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California's future depends on how leaders rebuild after the Los Angeles fires
- unquietwiki 2y agoA lot of single-family housing burned in the fires. For the sake of density, we need to put in more apartments, and ones that don't cost $3-4K/mo for a 1-2 bed. Metro is expanding ahead of the Olympics, and Waymo services a decent chunk of the city (not the burned areas though); you could go with less parking to save costs, but a lot of folks have roommates, so you end up needing double the parking, and that clogs up the streets... there are no easy answers to this situation, unfortunately.
- calciphus 2y agoLA is one of the most car-centric cities I've ever seen. "we can have less parking" would require a fundamental shift in culture. Doing it right after a major fire where people are alive precisely because they were able to put themselves and a few belongings into their personal vehicle and go where they could shelter with friends or family is bordering on an impossible ask.
- whimsicalism 2y agoin 10 years time self-driving will be all over LA, we should build with foresight
- grajaganDev 2y agoI think this is optimistic.
- grardb 2y agoThe idea that self-driving cars will be anywhere in any timeframe is actually very pessimistic to me.
- whimsicalism 2y agoreally? i can already call a self-driving car in LA but the idea that this will scale up in the next 10 years is out there?
- HDThoreaun 2y agoWaymo is not self driving. It’s remote operated, much more expensive. People will not give up their vehicle for an expensive taxi service. There are no self driving cars that actually work and there are none on the horizon.
- whimsicalism 2y agoit’s not remote operated and it is also not much more expensive and i have no idea why you assume costs will be constant. i take waymos all the time, often replacing my car, i have never had a single issue
- HDThoreaun 2y agoLiterally so easy to find out that it’s remote operated with the operators taking over on average once per mile. That can’t scale in a cost effective way unless you only use it like once a week. People who need to drive everyday can’t afford it. Otherwise they’d just be ubering everywhere now instead of owning a car.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyou literally do not know what you’re talking about, source me a number on the “once per mile” intervention - i’ve driven hundreds of miles in waymo and never had an intervention of course they can scale in a cost effective manner, the operating costs are theoretically the same as just owning a car but they get to amortize it across many different users and don’t have to pay for human labor
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
- thrance 2y agoI don't see what that's got to do with city planning and increasing density.
- whimsicalism 2y agofeel like it has obvious salience around the necessity of parking requirements going forward just like if a rail line opened up near you
- fragmede 2y agoNo need to wait 10 years, Waymo currently operates in LA.
- kristjansson 2y agoIn a service area that _very_ purposefully stops before the sort of narrow, hilly streets that covered most of the evacuation zones.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyeah i’m sure that’ll stay the same for 10 years, technology famously stays constant
- kristjansson 2y agoI suspect you're right, I was pointing out the current limits. But so what if they do have full coverage in 10 years? We can build apartments with no/fewer parking spaces, and therefore somewhat lower costs. Why do we build those sort of apartments on some of the most desirable land on the planet? Look at the One Coast development on the bottom of Sunset - denser than SFH, plenty of parking, and no trouble selling condos starting at $3-5m. At that's at the bottom of the hill!
- whimsicalism 2y agowhy should we only build large buildings in places where poor people live? i don't see why these neighborhoods should be reserved for the wealthy rather than mixed income if the demand is there. generally the market pressure for larger buildings is going to be highest in wealthy areas and for good reason
- kristjansson 2y agoThey're not reserved for the wealthy, they're desirable. Self-driving and associated parking minimum reductions doesn't materially change those economics. If you had permission to build large buildings with an ocean view and beach access ... you'd build it with parking and start the studios at $1m like they do half a mile away on Ocean. Build 115% of the units by omitting parking, and you'd probably still sell a studio for $1m, honestly. The demand is deep, global, and pretty inelastic. Does Monaco have apartments for $300k? Does the LES? West Palm Beach?
- sagarm 2y agoPlenty of people had to abandon their cars and flee on foot
- likeabatterycar 2y agoMalibu and the Palisades were exclusive neighborhoods where celebrities and other well-off industry personnel lived. They're not adding low income apartments or execute any urbanist pipe-dream for the same reason they're not bulldozing Pac Heights to install homeless shelters. Not going to happen. Ever.
