Jake's blog
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...
New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area should all be more like Sacramento.
Got your attention, didn't I? Great. Because when it comes to the housing shortage, and if you want an example of what to do, New York, LA and the Bay Area should follow Sacramento's example. Yes, Sacramento, the cowtown mid-sized city that hosts the state government. There's three major reforms that Sacramento's doing right now, which other cities would be wise to emulate. they're rezoning the whole city at once for more housing. they're giving automatic approval for new apartments that meet the underlying zoning law. they abolished the minimum parking law. I'll discuss each of the three in turn....
Let's talk about the coronavirus's effect on the housing crisis.
I've avoided specifically talking about the effects of the coronavirus epidemic on the housing question for a while, because I've never quite had a handle on the way that things would eventually shake out. But now, you can start to see the outlines of how the future of work, and the future of housing, are going to be going forward. BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: Coronavirus has unintentionally opened up a safety valve for the housing crisis, because it makes a lot of semi-remote work possible, and it extends the big-city commuter belts further out than was previously practical. The single...
Let's talk about why LA is so expensive.
A friend of a friend asked just why the hell housing in Los Angeles isn't getting any cheaper if condo towers seem to be going up everywhere. So, I've written an explainer. This is written about Los Angeles, but the same processes have made the San Francisco Bay Area a mess as well. There is no reason why Los Angeles needs to be as expensive as it is. LA isn't on a peninsula like San Francisco, bracketed by mountains like Seattle, or on an island like Manhattan. As Dorothy Parker joked, LA is 72 suburbs in search of a city....
Let's talk about empty shopping center parking lots.
i have nothing to say about our current horrific national crisis that hasn't already been said. this post, about a dying shopping center, is my attempt to get my mind off it. There's actually two real estate crises going on at once in California. There's the housing shortage, which everyone's painfully aware of - with homeless on the streets, and million-dollar houses in East Los Angeles. But there's also a the parallel crisis that's been festering with commercial real estate. But first, let's talk about zoning law a little bit. Every last square inch of land in any California city...