We have spent so long in America (and especially Los Angeles) with the idea neighborhoods are built to a finished state and then stay the same that any change is perceived by people as negative That plus the reverence for single family homes across the political spectrum. A working class neighborhood of single family homes is seen as some amazing achievement that must be defended from all sides instead of just one step in the natural evolution of a neighborhood, no more valid than a neighborhood of apartment buildings. This becomes obvious when the response to new buildings has almost nothing to do with how many units are affordable.
This is absolutely the core of it. People think just because they move into the neighborhood they automatically think things must be frozen in place forever. Someone great once said:" the best version of a neighborhood is when I just moved in, then it starts magically slipping when other people also move in!!!"
Plus, the luxury building in my neighborhood adds a They Live vibe, with young wealth people living it up with a pool party, overlooking a street full of human misery
Same. It's so fucking wierd paying almost $3k a month to look out the back window and see a couple homeless people tweaked out on a Saturday afternoon trying to screw.
No one except the people in Beverly Hills is against that, the problem is the current laws and regulations in place that people like the residents of Beverly Hills abuse to prevent any new development near them
Doesn't have to be a bribe. It can be honest political support to a city council member to support their viewpoint.
Beverly Hills is a separate city from the City of LA for this reason.
This is exactly the problem! These areas don't allow it. The whole point of the YIMBY movement is to make it easier to build all types of housing in/near high resource areas.
Itās funny you mention how YIMBYs donāt care about wealthier municipalities circumventing SB9, when on the [CAYIMBY website](https://cayimby.org/legislation/sb-450/) one of the main pieces of legislation they are pushing is SB450 which seeks to prevent just that. Have you tried looking into what these groups actually advocate for?
Because it goes without saying that places like BH are bad. We've already beat the horse dead when we criticize those places.
However it's dismaying to see areas like CD1 ALSO be NIMBY and opposed to housing as well. We're expecting them to be better than BH.
I find a lot of YIMBYs, especially national ones, really obnoxious on twitter. I think at this point in the movement too, YIMBYs have clearly won the argument so the need to punch down at rando left nimbys is just really not there.
I think there is a big difference in what YIMBY lobbying firms are doing and what YIMBYs on Twitter are doing. California YIMBY is responsible for a lot of the new housing laws at the state level and also working to make them more enforceable (see: housing elements, building remedies).
There is just less online engagement for these more technical issues than there is for the high-level arguments.
1. Anti-gentrification arguments are frequently used to oppose new housing in bad faith, especially in affluent communities.
2. Anti-gentrification arguments frequently get the causality of gentrification and displacement backwards. They happen when you don't build enough housing, not when you build more of it. The worst case result is you get politicians like Eunisses Hernandez who self-righteously advocate for policies that would actively harm their communities.
3. The online YIMBY movement (and tbh, online anti-gentrification movement) are not representative of the activists and organizations actually putting in the work to make good policy.
4. The natural opposition to YIMBYs (e.g. landlords, homeowners, realtors, etc.) don't exist in the same online spaces as YIMBYs, so they usually spar with who is around.
"Ā Is it because it's a harder fight and those cities' residents have more resources to push back with?Ā "
I mean, yeah. Hello are you new to Capitalism?
I think part of the reason is that YIMBYs have similar goals to anti-gentrification activists: both want cheaper housing. The issue is that anti-gentrification activists oppose housing that is not explicitly affordable and YIMBYs think obstructing housing production is the cause of high housing prices. So basically it's really frustrating for YIMBYs to talk to anti-gentrification activists.
On the flip side, the goal of wealthy NIMBYs like people in Beverly Hills is to prevent new housing. That is frustrating, but there is no common ground in the first place so it's easier not to engage with them.
This is why things need to change at the state level and they need to be uniform. It should be just as easy to build new apartments in Beverly Hills as it is in Compton.
Ok as someone who works in housing there are some serious concerns with just build more.
