alt Hacker NewsIt's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money into the hands of landlords and homeowners from all newcomers.
LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.
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And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.
I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?
To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as well
There is also a completely unreasonable shortage of water for a much bigger city.
>The massive downzoning of the 1980s...
To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.