a teacher, my entire life they barely broke 100k combined and were BARELY able to give me and my sibling a decent life in LA. If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same thing goes with my grandparents. California has very high income tax, which arguably compensates for the low property taxes. This strikes me as more fair, as the high earners are the ones hit with the tax bills rather than my grandma, who made nothing and had no way to pay the tax that comes with a $2M property valuation, despite having worked hard to buy her house when she was younger. So yeah, you're right in some sense, but its not fair to completely ignore the alternative of lower/middle class people being kicked out of their homes if they didn't have prop 13. The real problem here is the NIMBYism that you describe and restrictive zoning. ALSO, the landed gentry are sort of limited as well. Yes their primary home (the one they live in) has a limited tax bill, but additional homes they own, they will probably end up renting out, and that rental income will be subject to California's high income tax.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Low income seniors who hit the real estate jackpot can defer taxes indefinitely. It's called the California Tax Postponement Program and solves exactly the problem you're discussing.
- andechs 5y ago
  > If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same thing goes with my grandparents. We're ensuring stability for the older generation, at the expense of a younger generation who couldn't possibly afford the same neighbourhood they grew up in. Those with millions in real estate equity can use that equity and financial engineering to defer the property tax increases until their death.
throwaway98211 5y ago
> for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-figure increases in equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price. yeah right... this is all 'the republicans' fault. Say what you will about conservatives, but a party that has held majority since the nineties (and more recently a supermajority) has no one but themselves to blame. Obviously prop 13 / single family zoning has had an effect on housing, along with taxes, onerous building codes and environmental regulation. However, as long the Homeless Industrial Complex controls the narrative with well-intention voters, and gets to call the shots on where / how to 'address' to problem, the problem of pervasive homelessness is not going to be fixed. We've simply created the wrong set of incentives.
muaytimbo 5y ago
Actually this proposition made it "less illegal" to be poor and a homeowner. Now poor people can keep their homes even if, through no fault of their own, property values rise around them. Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other item do you continually need to pay for after you own it? And why is the amount you need to pay pegged to what other people in the neighborhood around you are doing?
- dahfizz 5y ago
  My municipality charges a yearly excise tax on cars, which is functionally the same as property tax. I have the same philosophical objects to both, but the car tax is pretty low so practically it is not worth getting upset about.
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  > Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other item do you continually need to pay for after you own it? A sham? Unless you argue that most people are buying property under false pretenses, especially given the public nature of property taxes, the expectation would be that those purchasing land do so understanding the existence of on-going financial duties. As to why land is potentially materially different from other assets: 1. Land is only yours while some party will coerce all other parties to respect your claim. The cost of that infrastructure is on-going. 2. Most land might accrue some small value because of the actions of the land owner, but mostly accrues in value because of externalities from the action of others. Taxing those externalities so that the commons benefits rather than the individual seems at least equally as just as the current model where the wealth generated by collective action is overwhelmingly privatized. Reasonable arguments can be made for deferring that tax until sale or equivalent, rather than on a continuous basis. 3. In terms of being inexorably linked to specific governments, land is much more akin to citizenship and / or residency than fungible widgets. Citizenship and residence also frequently incurs ongoing tax duties. 4. Other scarce asset classes have been controlled in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
  - muaytimbo 5y ago
Shuang1 5y ago
Republicans caused all the problems in a city that they haven't controlled since 2001, in a state they haven't controlled since 1987? That really is incredible! I wonder how they accomplished that.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Probably the same way that they're blaming Trump for Russia's aggression during the non-Trump presidencies before and after the Trump one. It's almost like reality doesn't align with their tribal narrative but they can't give it up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zanderz 5y ago
Many don't realize that Prop 13 also protected commercial real estate - the Transamerica Pyramid in SF was the poster child for this until it sold recently https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-30-me-property30-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-30-me-prope...

