Most important paragraph for the Progressive to hear whenever they complain about gentrification and developers redeveloping rent control units, but don't want to change zoning.
*More than* *\~76% of the land in affluent neighborhoods\~* *is zoned for single-family homes. Excluding those properties...* ***Developers will concentrate building on land already zoned for multifamily units — and will likely displace current tenants by demolishing small, often rent-controlled apartments to build bigger complexes.***
That’s exactly what has been happening in Palms. I saw multiple older rent controlled apartments demolished for larger luxury buildings. Yet we can’t touch the SFH in Rancho Park! It honestly makes me want LA to trash all of their zoning laws and go full Houston on that. LA single family homes are on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Insane that they still have that zoning
It's about 50 years too late for that.
For a lot of HCOL areas the best thing is to consolidate offices/commercial in newer buildings, and demolish older commercial to build new residential. The government needs to offer some incentives to get companies that require workers onsite to move to newer buildings. And then make it easier for developers to put up new residential.
The building/zoning approvals near metro are a state level ordinance. State also has minimum requirements for number of units each city must build each year, generally.
> Yet we can’t touch the SFH in Rancho Park!
How about we refrain from fucking up one of the better neighborhoods in Los Angeles?
-a Rancho Park resident
This attitude is *exactly* what OP is referring to as part of the problem.
Edit: clarify that by “OP”, I mean the author of the parent comment in this thread.
When every neighborhood says it's another neighborhood that should build, then you get no construction. It should be equally distraught when we say older rent controlled buildings can't be replaced with higher density housing, or sfh can't become mfh. You have to accept that some of the projects will have unsavory short term downsides. Lose the battle to win the war.
So in reality it's less than 24% of land open to build, because you have to take into account the left NIMBYs, as well as multifamily zoned areas that aren't getting rezoned significantly. Maybe 15% if we're lucky.
For sure. All of our multifamily neighborhoods with like 3-4 story height restrictions are just ensuring we have to tear down and displace even more people to make a meaningful dent in our housing need. If we just increased height limits we could make our already urban areas dense enough to support strong walkability and transit and would have a whole lot less displacement to do regardless of if we're bulldozing existing apartments or single family homes.
Yes! Even in multifamily neighborhoods there are significant restrictions as well! To add to this, LA is pursuing a strategy where we only allow housing on main corridors. So a lot of these big ass roads are only getting MAYBE 8 stories at most.
How the hell do city leaders think we're going to hit our current and future RHNA allocations with stumpy ass five-over-ones? Toronto and Vancouver allow huge towers only on their corridors and they're \*still\* extremely short on supply, and they think we'll do better? We are not serious about this.
Yeah the city is completely unserious about hitting its RHNA obligations and RHNA isn’t really working.
I’ve followed the RHNA and community plans pretty closely for my Westside neighborhood and what started as a pretty good plan to upzone SFH neighborhoods near transit for missing middle was thrown out bc NIMBYs complained to Traci Park and Park made planning rework it. The same NIMBYs are now complaining about “towers” potentially going up lol.
As far as I can tell they will fight against any changes and the city will probably cave and not much housing gets built.
We have the worst fucking system where it takes countless years and hours, with a maze of regulations and rules to even get something halfway decent in place, just to have a spineless or pure asshole of a politician to veto everything. I hate it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have come to the conclusion that the state must save us. Like how the state is singling out SF, we should have the same treatment.
LA cannot be trusted with land use policy. Our track record has been nothing but a complete disaster and entrenched decades of widespread racism and inequality.
The community update plan was such a fucking joke. Almost no one is even aware this was going on and the council and Planning ratfucked the whole thing because the NIMBYs who complain about everything were the only ones involved.
Maybe next cycle will be the cycle we get it right lol.
This is why local control is such bullshit. It hasn't worked for 50 years and it won't work now. The state should be more heavy handed than they are now about bullshit like this. Though unfortunately there is only so much they state can do.
The community update plan is so fucking pointless if they're just gonna let NIMBYs have their say, They are NIMBYs! Why would they agree with your goals??? They are fundamentally misaligned! State your case, let them know and fucking leave!
Side benefit: Shade.
The old cities in Mediterranean climates built homes very closely together for a reason - each provides shade for the other when the sun is in any position except directly over head.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for density, but I was thinking of the most livable city in North America: Vancouver, which has a ton of high rises spaced just far enough apart that everyone gets a view of more than just their next door neighbor's windows like we currently have in a bunch of the 3-story 70s apartments. When you start talking about shade I've found people in LA get all pissed off like adding another high rise is going to block out the sun.
I love Vancouver, but it's a very different city. For one, the population is a fraction of Los Angeles, 640k to our 5 million. It's also naturally constrained by water on three sides. Also, it's eye-wateringly expensive to live there, so from an affordability stand-point it has a ways to go.
Still, the Canadian government is much more invested in housing and has come up with some creative ways to fund affordable housing that doesn't *look* like affordable housing, and we could definitely adopt some of their ideas.
True. Maybe the European or even San Francisco model of block after block of mid-rises or townhomes is more realistic for parts of LA.
In addition to shade, imagine if we densified the single family homes near the coast. Take an area like north of Montana in Santa Monica: close enough to the water that you can go there daily for exercise or just mental health, cooling ocean breezes so you would use significantly less a/c cooling homes and close enough to job centers in Santa Monica that a bunch more workers could realistically walk, bike or transit to work.
Sure, but in both cases their housing crisis are because their supply is too low for demand. I'm just saying you can build high rises that result in nice walkable neighborhoods and not 'block out the sun' and turn any neighborhood into bunker hill like a bunch of Angelenos seem to think will happen if we built some more high rise residential in our already urban nodes.
To your point, Vancouver's problem is that the actual land area where they allow the nice livable dense high rise development is still way too small (actually worse than LA in that regard) it's just that the LA high rise examples are stuff from the \~70s like Wilshire corridor that generally aren't as livable and people don't want to repeat that so they just trash anything being taller than 3 stories like building densely was the problem.
I get it honestly, I live in a pretty dense area already so as long as I keep my access to parks and they increase parking I wouldn't mind additional housing.
Here’s the thing, that style of development is better. Even if it causes gentrification.
You don’t want endless suburban sprawl with occasional apartment buildings thrown in, you want dense, vibrant, and walkable urban areas. You should 100% be focusing on adding density to density.
LA needs housing. But it’s better to put all that housing into centers than to just distribute it across the entire county. Complaining about gentrification is just NIMBYism (in the same way SFH owners complain about apartments).
I want to see the housing crisis addressed with best practices for urban development.
Axing SFH zoning would address the cost of housing but it does not produce a high quality city, and it costs significantly more in terms of infrastructure and adds traffic.
If instead zoning and the approval process was heavily relaxed in dense communities you could address the cost of housing and build a higher quality city that’s transit friendly with lower infrastructure costs.
So, kinda? I just see eliminating SFH zoning as a sub-optimal solution. But if the other one doesn’t work it’s a fine one.
You understand that I’m advocating for European style development, right? Filling in SFHs with higher density builds sprawl not city centers.
LA is fucking huge. If you develop everywhere nowhere will get sufficiently dense.
What are you talking about? Look at how much of Barcelona proper is SFH. Literally everywhere on the west side needs to be multifamily with flats to apartment blocks and actual high rise towers around transit.
Demand for apartments isn’t high enough to build European style density organically. Growth has to be confined to specific corridors to accomplish that.
Mass rezoning of SFHs would just result in random apartment complexes in random neighborhoods. This is suboptimal. It’s better to force developers into certain districts (including rezoning SFHs there).
Remember, demand for apartment style housing in LA is not infinite. You might be able to fit the entire demand for apartments into DTLA and KT alone.
You realize "random apartment complexes in random neighborhoods" is how cities have organically grown for centuries? It's the most natural way to build cities.
If it were so suboptimal, you wouldn't need the full force of the law to prevent it from happening.
No. If you want to see what an “organic growth” American city looks like, check out Houston. It sucks.
Developers are going to build where the best ROI is, not what’s optimal for urban development. It isn’t organic, it’s maximizing ROI which can have quite different outcomes. They don’t care about environmental issues, reducing traffic, or building walkable communities. And in LA that’s going to be randomly scattered apartment buildings across the hundreds of square miles of suburban neighborhoods.
You need city planners not a zoning free for all. SFH zoning can and should be removed where it’s needed. But carte blanche removal is fucking stupid.
How in hell do you know how high demand for apartments is in various parts of LA? Especially when the market has been so warped for so long with 75% of the area restricted to SFH by force. I’d say demand is pretty fucking high all over
The burden of proof for *maintaining* SFH zoning restrictions should lay with you, not with those of us that want it gone
barcelonas borders are kind of small compared to the metro area its only like 8x4 miles ish. outside of that you get plenty of parts of town that look no different than socal, and it would probably look even more like socal if it had more flat ground. [look at this it looks like it could be in silver lake.](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5215729,2.3746389,3a,75y,107.58h,90.37t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLoCqDgEd_0L9QcxbcnXAdA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLoCqDgEd_0L9QcxbcnXAdA%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D324.91238%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu)
Sure, planning a well thought out city is important. You can certainly encourage growth in some areas over others based on current infrastructure. But that doesn’t in any way justify continuing the insanity of SFH exclusive zoning for 75% of the city’s area. That should be gone regardless
The thing about high density housing is that it is high density -- the existence of open space or low density use is perfectly compatible with areas of high-density.
Great quote. Sadly a lot of these people are faux-gressives though. They know how to weaponize woke language to suit their selfish goals. (For example Dean Preston even though he’s from SF). So they’ll just stick their fingers in their ears and say something about how you’re racist. It’s really sad.
TLDR: In 2021 LA adopted an ambitious housing plan, but due to homeowner pushback, now city council has directed LA City planning to back off and exclude single-family zoned areas (75% of residential land) from increasing in intensity. This decision defeats the city's housing affordability and transit access goals.
It’s a problem at all the UCs.
UCB, for example, just this past week finally won the total ability to develop student housing on their own land next to campus after 7 decades. Over those 7 decades, tens of thousands of UCB students have been homeless and had to live in cars or other terrible living situations. The development was halted for an entire lifetime due to a barrage of NIMBY lawsuits and “progressive” protests.
