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There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the u

There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the ultimate problem is transportation. To solve the problem of housing in LA, a person should be able to live in Reno,Nevada and work somewhere in Santa Monica, CA. I'm not saying I have a solution, I'm just pointing out the problem domain. The US does not have modern transportation infrastructure like similarly sized countries like China. Generally speaking, housing is built near bodies of water or alongside transportation towards bodies of water. Even issues like NIMBYism can be resolved by constructing underground bullet trains that won't affect appearances. This is a hard problem, but not an unsolvable problem. It isn't just economies of scale, government investment, clever economic strategies,etc.. that are needed but actual revolutions in construction technology and transportation. Timelines for construction that are only few years not decades. But alas, I fear the politics of these days would not allow for this.

CalRobert 2y ago
LA has good public transport but then builds low density around it
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  Good coverage, but it’s absolutely abysmal in terms of reliability, convenience, speed and cleanliness. I tried to survive a week without Uber/driving in LA, and gave up after 3rd day. If your public transport is mostly used by low income residents, you’ve already failed. It just shows that it’s not good enough for anyone else and alternative methods are superior if you have money.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Subways are too expensive per mile for a lot of cities. Density makes transit cheaper
- notepad0x90 2y ago
  I agree, so let's make it cheaper. Other countries build subways cheaper over longer distances. It isn't a practical limitation but one of politics and policy.
resonantjacket5 2y ago
Or allow building higher than one story? Like most cities around the world
supertrope 2y ago
It would be much more efficient to legalize apartments in LA than to run high speed trains to bedroom communities. Digging tunnels would blow out the cost by itself. Dropping infinite resources into stretching commutes across vast distances is not realistic. Taken to its logical extreme everyone should commute by private jet. The larger the transportion network, the more it costs, or at the same cost the less convenient it becomes because intervals between vehicles increases. The most efficient form of transportation is avoiding the trip in the first place through telecommuting. Then walking or biking. Then mass transit which works best with areas with lots of riders (dense cities). https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe. Think of train service like a pancake. For a given amount of batter you can make a normal pancake, or you can spread it thinly over a large area, or you could make a small and thick pancake. If you want great service over a huge area you must massively increase resource expenditure.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Buses aren’t that sexy but they are probably a good compromise for cities like LA. They don’t require a ton of infrastructure and can still remove lots of cars from the road. Make them convenient (better bus stop UX, wait time no more than 10 minutes, GPS track them, modernize them) and people will consider buses. Send surveys to all the biggest companies in the city to figure out specifically the routes that need to be created.
  - supertrope 2y ago
    Buses are usually the cheaper inferior option. While bus service doesn't inherently suck, buses are usually chosen because of cost not because they want to run a good service. This results in cost cutting of every portion of a bus network until the experience suffers. Dedicated lanes are not provided so buses get stuck in traffic. Bus stops without rain shelters or even a bench (versus full stations). Operating budgets get cut and then the interval between buses goes to 30 min. Service after 10 p.m. gets cut. The bus networks that don't suck are usually called "shuttles" and are underwritten by tourism districts, airports, and theme park operators.
  - 2y ago
janalsncm 2y ago
Absolutely. Or put another way, if you can imagine a map of a metro area distorted in terms of commute times between places rather than physical distance, the goal is to maximize the density of the city, putting as many people as possible within reasonable commute times. This is possible via either dense housing or efficient transportation or both.
acdha 2y ago
> There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the ultimate problem is transportation. To solve the problem of housing in LA, a person should be able to live in Reno,Nevada and work somewhere in Santa Monica, CA. Trying to present this in such absolute terms makes it wrong. There’s no feasible way that a 600 mile one-way commute is going to be desirable short of magic teleportation booths. Even if you have a personal jet and priority air traffic control that commute sucks and people want to be enjoy the areas where they live, not spend all of their time traveling somewhere else. Transportation really is a big problem, but it works the other way around: we need transit and enough density so people don’t need to use cars on a daily basis, freeing up close to half of the land usage in American cities and making housing cheaper. What would help would be if there was a way to live in Burbank or Chatsworth and not need to spend an hour driving to go to Santa Monica, or paying many thousands of dollars per year for the privilege of doing so.
- notepad0x90 2y ago
  People don't like to live in dense environments. Apartments and condos suck, people want their back yard. I presented it in absolute terms because we're talking high-level here. The possibility to commute from reno to santa monica and having lots of people actually doing that are different things. My point was, if that was a 1-2 hour commute, then housing along side that commute would make economic sense, as will many other economic activities. If it is a train, I personally won't mind a 2-3 hour total daily commute, since I can catch up with books,entertainment,etc.. but if it is a drive, that would be too much, and that in essence is one of the critical issues on how this is being thought about. Cars (EV or not) are one of the root causes of the housing problem.
  - acdha 2y ago
    Some people don’t, but many people do - for example, older people don’t want to do yard work - and everyone has to choose between a number of different related things. If you want to live somewhere with culture, interesting local businesses, a healthy walkable lifestyle, etc. the suburban model isn’t economically sustainable. If you want a detached single family house and a large yard, you might trade those amenities for the house you want but it’s definitely a choice with significant costs. The fact that America’s walkable neighborhoods have such price competition suggests that there is a significant underserved market for that even if the preference isn’t universal. As for that scenario, 1-2 hour commutes are still misery class. Doing it on a train is better, but countless studies have found that a shorter commute increases happiness more than a big house (the amenities don’t matter, you don’t have time to use them!).
peterbecich 2y ago
If the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail is completed, it would be reasonably convenient to live in the Central Valley and commute to San Francisco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portal_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portal_(San_Francisco)). Unfortunately, the High-Speed Rail has become exorbitantly expensive, all publicly funded a.f.a.i.k. On the other hand, housing in general and the existing 19th-century railroad network were built with private money. As an aside, this is why the internet backbones from coast-to-coast are privately owned; these are on railroad land.
- loglog 2y ago
  Even a rail line such as RER A only has a capacity of at most 40k people/h/direction. It cannot solve all, or even most, transportation problems of a large city. For that, you'd need tens of lines, as in China or Madrid.
enaaem 2y ago
A solution is to build transportation first and build housing afterwards. In Japan, rail companies are also real estate developers who buy the land around the stations and capture the increased land value. US rail companies used to do the same.

