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It's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money int

It's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money into the hands of landlords and homeowners from all newcomers. LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.

kfarr 27d ago
And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.
- syspec 27d ago
  Do you own your home? Here in Ca? You know that property tax is 1.4ish % and goes up by 2% a year, pretty much no matter what? On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds. That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home. People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes
  - dbmikus 27d ago
    That is close to the average rate of inflation, though. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
  - codemac 27d ago
    They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years. You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
  - stouset 27d ago
    While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident. This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
    - lokar 27d ago
      I’m not sure why people are downvoting (without commenting), but I agree. The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
      - MarkusQ 27d ago
        That makes it sound like the increase was due to some inexorable natural force. California's per capita budget is over twice Arizona's, and they're running a huge deficit on top of that. If taxes are too high, cut taxes. If that means you need to cut spending, cut spending. But don't play "hey, let's tax the other guy!" games and expect that to work.
        Schiendelman 27d ago
        A lot of this also comes down to prohibiting growth. In Seattle, every time we build a new building, everyone else's property tax payments decrease. High growth years lead to lower bills. The same would work in California, they just don't build much of anything because they've made it nearly impossible to.
        fc417fc802 27d ago
        You're not wrong, but the irony of positioning Seattle as having good zoning policies is almost unbearable.
        Schiendelman 27d ago
        Oh, I'm with you. I think this needs to be overturned wholesale. Seattle is bad. Still better than California.
        lokar 27d ago
  - isubkhankulov 27d ago
    Yes, your property tax is high ($17k) because of prop 13 - you are effectively subsidizing others who have sat on their residential and commercial property for 20-30+ years who are paying 25-50% of what you pay for any similar property in the same calendar year! Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13. They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism. Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
    - cucumber3732842 27d ago
      > It’s feels like icky European feudalism. Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
    - fatcatsbestcats 27d ago
      I agree with everything you’ve said, but one clarification: you don’t even need a trust to pass the tax break down to your kid when you die. Sure, a trust can streamline that process, but it’s not required. At least everyone lucky enough to inherit benefits, not just those whose parents had the foresight (and the means) to create a trust.
  - jedberg 27d ago
    > Do you own your home? Here in Ca? Yes and yes. And I pay 10K less a year than my neighbor for the same value house. And I pay 10K more a year than my other neighbor. I get a huge advantage from Prop 13, but I still think it needs to get replaced with a much fairer system.
    - deleted 27d ago
      [deleted]
  - tikhonj 27d ago
    I do own a house in California and I pay closer to $30k in property taxes. The previous owners of my house paid $7k. My neighbor—who has a bigger, more expensive house!—pays $9k. It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
  - skywhopper 27d ago
    You realize government services that support that home cost money, right? You act like if you own your home that your living there doesn’t impose any costs on your neighbors.
- bingohbangoh 27d ago
  Do people really think that if we revoked Prop 13 that other taxes would go down with the new money from property taxes? Or do we think that property taxes would go up while other taxes stay put? This feels like the argument at play when people criticize Prop 13. Not saying it’s good but California hasn’t ever cut taxes meaningfully and I’m not convinced raising property taxes would solve anything. California would still be expensive to live in.
  - groundzeros2015 27d ago
    It would increase liquidity in the housing market.
  - jrmg 27d ago
    To keep tax revenue equal, property taxes for those who purchased recently would go down, and property taxes for those who’d purchased in the past would go up. The housing market would become more liquid because people would move out of homes if their values rose too much and they could no longer afford the taxes. This would be a shock initially, but over time it would just be seen as part of life like it is in other areas: mostly, empty nesters would downsize to a cheaper, smaller house with lower taxes. Gentrification might be more problematic though. In practice, probably some phased rebalancing would have to happen to avoid the sudden economic shock, but, politics notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to suggest it could be done and that the end state might be overall ‘better’ for most people. The end state would be how property taxes work almost everywhere else.
    - bingohbangoh 26d ago
      > To keep tax revenue equal, property taxes for those who purchased recently would go down, and property taxes for those who’d purchased in the past would go up. That's what I'm saying _won't_ happen. The high property taxes as-is will stay high and previously protected properties will have their taxes shoot up. That is my prediction and nothing about the state of California, or the US broadly, suggests otherwise to me.
  - andrewmutz 27d ago
gradus_ad 27d ago
To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as well
- returningfory2 27d ago
  NYC zoning is less limiting than LA, but still extremely limiting.
- oblio 27d ago
  Nah, watch this if you have time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU At least watch this money shot: https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 (wait for the video to reveal the construction years) As Max Fisher puts it: American cities have been frozen in amber.
  - epistasis 27d ago
    This is such an amazing video. It collapses about three years of my casual research into housing down into just a few minutes. Thanks for sharing.