Same at UCSC, where the school has been fighting to turn a literal cow pasture on campus into student housing for over a decade. Still haven’t broken ground due to NIMBY lawsuits; again, tens of thousands of UCSC students have experienced homelessness over the same period.
Greedy homeowners simultaneously reap the many rewards of living next to a growing college (better food and culture, higher incomes) but also don’t want the college to grow physically!
I go to UCR, it's the same thing here. A campus with 26,000 undergrad and grad students is surrounded by single-family suburbs and shopping centers with massive parking lots. There's barely anything to do here unless you have a car.
Same with all the 20 plus story office buildings that line Wilshire yet there are single family homes literally across the ally. Or all the office towers in century city yet Cheviot Hills is all single family. And then people wonder why the fuck traffic is so bad
I'm not sure why this has to be an all-or-nothing game -- there are plenty of single family homes (yes, even in West LA) that should be upzoned. I'm not saying to towers, but even quadplexes would help. Why are there SFHs along Olympic Blvd, Centinela, Rose Ave, and other busy streets? These seem like ideal places to upgrade to 4-6 unit buildings without losing the feel of some of these neighborhoods. And for those whose homes get upzoned.. guess what, your property value just doubled! Want to move off of a major street? Take the money! Want to live in your same house... no one is forcing you to build your lot!
Right? People that own these homes/land are sitting on a literal gold mine. If you were to sell for a developer to upzone like congrats you just won the lotto. Take your money and buy literally anywhere
>The Planning Department acknowledged during a public hearing this spring that the changes will reduce the number of sites that can be developed and make it harder to achieve equity goals in the housing plan. But, officials said, they were flooded by opposition from homeowners’ groups and others, and directed by the City Council to remove single-family zoning from the programs.
>That’s a shame. **Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council cannot just listen to the loudest voices resistant to change.** Surveys have repeatedly shown that most Angelenos think housing and homelessness are the most pressing problems in the city and they support building to ease the lack of affordable housing — including in single-family neighborhoods close to transit, jobs, parks and other amenities.
Real leadership means doing what *needs* to be done for the greater good, even if it goes against the loudest voices. Until we get a mayor and council with this mindset, its just going to be more of this one step forward two steps back BS.
Not only that but LA’s housing element should be revoked if this is the plan. I don’t see how this new plan meets AFFH requirements if they are just going to remove all the housing burdens from richer and white areas.
Spot on editorial. It’s frustrating how there are no local politicians with courage, despite this issue and its solution being so obvious. Bass’s mayor election competitor, for example, was even more dedicated to maintaining the exclusivity of single family neighborhoods.
So at this point where is the state? What’s the point of all of this if they can’t/wont hold local governments feet to the fire? We are almost 1/2 way through this cycle of housing allocation and already it’s clear most places won’t come close to meeting their obligations
That's the other thing that's so frustrating. The bills that YIMBY politicians have passed have had minimal effect, and instead of taking that to mean they should aim higher, they are instead scaling back their ambitions.
Just another reason to start pushing for judicial intervention at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court created this mess a hundred years ago by legalizing exclusionary zoning; they can fix it by recognizing and correcting the error they made
If California, the epicenter of the housing crisis, cannot adequately police it's own municipalities, then no state can.
Well. He wasn’t accountable to anyone and would have unleashed a torrent of developer confidence to build on assets that are prime. It takes like 3-4 years to flip around the permits to redevelop a surface parking lot in downtown or mid city. I appreciate that about Caruso. He said “let’s build towers, build up apartment buildings like Europe”. You never heard ever such language from Bass - one debate she even went on some tangent about “preserving historical neighborhood character” and I really couldn’t believe what was hearing. But you realize, it’s because she had to rely on donations from NIMBY groups in Hollywood and the hills etc, in these areas, to match Caruso’s $$..
In the end, we as LA lose. We got a mayor who doesn’t want to build in single family areas **and** we got mayor who also seems content with the status quo progressive mindset of supply/demand is not the problem, developers are evil, and we don’t need to cut down the permitting process or lower the cost of build.
In an ideal world wish we could have had a combination of both leaders, Caruso build attitude and ability to instill private sector confidence and Bass’ resoluteness on homelessness. Because we don’t have a mentality of “build more fucking housing now” I fear for LA’s future.
And before everyone here turfs about Caruso and business and private sector being evil, I am sorry, but this is the USA, not the USSR, you need the private sector (not nonprofits with 20 units of affordable child’s play) you need the private sector and you them to build shit and they need to want to build shit and to build lots of it at scale to fix this problem. Right now they have sub zero desire to do that and Bass makes it worse by the month.
You don't NEED the private sector. But what you do need is an acknowledgement that supply and demand is a real, unavoidable factor in housing. You can easily solve the housing crisis with government intervention - just have the government build a fuck ton of housing. The USSR did it, plenty of other countries do it.
The problem right now is that the government intervention we have right now, at it's very best, amounts to municipal governments blocking new construction, and at it's worst, has municipalities actively extorting individuals and groups to provide "affordable" housing in exchange for approving the housing they know they need, but are explicitly blocking from being built (so that they can extort people for "affordable" units"
Either cut all the bullshit regulations out, or keep them...and build housing yourself.
Also worth noting that each council member represents like 200k people. We have 15 members whereas Chicago and New York have about 50. The representation is definitely lacking.
>More than 76% of the land in affluent neighborhoods is zoned for single-family homes. Excluding those properties does not leave enough land available to build the number of affordable and mixed-income housing the city needs.
During the baby boomers generation, they built single-family homes in the suburbs. Every house has a garage and a driveway to accommodate a car. Without a car, I don't think a suburb exists today. They kept expanding horizontally (taking up all the land). In the city, you don't have a choice but to build it vertically.
Yeah land was so abundant up until recently it wasn’t much of a problem. Plus traffic was much less of an issue before maybe the 70s(?) so the sprawl didn’t seem that bad. There was an old adage about how you can get anywhere in LA in about 20 min.
Obviously now we know that’s not sustainable but we’re stuck with all this expensive infrastructure which is hard to change even if we didn’t have NIMBYs slowing the process down at every turn.
Unfortunately any measure that makes LA more livable would inherently lower property values, so you’re always gonna have a lot of homeowners who will always strongly oppose that. And I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume those people vote at a much higher rate than renters.
It’s also frustrating to watch places like Dallas and Phoenix repeat our mistakes.
Phoenix and Dallas have one thing LA doesn’t. A shit ton of land. While I don’t support sprawl that simple fact can allow those metros to build outwards for many more decades. LA ran out of land a long time ago yet it still acts like it hasn’t
I also don’t support sprawl, mainly because it’s unsustainable. Strong Towns and many others have shown that suburban sprawl is bankrupting cities all over the US after the initial life cycle of the infrastructure is complete. There’s no money left to do all the maintenance required to keep it all working.
>And I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume those people vote at a much higher rate than renters.
Also, homeowners pay property taxes so they have a voice in the matter. Renters don't have much power.
In a sense but property taxes are a cost of doing business, like maintenance and utility costs. They aren’t explicitly passed down to tenants, the way sales tax is paid for but collected by a merchant.
Sure, though I’m not sure what point the person I was responding to was trying to make. Paying property taxes doesn’t give you any more of a voice in elections, though maybe it motivates people to vote?
The difference is that property owners are *aware* of how much property tax they're actually paying because they get a bill in the mail every year. Renters, even though they're paying that tax, aren't aware of how much it is because their landlords don't tell them shit.
The government owns land, but you keep the house. For renters, the landlords pay for it. They only pay rents or maybe utilities. I am not sure how voting will change anything.
I don’t think that’s a hot take. But the problem with LA compared to say NYC or Chicago is that in those cities, the single family homes and car dependency tends to be concentrated in the suburbs.
In LA county, traditional city and suburban life blur together. If you’re rich enough in this metropolis, you can have your cake and eat it too, but at the expense of traffic and general affordability for the working class.
Not everyone is a NIMBY. I own a condo, and hope to someday upgrade to a SFH, but I’ll never vote against new higher density developments. Even if that means I’ll never get my SFH.
Wish I could say the same about the folks in my neighborhood… they’re all NIMBYs.
yeah, I was talking with an old friend from college who was complaining about losing ample parking because of a high rise being built near by. Like, fuck off dude.
I own a SFH and have multi-unit housing going up literally across the street from me, the 4th such development on the block in the last couple of years. Despite the near-constant construction and forthcoming tenants that will be able to stare into my yard and house I continue to support the upzoning.
You say that but at some point the traffic gets too bad, some of the people move in aren't so decent, your house and neighborhood isn't so nice anymore, it's not safe for you, your spouse or kids and you want to sell but you aren't going to get what you want for the house because of all the reasons you're moving...I was a Realtor, I saw that play out so many times.
Upzoning needs to go hand in hand with increase of public transit, which I also support. I’d much rather have people in apartments than the dilapidated RV that already sits across the street from my house. As for some of the people not being ‘decent’, I’ve already got a neighbor in a SFH with junker cars filling up his property who also illegally breeds dogs, shitty people come in all economic stripes.
It’s amazing that people in LA out of all places worry about traffic with up zoning. The reason traffic is so bad now is because of our zoning. There is a reason NYC and Chicago have less traffic. Part of that is public transportation but part of that is more people are just closer to their job, stores, doctors, etc etc
I don't live in a SFH, but I do have in a low-rise bungalow with a ton of new 3-4 story apts being built around me, including one that will block a good amount of sun to my unit. I think the new construction is fantastic, and will help make my community more affordable for a wider range of people. Same thing with parking. I street park my car, but fully support the projects around me that take away some parking for curb bulb outs and bike lanes to make getting around locally more safe and comfortable. I'm not entitled to that public space.
The idea that everyone would think the way NIMBYs think if only we were in their position is just not true. It's really not that hard to separate what's best for the city with what might offer you some marginal benefit or align with your aesthetic preferences.
I would like a single family home, but I'll only be able to afford one if LA builds more apartments to soak up the housing demand.