sevenf0ur 5y ago

Liberal policies is why Los Angles has been dealing with a homeless crisis for so long. Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Day1 5y ago
It seems insane because it is insane. Unfortunately, we already started down this path long ago and it will only get worse until catastrophe. I.e China takes over.
spicyusername 5y ago
> Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane I don't think it was known, in advance, that this would be the resulting cost, assuming that figure is accurate. I don't think any rational person would put forward such a program and that $837,000 to build a single studio house seems insane to everyone, not just non-Californians. I think the point OP is trying to make is that the skyrocketing cost is partly caused by a certain class of privileged Californian's continuing to fight the effort to build more housing.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > $837,000 That's not what is happening. Per the article: 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost $837,000 per unit.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    This is a meaningless nitpick. Spending "over $700,000" to house an individual is just as insane as spending "up to $837,000". Its embarrassing and ridiculous either way.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      It's not meaningless. 86% cost less than 700K.
mullingitover 5y ago
It's nothing to do with liberal policy. It was pure corruption that happened right under the noses of voters. The sales tax ballot measure to fund housing had an innocent-looking line which restricted the contractors eligible for the jobs. The contractors had to have experience building this type of housing. The problem with this is that there were only two contractors that met the requirement, and as a result they could charge whatever they wanted since it was practically a no-bid contract. Los Angeles could've spent dramatically less, and housed more people, had they simply purchased housing on the open market with the money. These prices are pure graft.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
- quartesixte 5y ago
  God. And it was Democrats who pushed for it too IIRC. Corruption deep on both sides of the aisle.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    To be fair, the republican party trashed its brand so thoroughly that it essentially doesn't exist in California, so we're under one party rule. There is no other side of the aisle. It's a shame because Schwarzenegger gave the party a winning formula when he was governor, but the party swung so far off the rails that his centrism makes him a bolshevik to the party as it exists now. One party rule isn't good, but we don't have any sane alternatives here.
    - myfavoritedog 5y ago
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > It's a shame because Schwarzenegger gave the party a winning formula when he was governor Yes, but “find a political cypher of a celebrity, run in an irregular election leveraging a crisis created by Republican state and federal policies, and appoint an listen to a lot of establishment Dems as advisers while ignoring Republican Party insiders and donors because you don't need them once you have the dual advantages of celebrity and incumbency and don't care about the party as such” isn't really a structurally-repeatable strategy.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Liberal policies Do you have any evidence of that? > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country. That's not what is happening, in any meaningful way.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  > Do you have any evidence of that? This is a totally valid question. Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that. Good points. First, what do the outcomes depend on? Policies of California state and local government are only limited factors. They do not create the economy, migration, weather, real estate development, etc. etc. (though they some limited effect on all of them). There are many other powers in the world. The government's power to control events is pretty limited. Second, do we see any correlation between California government and these outcomes? Homelessness has existed worldwide probably for all time. A fundamental question is, with what is increased homelessness correlated? Third, we don't know what the outcomes would be without the policy or with other policies. Negative outcomes don't indicate bad decisions - things could be worse. If you are dying of terminal disease, you don't assume the doctor's decisions are the cause, and therefore we'd be better off without healthcare. We are dealing with a difficult problem. Finally, not all decisions and policies are partisan; people and publics are not politically consistent anwyay, and make policies for all sorts of reasons. And California has had Republican government on and off for a long time, and anything effects of government policy you see now are the outcome of decades of governance.
    - muaytimbo 5y ago

JJMcJ 5y ago

> curtail rising taxes That, of course, was Proposition 13, a ballot initiative. The fallout was exactly what people predicted. Prop 13 did two things. It capped property taxes, though there have been a variety of ways of getting around that. The other thing was it capped increases in property taxes. Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. Imagine, here in the SF Bay Area, 100,000 apartments magically appeared tomorrow morning. I don't think we'd see rents going up 15% a year after that.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. If you means test things, it can work better. If you're an artist or a retiree in san francisco, and then someone goes and invents the internet, prices will go way way up around you. If you don't want to force the artists and retirees to learn to code to keep up with housing catering to newcomers, something like prop 13 helps. But then if they do go and learn to code, taking advantage of the new skyrocketing job market, then they don't need prop 13 protections. Prices went up but their income kept pace, so they don't need the protections. A lot of these kinds of issues seem to come back to lack of means testing or poorly implemented, non-holistic, perverse incentivizing means testing.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Retirees and the disabled have the California Tax Postponement Program to protect them from rising taxes. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary for them. Artists? They can cash out for enormous windfall profits if they can't sell enough art.
  - JJMcJ 5y ago
    That's if they are property owners. Renters have little protection in most communities.
zamfi 5y ago
> Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. Sure you can, you just also need to build new housing. The key is that the new housing has to be higher density than the old housing — the value is primarily in the land, not the house. If a developer could legitimately and easily build a 4-plex where any single-family home exists right now, the prices of SFHs would likely stay high — they are still a luxury, and become more so as they become rarer, raising prices further — while the units in a 4-plex (still housing!) are more affordable. Everyone wins. Except we can’t do that, because we can’t build denser housing in basically any of California.