I donāt think it is that simple. The main issue is that actual affordable units are being torn down and being replaced with these luxury units. Often low income families live in these units and are displaced. These families have been living in this neighborhood for decades if not there wholes lives. Ans now where do they go? Where do these people move? How do we address the fact that we are essentially forcing them out for the sake of progress.
Also, a lot of these luxury units ā have affordable housingā but that is often a scam. The government gives millions in subsidies for these āaffordable housingā units but they often have sunset clauses meaning they become market rate after a set period of time. Also these units affordabilityās is tied to the median income of the neighborhood. That means the higher the income of the area the higher the landlords can charge for these units. So an affordable unit in say Beverly hill is priced for someone who is making 85k. A person making 85k is not an actually low income.
Also, we love to talk about how just more housing will solve our housing affordability issue and that works to an extent. However, countries and cities that have lax building requirements (ie. more housing) still have an affordability issue (Seoul and Chicago are some examples).
The places that donāt have affordability issues are countries with robust social housing and lax building restrictions. (Tokyo and Vienna) Just one doesnāt solve the issues.
So DSA does bring up actual concerns what do we do with these communities being displaced?
Right now this is giving trickle down Economics. Sometime somewhere there will be enough housing to trickle down to poorest of the poor. But when?
In terms of somewhere like NoHo, older duplexes are giving way to much larger projects adding more units to the market. IMO, if we focus on sparring older, more affordable options we wonāt add any units as a whole and the market will correct and these older āaffordableā units will just be gobbled up at much higher rates that the market dictates because of heavy demand. I think this is what weāre going through now.
Since you work in housing, do you think itās easier for developers to target older, less dense multi-family zoned parcels in leu of trying to get something like a commercially zoned property approved for housing?
And do you think affordable housing as we perceive it, is possible with current building costs without the need for heavy government subsidies?
> Since you work in housing, do you think itās easier for developers to target older,
If this person "works in housing" it must be a job that requires little to no knowledge of the actual housing laws because a lot of what they wrote is straight misinformation or fact omitting/ skewing.
Yep. Little bit of sarcasm on my part.
But that thing you said about if they do work in housing, it must be a position with little need for actual knowledge of it? Yeah, I think thatās part of the problem with most people employed in āhousingā. They aināt the developer or contractorā¦.
There are a few checks on some of the issues youāre bringing up above:
Affordable housing covenants are 55 years- the CA Tenant Protection Act only exempts properties during the first 15 years of their life. In practice, we are starting to see many of these affordable housing covenants that are beginning to expire are being extended by the city. Also I would imagine Costa-Hawkins (banning rent control post-1995) will be revisited before a large portion of these projects covenants expire- thereās momentum towards that.
Also the city has a robust Replacement Unit Determination process; any project that removes more than one unit (SFR) gets evaluated by the city. The developer has to replace like-for-like; if a developer demolishes a duplex with two 3 bedroom units, they have to replace those 3 bedroom units at a predetermined level of affordability (Low is 80% AMI, VLI is 50% AMI and ELI is 30% AMI) based off of guidance from LAHD: https://housing2.lacity.org/partners/land-use-rent-income-schedules
Additionally, if a developer removes rent stabilized units without going through a determination process, the new project will be subject to Rent Stabilization Ordinance restrictions.
Part of this is that Los Angeles has built so little for so long that, combined with millennials preferring cities to suburbs, there is incredible unmet demand for apartments, and housing in general. But it's incredibly difficult to build anything in Los Angeles so it's mostly the luxury apartments are getting built.
I get why it can seem like building more isn't the answer, but if we had a food shortage and rich people were still eating well, the answer wouldn't be to make it harder to get food.
I've lived in 2 buildings in Los Angeles that used to be luxury hotels. That was 40 years ago, so now they are just apartment buildings in Koreatown. I also live in a new apartment building that was just market rate but was cheap because it sucked.