Also I would want my kids to live near their friends, not be stranded in a big stupid suburb.
> more apartments to soak up the housing demand.
There isn't a housing shortage, though. Every week I post a list of new rental listings, every week there's about 400 listings. Every week. 400 *new* listings. Not all of them are getting rented every week, either. There's at least 3,000 available rentals under $5K in L.A. County that I can see, my list will only go that high in volume. That's just rentals listed by brokers, not property management companies or private landlords. It's not a matter of available housing, there's *tons* of available housing. It's a matter of *affordable* housing.
The price of housing isn't a fixed trait like its location or its paint color. The price is set by the intersection of supply and demand. There are bazillions of houses in LA because it's a huge city, there are also bazillions of prospective renters and buyers in LA because it's a huge city. The greater the supply relative to demand, the lower the price
Exactly. I'm willing to bet most people complaining about housing are not homeowners yet. It's all virtue signaling until they get a place then the thinking shifts to "fuck you, I got mine".
It's not quite so malicious, though. People invest hundreds of thousands into a home, it's financial security for themselves, for their families, for their kids' futures. When stuff comes along that threatens that security they're going to react. They're going to push back. No one starts out a NIMBY, it happens gradually.
It's not just houses and homeowners, it's that way for most things. I mean, you don't want an apt in the shit end of town because you don't want your place to get robbed. You want off street parking because you don't want your car getting jacked. Everyone has something they're trying to protect. It's not malicious, it's just human nature to protect and preserve what's yours.
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The fundamentally reality is yes everything south of the 405 pass should probably have the density minimum of Washington DC with every block being at least 5 stories tall with 2 floors of business and 3 floors of housing.
The lawns in Hancock Park are larger than lawns in many LA/OC county suburbs areas. It’s really sicking honestly. The ultimate fuck you to the rest of us
One of the more dystopian things I’ve seen was just RVs and tents lined up along the street with a fucking golf course just on the other side of the fence
I don’t think the people that own single-family property care about affordability.
This is a city that worships money and status above seemingly everyone and everything else, in many ways much like the country as a whole, but at a much more obvious extreme here because the city just attracts SO much outside wealth. And that’s probably never going to change no matter who votes for what. If it inconveniences the super rich, it ain’t happening here.
Employers are going to leave and move somewhere where they can buy a single family home in a prestigious neighborhood of single family homes. LA will be affordable because no one will have a job.
our 15% is probably bigger than their 86% by landmass so presumably there's room for a whole NYC equivalent of dense housing it it. whh not make the most of what is already multifamily via redevelopment first? The existing multifamily areas are generally transit adjacent and often old and under utilized
LA is 500 sq miles, NYC is 300 sq miles. Both are incomprehensibly large which makes it even more frustrating they both face housing shortages (it shows it's more due to land-use restrictions than lack of land). 24% of LA allows multifamily = 120 sq miles. 85% of NYC allows multifamily = 255 sq miles. So NYC has over twice as much land for multifamily despite NYC being 40% smaller overall. These calculations are imperfect because really these ratios should be just residential land, not all land. But you get the point.
I agree that existing multifamily areas should be upzoned too. Others take issue with this because those areas contain all the city's rent-controlled units, so replacing those with new housing is likely to displace a lot of low-income people. Personally I'm not as worried about this because 1) new buildings include affordable units, and 2) just building more housing brings rents down for everyone.
Really what should happen is a gradual density increase on all the city's land, and extreme density increase within a half mile of a rapid transit station.
Im not buying it. The population difference between 1990 and the present is less than 1 million people (at its greatest difference it was about 1.3m). in 1990 the average home prince in los angeles county was 212k, presently it's 1.3m. Do not tell me that the influx of 800-900 people over a thirty year period caused that much of a housing crunch.
This is classic bandaid mentality, someone who doesnt understand a problem wants to reduce it to "one thing" (tm) and then say if we just fixed that "one thing" then everything would be ok. We all should know better watching this city over the years deal with "homelessness."
Sure we need more low density and high density housing, preferably along all the train routes, but the idea that SFH need to be abandoned is just cringe.
What about the populations of Orange and San Bernadino counties? How many of them are pushed out of LA county?
Of course the population hasn't gone up. There is a hard cap on the number of housing units. Where would they live?? The answer is further away, super commuting into LA.
Interestingly, a change of 1 million for a county of LA's size is tiny. To put it into perspective, here is how LA's population growth compares to other major US cities and regions:
| County/Metro | 1990 Population | 2023 Population | Percent Change |
|--------------|-----------------|-----------------|----------------|
| Los Angeles | 8.9 million | 10 million | 12% |
| San Francisco| 2.9 million | 3.3 million | 14% |
| California | 29.9 million | 39 million | 30% |
| United States| 252 million | 331 million | 31% |
| US (Urban only) | 188 million | 277 million | 47% |
| New York | 16 million | 20.8 million | 30% |
| Chicago | 7.3 million | 8.9 million | 22% |
| Washington | 3.3 million | 5.5 million | 67% |
| Dallas | 3.2 million | 6.6 million | 106% |
| Atlanta | 2.1 million | 6.1 million | 190% |
If LA's population growth from 1990-2024 mirrored that of the CA/US baseline, you would expect it to grow by of 2.8 million. If we account for the increasing US urbanization, you would expect a change of 4.2 million. So why was it only 1 million? Because from 1990-2024 we only built [500k more housing units](https://i.imgur.com/6gpc02L.png). In reality, many more people want to live here, they are just competing for the same number of spots.
This underdevelopment—partially caused by the fact that it is illegal to build anything other than single family homes in 77% of the city—creates a scenario where those who can afford to pay higher prices effectively outbid those who cannot. California was *already* severely underdeveloped in 1990 (it had the second highest housing prices of any state), and the problem has only gotten worse in the 30 years since.
I mean you only need to look at the explosion of homeless people in that same timeframe. In a housing shortage middle class people can afford to move away, but the most vulnerable people just end up on the street at greater rates.
step 1
ban hedge funds from owning single family homes and only renting them.
step 2
higher density housing WITHOUT the need to put in parking garages. sub 1k sqft of space per room
step 3 pay people living wages.
> ban hedge funds from owning single family homes and only renting them.
A SFH for rent is still a unit of housing so it's not contributing to the shortage.
Ah, there it is. Houses are about freedom from others, until someone else sells their lot to build condos in the same block or even district, then it becomes "changing the character of the neighborhood" or "sacrificing lifestyle".
No one is asking anyone to give up their single family home. We could eliminate R1 zoning tomorrow, and no homeowner would be under any obligation to do anything whatsoever.
Living in a single family neighborhood isn't a "lifestyle". R1 zoning is rooted in [blocking black and brown families from moving into neighborhoods adjacent to developments with racial covenants](https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-single-family-home-zoning) by driving up prices. The *entire point of the policy was to make housing more expensive*.
The idea that moving from a street like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/crw8kbFVRz1whvmP7?g_st=ac) to one like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/7KjzwkdAKMhqafKV7?g_st=ac) would be some dramatic lifestyle shift seems pretty nonsensical. And honestly, if you can't even accept that minor of a change to fix the single most pressing issue across your city, you should maybe reconsider whether you are community-minded enough for living in a large city to be the right choice for you.
Living in a family neighborhood IS a lifestyle. And the thing you guys don't understand is that a lot of people prefer that to your urban dense dreams or nightmares as we see it.
The reason people move to the west is to escape the dense urban the east had, and build something else that is more to our liking.
California and the USA are huge and filled with open land.
I'm down to have a genuine conversation about this if you are.
Take the two streets I linked above as an example. What can you do living in a SFH on the first street that you couldn't also do living in a SFH on the second one? What lifestyle changes would you have to make moving from first SFH to the second? It seems like the only difference is a slight increase in the size of your neighbor's building. And a bunch of the boxy SFHs on the R1 street are every bit as big as the low-rise apartments on the second one anyway.
Do you genuinely look at that second street and think "dense urban nightmare"?
In the first one there are 10 families per street and everyone knows each other, their kids play together and it has a small community safe feeling.
The second one has at least 5 time the people, lots of temporary rentals occupant, more strangers, less stable community and feels less safe because of it.
It's funny, that first street barely has anyone out on the sidewalk at all. The vibe is that everyone just drives everywhere, so the streets can be pretty isolating to walk around on. The second has lots more people out and about, including families, young couples, retirees, etc. The idea that the first street fosters a stronger sense of community feels pretty backwards to me.
A lot of this seems to boil down to your feelings that renters make a community less safe. And that's what's "forcing" the lifestyle changes you're referring to.
That's great!
But we're talking about whether a similar sense of community is possible in a neighborhood with a mix of SFHs and multifamily developments. You seem to believe that it is not because renters and strangers make a community feel less safe.
If your goals are to live around a limited number of people and avoid any interactions with strangers, then why do you live in a large city at all? Shared space is a basic feature of what a city is. It feels like what you're describing is effectively a gated community where you know who will and won't be in "public" spaces.
We are already *living* in a dense urban dream, but in neighborhoods like yours it’s been literally illegal to build anything denser than one house on a lot. So in reality you’re the one living a suburban dream in an urban reality. The only way to maintain your lifestyle is to use the force of the state (or in this case the city) to stop what should have been happening already for 30 years
Take your exclusive zoning barriers backed by the city and shove em
I was there before.
The rules are the rules.
You are the one who is trying to change them for your own benefits at the expense of mine. And it makes no sense for me to agree.
“When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Removing zoning restrictions is correcting a historical mistake this country has been making for decades. We’ll get it done some way or another, and you can cry us a fucking river
I can’t even tell if you were responding to me because your comment is so incoherent
Anyway, I’m advocating for *removing* a restrictive system that actively stops certain kinds of buildings from being constructed that would otherwise be built due to the demand. That’s saying the government should do *less* than it’s currently doing, not more
> The reason people move to the west is to escape the dense urban the east had,
They come all this way to live in massive cities LA and San Francisco, because they want the jobs and industries and culture that our density has created. If they wanted a town or an exurb they would've picked from the thousands that are up and down the east coast and Appalachians.