CalRobert 2y ago

LA has good public transport but then builds low density around it

tokioyoyo 2y ago
Good coverage, but it’s absolutely abysmal in terms of reliability, convenience, speed and cleanliness. I tried to survive a week without Uber/driving in LA, and gave up after 3rd day. If your public transport is mostly used by low income residents, you’ve already failed. It just shows that it’s not good enough for anyone else and alternative methods are superior if you have money.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

Subways are too expensive per mile for a lot of cities. Density makes transit cheaper

notepad0x90 2y ago
I agree, so let's make it cheaper. Other countries build subways cheaper over longer distances. It isn't a practical limitation but one of politics and policy.

resonantjacket5 2y ago

Or allow building higher than one story? Like most cities around the world

supertrope 2y ago

It would be much more efficient to legalize apartments in LA than to run high speed trains to bedroom communities. Digging tunnels would blow out the cost by itself. Dropping infinite resources into stretching commutes across vast distances is not realistic. Taken to its logical extreme everyone should commute by private jet. The larger the transportion network, the more it costs, or at the same cost the less convenient it becomes because intervals between vehicles increases. The most efficient form of transportation is avoiding the trip in the first place through telecommuting. Then walking or biking. Then mass transit which works best with areas with lots of riders (dense cities). https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe. Think of train service like a pancake. For a given amount of batter you can make a normal pancake, or you can spread it thinly over a large area, or you could make a small and thick pancake. If you want great service over a huge area you must massively increase resource expenditure.

