Jake's blog
Let's talk about homelessness.
Bottom line, up front: homelessness isn't about alcohol and drug treatment, or mental health, or better weather, or moral fiber. Ultimately, it's just about having enough housing. I'm going to illustrate this with an anecdote, then going to illustrate it with the data, and finally talk about how to attack the problem. First, the anecdote. My story is about the guy who lived across the street when I was growing up in San Francisco. He was a Russian painter, and his name was Bogdanoff. Bogdanoff wasn't a landscapes-and-portraits painter, mind you. He was a make-your-walls-a-different-color painter, a blue-collar guy. Bogdanoff...
A primer on affordable housing in California.
Most of the shitshow that we're in is because of the affordable housing shortage, as I've written at length. I'm going to use this part of this housing series to discuss just what affordable housing means, and to clarify just why it's so damned hard to build more of it. There's four kinds of affordable housing. Cheap market-rate housing. Privately-subsidized housing in for-profit developments. Publicly-funded housing. Public housing. 1: Market rate housing which happens to be cheap. When you, a normal Angeleno, talk about "affordable housing," you probably are talking about an apartment that you can afford to live in....
Let's talk about how to build more cookie-cutter homes.
Today, you think of new tract housing as an exclusively suburban phenomenon, something you see way the hell out at the urban fringe, in places like Rockland County, Irvine or Modesto. You don't see that anymore in expensive coastal cities, because New York and California's local governments have decided that it's more important to keep Greenwich Village, West LA and Palo Alto exactly as they were in 1970. But it wasn't always this way. And if you'll hop in the DeLorean with me, I'll show you some examples, and give some ideas for how to bring back mass-produced homes in...
Let's talk about how rich cities are trying to dodge their legally-required housing quotas.
For this post, I'll talk about how rich cities in greater LA are trying to bullshit their way out of building new housing. This is going to be a deep dive into how the sausage gets made. INTRODUCTION: THE STATE QUOTAS Right now, the state has new laws which requires cities to zone for, and build, enough housing to meet a state quota. If your don't zone enough, the state can void your zoning, appoint a judge to run the zoning process, and generally sue you into oblivion. If your city doesn't build enough, developers can show up with a...
Let's talk about how to build cheap market-rate apartments.
I talk a lot about the apartment I used to live in in Sacramento, because it really was a great place to live as a baby lawyer making $56,000 a year at the attorney general's office. The building was seven one-bedroom apartments with a patio in the back. No garage, no gym, no elevator, nothing super-luxe, but it was cheap, adequate housing. This kind of cheap, no-frills apartment is called a "dingbat." It originated in Los Angeles, and has been called "apartment building architecture at its worst." So, let's talk about how these kinds of cheap, adequate buildings used...