- piva00 2y agoAltadena isn't one of those exclusive neighbourhoods though.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoMiddle class and minorities in Altadena don't want to raise their families in Soviet-style apartments because some hipster urbanist thinks its best. They want SFH, that's why they live there.
- piva00 2y agoUsing those buzzwords really doesn't invite much of a conversation, even less when it's basically strawmanning from your part. Still I will bite a bit... There are many examples of places around the world who managed to intersperse SFH with medium-density housing (3-4 stories apartment buildings) so it's not an either-or situation. For example: many suburbs of Stockholm have developed this way, it allows options based on people's budgets and needs, while also creating enough density to attract local businesses so people are not entirely car-dependent for basic necessities, creates third places for meetings, etc. I'm preaching to the choir though, I do understand you will probably never understand or see it that way given the vitriol you started with. It's quite sad because there are other ways for a community to live that can cater to different needs where mixed-housing exists while also making these neighbourhoods more interesting and livable in themselves.
- whimsicalism 2y agothe electorate controls the people with guns, so we can kinda make whatever we want happen if we vote for it
- bilbo0s 2y agoEveryone wants to rebuild in accordance with their favorite urban planning theory. Very few want to give developers the profits they need to match the profits they get rebuilding in accordance with maximizing the return on their investments. People asking for cheap apartments are just not being realistic. Why rent that square footage at less than luxury prices when the market will readily eat up the square footage at prices far exceeding the national luxury median? And that’s before we even get to the people who want condos or luxury homes. You would basically need to make a law that caps how much an owner can make on his land for some of these ideas to work.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoMultiple apartments should be more profitable than a single family luxury home.
- orionsbelt 2y agoNot in some of these areas. This was some of the best real estate in the country. $80M homes burned down.
- whimsicalism 2y agogenerally “most expensive real estate in country” is where profits from apartments/condos is highest, not the other way around
- orionsbelt 2y agoNot up in the hills or on oceanside lots on the Pacific Ocean next to the PCH. I’m no builder, but my sense is, even if the zoning were relaxed, you are at best building like a quadplex. Four apartments are not going to equal an $80M home. Maybe in the flats of the palisades.
- ta1243 2y ago$70m of that $80m house is the land its on, and that hasn't been destroyed.
- rayiner 2y agoWe shouldn’t rebuild at all in many of these places.
- grajaganDev 2y agoWe should build glass and steel high density apartment buildings with no parking.
- bilbo0s 2y agoThose apartments would all cost more than 3k a month. Putting up high rises in LA is expensive. (Earthquakes, fires, etc). So there is zero motivation for developers to not get the maximum amount of rent possible for a given square footage. No one has explained why a given developer should rent for less than 3K when they could easily rent the same space fo 4K? Is the government providing an incentive covering the shortfall?
- lavelganzu 2y agoBuild enough housing & prices go down. It's worked everywhere it has been tried, and it'll work in LA, too.
- indymike 2y agoThis would shift the political dynamics in the rest of the US as people left for car-friendly cities where they could own their homes.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoYou can’t get to these areas without driving. Where will the residents park?
- ravenstine 2y agoThe reason modern apartments in LA cost an arm and a leg is the same one for why new houses are no longer starter homes but McMansions.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoMcMansion is a Texan thing. New homes in LA are a fairly boxy west coast style. Box housing maximizes square footage use and takes advantage of the fact that it doesn't really snow in LA so no very sloping roof is needed.
- kristjansson 2y agoDensity is an imperative for Los Angeles, and big sprawl-y cities generally. And we're building density! DTLA is getting more residential, train stops are getting surrounded by everything from 5+1s to superblocks, Santa Monica is getting taller, ... That global imperative does not translate into a local demand that every SFH (and in particular, these SFHs) be replaced with denser housing. As you realize in your comment, the damaged areas aren't exactly well-positioned to support substantially denser housing.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoThese are the palisades though so very hilly with lots of great views. I can't really imagine building apartments up there, and they are really not very centrally located anyways, not like lower Brentwood or most of Santa Monica. Even Hong Kong builds mostly between its hills and only on them when really rich people are involved (e.g. Victoria Peak).
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoCalifornia leaders haven't made good decisions since the 70s. So basically we're doomed.