- kccqzy 27d ago
  NYC has had so much downzoning too. The icon of the city, the Empire State Building, now has a floor area ratio about double what’s permitted in that district. Many historical buildings, just like ESB, simply could not have been built today under current zoning regulation. The city’s original 1916 zoning regulation permitted a hypothetical maximum population of 55 million; after WWII the new zoning regulations essentially limited hypothetical maximum population to a little more than 10 million if everything is fully developed. Recent initiatives like City of Yes did too little to reverse the trend.
- tokioyoyo 27d ago
  Everything has a gigantic depends* on it when it comes to RE. People want to find one reason why things are bad, but it is always a big bag of mixed things. When I was in Vancouver, people kept saying if we got rid of rent control, houses will be built, rent will come down. But houses are expensive to build, and they need to make money asap in the “exit economy”. They won’t come up easily, unless they make it cheap to build, which isn’t happening. Rents just started coming down, but so far insignificant amount (I just checked, a place I paid $2500 for in 2019, is going for $3300 after the decrease!), and demand curbing had more influence on it. Personally, I think we shouldn’t force people to move to a different area because rents skyrocketed. I’m all in support of getting paid out though. People look at Tokyo, and talk about “less-zoned build whatever, and no rent control, thus more or less affordable”. Which also depends*. YoY rents are going up by 10-15% right now, even more in some areas. It’s unreasonable for a good chunk of residents. Speculation is big influx of money from China. But you can actually challenge the rent increase in a good chunk of cases. So it’s a pseudo-rent control. I’m not saying something is right or wrong, just saying everything has multiple layers of problems.
MikeNotThePope 27d ago
I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?
- mitxela 27d ago
  this is the same fallacy of saying there's no point getting a 10x faster server because you'll just have 10x more load and your site will still be slow.
- esikich 27d ago
  Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?
  - prawn 26d ago
    They're asking if there's an end game. If the single family homes get rezoned to three storey blocks, does that just become 10-storey towers and then arcologies, each more efficient than the other. Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.
- xmprt 27d ago
  Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition. The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day. Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.
golem14 27d ago
There is also a completely unreasonable shortage of water for a much bigger city.
- wdr1 27d ago
  I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window. And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy. We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem. For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs. Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
  - thrance 27d ago
    You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights. It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
    - cucumber3732842 27d ago
      Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are. Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained. You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
slg 27d ago
>The massive downzoning of the 1980s... To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.
- lwansbrough 27d ago
  Same story in San Francisco of course, and the rest of the US pretty much aside from a few cities in recent years.
  - TomGarden 27d ago
    At least we have parking lots. Ah, so many parking lots
  - hackernud3s 27d ago
    There's still Houston but that's it as far as I know.
- pjerem 27d ago
  My impression of LA when I got there was that I would never live there, even in the nicest spots. Which confirms my intuition that the richest have no taste. Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
  - stasomatic 27d ago
    I've lived in LA on and off for over a decade cumulatively. If Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Burbank, North Hollywood count as "L.A." :) I love the climate and nature there, besides the fires. Ocean, lakes, mountains, deserts, all within 1-3 hour drive. It is a dehumanizing city to commute in, and is expensive, but it's the best one I have lived in (NYC, Brooklyn, NJ cities, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami) and I want to return when finances allow.
WD-42 27d ago
I was just down there and saw multiple massive development projects going on. Like huge new neighborhoods. Of course they aren’t in LA proper. But it seems like people that want to live in SoCal want the suburbs. You talk like LA is this artificially small place except that it’s more like a neighborhood in the middle of sprawl at an almost unimaginable scale. Not saying any of this is good. In fact it’s terrible. Personally I feel like the entire LA metro area is about as close as you can get to a real paradise lost on earth. Maybe one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, bulldozed over for a maze of 6 lane uncrossable suburban streets and cookie cutter McMansions.
- epistasis 27d ago
  It only seems like that because every other type of housing is literally banned. If apartments, even small buildings, were legal in LA, they'd be building them everywhere and they'd immediately fill up. The Mayor, Karen Bass, accidentally screwed up and made affordable possible to build, as in allowing it to get through the gauntlet of approvals. This resulted in a massive amount of extremely costly affordable housing to get built, merely because the approval couldn't be stopped arbitrarily: https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-her-successful-housing-plan/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-h... Ift that sort of project approval was opened up to not only affordable housing, but also for-profit housing, there would be a massive shift in the type of new housing in the area.
21asdffdsa12 27d ago
There must be a incredible incentive to build "pod-housing" basically take a overpriced suburban home, excavate out into the depths and build sleeper-coffin like homes, then in the morning, its 3 minivan of shuttleb-busses going "to schools" - and in the evening back. Basically build affordable housing illegally

kfarr 27d ago

And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.

