Jake's blog

There's been a lot of progress to fix California's housing crisis, because the State Legislature has finally decided to fix things.  Credit where credit is due.  There's going to be two parts to this post. The first part will be a summary of what the Legislature has done to fix things; the second will be what the legislature needs to get done.  You'll note that there's not a whole lot of local reforms in here. Some city councils have acted in good faith to do their part, like Sacramento, Oakland and Berkeley. But most, like LA, SF and San Jose,...

A group of tech billionaires has quietly bought up 78 square miles of Solano County, California, halfway between San Francisco, where I grew up, and Sacramento, where I used to work. The funders are a who's who of the tech industry, including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn; Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the Apple founder's widow.   They want to build a new city of 400,000 people there, i.e., about the size of Oakland. It's called California Forever. The group released their city plans to the public a couple weeks...

I've been asked by a good number of people on Bluesky and elsewhere for my voting endorsements. I've collected my voting recommendations here.   CANDIDATES NYC Mayor: Zohran Mamdani.  I was publicly skeptical of him in the primary, and I'm still not crazy about a lot of his ideas. But he's the best option in the field because he's correctly identified what NYC's problems are, and he's surrounded himself with competent people.  The alternatives are far worse.  Andrew Cuomo ran the subways into the ground when he was governor.  Curtis Sliwa is an incoherent crank, even though some of his ideas...

BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: The big rezoning bill, SB79, passed the Legislature and it is a big fucking deal for dealing with the housing crisis. Because now it's legal to build apartments near public transit, statewide. Side note before I begin - this post is about LA, but everything about this also applies to the Bay Area. There are two crises that California faces these days. #1 is the housing crisis, because there just isn't enough housing to match the number of jobs. The housing crisis exists because cities have made it nearly impossible to build new housing. Some suburbs,...

the event in brooklyn that was originally cancelled is back on for next week.  see you there? note: this is a non-ticketed event; come as you are.