- darth_avocado 2y agoOakland just shut down 2 Fire Stations in the hills where the risk of fires is the highest, with up to 7 more on the horizon due to budget cuts. https://www.kqed.org/news/12021505/a-tragedy-waiting-to-happen-oakland-shutters-2-fire-stations https://www.kqed.org/news/12021505/a-tragedy-waiting-to-happ... In fact the station that responded first to the fires of last October was the one cut. https://oaklandside.org/2024/10/22/oakland-budget-cuts-firefighters-keller-fire/ https://oaklandside.org/2024/10/22/oakland-budget-cuts-firef... The government officials argue that there is no money, but in reality, almost every department is seeing budget increases other than the fire department. The city administrators are getting 3x the money than last budget. California leaders are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Edit: this just from yesterday https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/response-time-for-oakland-hills-fire-delayed-due-to-recent-budget-cuts-station-closures/amp/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/response-time-for-oaklan...
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- tredre3 2y agoThe government officials argue that there hasn't been any budget cut or mismanagement, they made an entire website about it: www.californiafirefacts.com Though, charitably, I suppose the city-level mismanagement that you're talking about do not directly contradict gavin's claims about state/federal level cuts. Maybe.
- darth_avocado 2y agoCan’t really speak about the entire state but in Oakland’s case, it is absolutely budget cuts. And closing 2 fire stations in the most fire prone area, where a recent major fire took place, can safely be called mismanagement.
- palmfacehn 2y agoNot surprised to read political takes on reconstruction from Vox. It may be a little bit early for this.
- altairprime 2y agoA useful alternative would be the Longreads article from 2018, discussing the history of the region that burned and how it was known to be a fire danger from the beginning (and has burned every so often as predicted): https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/ https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu... > The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames > Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded > He also provided a classic account of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning its way to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 blaze. And identifies that the policy of colonizing wildfire-prone zones with single family homes was set in the late 50s: > By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Fires continued, of course, like clockwork: > The next firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire weather (drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity, and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind) with a bumper crop of combustible wood-frame houses. According to firefighters, the popular cedar shake roofs “popped like popcorn” as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridgeline of the Santa Monicas toward the sea And so on. So I wouldn’t say it’s “too early” for political takes on reconstruction; this debate — Oh No Fires! What Next For Zoning? — has been going on for almost one hundred years, even if it’s news to the current decade that this was ever a risk.
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- lysace 2y ago.
- iamtheworstdev 2y agoHonestly, that's not wild at all to me. They invented AI with other people's money. But they have to use their own money to fight fire.
- altairprime 2y agoAfter the Santa Rosa fires in 2017, that city’s leaders ignored local worker pressure to increase density in favor of leaving zoning unchanged and letting family people rebuild single-family sprawl. Rents never dropped from their 25%+ increase that year and the region’s economy has been depressed since due to workers having less pay and landlords who spend their rents in other counties. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in cities like LA after they predictably burn each year, now that the “zone it for density or we invalidate your zoning” laws are in place. Forest mismanagement fires are making up for weak-willed politicians unwilling to use eminent domain for anything but highways and that is a force of change that some city will eventually take advantage of. I hope, anyways.
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- spiralpolitik 2y agoIt's a fair take. California is now unaffordable for most families and it's going to get worse. Example: New construction in Santa Clarita (north Los Angeles county) $800k 3 bedroom town house. Even with ~50% down you are still looking around $4k+ per month in payments, with 25% of that amount being property tax. You'll also likely be paying more due to Mello-Roos and with HOA and home insurance on top of that. Plus it's unlikely at this point you'll be able to get fire insurance. Good luck trying to make the numbers work on the country medium income of ~$100k. (And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home).
- yostrovs 2y ago"And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home)." I believe there are a lot of families that pass down wealth, most of it being used to buy houses.
- jas39 2y ago[flagged]
- grajaganDev 2y agoThis is an incredibly simplistic take.
- rs999gti 2y agoIf California does not do controlled burns to the underbrush like what nature or the American Indians were doing when the Conquistador arrived, then there will be more and more wildfires. This is regardless of climate change or what politicians are in power.
- grajaganDev 2y agoWhat you are missing is that the homes themselves provided the fuel. It had nothing to do with underbrush or forest management.
