California's Love of Cars Is Fueling Its Housing Crisis | Hacker News Reader

California's Love of Cars Is Fueling Its Housing Crisis

bloomberg.com

17 pointsjseliger16 comments

I think required parking spaces is a minor factor in why building is so hard in California. The biggest problem is that if you have plans for a building that meets all the existing zoning and building regulations for the lot, it can still take many years (sometime decades) before one will be able to start construction. One has to deal with lawsuits by people who don't want it built, planning commissions that have to put their own stamp on the building, and public meeting after public meeting that resolve nothing.

I have heard of a few different laws floated in Sacramento to help try and help with this problem, but I think it is more of a cultural value in many parts of California (like prop 13) where people feel a place should not change from how they found it when they moved to California. This is probably not something that can be legislated away.

Reminds me of this story:

https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spe...

Only some of the problem is California. Consider the areas just outside of Red Bluff, Oroville, and Anderson. Am I wrong to think the problem isn't so severe in those areas?

If you all want to live on Russian Hill, well...

This is an underrated problem and also contributes to some grimly hilarious public policies that offer funding to build housing for the homeless on the one hand, but forbid most housing from actually being built on the other: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f...

This is one of many many regulations and requirements that make housing so damn expensive. When you combine all these overburdening regulations together, the result is: you can't have cost effective housing anymore. At the very least they should open up a few square miles of space where they relax some or all the regulations a bit. This would allow developers to innovate and drive down the cost of housing.

We haven't seen much meaningful innovation in housing in the last 100 years, at least none that addresses cost.

Imagine what a great world we could live in, if everyone could build what they wanted as easily as building a website. There's a lot of issues to tackle, i know, but it's a good starting point for progress. And considering that most of our incomes go to housing, it's the most important area for progress.

$27,000 / parking spot? I like how the total cost of the building or percentage of total cost is suspiciously lacking.

It's a shame that people want to turn los angeles into nyc or sf. We have that already. Can't LA remain unique?

Uniquely filled with homeless and skyrocketing rents because there's not enough housing? Uniquely stuck in traffic because there's not enough metro lines? Unique that there's few walkable areas like the lovely cities in Europe?

No LA currently is the worst of both worlds, an unwalkable, undrivable suburb as far as the eye can see. The best thing that could happen to it is to become a real city.

Doesn't the earthquake risk significantly curb LA's ability to build up as much as NYC? I think there are probably certain density limiting factors like this. Which just means that they need to adapt to what that means in terms of sprawl and moving people around.

Very tall buildings can actually be safer than shorter buildings, because they are all made of steel, and can have a lot of anti earthquake support built in.

Also as a short proof, Japan and Taiwan are also directly on top of a fault line. Taipei and Tokyo have some of the tallest buildings in the world. The tech is there.

DTLA has plenty of skyscrapers.

Tokyo is bigger than LA and NYC put together.

The policy described in the article and those set in place in the past 5 years have created the worst traffic we've seen. Watch any movie filmed in LA before 2000 and look at the traffic compared to now. There were ten plus million residents then too. Essentially, we have terrible City managers now that favor ideology over flow algorithms and have made the city avg speed 9 mph

I found LA absolutely horrible to get around.

Second city I had visited in the US. Got a hotel room near Hollywood because that seemed like a decent idea as a tourist for a long weekend. On the first day I find that parking is $60/night. So I park a half mile away where it's closer to $10 and walk. That half mile turns into close to thirty minutes of walking because it involves crossing roads with three lanes in either direction. So I decide to try public transport: except for that there's no metro line near West Hollywood, buses take exact change only and I can't find one to begin with, and to get a TAP card I have to drive to the nearest vendor anyway which doesn't sell TAP cards past 5pm. Fine, so I'll drive. Except for that I have to take route 10 or 101 to get anywhere, both of which are almost always at a standstill. In the evening I decide to go drinking and realise I HAVE to get an uber.

So I can't drive, can't walk, can't use public transport...admittedly I booked a hotel in a bad location for sightseeing since it was very last minute, but I have NEVER had any issues with getting around European and Asian cities in similar situations.

Only typing this out because this is how I'm guessing a very large percent of tourists see LA: it's an absolutely beautiful city completely ruined by the fact that you can't see any of it easily.

West Hollywood is a nice area but horrible for getting around. Hollywood itself is the opposite however, due to the Red Line and FlyAway Bus.

Do you live in LA, have you actually spent time here or is this a random post? People think the traffic is terrible, but they also expect to get from the east side to Santa Monica at rush hour for some unknown reason. There is a growing rail system, and the 2nd largest bus system in the US.

Given the population as it is now, I think "unwalkable, undrivable" is a bit of an overstatement or people simply wouldn't live here.

Born here. In a city you’ll take a metro because density would support it.

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