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Who Owns Los Angeles?
- antidaily 12y agoNoah Cross.
- lkbm 12y ago#1 Children's Hospital Los Angeles: Non-profit teaching hospital. #2 Kaiser Foundation Hospitals: Non-profit hospital #3 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Non-profit hospital Are non-profit hospitals property-tax exempt? I know non-profits normally aren't, but there are exceptions (e.g., low-income student housing co-ops in Texas).
- zorpner 12y agoThat's correct, per section 214 of the CA revenue and taxation code: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=rtc&group=00001-01000&file=201-242 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=rtc&gr... There are a number of conditions that must be met for exemption, and being a non-profit hospital generally fulfills them.
- jnosCo 12y agoYes, within a definition of non-profit. http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/pdf/ah267.pdf http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/pdf/ah267.pdf (page 19)
- joshuaheard 12y agoYes. You pay taxes on profits. Since a non-profit entity makes no profit, it pays no taxes. The bigger issue I come across is whether a donation to a non-profit organization is tax deductible. For that, the non-profit entity must apply to the IRS for IRC 501(c)(3) status and receive it before a donation to a non-profit entity is tax deductible.
- _delirium 12y agoProperty tax is a tax on property, not on profits. Even a business that's losing money (negative profit) has to pay property tax, if it owns property. Some states do exempt charities (or some types of charities) from property taxes as well, but it doesn't follow automatically from non-profit status.
- rtpg 12y ago>Since a non-profit entity makes no profit, it pays no taxes Is this true in the strictest sense? I mean I've seen a lot of non-profits make more money than they spend, but they're somewhat obligated to reinvest the money next year. My impression was that non-profit was sort of a "pinky promise" about how you'll use your profits (with the IRS flying in if this is not the case)
- joshuaheard 12y agoThat's true. If profit is defined as income less expenses, some orgs may have more income than expenses at the end of the year, which could be considered "profit". However, a non-profit is organized in such a way as there are no shareholders or other owners to distribute the profit. So, the precise term should be non-profit-distribution, I guess. Of course, the principals of a non-profit still take a salary, and you could probably sneak in a reasonable bonus as well, and not call it a profit distribution.
- caycep 12y agoCedars, while "non-profit" in category, certainly isn't by spirit...
- choward 12y agoWhoa. That escalated fast. I thought I was reading an simple article about property data. And then, BOOM! All the sudden we're discussing file formats, and then making database queries. And out of nowhere this monster appears: http://robrhinehart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/spherical_harmonics.png http://robrhinehart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/spherical...
- tfgg 12y agoThat equation is rather unnecessary showing off, I don't see it being used later on, and the author doesn't bother trying to explain it. It looks like (going by the GM/r) that it might be the gravitational potential for a mass distribution described by a bunch of spherical harmonics.
- 7952 12y agoYes, especially as one of the key advantages of using a projection is that you don't have to worry about this stuff. You can just work with a Cartesian coordinate system and the results will probably be right.
- johnloeber 12y agoThe equation is barely even showing off: if you decode it, that's just a bunch of algebraic manipulations. There's not even any calculus in there.
- zerocrates 12y ago
- contingencies 12y agoI heard the largest landholder, once you strip back the entities, is actually the Church of Scientology. Maybe that was just hearsay, or only visible in Hollywood, where it's almost certainly true.
- cmsmith 12y agoYour statement, which is just accepting an internet-rumor as true, contrasts very strongly with the article itself, which is about going to great effort to learn things from hard data.
- skuhn 12y agoI don't see how the article addresses this point at all. The owner_name is simply text in a field, and could represent a subsidiary of another entity, a front company or an LLC established simply to own that piece of property (common in California business real estate). Even a simple typo or difference in conventions at the time of data entry will obfuscate that multiple parcels are owned by the same entity. The article's method simply performs exact matches on owner_name, which is a place to start. It makes no attempt to delve deeper to piece together the true ownership structures that this data represents, an admittedly far harder problem.
- wcfields 12y agoExactly, an interesting query would be some regex to see if owner_name is like address, e.g., "1234 Street Address Holdings, LLC"
- WillNotDownvote 12y agoA surprising number of homes in my LA neighborhood are owned by trusts. I used to assume they were trusts for the people living in them, but then I noticed many of the trusts own a number of properties. There's probably an interesting story or three to be told there with some data digging.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoFor those interested in the 2006-Libertarian-Loving-County story, I found the New York Times story about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?pag... I really wonder what those folks are up to today.
- kylek 12y agoMasons
- jkot 12y agoI expected story about John Sutter.At some point he owned half of todays California. Then Gold Rush started and all those squatters moved in :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter
- greeneggs 12y agoAccording to the Wikipedia article, Sutter had title to 48,827 acres (76 square miles or 200 square kilometers).
- wallaceowen 12y agoJefferson Starship - they built it out of rock and roll, as I understand it.
- 72deluxe 12y agoGenius!
- mooreds 12y agoFascinating article. I'm no GIS wonk, but I've moved in real estate circles for a while and understand how messy (truly truly messy) property data can be. If Rob wants parcel data across the country, he can pay for it, otherwise its a standartization nightmare. I also love that this is a subtle pitch for a chief database architect (with 3-5 years of experience(?)).