- spiralpolitik 2y agoGood luck doing a controlled burn where the smoke is going to blow into a rich neighborhood like the Palisades. You'll be buried under so many environmental impact lawsuits that any burn will take years (if ever) to happen.
- grajaganDev 2y agoPeople listening to the media are so confused.
- dang 2y agoMaybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728555? A good comment needs more information than this. If you know more than others, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that or don't have time, that's fine, but in that case it's best to just accept that the internet is wrong about everything and not reply. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- thrance 2y agoI still don't see how building more homes would fix the housing crisis. Aren't there like millions of uninhabited homes? Isn't the problem that landlords are free to extract as much money as they want to provide a necessity without adding any value to it? Wouldn't any solution necessarily involve a massive direct or indirect devaluation of properties?
- ta1243 2y ago> Aren't there like millions of uninhabited homes? No. Certainly not in places where people want to live. Why would you think there are? Why would someone deliberately let their property deprecate while not earning an income, (setting aside the unearned speculation caused by land values increasing) LA has about 2-3% empty homes. Higher than some global cities, but still a very small number.
- ianburrell 2y agoYou think that building housing for more people won’t help the people who are looking for housing. The vacant homes count any vacancy even if they are for sale or between tenants. It is impossible to use those for housing. And putting people in them means that normal buyer and tenants couldn’t live there. Rent is a market and landlords can only charge what people can pay. More cheaper housing will drive down rents, or more likely slow down rent growth since prices are sticky. Building more homes would make existing home less valuable but would make the land under the homes more valuable cause could be used for more valuable housing. I also think that remaining houses will be more valuable for people who want house over apartment.
- thrance 2y agoBut if neither rent nor house price goes down, then we still have a crisis, don't we? I've never seen rent go down or slow down as a result of market forces, it must be forced by the local government. Why would building more homes drive price down? Why wouldn't the builders just sell it at market price?
- readthenotes1 2y agoWould LA be bright enough to hire a Christopher Wren even if they knew him?
- kristjansson 2y agoI really, really, need every think piece that talks about 'rebuilding LA' to look at an actual map of what was damaged by the fire before I hear their views on urbanism and what Los Angeles needs. Yes, 23k acres burned in the Palisades fire, and 15k in the Eaton fire. Yes that's a lot of area compared to SF, Manhattan, etc. Most of that area is mountainside! There's not suddenly 50 square miles of open space in LA to remake in the image of some ideal. Of the portion of heavily burned land that was developed, quite a bit was also mountainside, or at least foothill. There's ~25 regular-ish blocks of the villages (backed up against foothill) that were destroyed, and some flat-ish area on Sunset Mesa, and the west side of Temescal Canyon, and a bit on Castellammare (but thankfully that wasn't as heavily impacted). But as the names implies, these are all mesa/ridge tops, bracketed by cliffs & canyons. The impacted parts of Altadena are a bit more regular, but very much sloping foothill backed up against their own mountainside. Moreover, both areas are somewhat peripheral, even for the city-without-a-center. The point being that these are not places one can casually lay out some expansive transit-oriented scheme that's going to solve housing problems for the city. They're topographically and geographically constrained, and need to be rebuilt in a way that's compatible with their constraints. To say nothing of the fact that these were people's homes, and are people's property, and they might have a say on how they would like to rebuild. There are some real challenges facing LA w.r.t. family-size rental/affordable housing stock, insurance in fire-prone areas, insurance generally depending on state policy, etc. I hope the civic and political energy leveled against barriers to rebuilding in Altadena and the Palisades can later be focused on ongoing transit expansion and associated higher-density development, infill, etc, in the parts of the city where those make sense. But to pretend that these fires present some great opportunity to 'remake' Los Angeles as a whole is a misunderstanding at best, reductive and insulting at worst. </rant>
- ianburrell 2y agoIt seems to me that right solution is to upzone Altadena. Small apartment buildings work fine in dense suburbs. The other part is that if can’t upzone Palisades to upzone other areas instead. It makes sense to build denser close to transit than force it on rich areas in the hills.
