Jake's blog
HELL YEAH. California finally legalized apartment buildings near transit, statewide. Let's talk about the consequences.
BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: The big rezoning bill, SB79, passed the Legislature and it is a big fucking deal for dealing with the housing crisis. Because now it's legal to build apartments near public transit, statewide. Side note before I begin - this post is about LA, but everything about this also applies to the Bay Area. There are two crises that California faces these days. #1 is the housing crisis, because there just isn't enough housing to match the number of jobs. The housing crisis exists because cities have made it nearly impossible to build new housing. Some suburbs,...
new event: september 17, 7pm, cordelia wine bar, brooklyn
the event in brooklyn that was originally cancelled is back on for next week. see you there? note: this is a non-ticketed event; come as you are.
My Thursday event in Brooklyn has been postponed.
The venue owners have decided to do a renovation, so the book talk is postponed until we can get a new date set. I'll post here when there's a new time.
On reaching the natural endpoint of suburban development
Paul Krugman wrote a good post on Substack yesterday about how Atlanta is approaching the limits of sprawl. What I really want to nail down is how this is really a limitation imposed by road capacity more than anything else. If you build your infrastructure and your cities with only drivers in mind, you reach capacity real fast. The gold standard for how many people you can move in any given direction is PPHPD, which stands for "People Per Hour Per Direction," for one specific lane or track. One lane/track of... ...has a capacity of this many people/hour/direction. City...
Let's talk about how the California state government has reformed the California Environmental Quality Act, making it significantly easier to build more housing.
One of the big reasons that California has a housing crisis is, ironically, an environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). CEQA (pronounced SEEK-wha) is a major obstacle to building new housing. Governor Newsom is expected to sign a reform bill on Friday exempting new urban apartments from CEQA. Wait. How could something called the California Environmental Quality Act possibly be bad? Really, it's because of the law of unintended consequences. But to explain why, I'm going to first give some background on what CEQA actually is. CEQA, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1970, requires state and...