janalsncm 2y ago
Buses aren’t that sexy but they are probably a good compromise for cities like LA. They don’t require a ton of infrastructure and can still remove lots of cars from the road. Make them convenient (better bus stop UX, wait time no more than 10 minutes, GPS track them, modernize them) and people will consider buses. Send surveys to all the biggest companies in the city to figure out specifically the routes that need to be created.
- supertrope 2y ago
  Buses are usually the cheaper inferior option. While bus service doesn't inherently suck, buses are usually chosen because of cost not because they want to run a good service. This results in cost cutting of every portion of a bus network until the experience suffers. Dedicated lanes are not provided so buses get stuck in traffic. Bus stops without rain shelters or even a bench (versus full stations). Operating budgets get cut and then the interval between buses goes to 30 min. Service after 10 p.m. gets cut. The bus networks that don't suck are usually called "shuttles" and are underwritten by tourism districts, airports, and theme park operators.
- 2y ago

janalsncm 2y ago

Absolutely. Or put another way, if you can imagine a map of a metro area distorted in terms of commute times between places rather than physical distance, the goal is to maximize the density of the city, putting as many people as possible within reasonable commute times. This is possible via either dense housing or efficient transportation or both.

acdha 2y ago

> There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the ultimate problem is transportation. To solve the problem of housing in LA, a person should be able to live in Reno,Nevada and work somewhere in Santa Monica, CA. Trying to present this in such absolute terms makes it wrong. There’s no feasible way that a 600 mile one-way commute is going to be desirable short of magic teleportation booths. Even if you have a personal jet and priority air traffic control that commute sucks and people want to be enjoy the areas where they live, not spend all of their time traveling somewhere else. Transportation really is a big problem, but it works the other way around: we need transit and enough density so people don’t need to use cars on a daily basis, freeing up close to half of the land usage in American cities and making housing cheaper. What would help would be if there was a way to live in Burbank or Chatsworth and not need to spend an hour driving to go to Santa Monica, or paying many thousands of dollars per year for the privilege of doing so.

notepad0x90 2y ago
People don't like to live in dense environments. Apartments and condos suck, people want their back yard. I presented it in absolute terms because we're talking high-level here. The possibility to commute from reno to santa monica and having lots of people actually doing that are different things. My point was, if that was a 1-2 hour commute, then housing along side that commute would make economic sense, as will many other economic activities. If it is a train, I personally won't mind a 2-3 hour total daily commute, since I can catch up with books,entertainment,etc.. but if it is a drive, that would be too much, and that in essence is one of the critical issues on how this is being thought about. Cars (EV or not) are one of the root causes of the housing problem.
- acdha 2y ago
  Some people don’t, but many people do - for example, older people don’t want to do yard work - and everyone has to choose between a number of different related things. If you want to live somewhere with culture, interesting local businesses, a healthy walkable lifestyle, etc. the suburban model isn’t economically sustainable. If you want a detached single family house and a large yard, you might trade those amenities for the house you want but it’s definitely a choice with significant costs. The fact that America’s walkable neighborhoods have such price competition suggests that there is a significant underserved market for that even if the preference isn’t universal. As for that scenario, 1-2 hour commutes are still misery class. Doing it on a train is better, but countless studies have found that a shorter commute increases happiness more than a big house (the amenities don’t matter, you don’t have time to use them!).

peterbecich 2y ago

If the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail is completed, it would be reasonably convenient to live in the Central Valley and commute to San Francisco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portal_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portal_(San_Francisco)). Unfortunately, the High-Speed Rail has become exorbitantly expensive, all publicly funded a.f.a.i.k. On the other hand, housing in general and the existing 19th-century railroad network were built with private money. As an aside, this is why the internet backbones from coast-to-coast are privately owned; these are on railroad land.

loglog 2y ago
Even a rail line such as RER A only has a capacity of at most 40k people/h/direction. It cannot solve all, or even most, transportation problems of a large city. For that, you'd need tens of lines, as in China or Madrid.

enaaem 2y ago

A solution is to build transportation first and build housing afterwards. In Japan, rail companies are also real estate developers who buy the land around the stations and capture the increased land value. US rail companies used to do the same.