- jhp123 2y agoA study of London[0] found that being bombed during the blitz was a net positive for the city, economically speaking, because the neighborhoods affected were rebuilt with more density. This gave me the idea that we could improve long-term urban wealth by following an "urban Cheney's algorithm". A city could be divided into let's say 8 sectors, like pie slices extending from the center, and demolished on a schedule (e.g. one sector per decade). The orderly and predictable demolition would provide an even greater boon to the city than the Nazi bombing campaign provided to London, especially because the wide range of demolition would allow easier renovation of structures like roads, sewers, and transit lines and depots. [0] https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/21/6/869/6213370 https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/21/6/869/6213370
- altairprime 2y agoIt would also allow for planned relocation so that residents who are being disrupted could be guaranteed housing without cost increases, since it would cost essentially nothing relative to overall cost to provide them replacement homes in the higher density neighborhood just rebuilt. I believe Rohnert Park, which borders Santa Rosa, is already doing this (not with pie slices though). Definitely this is a known SimCity tactic to build a high density high wealth city! You just have to get the feeder road layout right.
- UltraSane 2y agoJust don't make houses out of flammable materials. Easy. Exterior walls must be cinder block filled with concrete and rebar or poured concrete with lots of rebar and perhaps fiber reinforcement. Roofs must be metal or ceramic or stone.
- nrki 2y agoMost rural houses in Australia are built this way. They still burn down. I don't think anyone really understands how intense wildfires can get when fanned by wind. It will destroy almost anything. See: Black Saturday bushfires, Australia. > "it really made no difference whether the houses were brick or timber. In fact, with the speed of the fire front some timber houses fared better than brick as it moved too fast for the houses to catch, but the bricks exploded from the sudden change in temperature." > "When you have a fire front coming through at 800C it'll melt your window seals and aluminum window frames. The glass will fall out then everything is on fire.
- UltraSane 2y agoIn the LA fire most home fires were ignited by the trillions of red hot embers driven by the wind. If these embers can ignite a home then the house is lost. So the key is to make the house from materials that resist ignition from wind driven embers.
- harimau777 2y agoWould cinder blocks and concrete be a good fit for standing up to the earthquakes that California is prone to?
- UltraSane 2y agoIf designed correctly they could be. It is an interesting actuarial problem which risk should be mitigated in home design.
- more_corn 2y agoLeaders don’t build. They permit.
- johnea 2y agoWhat a totally vacuous article 8-/ This has no bearing whatsoever in how LA will be rebuilt. The reconstruction in LA will follow the exact same principles that have governed the construction of all housing in southern california, ever. That is, the housing will be rebuilt in the way that makes the destruction mafia the most money, right now. This is the way it has ALWAYS been done, everywhere. My house in San Diego is 105 years old. A craftsman cottage. It was built in 1920 in the way that made the construction company the most money, in the ~6 months it took them to build the structure and sell it. The fact that the building has now been inhabited for 105 years, and massive money could have been saved in fuel and maintenance if more robust construction were used, had 0 impact on how it was built. This is exactly how reconstruction in LA will now proceed. With 0 concern for the future consequences. That is exactly how all housing is built, everywhere (in the US at least). The suggestion that this is somehow dictated by, or curtailed by "leaders", is equally disconnected from reality. Gavin, that plutocratic prick, will not take one step to curtail the profit of the destruction industry. This is illustrated by a large swath of recent CA legislation. For example, a state law that dictates that localities must allow construction of double the number of units if "affordable housing" is included in the project. The law of course, doesn't say "how much", or "what kind" of affordable housing must be included. Local North County San Diego municipalities were then successfully sued by developers who insisted that including 1 "affordable housing" unit in an entire project allowed doubling the number of "market value" housing units to be constructed. This has all contributed to the unafforability of housing in southern california, and massively boosted profits for real estate developers. If you want to make housing affordable in So Cal, outlaw short term rentals. That would be a great start. But the long haul would require significantly curtailing laissez faire capitalism in housing construction. This is something that is just NOT going to happen under the so called "liberal" governance of the state..
- underseacables 2y agoInteresting Datapoint: the Camp Fire in 2019 completely destroyed the affluent town of Paradise California. Today it is only 30% recovered. Looking at some of the other data points around rebuilding in California, I don't think Los Angeles will recover from this at least a decade or more.
- jhanschoo 2y agoThe article suggests off-hand that higher-density development is less fire-prone, but does not explain this claim any further. Can someone here help me with an explanation? Is it a matter of typical materials?