You use the phrase "trivially fix". If your definition of "trivially" means several decades with the investment of billions of dollars, then perhaps. There are no "trivial fixes" in city infrastructure. Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. This drives the price of any development up making it unprofitable in most cases. I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously.

To add to what the central city budget problem is - each new piece of street and road in LA has, on average, not paid for itself in terms of increased revenue from taxes or otherwise.

So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.

Add over decades all of the street and road construction that LA has done, and it now has a unsustainable amount of road maintenance it's responsible for compared to the amount of revenue it pulls in. I'm having a hard time finding numbers though so please correct me or add numbers if you can find them.

Not true.

California is doing a ton of things to create housing — just look at the many state bills that have passed in a span of 2-3 years: https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed

Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies.

It’s just going to take time between passing bills, incentives lining up, and getting money for building homes. That’s also why the state has focused on ADUs too — because individuals can get through a whole decision process to develop housing quicker than a big developer can. ADUs have a lot of problems but the state knows this and is attacking the issue on both short and long term scales.

You don’t just steer the 4th largest economy in the world. It’s built like a steakhouse and steers like one.

I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision.

Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.

> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control.

The state of California already mandated certain density improvements:

https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-...

There is another law that mandated local communities plan to manage housing to accommodate population growth or the local community loses it's ability to deny permits. Struggling to find that but it was well before 2025 I believe.

The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs:

https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-californ...

50 years ago, the U.S. was a nation that _made things_ whereas today it's primarily people conference calling and making slide decks for each other (perhaps not for long, given the progress of LLMs). What if that's the real underlying problem and not how many layers of people we can stack on top of each other in a small space?

> lack of density

One interesting question: what is "density"? Is it number of people per road-mile? Number of households? Structures? Sales tax revenue? Property tax revenue? Property value per road mile?

LA has somewhat insane property values right now, and by the metric of millions of dollars of residential value per road-mile, I think one might imagine the density to be sufficient to afford decent streets. Of course, that does not translate to municipal budgets or even to disposable income of the owners or the residents in those properties.

> replacing your wastewater system costs money... lots of money. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow.

I kind of disagree. Deferring maintenance does make emergency repairs more likely, but if you need to replace your sewer piping (for example) every 30-50 years, doing it at 33 year intervals means three installs in 100 years, and doing at 50 years means two installs in 100 years.

As long as you don't push the deferral so long that you end up having emergency repairs and remediation of significant leaks, deferring maintenance reduces the burdens of maintenance.

You do need to invest more in surveillance if you want to run your installed infrastructure longer, but surveillance is a good practice regardless, because sometimes 30-50 year infrastructure fails early. For sewers, the idea is camera inspections of all the municipal lines every 3-5 years to generate a prioritized list of maintenance/replacement projects; do the work as budget allows, rinse and repeat. Older sewer systems will benefit from more frequent inspections and newer systems can get by with less. You really shouldn't fully eliminate inspections on new systems, because earth movement and early material failure due to manufacturing error don't always happen on your schedule.

That said, a lot of sewers were initially installed in the post war boom times of the 1950s and deferred maintenance is coming due -- many portions may have been replaced as needed, but a lot of original pipes are hitting 70+ years of service life and are likely nearing the end of their life. There's an argument to be made that if they had been replaced at their forecast service life, things would be better now ... but that really just brings forward the next replacement.

IMHO, The City of Los Angeles really should be multiple municipalities. The boundary is pretty wonky, in part to capture the port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, but also downtown vs San Fernando Valley; and that has got to make a lot of administration stuff significantly harder than if it were multiple geographically focused municipalities.

> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density

I agree that density is likely the right way forward, but I don't think it's trivial. Especially since organic density increases have been suppressed for so long, it's helpful to coordinate rapid increases in density so that dense housing lands in places with appropriate transit and other services; but coordination is difficult.

The city of Los Angeles is pretty dense.

Also, in 2025 they spent 3 times as much dealing with legal fallout from police misconduct compared to street maintenance.

I'm of multiple minds about this. I like high density. I like a car-less lifestyle of the last 30 years I lived without a car.

That said, currently I live in West LA. Traffic is atrocious! Doubling or tripling density will make it even worse, probably exponentially worse. Adding non-car transit options just isn't in the cards in any reasonable time frame because of all the people that block construction and because the USA, like most countries, refuses to setup a win-win situation for transit (like Japan) and instead continues to insist it be government based and therefore most likely to go over budget during construction and then under budgeted during operation.

At the same time, I wish our entire coast was 30-50 story high-rises. It's ridiculous to me that only a few elites get to view the ocean from their homes on the coast and everyone else is shut out because no one is allowed to build the high-rises.

so the story is about a silly law requiring bike lanes and handicap curbs and your proposal is to kick everyone out of their homes and remigrate them into the cities?

ADA code is insanely expensive. We did a couple blocks of those silly dimple ramps for $250,000 . You could hire every blind person in town a personal guide for less than it would be to ADA all the side walks.

A number of cities in Northern California are doing just this. We have at least 12 high density projects being built in Santa Cruz and we are a small city.

I've been thinking recently about how with the impending demographics crunch hitting a lot of countries soonish you're going to see a sort of day of reckoning for municipalities that were run poorly in the past because people will just move to ones that that don't have horrible budget and infrastructure deficits and the one sthat do will just shrivel up and die.

Tha perpetually increasing population growth is no more and that means no more growing tax base to paper over terrible decisions to pass them onto another generation.

For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.

Once I became a Dad, getting socks for Christmas suddenly turned into one of the most thoughtful gifts possible. A self-care item. The flip was very sudden and surprising.

this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple.

> Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane

see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.

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