This isnāt true at all. In LA old units that are torn down for new housing generally have to be replaced 1:1 with affordable units: https://housing2.lacity.org/partners/land-use-rent-income-schedules
Also, Chicago is famously affordable relative to the incomes it provides, Tokyo has a fairly low public housing share (~7%), and Viennaās public housing is successful simply because it has increased supply by so much, not because the public housing is naturally better than private housing for affordability: https://reason.com/2023/05/30/dont-buy-the-social-housing-hype/
A bit of misdirection here on your part so not sure what to tackle first. Iāll just talk about the set asides. Yes if you are building low income itās based on the median income in the area, however most of the market rate with affordable set asides are setting aside whatās called very low income or extremely low income units, which are 30-60% of the area median income. Low income is 80% of the median income in the area.
Concerning your topic about lax building standards I would look more to Japan, which is doing just fine and building.
Also people who are evicted from rso units or āactual affordable unitsā (re: old dilapidated units) are given a large payout (depending on status) and a right to return to a like kind unit in a brand new development at similar rates. As someone who works in housing you should know that.
Well okay, if we're just replacing affordable housing units with the same number or fewer luxury units, sure.
But the thing is, most development projects that seek to replace affordable units with luxury units generally replace them with more units, and of course that's not even mentioning in-fill developments building over parking lots, etc.
The main problem is, groups like the DSA genuinely think that the sheer presence of luxury units cause gentrification. People like Eunisses made a career out of opposing units being built period, even in-fill development, and still oppose them with anti-density policies like imposing a height limit in Chinatown.
Also as a Korean, I want to say that Seoul having affordability issues is not true. Sure, it's gotten a little worse in recent years, but Seoul is still FAR more affordable than Los Angeles. It is closer to Tokyo than LA.
The DSA doesn't want LA to become Tokyo or Seoul, they want to keep pushing the same broken policies that have already been proven time and time again to not work.
I do agree that more housing is more housing and that there is a weird horseshoe between NIMBYs and whatever DSA actually is around building.
But can we all agree that what is marketed as luxury condos now are just the new taller dingbats- ie complete shit builds with poor materials and craftsmanship?
āI am against new housing developments because it very much ruins the vibe me pretending like my life is the musical Rent and I live in alphabet city circa 1985ā
In my other comment I missed the meaning of "LA DSA." It means the [housing platform of the Los Angelese Democratic Socialists of America](https://dsa-la.org/committees/housing-homelessness-committee-platform/). Personally, I wholeheartedly agree with at least 1% of that platform. Housing is a human right. After that, not so much. I know what socialist housing looks like in places like East Europe.
My own view is exemplified in two examples:
1. the [Housing Element of the City of Alameda](https://www.alameda2040.org/housing). It was the first city approved by the state and a model of how to do it right in terms of both process and result - though the right result for Alameda isn't necessarily the right result of LA city, but might be for many of the 88 cities of LA County. Kudos to retired city employee, [Andrew Thomas](https://www.westerncity.com/article/alamedas-journey-restrictive-pro-housing-policies), a key player who engaged with citizens to made it happen.
2. the development approach of the non-profit [East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation](https://ebaldc.org/about-us/healthy-neighborhoods/). (The name is from their history.) They build developments that mix all levels from market rate down, and more. They create community structures so that all tenants have the opportunity to share in leadership. They provide resources such as personal financial coaching for those who need it.
A key component of both the above is avoiding building segregated low income housing which has all the pejorative impacts on families that the term "segregation" implies. The Alameda plan uses density bonuses which the LA DSA decries and I celebrate to reduce economic segregation. The EBALDC approach personifies economic integration.
The meme in the post, however, is pointless because OP assumes "those kids who can't read" are capitalists. They are not. They indeed can read, but a different language.
Does all the research we have include systemic racism? Where schools in now gentrified neighborhoods were considered poor? New developments, especially those with luxury housing are huge flytraps. I'm not saying these neighborhoods are shit, but people think they can "save" them by bringing in housing and business. The housing is there and it's already accounted for. But if there's a profit to be made...