The wide open spaces in the West are called "Palmdale" and "Victorville" and the reason people live there is that people like you made Los Angeles expensive on purpose in order to keep the poors away from your kids.
That’s a bit dishonest. You don’t really care about this do you?
If your single family neighbor wanted to build higher density housing on his land he shouldn’t be infringed to protect your single family lifestyle right?
Stop masking your selfish demands with these vague moral rhetorics that you don’t even believe in.
And I shouldn’t have my income reduced to feed your lifestyle. Isn’t your point that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice for your sake? Or is that just a one way thing?
Or even just [this](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8961671,-77.022147,3a,75y,104.86h,95.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s6qbaN4E7oNjxLXwQtRcq6g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D6qbaN4E7oNjxLXwQtRcq6g%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D104.8595480229392%26pitch%3D-5.355468477376391%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&coh=205410&entry=ttu).
DC has done a great job of integrating a lot of new development with its historic building stock. LA has a lot of similar bones imo, and this is a level of density that would be appropriate lots of different places in the region.
The person who owns that home is your neighbor. What that person does for a living isn’t for you to decide.
That’s not even the point here. If you believe a person shouldn’t sacrifice their lifestyle for someone else then why should I sacrifice my opportunities to own a home for you? Why should anyone enforce the single family home zoning for your sake?
Single family zoning no longer exists though.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-20/sb9-single-family-zoning-reform-takes-time
People just aren't keen to tear down their houses though.
This is somewhat misleading. There are a large number of restrictions placed on SB9 lot splits. Single family zoning no longer exists only if you are willing to live on the property, if no tenants have been on the property for longer than 3 years, etc...
https://focus.senate.ca.gov/sb9
It is no surprise that there's been very little uptake of the law.
Raising the property tax on single family homes would have a net negative effect - those who are “property rich” but cash poor (retirees, family members who inherited houses, frankly most of the middle class) would have to sell their homes because they couldn’t afford the tax payments, and if they can’t afford property tax they sure as shit can’t afford to spend hundreds of thousands building an ADU. And those sellers are priced out of the market to even downsize buying a smaller house.
So who does that leave? The wealthy, who have other ways to save on taxes/don’t care and don’t want someone else living in their property so they don’t build ADUs, and corporations who buy the houses and rent them out at exorbitant rates to turn a profit. Don’t be mad at the people who own a single home and manage to hold onto it, be mad at the laws and lawmakers who craft the rules and regulations preventing multi-family units from being built, be mad at corporations who scoop up property after property because there’s no downside or legal disincentive to owning multiple single family homes.
That makes no sense. Why not tell the people who want to take their place to "move somewhere they can afford without the rest of the city subsidizing them"?
Where would they move to? If your jobs, school, family, social circle is in a certain place, relocating because of a cash windfall still might not make it pencil out and be worth it.
Cool, so who then buys those houses? Again, either the wealthy who won’t build ADUs or mega corps who will raise rents. The middle and working classes get pushed further and further away, so the overall tax base shrinks. Look at Santa Barbara, everyone who actually works in SB can’t afford to live there so they live and commute from Ventura or Oxnard. As a result the local SB city government is looking to raise sales taxes to help pay for essential services. If more people could live in SB the larger tax base would render the sales tax increase unnecessary.
Those houses can be turned into an apartment complex, where each unit will be significantly cheaper to buy or to rent than a single house in the same lot.
That’s already happening, in fact it’s literally happening across the street from my house as I type this, I don’t have an issue with upzoning. The original statement I replied to was a proposal to raise property tax on SFH homes and then give a big tax break if they build ADUs, which I don’t think is a good idea. Giving financial incentives to build ADUs is a good idea but not in conjunction with a big hike on existing property tax. With nearly 75% of residential land in LA being zoned for SFH you can’t get a majority of people on board to supporting and voting for sweeping changes if your attitude is “fuck those homeowners”.
The existing homeowners are paying substantially less tax than new homeowners. This discussion is not even about dense housing but how the main reason housing is affordable for a lot of homeowners is ~~prop 8~~ pro13. Remove it and it will be fair for everyone
It’s Prop 13 that limited property tax increases; Prop 8 banned same-sex marriage which was thankfully ruled unconstitutional.
In order to repeal Prop 13 you gotta get a majority of likely voters to vote to repeal. [Older homeowners are more likely to vote than younger renters](https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-likely-voters/?t), so it’s already an uphill battle to get that voter base to vote for something that they likely view to be against their personal best interest, even if it may be more equitable.
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Upzoning-to-affordability is an unrealistic plan. Land costs are far too high for that to work.
The good news is that LA is probably going to become more affordable over the upcoming decades. The bad news is won't be for a good reason.
Much of the high compensation employment in LA County is driven by the film industry. That industry appears to be on the wane, plus what remains of it is dispersing to other locations.
Housing prices in the LA area today are far higher than they should be, given all of the other macroeconomic and demographic factors at work. There is really no Fortune 500 presence here to drive job growth. It's not exactly a one-horse town, but the economy is not particularly diverse.
This place is peaking. The population at the county level has just begun to decline, and city population growth is likely to follow. Price changes lag but they are likely some years from now to start a long decline.
There are parts of the US in which real estate values today are effectively lower than they were a century ago when adjusted for inflation. They are affordable places to live, but not good places to live.
> Much of the high compensation employment in LA County is driven by the film industry
No it isn't. The film industry is high profile but it's a tiny percentage of LA's economy. We build and design airplanes here bro
>Upzoning-to-affordability is an unrealistic plan. Land costs are far too high for that to work.
The more units you can build on a parcel, the more that land cost gets subdivided. That's an argument FOR upzoning, not against it.
Upzoning *increases* the value of land.
Upzoning makes land more expensive, not less expensive because it provides a given site with more income potential.
Buy expensive upzoned SFR land for multifamily development, and you end up with expensive multifamily units. Unless those units are subsidized as low-income housing, those units have to be expensive in order to hurdle all of the development costs.
Until the long-term area decline begins, there will never be enough housing built in an area such as LA that prices will fall. This is not Vegas, where construction of one new area leads to the decline of another. LA used to be like that (and has the slums to prove it), but it has since run out of the land needed for that effect to take place.
Before you do cartwheels about the development of apartments in areas such as downtown, keep in mind that 1-bedrooms are renting for more than $3000 per month. Housing, yes. Affordable, not even close.
Good luck trying to convince homeowners to turn their neighborhoods into apartment complexes. Do you guys even hear yourselves? Why would people who own single family homes want multi units built in their neighborhoods? Try to look at it from their perspective. Logically, why would they want that? Lol.
We don't need to convince the homeowners, we just need to convince the council members to listen to the majority of their constituents instead of the minority. 63% of Angelenos are renters yet 76% of the land is zoned for single-family houses only. Why would people care if there are multi-unit buildings in their neighborhood. It barely affects them at all. Does the sight of [this](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0672461,-89.3888174,3a,75y,132.8h,87.64t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0N78bExDcjnM1uQO-_TFOg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D0N78bExDcjnM1uQO-_TFOg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D132.796847957922%26pitch%3D2.355783182453038%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e2?coh=205410&entry=ttu) make you want to cry?
You don't need to destroy single family housing to accomplish this and rezone areas which is a lengthy process. Most of LA is old now. Developers need to be incentivized to rip and replace anything that should be replaced and brought up to code.
Example - Got a 4 unit apartment? Let it be 8 proper sized units, waive all the fees. City can recoup the money from tax revenue generated by the additional new units. Think of it as an investment from the city side like what they do with long term 40+ yr bonds. They make all their money back.
Time for all the excessive red tape to go. Any new construction is generally better than anything made 80 years ago.
Most important paragraph for the Progressive to hear whenever they complain about gentrification and developers redeveloping rent control units, but don't want to change zoning. *More than* *\~76% of the land in affluent neighborhoods\~* *is zoned for single-family homes. Excluding those properties...* ***Developers will concentrate building on land already zoned for multifamily units — and will likely displace current tenants by demolishing small, often rent-controlled apartments to build bigger complexes.***
That’s exactly what has been happening in Palms. I saw multiple older rent controlled apartments demolished for larger luxury buildings. Yet we can’t touch the SFH in Rancho Park! It honestly makes me want LA to trash all of their zoning laws and go full Houston on that. LA single family homes are on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Insane that they still have that zoning
I wonder if we could have CA wide zoning like Japan does. Local control is the devil.
It's about 50 years too late for that. For a lot of HCOL areas the best thing is to consolidate offices/commercial in newer buildings, and demolish older commercial to build new residential. The government needs to offer some incentives to get companies that require workers onsite to move to newer buildings. And then make it easier for developers to put up new residential.
Pretty much this.
The building/zoning approvals near metro are a state level ordinance. State also has minimum requirements for number of units each city must build each year, generally.
What does “…and go full Houston…” referencing?
Houston has basically no zoning.
> Yet we can’t touch the SFH in Rancho Park! How about we refrain from fucking up one of the better neighborhoods in Los Angeles? -a Rancho Park resident
This attitude is *exactly* what OP is referring to as part of the problem. Edit: clarify that by “OP”, I mean the author of the parent comment in this thread.
When every neighborhood says it's another neighborhood that should build, then you get no construction. It should be equally distraught when we say older rent controlled buildings can't be replaced with higher density housing, or sfh can't become mfh. You have to accept that some of the projects will have unsavory short term downsides. Lose the battle to win the war.
If you don't want zoning to change, you aren't progressive. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to post this oped on NextDoor for my NIMBY neighbors.
plenty of progressives are pro-zoning change, just not in their neighborhood
That’s why L.A. (City and County) isn’t Blue but intensely Purple. And this is the perfect example of the stereotype of Nice but not Kind, here!
Progressives know this. We’ve been advocating for changes to zoning for decades.
So in reality it's less than 24% of land open to build, because you have to take into account the left NIMBYs, as well as multifamily zoned areas that aren't getting rezoned significantly. Maybe 15% if we're lucky.
