Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

As an LA local, I'm not sure I share your sentiment against high quality building codes.

I think you misunderstand, I'm not against high quality buildings, nor high quality building codes. I'm against the terribly restrictive parking requirements, but those are not high quality.

Wouldn't you rather just set some base standards for construction and let people choose where to live? Greenspace rules, parking spot regulations all seem to stifle growth.

I would gladly pay for an extra spot, and I'm sure developers would build more monthly garages a la NYC.

Exactly, these overly restrictive codes and zoning are just a few people inflicting their exact life style on others.

It's super hard to convince all those single family home owners at meeting that I actually like density, and choose to live in the densest part of my city because I like it. I'm not alone, there are a lot of us! But others prevent us from living in our preferred way for no good reason.

I understand you like dense housing, but not having a car in LA severely limits where you can work. The nice places to work are not clustered in downtown (which is all you could realistically do if you had not car). The greater LA area is very car centric, and I'd find it hard to believe you'd find it convenient to live in LA proper and commute to, say, Anaheim (or even Brea) without access to a car.

Not building parking spaces in LA would be denying the realities of living there.

To take a page from the anti-SB827 forces, why have one size fits all? Why should I pay 33% extra on my housing if I can get by without a car? For example, maybe I live and work in Santa Monica, and can bike, walk, and ride share?

Refusing to allow people to go carless has a predictable result, that is self enforcing. I would say that "denying reality" is when people refuse to allow others to be different from them.

And it's not just LA, it's the entire state.

Ah, I did misunderstand but I'm still not sure I agree. We could lift the codes but those spaces are still pretty much required. LA really has to invest in more public transit. As it stands now, the city just isn't walkable. You'll just end up having a car anyway and fighting for what little street parking there is.

Instead we seem to be building large condo/apartments with shops at the ground floor and parking underground. We'll see how they turn out, I suppose.

  large condo/apartments with shops at the ground floor

That's a model that has been used for decades (e.g. Two Worlds in Mountain View), but we're already facing a growing number of retail space vacancies, as fewer retail purchases occur locally due to Amazon, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com