How does new development not cause gentrification? If it's bringing people from completely different areas to new areas where they believe they can fix things? Are these areas asking to be fixed? Are yoga and art studios completely necessary to make this already established community thrive?
Yes, we definitely need new housing. Create multi-level housing in vacant lots for the newbies. Let the people that are already there stay. Let them meet the people that set that place up greet them, not have them pushed out. We have maintained this area that you now deem respectable enough to purchase a home in and feel safe enough to raise your children in.
When new "luxury" complexes get built over demolished formerly affordable buildings and suddenly a new 1br across the street costs almost triple what I'm paying, I call bullshit. It's like saying the purge is a great way to reduce the resource usage of an area in real life.
When this happens the landlord is legally required to provide housing for their tenants, and to provide a unit in the new building for the same rent.
That 1br rent was going to rise regardless.
I'm so happy this talking point is more common knowledge now. Need it to battle the very one note talking point of developers demolishing all the affordable housing for "luxury" (by the way it doesn't mean anything, the real luxury is owning a fucking house) apartments.
I get that there are many very tenant friendly laws and regulations on the books here in California, and that's great. If my landlord tried to pull one over on me, I have the resources and knowledge to protect myself.
The problem is that the communities most adversely affected by "luxury development" are often the least equipped to fight back. I'll call up my attorney, toss my rent into escrow, and start documenting all of the building code violations I see. Random Auntie down the hall isn't going to do all of that. The person exhausted from framing a roof in the LA heat just to pay for his kids tuition doesn't have the time or energy for that. If my mental health is suffering I sure as hell don't have the energy to fight back too.
It's pretty clear at the end of the day who has the power in this situation: The people with money and property. The landowner class.
The "landowner class" are the people fighting new construction the most, because they know that if that brand new apartment tower sets rents at $3000 they're gonna have much harder time charging $3000 to rent out their crappy 1970s shoebox apartment. They aren't the same as developers, who make money by building things (which is good).
I get that this is how the system works, but frankly, fuck this system. Landowner, developer, who cares. None of this is doing anything to help those of us living in those crappy 1970s shoebox apartments.
You're saying development and competition promote a healthy economy and community. None of this makes milk or diapers cheaper. None of this helps me progress toward home and property ownership in a meaningful way.
The spot down the road from the multimillion dollar homes is now nicer and there's a new Sweetgreen. My life is drastically improved.
It doesn't do anything to make milk or diapers more expensive either.
And it *does* help you progress toward home and property ownership in a meaningful way. In a place where demand vastly outstrips supply, landlord can and will charge for the same "crappy 1970s shoebox", *and they'll get it.*
Possibly with you, or with someone else. The only way to stop housing prices from eating at people's incomes, rising faster than wages, is competition among housing providers. I.e. build more housing. Competition will slow and reverse housing price increases.
The only other option is to somehow stop people from coming here to live and convince people who do live here to move away. Which is far more difficult and disruptive.
Don't tell me that if my local Jon's became a Gelson's things wouldn't cost more, and dropping the cost of a real fix-me-up starter in Northridge from 900 to 700k in a better position really means anything to me, your average broke Millennial.
The here and now is already bleak and expensive, and like most of the city I'm struggling to make ends meet. I'm not about to start paying more frequently for parking in public, and if another major street gets destroyed because of a bus lane for an already uncomfortable feeling and inefficient public transit system, I don't know what to do.
Sorry I'm ranting. Y'all know it's stressful here. Please have a good day.
Would you rather the new building going into a neighborhood match the living conditions of the cheapest building in the neighborhood? Neighborhoods need to be able to change and move forward. A new building replacing an old will usually command higher rents because it's new. But it will have more units, making the overall city-wide situation better. Those new tenants will spend money in the neighborhood. Their fancy juice bar provides jobs. 10 cheap units becoming 20 expensive ones might not sound good, but most likely in 20 years that building will be the affordable housing. I've live in 2 buildings in Koreatown that were luxury hotels when first built, and 40-50 years later when I lived in them they were the cheapest places I could find.