- bkeroack 12y agoGreat article. I have the firm belief that Los Angeles is actually the largest city by population in the USA (as opposed to NYC). Due to an accident of history, what people colloquially call "LA" is still divided politically into something like 80 independent cities. New York City consolidated into the five boroughs in the late 19th century, prior to that Queens, Brooklyn, etc. were separate cities. If you look at the city borders of official Los Angeles, it's a complex mapping of the spaces around and in-between the various independent cities. In most of the US, unincorporated land is extremely rural. In LA, "unincorporated" land blends seamlessly into the urban landscape. Often if you're in an unfamiliar area you can't tell what "city" you're in without looking at the street signs. While not 100% of LA county residents can be counted as living in "LA", it's a close-enough approximation. ~10 million vs NYC's 8 million.
- jessriedel 12y agoIf you're going to include all that into LA, shouldn't NYC lay claim to Yonkers, Jersey City, and dozens of other places? The New York metropolitan area is certainly larger than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I'd wager that there's no circle of radius R in the US, for R between 1 mile and 1000 miles, that contains more people than one centered appropriately on lower Manhattan.
- WillNotDownvote 12y agoA key difference is that the actual City Of Los Angeles is quite sprawling and surrounds many of the areas that are incorporated as their own municipalities.
- xxpor 12y agoIf you're going to go down that route, you'd also have to consider sections of NJ and Westchester County. The density of say, Jersey City is 16,736.6/sq mi. There's the Hudson River in between, but so what?
- whatusername 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_t... Lists NY as ~23 million, LA as ~18 million. It's amusing -- in Australia we list cities populations like this by default. I never consider the population of Melbourne to just be the area covered by Melbourne City Council - it has always included the greater metro area.
- slackpad 12y agoThat table of most expensive cities is interesting. Given how Proposition 13 works, the assessed value of places in various cities might be more a reflection of how actively things are turning over than how much they are actually worth. The old house we rent in Manhattan Beach has an assessed value of like $88,000 since the landlord has owned it forever but if we bought it the value would jump to like $1.7 million. It would be cool to integrate this data with estimated house values from Zillow to see how much that skew is per city.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoYou could just to a bileaner filtered surface over recently sold houses in your town to more or less fake the same result. Just subtract the assessed value from the height of the approximate surface.
- gxs 12y agoI absolutely love these top of articles. I went in with no expectations, so I wasn't as upset as other readers about where the article took. Loved seeing the queries and results, along with the commentary. I am a product manager now, but I miss the days when I was analyst and would put similar queries together to drive various business decisions. I've bookmarked the site to look for interesting content in the future. Also, would love to see a similar analysis for the bay area.
- prawn 12y agoAbsolutely. Someone went in curious, shared their work, provided interesting commentary and it's useful whether followed in detail or skimmed.
- addisonj 12y agoOut of curiosity, I wondered what sort of data my home county (Salt Lake County) kept and if I could get access to it. It was easy to find... but apparently will cost me $1000 dollars to access it... Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download. The article doesn't mention it, but it looks like LA County charges as well.
- frozenport 12y ago>>public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available Perhaps it was free, they wouldn't have resources to compile it? Plenty of things that tax payer money supports aren't free, for example suburban swimming pools or perhaps more egregiously sports venues.
- Shivetya 12y agomy previous county listed lots, primary owner, and assessed value, when they first went live many years ago. Since then I think they only removed the owner's name; it usually was just last name. why was it important, having someone who you don't want contact with could determine your home and possible income simply by searching the county tax records.
- bbanyc 12y agoHere in New York City, a lot of condos are officially owned by LLCs in order to keep the rich/famous owners' names out of the public record. Full deeds are available free online (though only through a Java applet), dating back to the 1960s. I haven't seen this in many other jurisdictions.
- WillNotDownvote 12y agoIt's the same in Los Angeles. But people still know that, for example, Warren Beatty has owned property for 40 years. There are no mysteries.
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- johnvschmitt 12y agoIt shows that long term planning will indeed win out in the long term. Meaning, if the extremist privatization politicians got their way, the gov't would own zero. But, if the gov't holds the commons in receivership over a very long term, the commons (as the gov't is ours if done well) will still hold a strong position over time.
- justin66 12y agoAn interesting bit of naivete from Rob Rhinehart here: Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to maintain this data Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate, inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on. I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of GIS.
- madeofpalk 12y agoWhy do counties deliberately obfuscate corrupt this data?
- justin66 12y agoRegarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given property. There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit a small number of people equipped to exploit them. I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.
- kylered 12y agoI've built GIS databases w/ parcel data, owner data, tax data and zoning layers of high growth Virgnia and North Carolina jurisdiction. It's a very time consuming and ad hoc process. Some jurisdictions charge a lot of money for this data. If anyone has any interest in exploring a parcel based CRM startup concept, contact me. There is a lot of demand for this service. I have a few paying consulting customers and thinking about building it into a SaaS tool to power real estate development.