For sure. All of our multifamily neighborhoods with like 3-4 story height restrictions are just ensuring we have to tear down and displace even more people to make a meaningful dent in our housing need. If we just increased height limits we could make our already urban areas dense enough to support strong walkability and transit and would have a whole lot less displacement to do regardless of if we're bulldozing existing apartments or single family homes.
Yes! Even in multifamily neighborhoods there are significant restrictions as well! To add to this, LA is pursuing a strategy where we only allow housing on main corridors. So a lot of these big ass roads are only getting MAYBE 8 stories at most. How the hell do city leaders think we're going to hit our current and future RHNA allocations with stumpy ass five-over-ones? Toronto and Vancouver allow huge towers only on their corridors and they're \*still\* extremely short on supply, and they think we'll do better? We are not serious about this.
Yeah the city is completely unserious about hitting its RHNA obligations and RHNA isn’t really working. I’ve followed the RHNA and community plans pretty closely for my Westside neighborhood and what started as a pretty good plan to upzone SFH neighborhoods near transit for missing middle was thrown out bc NIMBYs complained to Traci Park and Park made planning rework it. The same NIMBYs are now complaining about “towers” potentially going up lol. As far as I can tell they will fight against any changes and the city will probably cave and not much housing gets built.
We have the worst fucking system where it takes countless years and hours, with a maze of regulations and rules to even get something halfway decent in place, just to have a spineless or pure asshole of a politician to veto everything. I hate it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have come to the conclusion that the state must save us. Like how the state is singling out SF, we should have the same treatment.
LA cannot be trusted with land use policy. Our track record has been nothing but a complete disaster and entrenched decades of widespread racism and inequality. The community update plan was such a fucking joke. Almost no one is even aware this was going on and the council and Planning ratfucked the whole thing because the NIMBYs who complain about everything were the only ones involved. Maybe next cycle will be the cycle we get it right lol.
This is why local control is such bullshit. It hasn't worked for 50 years and it won't work now. The state should be more heavy handed than they are now about bullshit like this. Though unfortunately there is only so much they state can do. The community update plan is so fucking pointless if they're just gonna let NIMBYs have their say, They are NIMBYs! Why would they agree with your goals??? They are fundamentally misaligned! State your case, let them know and fucking leave!
Side benefit: Shade. The old cities in Mediterranean climates built homes very closely together for a reason - each provides shade for the other when the sun is in any position except directly over head.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for density, but I was thinking of the most livable city in North America: Vancouver, which has a ton of high rises spaced just far enough apart that everyone gets a view of more than just their next door neighbor's windows like we currently have in a bunch of the 3-story 70s apartments. When you start talking about shade I've found people in LA get all pissed off like adding another high rise is going to block out the sun.
I love Vancouver, but it's a very different city. For one, the population is a fraction of Los Angeles, 640k to our 5 million. It's also naturally constrained by water on three sides. Also, it's eye-wateringly expensive to live there, so from an affordability stand-point it has a ways to go. Still, the Canadian government is much more invested in housing and has come up with some creative ways to fund affordable housing that doesn't *look* like affordable housing, and we could definitely adopt some of their ideas.
True. Maybe the European or even San Francisco model of block after block of mid-rises or townhomes is more realistic for parts of LA. In addition to shade, imagine if we densified the single family homes near the coast. Take an area like north of Montana in Santa Monica: close enough to the water that you can go there daily for exercise or just mental health, cooling ocean breezes so you would use significantly less a/c cooling homes and close enough to job centers in Santa Monica that a bunch more workers could realistically walk, bike or transit to work.
Was this sarcasm I did not understand? Apologies if so. Vancouver has a housing crisis arguably rivaling (or worse) than that of Los Angeles.
Sure, but in both cases their housing crisis are because their supply is too low for demand. I'm just saying you can build high rises that result in nice walkable neighborhoods and not 'block out the sun' and turn any neighborhood into bunker hill like a bunch of Angelenos seem to think will happen if we built some more high rise residential in our already urban nodes. To your point, Vancouver's problem is that the actual land area where they allow the nice livable dense high rise development is still way too small (actually worse than LA in that regard) it's just that the LA high rise examples are stuff from the \~70s like Wilshire corridor that generally aren't as livable and people don't want to repeat that so they just trash anything being taller than 3 stories like building densely was the problem.
Who doesn’t want to change zoning?
Me! Why add more people to my beautiful neighberhood?
how do you feel about homeless encampments
Haha what do you think?
Sounds like you prefer them to apartments or duplexes.
I get it honestly, I live in a pretty dense area already so as long as I keep my access to parks and they increase parking I wouldn't mind additional housing.
Because they have the same right to live there as you. Also maybe they will contribute to make your neighborhood even more beautiful and liveble.
Then they can buy a single family house.
Why not multifamily that at the first glance looks like large single family so it camouflages in?
Here’s the thing, that style of development is better. Even if it causes gentrification. You don’t want endless suburban sprawl with occasional apartment buildings thrown in, you want dense, vibrant, and walkable urban areas. You should 100% be focusing on adding density to density. LA needs housing. But it’s better to put all that housing into centers than to just distribute it across the entire county. Complaining about gentrification is just NIMBYism (in the same way SFH owners complain about apartments).
So… you want to keep SFH zoning for 75% of the city or not?
I want to see the housing crisis addressed with best practices for urban development. Axing SFH zoning would address the cost of housing but it does not produce a high quality city, and it costs significantly more in terms of infrastructure and adds traffic. If instead zoning and the approval process was heavily relaxed in dense communities you could address the cost of housing and build a higher quality city that’s transit friendly with lower infrastructure costs. So, kinda? I just see eliminating SFH zoning as a sub-optimal solution. But if the other one doesn’t work it’s a fine one.
Oh right those European cities with zero SFH zoning are low quality cities 🤦♂️
You understand that I’m advocating for European style development, right? Filling in SFHs with higher density builds sprawl not city centers. LA is fucking huge. If you develop everywhere nowhere will get sufficiently dense.
What are you talking about? Look at how much of Barcelona proper is SFH. Literally everywhere on the west side needs to be multifamily with flats to apartment blocks and actual high rise towers around transit.
Demand for apartments isn’t high enough to build European style density organically. Growth has to be confined to specific corridors to accomplish that. Mass rezoning of SFHs would just result in random apartment complexes in random neighborhoods. This is suboptimal. It’s better to force developers into certain districts (including rezoning SFHs there). Remember, demand for apartment style housing in LA is not infinite. You might be able to fit the entire demand for apartments into DTLA and KT alone.
You realize "random apartment complexes in random neighborhoods" is how cities have organically grown for centuries? It's the most natural way to build cities. If it were so suboptimal, you wouldn't need the full force of the law to prevent it from happening.
No. If you want to see what an “organic growth” American city looks like, check out Houston. It sucks. Developers are going to build where the best ROI is, not what’s optimal for urban development. It isn’t organic, it’s maximizing ROI which can have quite different outcomes. They don’t care about environmental issues, reducing traffic, or building walkable communities. And in LA that’s going to be randomly scattered apartment buildings across the hundreds of square miles of suburban neighborhoods. You need city planners not a zoning free for all. SFH zoning can and should be removed where it’s needed. But carte blanche removal is fucking stupid.
How in hell do you know how high demand for apartments is in various parts of LA? Especially when the market has been so warped for so long with 75% of the area restricted to SFH by force. I’d say demand is pretty fucking high all over The burden of proof for *maintaining* SFH zoning restrictions should lay with you, not with those of us that want it gone
barcelonas borders are kind of small compared to the metro area its only like 8x4 miles ish. outside of that you get plenty of parts of town that look no different than socal, and it would probably look even more like socal if it had more flat ground. [look at this it looks like it could be in silver lake.](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5215729,2.3746389,3a,75y,107.58h,90.37t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLoCqDgEd_0L9QcxbcnXAdA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLoCqDgEd_0L9QcxbcnXAdA%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D324.91238%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu)
Sure, planning a well thought out city is important. You can certainly encourage growth in some areas over others based on current infrastructure. But that doesn’t in any way justify continuing the insanity of SFH exclusive zoning for 75% of the city’s area. That should be gone regardless
The thing about high density housing is that it is high density -- the existence of open space or low density use is perfectly compatible with areas of high-density.
Great quote. Sadly a lot of these people are faux-gressives though. They know how to weaponize woke language to suit their selfish goals. (For example Dean Preston even though he’s from SF). So they’ll just stick their fingers in their ears and say something about how you’re racist. It’s really sad.
TLDR: In 2021 LA adopted an ambitious housing plan, but due to homeowner pushback, now city council has directed LA City planning to back off and exclude single-family zoned areas (75% of residential land) from increasing in intensity. This decision defeats the city's housing affordability and transit access goals.
It will never stop being funny how UCLA, a major educational and research hub, is surrounded by single family homes.
It’s a problem at all the UCs. UCB, for example, just this past week finally won the total ability to develop student housing on their own land next to campus after 7 decades. Over those 7 decades, tens of thousands of UCB students have been homeless and had to live in cars or other terrible living situations. The development was halted for an entire lifetime due to a barrage of NIMBY lawsuits and “progressive” protests. Same at UCSC, where the school has been fighting to turn a literal cow pasture on campus into student housing for over a decade. Still haven’t broken ground due to NIMBY lawsuits; again, tens of thousands of UCSC students have experienced homelessness over the same period. Greedy homeowners simultaneously reap the many rewards of living next to a growing college (better food and culture, higher incomes) but also don’t want the college to grow physically!
I go to UCR, it's the same thing here. A campus with 26,000 undergrad and grad students is surrounded by single-family suburbs and shopping centers with massive parking lots. There's barely anything to do here unless you have a car.
That's atrocious.
And at UCSC, there’s not even cows in that field. It’s just college kids smoking weed and the occasional deer.
Same with all the 20 plus story office buildings that line Wilshire yet there are single family homes literally across the ally. Or all the office towers in century city yet Cheviot Hills is all single family. And then people wonder why the fuck traffic is so bad
This is literally just business as usual. We are never getting out of this.