Dig1t 5y ago

I think you're talking about this in pretty black/white terms and the partisan framing doesn't do much. Prop 13 is a double edged sword IMO. It does have the problem you describe of landed gentry not getting hit with high property taxes, but also it does protect middle class people from getting kicked out of their homes due to the popularity of the area they live in. My parents are the perfect example of this, my dad is a plumber and my mom is a teacher, my entire life they barely broke 100k combined and were BARELY able to give me and my sibling a decent life in LA. If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same thing goes with my grandparents. California has very high income tax, which arguably compensates for the low property taxes. This strikes me as more fair, as the high earners are the ones hit with the tax bills rather than my grandma, who made nothing and had no way to pay the tax that comes with a $2M property valuation, despite having worked hard to buy her house when she was younger. So yeah, you're right in some sense, but its not fair to completely ignore the alternative of lower/middle class people being kicked out of their homes if they didn't have prop 13. The real problem here is the NIMBYism that you describe and restrictive zoning. ALSO, the landed gentry are sort of limited as well. Yes their primary home (the one they live in) has a limited tax bill, but additional homes they own, they will probably end up renting out, and that rental income will be subject to California's high income tax.

rcpt 5y ago
Low income seniors who hit the real estate jackpot can defer taxes indefinitely. It's called the California Tax Postponement Program and solves exactly the problem you're discussing.
andechs 5y ago
> If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same thing goes with my grandparents. We're ensuring stability for the older generation, at the expense of a younger generation who couldn't possibly afford the same neighbourhood they grew up in. Those with millions in real estate equity can use that equity and financial engineering to defer the property tax increases until their death.

throwaway98211 5y ago

> for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-figure increases in equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price. yeah right... this is all 'the republicans' fault. Say what you will about conservatives, but a party that has held majority since the nineties (and more recently a supermajority) has no one but themselves to blame. Obviously prop 13 / single family zoning has had an effect on housing, along with taxes, onerous building codes and environmental regulation. However, as long the Homeless Industrial Complex controls the narrative with well-intention voters, and gets to call the shots on where / how to 'address' to problem, the problem of pervasive homelessness is not going to be fixed. We've simply created the wrong set of incentives.

muaytimbo 5y ago

Actually this proposition made it "less illegal" to be poor and a homeowner. Now poor people can keep their homes even if, through no fault of their own, property values rise around them. Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other item do you continually need to pay for after you own it? And why is the amount you need to pay pegged to what other people in the neighborhood around you are doing?

dahfizz 5y ago
My municipality charges a yearly excise tax on cars, which is functionally the same as property tax. I have the same philosophical objects to both, but the car tax is pretty low so practically it is not worth getting upset about.
ShroudedNight 5y ago
> Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other item do you continually need to pay for after you own it? A sham? Unless you argue that most people are buying property under false pretenses, especially given the public nature of property taxes, the expectation would be that those purchasing land do so understanding the existence of on-going financial duties. As to why land is potentially materially different from other assets: 1. Land is only yours while some party will coerce all other parties to respect your claim. The cost of that infrastructure is on-going. 2. Most land might accrue some small value because of the actions of the land owner, but mostly accrues in value because of externalities from the action of others. Taxing those externalities so that the commons benefits rather than the individual seems at least equally as just as the current model where the wealth generated by collective action is overwhelmingly privatized. Reasonable arguments can be made for deferring that tax until sale or equivalent, rather than on a continuous basis. 3. In terms of being inexorably linked to specific governments, land is much more akin to citizenship and / or residency than fungible widgets. Citizenship and residence also frequently incurs ongoing tax duties. 4. Other scarce asset classes have been controlled in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
- muaytimbo 5y ago

Shuang1 5y ago

Republicans caused all the problems in a city that they haven't controlled since 2001, in a state they haven't controlled since 1987? That really is incredible! I wonder how they accomplished that.

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Probably the same way that they're blaming Trump for Russia's aggression during the non-Trump presidencies before and after the Trump one. It's almost like reality doesn't align with their tribal narrative but they can't give it up.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zanderz 5y ago

Many don't realize that Prop 13 also protected commercial real estate - the Transamerica Pyramid in SF was the poster child for this until it sold recently https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-30-me-property30-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-30-me-prope...