Jake's blog
Let's talk about why public services suck even in rich suburbs.
A lot of you live in objectively wealthy suburbs where public services still seem to suck. Burbank. Davis. Cupertino. Long Island. Sounds dumb if you think about it, right? Because the whole reason people move to the 'burbs and pay all those taxes is so they don't have to put up with budget cuts, school closures, poorly-paved roads, and stuff like that. We'll discuss why your local government always seems to be broke, even if you live in one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Bottom line, up front: Suburbs are so inefficient with land that it's much harder...
I'm disappointed in my hometown.
I was partly raised in San Francisco, and partly in Davis, California, a college town which calls itself the Bicycle Capital of the World, about an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco. This is going to be a shade more personal than most of my posts, since my hometown is determined to price out all the kids who graduated from Davis High School, or studied at UC Davis. Introduction The State has a bunch of new laws to end the housing crisis which require each region to plan for and build a ton of new housing between 2021...
Let's talk about why most of America looks like endless suburbs and strip malls.
One of the shitty parts about most American cities is that it's all suburban subdivisions and strip malls. There's not much in the way of charming historical neighborhoods, and people wonder why things got that way. Well, here's why: because American zoning laws require it. And these same laws are what's preventing suburban sprawl from evolving into traditional Main Streets. I'll use Los Angeles as an example - but the same processes apply nearly everywhere. In the order of importance, these laws are: (1) the building use law; (2) the building size laws; (3) the minimum parking law; and (4)...
Let's talk about how to use land more creatively.
In attacking the housing shortage, sometimes the fixes are pretty straightforward to conceive of. It ain't rocket science to speed up housing approvals, or to build apartment buildings near train stations. But there's also a lot of land which is available for new development if you start thinking creatively. And I'm not just talking about building apartments in parking lots. I'm talking about wasted land which literally does nothing for anybody. The last 70 years of American suburban development really really IS that inefficient. Follow me, if you will, to Davis, California. Davis is an affluent college town made up...
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...