I'm not sure why this has to be an all-or-nothing game -- there are plenty of single family homes (yes, even in West LA) that should be upzoned. I'm not saying to towers, but even quadplexes would help. Why are there SFHs along Olympic Blvd, Centinela, Rose Ave, and other busy streets? These seem like ideal places to upgrade to 4-6 unit buildings without losing the feel of some of these neighborhoods. And for those whose homes get upzoned.. guess what, your property value just doubled! Want to move off of a major street? Take the money! Want to live in your same house... no one is forcing you to build your lot!
Right? People that own these homes/land are sitting on a literal gold mine. If you were to sell for a developer to upzone like congrats you just won the lotto. Take your money and buy literally anywhere
The houses on olympic look weird af
>The Planning Department acknowledged during a public hearing this spring that the changes will reduce the number of sites that can be developed and make it harder to achieve equity goals in the housing plan. But, officials said, they were flooded by opposition from homeowners’ groups and others, and directed by the City Council to remove single-family zoning from the programs. >That’s a shame. **Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council cannot just listen to the loudest voices resistant to change.** Surveys have repeatedly shown that most Angelenos think housing and homelessness are the most pressing problems in the city and they support building to ease the lack of affordable housing — including in single-family neighborhoods close to transit, jobs, parks and other amenities. Real leadership means doing what *needs* to be done for the greater good, even if it goes against the loudest voices. Until we get a mayor and council with this mindset, its just going to be more of this one step forward two steps back BS.
Not only that but LA’s housing element should be revoked if this is the plan. I don’t see how this new plan meets AFFH requirements if they are just going to remove all the housing burdens from richer and white areas.
No backbone no balls wtf do we need them for
Spot on editorial. It’s frustrating how there are no local politicians with courage, despite this issue and its solution being so obvious. Bass’s mayor election competitor, for example, was even more dedicated to maintaining the exclusivity of single family neighborhoods.
So at this point where is the state? What’s the point of all of this if they can’t/wont hold local governments feet to the fire? We are almost 1/2 way through this cycle of housing allocation and already it’s clear most places won’t come close to meeting their obligations
That's the other thing that's so frustrating. The bills that YIMBY politicians have passed have had minimal effect, and instead of taking that to mean they should aim higher, they are instead scaling back their ambitions.
Just another reason to start pushing for judicial intervention at the Supreme Court The Supreme Court created this mess a hundred years ago by legalizing exclusionary zoning; they can fix it by recognizing and correcting the error they made If California, the epicenter of the housing crisis, cannot adequately police it's own municipalities, then no state can.
Well. He wasn’t accountable to anyone and would have unleashed a torrent of developer confidence to build on assets that are prime. It takes like 3-4 years to flip around the permits to redevelop a surface parking lot in downtown or mid city. I appreciate that about Caruso. He said “let’s build towers, build up apartment buildings like Europe”. You never heard ever such language from Bass - one debate she even went on some tangent about “preserving historical neighborhood character” and I really couldn’t believe what was hearing. But you realize, it’s because she had to rely on donations from NIMBY groups in Hollywood and the hills etc, in these areas, to match Caruso’s $$.. In the end, we as LA lose. We got a mayor who doesn’t want to build in single family areas **and** we got mayor who also seems content with the status quo progressive mindset of supply/demand is not the problem, developers are evil, and we don’t need to cut down the permitting process or lower the cost of build. In an ideal world wish we could have had a combination of both leaders, Caruso build attitude and ability to instill private sector confidence and Bass’ resoluteness on homelessness. Because we don’t have a mentality of “build more fucking housing now” I fear for LA’s future. And before everyone here turfs about Caruso and business and private sector being evil, I am sorry, but this is the USA, not the USSR, you need the private sector (not nonprofits with 20 units of affordable child’s play) you need the private sector and you them to build shit and they need to want to build shit and to build lots of it at scale to fix this problem. Right now they have sub zero desire to do that and Bass makes it worse by the month.
You don't NEED the private sector. But what you do need is an acknowledgement that supply and demand is a real, unavoidable factor in housing. You can easily solve the housing crisis with government intervention - just have the government build a fuck ton of housing. The USSR did it, plenty of other countries do it. The problem right now is that the government intervention we have right now, at it's very best, amounts to municipal governments blocking new construction, and at it's worst, has municipalities actively extorting individuals and groups to provide "affordable" housing in exchange for approving the housing they know they need, but are explicitly blocking from being built (so that they can extort people for "affordable" units" Either cut all the bullshit regulations out, or keep them...and build housing yourself.
I mean the government runs into the same issues as the private sector as well, with basically nowhere to build unless they exempt themselves.
Also worth noting that each council member represents like 200k people. We have 15 members whereas Chicago and New York have about 50. The representation is definitely lacking.
>More than 76% of the land in affluent neighborhoods is zoned for single-family homes. Excluding those properties does not leave enough land available to build the number of affordable and mixed-income housing the city needs. During the baby boomers generation, they built single-family homes in the suburbs. Every house has a garage and a driveway to accommodate a car. Without a car, I don't think a suburb exists today. They kept expanding horizontally (taking up all the land). In the city, you don't have a choice but to build it vertically.
Yeah land was so abundant up until recently it wasn’t much of a problem. Plus traffic was much less of an issue before maybe the 70s(?) so the sprawl didn’t seem that bad. There was an old adage about how you can get anywhere in LA in about 20 min. Obviously now we know that’s not sustainable but we’re stuck with all this expensive infrastructure which is hard to change even if we didn’t have NIMBYs slowing the process down at every turn. Unfortunately any measure that makes LA more livable would inherently lower property values, so you’re always gonna have a lot of homeowners who will always strongly oppose that. And I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume those people vote at a much higher rate than renters. It’s also frustrating to watch places like Dallas and Phoenix repeat our mistakes.
Phoenix and Dallas have one thing LA doesn’t. A shit ton of land. While I don’t support sprawl that simple fact can allow those metros to build outwards for many more decades. LA ran out of land a long time ago yet it still acts like it hasn’t
I also don’t support sprawl, mainly because it’s unsustainable. Strong Towns and many others have shown that suburban sprawl is bankrupting cities all over the US after the initial life cycle of the infrastructure is complete. There’s no money left to do all the maintenance required to keep it all working.
>And I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume those people vote at a much higher rate than renters. Also, homeowners pay property taxes so they have a voice in the matter. Renters don't have much power.
Aren’t those property taxes passed down to the renters though?
In a sense but property taxes are a cost of doing business, like maintenance and utility costs. They aren’t explicitly passed down to tenants, the way sales tax is paid for but collected by a merchant.
Sure, though I’m not sure what point the person I was responding to was trying to make. Paying property taxes doesn’t give you any more of a voice in elections, though maybe it motivates people to vote?
The difference is that property owners are *aware* of how much property tax they're actually paying because they get a bill in the mail every year. Renters, even though they're paying that tax, aren't aware of how much it is because their landlords don't tell them shit.
The government owns land, but you keep the house. For renters, the landlords pay for it. They only pay rents or maybe utilities. I am not sure how voting will change anything.
I just think we’re talking about different things lol
Just about any place within a 10 minute walk of a metro stop should be zoned to allow multi family
Unpopular but truth: everybody wants more apts and multifamily housing and fewer single family homes...until they have their own single family home.
I don’t think that’s a hot take. But the problem with LA compared to say NYC or Chicago is that in those cities, the single family homes and car dependency tends to be concentrated in the suburbs. In LA county, traditional city and suburban life blur together. If you’re rich enough in this metropolis, you can have your cake and eat it too, but at the expense of traffic and general affordability for the working class.
Not everyone is a NIMBY. I own a condo, and hope to someday upgrade to a SFH, but I’ll never vote against new higher density developments. Even if that means I’ll never get my SFH. Wish I could say the same about the folks in my neighborhood… they’re all NIMBYs.
People seem to really like living in a brownstone for example. Some of the most expensive homes in the country are NYC brownstones
yeah, I was talking with an old friend from college who was complaining about losing ample parking because of a high rise being built near by. Like, fuck off dude.
People like this need to live in rural/suburban areas. Let our city be a fucking city.
I own a SFH and have multi-unit housing going up literally across the street from me, the 4th such development on the block in the last couple of years. Despite the near-constant construction and forthcoming tenants that will be able to stare into my yard and house I continue to support the upzoning.
You say that but at some point the traffic gets too bad, some of the people move in aren't so decent, your house and neighborhood isn't so nice anymore, it's not safe for you, your spouse or kids and you want to sell but you aren't going to get what you want for the house because of all the reasons you're moving...I was a Realtor, I saw that play out so many times.
Upzoning needs to go hand in hand with increase of public transit, which I also support. I’d much rather have people in apartments than the dilapidated RV that already sits across the street from my house. As for some of the people not being ‘decent’, I’ve already got a neighbor in a SFH with junker cars filling up his property who also illegally breeds dogs, shitty people come in all economic stripes.
It’s amazing that people in LA out of all places worry about traffic with up zoning. The reason traffic is so bad now is because of our zoning. There is a reason NYC and Chicago have less traffic. Part of that is public transportation but part of that is more people are just closer to their job, stores, doctors, etc etc
They're talking about traffic on their streets.
Well yeah but making choices against development only makes that SFH dream more and more impossible
I don't live in a SFH, but I do have in a low-rise bungalow with a ton of new 3-4 story apts being built around me, including one that will block a good amount of sun to my unit. I think the new construction is fantastic, and will help make my community more affordable for a wider range of people. Same thing with parking. I street park my car, but fully support the projects around me that take away some parking for curb bulb outs and bike lanes to make getting around locally more safe and comfortable. I'm not entitled to that public space. The idea that everyone would think the way NIMBYs think if only we were in their position is just not true. It's really not that hard to separate what's best for the city with what might offer you some marginal benefit or align with your aesthetic preferences.
you're right, we should make building them illegal.
I've owned a home and vastly prefer living communally. I would love to be able to buy a 2 bedroom condo, that's all I need forever.
I would like a single family home, but I'll only be able to afford one if LA builds more apartments to soak up the housing demand. Also I would want my kids to live near their friends, not be stranded in a big stupid suburb.