syspec 27d ago
Do you own your home? Here in Ca? You know that property tax is 1.4ish % and goes up by 2% a year, pretty much no matter what? On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds. That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home. People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes
- dbmikus 27d ago
  That is close to the average rate of inflation, though. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
- codemac 27d ago
  They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years. You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
- stouset 27d ago
  While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident. This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
  - lokar 27d ago
    I’m not sure why people are downvoting (without commenting), but I agree. The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
    - MarkusQ 27d ago
      That makes it sound like the increase was due to some inexorable natural force. California's per capita budget is over twice Arizona's, and they're running a huge deficit on top of that. If taxes are too high, cut taxes. If that means you need to cut spending, cut spending. But don't play "hey, let's tax the other guy!" games and expect that to work.
      - Schiendelman 27d ago
        A lot of this also comes down to prohibiting growth. In Seattle, every time we build a new building, everyone else's property tax payments decrease. High growth years lead to lower bills. The same would work in California, they just don't build much of anything because they've made it nearly impossible to.
        fc417fc802 27d ago
        You're not wrong, but the irony of positioning Seattle as having good zoning policies is almost unbearable.
        Schiendelman 27d ago
        Oh, I'm with you. I think this needs to be overturned wholesale. Seattle is bad. Still better than California.
      - lokar 27d ago
- isubkhankulov 27d ago
  Yes, your property tax is high ($17k) because of prop 13 - you are effectively subsidizing others who have sat on their residential and commercial property for 20-30+ years who are paying 25-50% of what you pay for any similar property in the same calendar year! Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13. They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism. Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
  - cucumber3732842 27d ago
    > It’s feels like icky European feudalism. Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
  - fatcatsbestcats 27d ago
    I agree with everything you’ve said, but one clarification: you don’t even need a trust to pass the tax break down to your kid when you die. Sure, a trust can streamline that process, but it’s not required. At least everyone lucky enough to inherit benefits, not just those whose parents had the foresight (and the means) to create a trust.
- jedberg 27d ago
  > Do you own your home? Here in Ca? Yes and yes. And I pay 10K less a year than my neighbor for the same value house. And I pay 10K more a year than my other neighbor. I get a huge advantage from Prop 13, but I still think it needs to get replaced with a much fairer system.
  - deleted 27d ago
    [deleted]
- tikhonj 27d ago
  I do own a house in California and I pay closer to $30k in property taxes. The previous owners of my house paid $7k. My neighbor—who has a bigger, more expensive house!—pays $9k. It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
- skywhopper 27d ago
  You realize government services that support that home cost money, right? You act like if you own your home that your living there doesn’t impose any costs on your neighbors.
bingohbangoh 27d ago
Do people really think that if we revoked Prop 13 that other taxes would go down with the new money from property taxes? Or do we think that property taxes would go up while other taxes stay put? This feels like the argument at play when people criticize Prop 13. Not saying it’s good but California hasn’t ever cut taxes meaningfully and I’m not convinced raising property taxes would solve anything. California would still be expensive to live in.
- groundzeros2015 27d ago
  It would increase liquidity in the housing market.
- jrmg 27d ago
  To keep tax revenue equal, property taxes for those who purchased recently would go down, and property taxes for those who’d purchased in the past would go up. The housing market would become more liquid because people would move out of homes if their values rose too much and they could no longer afford the taxes. This would be a shock initially, but over time it would just be seen as part of life like it is in other areas: mostly, empty nesters would downsize to a cheaper, smaller house with lower taxes. Gentrification might be more problematic though. In practice, probably some phased rebalancing would have to happen to avoid the sudden economic shock, but, politics notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to suggest it could be done and that the end state might be overall ‘better’ for most people. The end state would be how property taxes work almost everywhere else.
  - bingohbangoh 26d ago
    > To keep tax revenue equal, property taxes for those who purchased recently would go down, and property taxes for those who’d purchased in the past would go up. That's what I'm saying _won't_ happen. The high property taxes as-is will stay high and previously protected properties will have their taxes shoot up. That is my prediction and nothing about the state of California, or the US broadly, suggests otherwise to me.
- andrewmutz 27d ago

