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Same story in San Francisco of course, and the rest of the US pretty much aside from a few cities in recent years.

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.

Interesting, I did not know that. Sure helped create the massive urban sprawl that LA is today, I mean it's basically one city all the way to San Bernardino, almost 100 km to the east.

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.

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

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.

There's a really great way to think about this that doesn't get enough attention: land rents.

Some plots of land are very valuable due to their location, what you can access, etc. It's pretty straightforward to find out what the monthly cost of land is in any area, either from simple regressions on property values, or empty lot sales, etc.

When the land rent starts to excessively exceed average income of number of households allowed to live on that plot of land, that's pretty inefficient.

Owning land is society letting you say to other people: you're not allowed here. When we restrict land us so that people can not figure out their best use of it, eg 4 families building townhouses together, we start to restrict access to opportunity and basic economic freedom.

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.

If you're really interested: as density increases, population growth decreases. High density places become a sink for populations from elsewhere. You end up reaching a regional equilibrium, where some of the lowest density places start emptying out entirely. Japan is a great example of this, small towns there disappear regularly, as Tokyo grows. Suburban life around Tokyo remains very stable as the center increases and edges decrease.

Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?

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-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.

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.

NYC zoning is less limiting than LA, but still extremely limiting.

By what measure are you saying they've taken the opposite approach? It seems to me their approach has been nearly identical, just a little less restrictive.

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.

Nah, watch this if you have time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU

At least watch this money shot: 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.

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.

CA has droughts, but not water shortages. Most of the water goes to highly inefficient and low value farming.

Dense, newer housing needs a lot less water. If Los Angeles had densified rather than sprawling into the Inland Empire, etc. overall water usage would be far lower.

As it is, water usage in Los Angeles has had flat water usage for decades, even as its population grew by over a million people.

By downzoning so much, Los Angeles got the worst of all worlds: higher water usage, unaffordable housing, and unbelievably bad traffic because everybody has to drive such massive distances to the job centers.

Downzoning is an environmental disaster compared to the alternative, like allowing factories to dump their pollution into rivers type of disaster.

this is the best resource I know of

https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/

It genuinely is much more sporadic then you think. 1 or 2 houses, then empty blocks with streets there, then 1 more, then some building ...

For a modern version, look up california city - modest suburban homes respectably maintained with cars in the driveway surrounded by endless nothing.

I have to presume there's some people that look at this and say "wow, this is perfect".

> worked really well, especially for folks without much money

That's probably part of the reason they got rid of them. You still see that argument used against transit: "it will bring _____ to our part of town".

A family member lives near Pasadena. We asked if they wanted to go to a restaurant near Santa Monica. They sort of scoffed at the idea of going over to the west side unless it was really important.

I think a not insignificant amount of it is literally just pavement too. Absurdly wide roads and parking lots everywhere. It’s a bit of a hellscape really.

All the way to almost San Diego, which is insane

I'm confused. LA doesn't strike me as dense. How dense can you get with huge areas of single family homes?

I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.

One's "underdeveloped wasteland" is someone else's untouched paradise. Particularly someone like Joni Mitchell.

Was it that a big, giant, horrible wasteland because it was undeveloped? That is, was there something bad about it other than being undeveloped? Personally, I love living in the city AND land in its natural state.

Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.

Funny. It's concrete hell.

It's part of a very popular song from the 70s by Joni Mitchell called "Big Yellow Taxi".

Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.

Somewhat sadly, the reason a lot of the ancestors of those 13 millions moved there was that they wanted an unpaved paradise.

Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.

Especially with this sort of map regarding this specific city. For example, Beverly Hills is a separate municipality contained entirely within the borders of Los Angeles. It appears here like an empty black space no different from the ocean, lakes, mountains, and parks also scattered around the city. The styling of this map makes it impossible to tell if an area is truly undeveloped and if so, why. Throw in the way there appears to be arbitrary selection criteria for some buildings outside city limits that make them appear as lone buildings in undeveloped space, and I think it adds up to potentially give people a wrong picture of the area.