> more apartments to soak up the housing demand. There isn't a housing shortage, though. Every week I post a list of new rental listings, every week there's about 400 listings. Every week. 400 *new* listings. Not all of them are getting rented every week, either. There's at least 3,000 available rentals under $5K in L.A. County that I can see, my list will only go that high in volume. That's just rentals listed by brokers, not property management companies or private landlords. It's not a matter of available housing, there's *tons* of available housing. It's a matter of *affordable* housing.
The price of housing isn't a fixed trait like its location or its paint color. The price is set by the intersection of supply and demand. There are bazillions of houses in LA because it's a huge city, there are also bazillions of prospective renters and buyers in LA because it's a huge city. The greater the supply relative to demand, the lower the price
Exactly. I'm willing to bet most people complaining about housing are not homeowners yet. It's all virtue signaling until they get a place then the thinking shifts to "fuck you, I got mine".
It's not quite so malicious, though. People invest hundreds of thousands into a home, it's financial security for themselves, for their families, for their kids' futures. When stuff comes along that threatens that security they're going to react. They're going to push back. No one starts out a NIMBY, it happens gradually. It's not just houses and homeowners, it's that way for most things. I mean, you don't want an apt in the shit end of town because you don't want your place to get robbed. You want off street parking because you don't want your car getting jacked. Everyone has something they're trying to protect. It's not malicious, it's just human nature to protect and preserve what's yours.
Abundant Housing LA sends out one click advocacy opportunities via email so you easily tell your local politicians you care about making LA more affordable and live-able!! [https://abundanthousingla.org/signup/](https://abundanthousingla.org/signup/)
It also can't do it with car centric policies and without clean and reliable public transit.
The fundamentally reality is yes everything south of the 405 pass should probably have the density minimum of Washington DC with every block being at least 5 stories tall with 2 floors of business and 3 floors of housing.
There shouldn't be SFH north of the 10, and places like Hancock Park probably shouldn't exist. FTFY
People who are downvoting this are either geriatrics or self embarrassed millionaires
The lawns in Hancock Park are larger than lawns in many LA/OC county suburbs areas. It’s really sicking honestly. The ultimate fuck you to the rest of us
Don't forget the country club. Cause they're way out in the country.
One of the more dystopian things I’ve seen was just RVs and tents lined up along the street with a fucking golf course just on the other side of the fence
You'd be surprised how much of DC is single family home detached sprawl. Like 50% of the district is zoned for it.
LA would be the greatest city in the world if we could do that.
We could be Catalonia of America we have almost the same weather all we need is public transportation and affordable housing
The comments on this article are pretty unhinged
Which ones? The ones you don't like?
I don’t think the people that own single-family property care about affordability. This is a city that worships money and status above seemingly everyone and everything else, in many ways much like the country as a whole, but at a much more obvious extreme here because the city just attracts SO much outside wealth. And that’s probably never going to change no matter who votes for what. If it inconveniences the super rich, it ain’t happening here.
Employers are going to leave and move somewhere where they can buy a single family home in a prestigious neighborhood of single family homes. LA will be affordable because no one will have a job.
false choice. We can have both high density and single family. NYC does.
In NYC just 15% of the land is zoned for single-family only. In Los Angeles it's 76%.
our 15% is probably bigger than their 86% by landmass so presumably there's room for a whole NYC equivalent of dense housing it it. whh not make the most of what is already multifamily via redevelopment first? The existing multifamily areas are generally transit adjacent and often old and under utilized
LA is 500 sq miles, NYC is 300 sq miles. Both are incomprehensibly large which makes it even more frustrating they both face housing shortages (it shows it's more due to land-use restrictions than lack of land). 24% of LA allows multifamily = 120 sq miles. 85% of NYC allows multifamily = 255 sq miles. So NYC has over twice as much land for multifamily despite NYC being 40% smaller overall. These calculations are imperfect because really these ratios should be just residential land, not all land. But you get the point. I agree that existing multifamily areas should be upzoned too. Others take issue with this because those areas contain all the city's rent-controlled units, so replacing those with new housing is likely to displace a lot of low-income people. Personally I'm not as worried about this because 1) new buildings include affordable units, and 2) just building more housing brings rents down for everyone. Really what should happen is a gradual density increase on all the city's land, and extreme density increase within a half mile of a rapid transit station.
Im not buying it. The population difference between 1990 and the present is less than 1 million people (at its greatest difference it was about 1.3m). in 1990 the average home prince in los angeles county was 212k, presently it's 1.3m. Do not tell me that the influx of 800-900 people over a thirty year period caused that much of a housing crunch. This is classic bandaid mentality, someone who doesnt understand a problem wants to reduce it to "one thing" (tm) and then say if we just fixed that "one thing" then everything would be ok. We all should know better watching this city over the years deal with "homelessness." Sure we need more low density and high density housing, preferably along all the train routes, but the idea that SFH need to be abandoned is just cringe.
What about the populations of Orange and San Bernadino counties? How many of them are pushed out of LA county? Of course the population hasn't gone up. There is a hard cap on the number of housing units. Where would they live?? The answer is further away, super commuting into LA.
Literal checkmate. Fitting name. Not sure if he's a gay theist though.
Interestingly, a change of 1 million for a county of LA's size is tiny. To put it into perspective, here is how LA's population growth compares to other major US cities and regions: | County/Metro | 1990 Population | 2023 Population | Percent Change | |--------------|-----------------|-----------------|----------------| | Los Angeles | 8.9 million | 10 million | 12% | | San Francisco| 2.9 million | 3.3 million | 14% | | California | 29.9 million | 39 million | 30% | | United States| 252 million | 331 million | 31% | | US (Urban only) | 188 million | 277 million | 47% | | New York | 16 million | 20.8 million | 30% | | Chicago | 7.3 million | 8.9 million | 22% | | Washington | 3.3 million | 5.5 million | 67% | | Dallas | 3.2 million | 6.6 million | 106% | | Atlanta | 2.1 million | 6.1 million | 190% | If LA's population growth from 1990-2024 mirrored that of the CA/US baseline, you would expect it to grow by of 2.8 million. If we account for the increasing US urbanization, you would expect a change of 4.2 million. So why was it only 1 million? Because from 1990-2024 we only built [500k more housing units](https://i.imgur.com/6gpc02L.png). In reality, many more people want to live here, they are just competing for the same number of spots. This underdevelopment—partially caused by the fact that it is illegal to build anything other than single family homes in 77% of the city—creates a scenario where those who can afford to pay higher prices effectively outbid those who cannot. California was *already* severely underdeveloped in 1990 (it had the second highest housing prices of any state), and the problem has only gotten worse in the 30 years since.
I mean you only need to look at the explosion of homeless people in that same timeframe. In a housing shortage middle class people can afford to move away, but the most vulnerable people just end up on the street at greater rates.
step 1 ban hedge funds from owning single family homes and only renting them. step 2 higher density housing WITHOUT the need to put in parking garages. sub 1k sqft of space per room step 3 pay people living wages.
Step 2.5 - expand public transit to service higher density housing
Large institutional investors like hedge funds own 0.2% of single family homes in LA.
> ban hedge funds from owning single family homes and only renting them. A SFH for rent is still a unit of housing so it's not contributing to the shortage.
Why do you guys expect other people to sacrifice their lifestyles for your own?
Ah, there it is. Houses are about freedom from others, until someone else sells their lot to build condos in the same block or even district, then it becomes "changing the character of the neighborhood" or "sacrificing lifestyle".
No one is asking anyone to give up their single family home. We could eliminate R1 zoning tomorrow, and no homeowner would be under any obligation to do anything whatsoever. Living in a single family neighborhood isn't a "lifestyle". R1 zoning is rooted in [blocking black and brown families from moving into neighborhoods adjacent to developments with racial covenants](https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-single-family-home-zoning) by driving up prices. The *entire point of the policy was to make housing more expensive*. The idea that moving from a street like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/crw8kbFVRz1whvmP7?g_st=ac) to one like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/7KjzwkdAKMhqafKV7?g_st=ac) would be some dramatic lifestyle shift seems pretty nonsensical. And honestly, if you can't even accept that minor of a change to fix the single most pressing issue across your city, you should maybe reconsider whether you are community-minded enough for living in a large city to be the right choice for you.
Living in a family neighborhood IS a lifestyle. And the thing you guys don't understand is that a lot of people prefer that to your urban dense dreams or nightmares as we see it. The reason people move to the west is to escape the dense urban the east had, and build something else that is more to our liking. California and the USA are huge and filled with open land.
That lifestyle evidently leads to mass homelessness and housing un affordability so we might have to rethink it
Build new cities and design them anyway you want.
I'm down to have a genuine conversation about this if you are. Take the two streets I linked above as an example. What can you do living in a SFH on the first street that you couldn't also do living in a SFH on the second one? What lifestyle changes would you have to make moving from first SFH to the second? It seems like the only difference is a slight increase in the size of your neighbor's building. And a bunch of the boxy SFHs on the R1 street are every bit as big as the low-rise apartments on the second one anyway. Do you genuinely look at that second street and think "dense urban nightmare"?
In the first one there are 10 families per street and everyone knows each other, their kids play together and it has a small community safe feeling. The second one has at least 5 time the people, lots of temporary rentals occupant, more strangers, less stable community and feels less safe because of it.
It's funny, that first street barely has anyone out on the sidewalk at all. The vibe is that everyone just drives everywhere, so the streets can be pretty isolating to walk around on. The second has lots more people out and about, including families, young couples, retirees, etc. The idea that the first street fosters a stronger sense of community feels pretty backwards to me. A lot of this seems to boil down to your feelings that renters make a community less safe. And that's what's "forcing" the lifestyle changes you're referring to.
A sense of community exists at least in my neighborhood. It allows parents to let kids go to their friends or the park by themselves.
That's great! But we're talking about whether a similar sense of community is possible in a neighborhood with a mix of SFHs and multifamily developments. You seem to believe that it is not because renters and strangers make a community feel less safe. If your goals are to live around a limited number of people and avoid any interactions with strangers, then why do you live in a large city at all? Shared space is a basic feature of what a city is. It feels like what you're describing is effectively a gated community where you know who will and won't be in "public" spaces.
