Jake's blog
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...
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...