Jake's blog
Let's talk about why LA doesn't have townhouses.
Let's talk about townhouses, and why LA doesn't have them, even though there's a housing shortage - and every other major city in the country has them. The quintessential LA house is a single-family detached home, whether it's a bungalow built after World War I or a ranch-style house built after World War II. LA generally doesn't have townhouses like the Victorians of San Francisco, the classic Chicago two-flat or the rowhouses of Philadelphia. Let's talk a little about why. Let's go back to the early 20th century, when LA was a boomtown of streetcar suburbs knit together by the...
Let's talk about why Los Angeles's housing shortage will finally start improving in the near future.
Lots of what I've written about is about rezoning questions and how we really do need large-scale zoning reform to make it less goddamn expensive to live in California. (Bill SB50, which would have allowed apartments near train stations, fell short early this year.) But SB50 or no SB50, LA's zoning is going to have to change dramatically in the next few years because of reforms that have already gone through. How we got here First, a little background. For most of California history, the state usually kept its nose out of local housing decisions. But as part of the...
Let's talk about the new MTA live subway map.
So, the NYC MTA made a new live subway map, and I've had a lot of requests from people to comment on it. Personally, I think it's a solid idea, but the execution is lacking. Some background: there's three schools of thought you could use to draw NYC's subway system. First, you can draw a diagram, like Massimo Vignelli did in the 70s. This does a great job of making sense out of the disorganized pre-industrial spaghetti of Lower Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City, and it shows all the subway services accurately, but you have to do violence...
Let's talk about why LA's zoning law gets in the way of new housing.
In this excellent post from a few years back, /u/clipstep on Reddit discussed the building and financial reasons why LA only seems to build luxury condos. I'm going to talk about the legal reasons why this is so. As always, this is not legal advice. Please hire an attorney if you have individual zoning questions. Bottom-line, up front: LA land use laws are so restrictive and bureaucratic that it's not financially possible to build small, no-frills apartment buildings anymore like we did before the late 1960s. I'll start by talking about how our zoning laws work, and then go...
Let's talk about environmental review.
This is going to be a primer on the California Environmental Quality Act for non-experts and why it makes it so hard to build new housing. Though I am a lawyer, please don't treat this as legal advice - consult your own attorney if you have CEQA questions. I'm also going to talk about an empty porn theater. The two are related. Trust me. A lot of people have the wrong impression that if you want to build a new building somewhere, it's straightforward. Just submit the plans to City Hall, and if the plans match the building code and...