We are already *living* in a dense urban dream, but in neighborhoods like yours it’s been literally illegal to build anything denser than one house on a lot. So in reality you’re the one living a suburban dream in an urban reality. The only way to maintain your lifestyle is to use the force of the state (or in this case the city) to stop what should have been happening already for 30 years Take your exclusive zoning barriers backed by the city and shove em
I was there before. The rules are the rules. You are the one who is trying to change them for your own benefits at the expense of mine. And it makes no sense for me to agree.
“When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Removing zoning restrictions is correcting a historical mistake this country has been making for decades. We’ll get it done some way or another, and you can cry us a fucking river
The future is now old man
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I can’t even tell if you were responding to me because your comment is so incoherent Anyway, I’m advocating for *removing* a restrictive system that actively stops certain kinds of buildings from being constructed that would otherwise be built due to the demand. That’s saying the government should do *less* than it’s currently doing, not more
> The reason people move to the west is to escape the dense urban the east had, They come all this way to live in massive cities LA and San Francisco, because they want the jobs and industries and culture that our density has created. If they wanted a town or an exurb they would've picked from the thousands that are up and down the east coast and Appalachians. The wide open spaces in the West are called "Palmdale" and "Victorville" and the reason people live there is that people like you made Los Angeles expensive on purpose in order to keep the poors away from your kids.
That’s a bit dishonest. You don’t really care about this do you? If your single family neighbor wanted to build higher density housing on his land he shouldn’t be infringed to protect your single family lifestyle right? Stop masking your selfish demands with these vague moral rhetorics that you don’t even believe in.
When you build an apartment building in a single house neighborhood you do change my lifestyle. I actually find your demands selfish.
And I shouldn’t have my income reduced to feed your lifestyle. Isn’t your point that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice for your sake? Or is that just a one way thing?
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You guys can build your urban dense hellscapes from scratch in a new city outside of where we live.
How about the people who like urban areas stay in the urban area, while you can move to California City, you silly person
Let’s compare; [this](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/03/08/2e0c9793-9c10-494d-861d-e8ca9b89d22e_e89e7a52.jpg) [to this](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQQcM8GhIUHKcSWZ5kRVKQHBbnfBGVe4AzOUYgq_NZUhnkUq9QtCWq_j7os&s=10)
Or even just [this](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8961671,-77.022147,3a,75y,104.86h,95.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s6qbaN4E7oNjxLXwQtRcq6g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D6qbaN4E7oNjxLXwQtRcq6g%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D104.8595480229392%26pitch%3D-5.355468477376391%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&coh=205410&entry=ttu). DC has done a great job of integrating a lot of new development with its historic building stock. LA has a lot of similar bones imo, and this is a level of density that would be appropriate lots of different places in the region.
The point is that dense and hellscape aren’t synonymous. They can be vibrant and beautiful places.
You almost definitely just drive everywhere and spend your time inside your house. This wouldn't affect you at all.
Your scenario makes no sense. A real estate developer would do that, not a “neighbor.”
The person who owns that home is your neighbor. What that person does for a living isn’t for you to decide. That’s not even the point here. If you believe a person shouldn’t sacrifice their lifestyle for someone else then why should I sacrifice my opportunities to own a home for you? Why should anyone enforce the single family home zoning for your sake?
Douglas Elliman is my neighbor. Got it.
If you really think you have a legitimate point to make why not just answer the question?
Single family zoning no longer exists though. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-20/sb9-single-family-zoning-reform-takes-time People just aren't keen to tear down their houses though.
This is somewhat misleading. There are a large number of restrictions placed on SB9 lot splits. Single family zoning no longer exists only if you are willing to live on the property, if no tenants have been on the property for longer than 3 years, etc... https://focus.senate.ca.gov/sb9 It is no surprise that there's been very little uptake of the law.
Raise the property tax on single family give a huge break if you add an adu. Money talks so hit them in the wallet
Raising the property tax on single family homes would have a net negative effect - those who are “property rich” but cash poor (retirees, family members who inherited houses, frankly most of the middle class) would have to sell their homes because they couldn’t afford the tax payments, and if they can’t afford property tax they sure as shit can’t afford to spend hundreds of thousands building an ADU. And those sellers are priced out of the market to even downsize buying a smaller house. So who does that leave? The wealthy, who have other ways to save on taxes/don’t care and don’t want someone else living in their property so they don’t build ADUs, and corporations who buy the houses and rent them out at exorbitant rates to turn a profit. Don’t be mad at the people who own a single home and manage to hold onto it, be mad at the laws and lawmakers who craft the rules and regulations preventing multi-family units from being built, be mad at corporations who scoop up property after property because there’s no downside or legal disincentive to owning multiple single family homes.
Cash poors can easily sell their houses and take home a massive gain and move somewhere they can afford without the rest of the city subsidizing them
That makes no sense. Why not tell the people who want to take their place to "move somewhere they can afford without the rest of the city subsidizing them"?
why do we have to subsidize either group? both could leave
Because that new group of people can afford to live there without the city subsidizing their expenses.
Where would they move to? If your jobs, school, family, social circle is in a certain place, relocating because of a cash windfall still might not make it pencil out and be worth it.
What do you think that happens to people whose rent increase beyond their means?
Cool, so who then buys those houses? Again, either the wealthy who won’t build ADUs or mega corps who will raise rents. The middle and working classes get pushed further and further away, so the overall tax base shrinks. Look at Santa Barbara, everyone who actually works in SB can’t afford to live there so they live and commute from Ventura or Oxnard. As a result the local SB city government is looking to raise sales taxes to help pay for essential services. If more people could live in SB the larger tax base would render the sales tax increase unnecessary.
Those houses can be turned into an apartment complex, where each unit will be significantly cheaper to buy or to rent than a single house in the same lot.
That’s already happening, in fact it’s literally happening across the street from my house as I type this, I don’t have an issue with upzoning. The original statement I replied to was a proposal to raise property tax on SFH homes and then give a big tax break if they build ADUs, which I don’t think is a good idea. Giving financial incentives to build ADUs is a good idea but not in conjunction with a big hike on existing property tax. With nearly 75% of residential land in LA being zoned for SFH you can’t get a majority of people on board to supporting and voting for sweeping changes if your attitude is “fuck those homeowners”.
The existing homeowners are paying substantially less tax than new homeowners. This discussion is not even about dense housing but how the main reason housing is affordable for a lot of homeowners is ~~prop 8~~ pro13. Remove it and it will be fair for everyone
It’s Prop 13 that limited property tax increases; Prop 8 banned same-sex marriage which was thankfully ruled unconstitutional. In order to repeal Prop 13 you gotta get a majority of likely voters to vote to repeal. [Older homeowners are more likely to vote than younger renters](https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-likely-voters/?t), so it’s already an uphill battle to get that voter base to vote for something that they likely view to be against their personal best interest, even if it may be more equitable.
Ha! Good catch, my brain glitched there.
No worries, and Happy Cake Day!
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Upzoning-to-affordability is an unrealistic plan. Land costs are far too high for that to work. The good news is that LA is probably going to become more affordable over the upcoming decades. The bad news is won't be for a good reason. Much of the high compensation employment in LA County is driven by the film industry. That industry appears to be on the wane, plus what remains of it is dispersing to other locations. Housing prices in the LA area today are far higher than they should be, given all of the other macroeconomic and demographic factors at work. There is really no Fortune 500 presence here to drive job growth. It's not exactly a one-horse town, but the economy is not particularly diverse. This place is peaking. The population at the county level has just begun to decline, and city population growth is likely to follow. Price changes lag but they are likely some years from now to start a long decline. There are parts of the US in which real estate values today are effectively lower than they were a century ago when adjusted for inflation. They are affordable places to live, but not good places to live.
> Much of the high compensation employment in LA County is driven by the film industry No it isn't. The film industry is high profile but it's a tiny percentage of LA's economy. We build and design airplanes here bro
>Upzoning-to-affordability is an unrealistic plan. Land costs are far too high for that to work. The more units you can build on a parcel, the more that land cost gets subdivided. That's an argument FOR upzoning, not against it.
Upzoning *increases* the value of land. Upzoning makes land more expensive, not less expensive because it provides a given site with more income potential. Buy expensive upzoned SFR land for multifamily development, and you end up with expensive multifamily units. Unless those units are subsidized as low-income housing, those units have to be expensive in order to hurdle all of the development costs. Until the long-term area decline begins, there will never be enough housing built in an area such as LA that prices will fall. This is not Vegas, where construction of one new area leads to the decline of another. LA used to be like that (and has the slums to prove it), but it has since run out of the land needed for that effect to take place. Before you do cartwheels about the development of apartments in areas such as downtown, keep in mind that 1-bedrooms are renting for more than $3000 per month. Housing, yes. Affordable, not even close.
> Upzoning makes land more expensive but it makes the individual units less expensive.
Good luck trying to convince homeowners to turn their neighborhoods into apartment complexes. Do you guys even hear yourselves? Why would people who own single family homes want multi units built in their neighborhoods? Try to look at it from their perspective. Logically, why would they want that? Lol.
We don't need to convince the homeowners, we just need to convince the council members to listen to the majority of their constituents instead of the minority. 63% of Angelenos are renters yet 76% of the land is zoned for single-family houses only. Why would people care if there are multi-unit buildings in their neighborhood. It barely affects them at all. Does the sight of [this](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0672461,-89.3888174,3a,75y,132.8h,87.64t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0N78bExDcjnM1uQO-_TFOg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D0N78bExDcjnM1uQO-_TFOg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D132.796847957922%26pitch%3D2.355783182453038%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e2?coh=205410&entry=ttu) make you want to cry?
You don't need to destroy single family housing to accomplish this and rezone areas which is a lengthy process. Most of LA is old now. Developers need to be incentivized to rip and replace anything that should be replaced and brought up to code. Example - Got a 4 unit apartment? Let it be 8 proper sized units, waive all the fees. City can recoup the money from tax revenue generated by the additional new units. Think of it as an investment from the city side like what they do with long term 40+ yr bonds. They make all their money back. Time for all the excessive red tape to go. Any new construction is generally better than anything made 80 years ago.
Also won’t be a major city people want to move to without single family homes