Jake's blog
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...
Let's talk about why Beverly Hills will have to build affordable housing.
Like I've written at length here, ground zero for the housing crisis isn't the homeless tent cities of Downtown Los Angeles, or immigrants crammed six-to-a-room in East Oakland. No, it's actually in the leafy, picture-perfect neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and Palo Alto. None of these places has built a goddamn thing in fifty years - so the corporate lawyers of the world go and gentrify the hell out of poor, minority neighborhoods. And if you get forced out of, say, Echo Park, Los Angeles by someone like me, your options are to go to San Bernardino, Las Vegas, or if...
Let's talk about why California has too many empty shopping malls and too few houses.
Now, I'll talk about why California ended up with way too many empty malls and way too few houses. But to do this, I have to focus in on a really arcane detail of how state and local government is financed. Just as background, state and local governments traditionally rely on three types of taxes to stay solvent: sales tax, property tax and income tax. There's some variation based on how many services each government provides, but in general there's no free lunch. (This is why Texas, for example, has such high property and sales taxes - to compensate for...