gradus_ad 27d ago

To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as well

returningfory2 27d ago
NYC zoning is less limiting than LA, but still extremely limiting.
oblio 27d ago
Nah, watch this if you have time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU At least watch this money shot: https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 (wait for the video to reveal the construction years) As Max Fisher puts it: American cities have been frozen in amber.
- epistasis 27d ago
  This is such an amazing video. It collapses about three years of my casual research into housing down into just a few minutes. Thanks for sharing.
kccqzy 27d ago
NYC has had so much downzoning too. The icon of the city, the Empire State Building, now has a floor area ratio about double what’s permitted in that district. Many historical buildings, just like ESB, simply could not have been built today under current zoning regulation. The city’s original 1916 zoning regulation permitted a hypothetical maximum population of 55 million; after WWII the new zoning regulations essentially limited hypothetical maximum population to a little more than 10 million if everything is fully developed. Recent initiatives like City of Yes did too little to reverse the trend.
tokioyoyo 27d ago
Everything has a gigantic depends* on it when it comes to RE. People want to find one reason why things are bad, but it is always a big bag of mixed things. When I was in Vancouver, people kept saying if we got rid of rent control, houses will be built, rent will come down. But houses are expensive to build, and they need to make money asap in the “exit economy”. They won’t come up easily, unless they make it cheap to build, which isn’t happening. Rents just started coming down, but so far insignificant amount (I just checked, a place I paid $2500 for in 2019, is going for $3300 after the decrease!), and demand curbing had more influence on it. Personally, I think we shouldn’t force people to move to a different area because rents skyrocketed. I’m all in support of getting paid out though. People look at Tokyo, and talk about “less-zoned build whatever, and no rent control, thus more or less affordable”. Which also depends*. YoY rents are going up by 10-15% right now, even more in some areas. It’s unreasonable for a good chunk of residents. Speculation is big influx of money from China. But you can actually challenge the rent increase in a good chunk of cases. So it’s a pseudo-rent control. I’m not saying something is right or wrong, just saying everything has multiple layers of problems.

MikeNotThePope 27d ago

I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?

mitxela 27d ago
this is the same fallacy of saying there's no point getting a 10x faster server because you'll just have 10x more load and your site will still be slow.
esikich 27d ago
Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?
- prawn 26d ago
  They're asking if there's an end game. If the single family homes get rezoned to three storey blocks, does that just become 10-storey towers and then arcologies, each more efficient than the other. Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.
xmprt 27d ago
Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition. The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day. Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.

golem14 27d ago

There is also a completely unreasonable shortage of water for a much bigger city.

wdr1 27d ago
I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window. And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy. We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem. For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs. Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
- thrance 27d ago
  You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights. It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
  - cucumber3732842 27d ago
    Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are. Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained. You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.

slg 27d ago

>The massive downzoning of the 1980s... To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.

lwansbrough 27d ago
Same story in San Francisco of course, and the rest of the US pretty much aside from a few cities in recent years.
- TomGarden 27d ago
  At least we have parking lots. Ah, so many parking lots
- hackernud3s 27d ago
  There's still Houston but that's it as far as I know.
pjerem 27d ago
My impression of LA when I got there was that I would never live there, even in the nicest spots. Which confirms my intuition that the richest have no taste. Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
- stasomatic 27d ago
  I've lived in LA on and off for over a decade cumulatively. If Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Burbank, North Hollywood count as "L.A." :) I love the climate and nature there, besides the fires. Ocean, lakes, mountains, deserts, all within 1-3 hour drive. It is a dehumanizing city to commute in, and is expensive, but it's the best one I have lived in (NYC, Brooklyn, NJ cities, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami) and I want to return when finances allow.

WD-42 27d ago

I was just down there and saw multiple massive development projects going on. Like huge new neighborhoods. Of course they aren’t in LA proper. But it seems like people that want to live in SoCal want the suburbs. You talk like LA is this artificially small place except that it’s more like a neighborhood in the middle of sprawl at an almost unimaginable scale. Not saying any of this is good. In fact it’s terrible. Personally I feel like the entire LA metro area is about as close as you can get to a real paradise lost on earth. Maybe one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, bulldozed over for a maze of 6 lane uncrossable suburban streets and cookie cutter McMansions.

epistasis 27d ago
It only seems like that because every other type of housing is literally banned. If apartments, even small buildings, were legal in LA, they'd be building them everywhere and they'd immediately fill up. The Mayor, Karen Bass, accidentally screwed up and made affordable possible to build, as in allowing it to get through the gauntlet of approvals. This resulted in a massive amount of extremely costly affordable housing to get built, merely because the approval couldn't be stopped arbitrarily: https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-her-successful-housing-plan/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-h... Ift that sort of project approval was opened up to not only affordable housing, but also for-profit housing, there would be a massive shift in the type of new housing in the area.

21asdffdsa12 27d ago

There must be a incredible incentive to build "pod-housing" basically take a overpriced suburban home, excavate out into the depths and build sleeper-coffin like homes, then in the morning, its 3 minivan of shuttleb-busses going "to schools" - and in the evening back. Basically build affordable housing illegally