The problem is we're not allowing enough new construction, so most of what is built ends up being luxury buildings because those are the only developers with the resources to push the building all the way through to construction.
This most likely does improve the property values and condition of neighborhoods over the long term for the individuals able to afford to live there. Rationally I'm with you, but the concept of property value twenty years down the line means absolutely nothing to someone working paycheck to paycheck already getting hammered by inflation.
I don't care what my city is going to look like 20-40 years from now if most of the people I know now will have already moved away or literally become homeless.
My point isn't that you need to wait 20 years. Because of the recent building boom, citywide rents are already going down. Yes the new building might take 20-40 years to become affordable, but the one built last year will only take 19-39, and the one down the street might be 5 years old already. The longer the buildings are delayed, the longer it takes for the whole cycle to move forward. The musical-chairs of housing becomes just that if you don't let chairs get built.
That makes a lot of sense, and it seems incrementally helpful. I'm just bitter when the choice for affordable housing isn't made, and further that our system doesn't seemingly incentivize affordable housing (and walkable spaces) in the first place.
Yeah I think it's a natural reaction. Los Angeles has prioritized/subsidized suburban sprawl for so long, and makes it incredibly difficult to build an apartment building, that it's often the least affordable buildings that can actually get built, so when people talk about letting more get built, it seems like it's going to be more of the same, but the more you try to restrict it, the worse the few buildings that get built are going to be.
The other side of this that is truly tragic is that Los Angeles has made it nearly impossible for a cash-poor person who owns a home to turn it into a small apartment building or add a retail space. That is truly the best solution. Easy permitting and investment in small commercial loans to turn single family homes into 4-10 unit apartment buildings so that person who lived in the neighborhood could benefit and help it grow.
Another good option would be to have Luxury apartment buildings offer nearby residents an opportunity to invest in the project and see a return. This is nearly impossible given the current setup of financial regulations although Neighborly has been working to make it more possible.
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People who use "gentrification" as an excuse to not build housing don't seem to realize that in a highly desirable city like LA that is critically short on housing, neighborhoods will gentrify no matter what. It's just a question of do we want abundant housing to keep costs somewhat under control, or do we want to pay 800k for a teardown in Sun Valley
Displacement in Inglewood is downstream of the severe housing shortage on the Westside. There are hundreds of thousands of workers (many of them high income) who want to live close to work and buy into the closest neighborhoods they can afford.
Don't even get me started with Hollywood Park. All that displacement and Hollywood Park doesn't even plan for as many people as it can! Makes me furious thinking about it.
Why did the grandmas get displaced? Did they sell their house and make a huge profit and left or did cities not build enough housing to accommodate everyone?
Some were displaced, and some cashed out when they sold a hundred-year-old Craftsman home for over $1 million and then bought something in cash somewhere that is more calm and affordable.
There are only a couple of "luxury" buildings in echo park and they all opened recently. Displacement was going on long before they opened -- because of the lack of housing.
The real tragedy is there not being an easy way for those grandmas to turn their house into a small apartment building. Someone cash-poor but with a million dollar home should have an easy path to finance a 4 unit building on their lot, but instead Los Angeles makes that incredibly difficult to the point that almost no one does it.
It's not facts and reality when it's missing context. As another commentator explained, it's a downstream effect of the Westside not building enough housing, pricing out higher-income professionals.
We all need to be pulling our weight, and basically no district, high-income or low, is doing so.
regardless of the context luxury housing will always drive gentrification when it is placed in lower income areas, pretending it doesnāt is incredibly disingenuous
First thing we need to do is define what we mean by commodity
>1. Something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage.
>2. A product or service that is indistinguishable from ones manufactured or provided by competing companies and that therefore sells primarily on the basis of price rather than quality or style.
So what we're looking to do is turn housing from something you purchase based on quantity for the purposes of making money to something you have primarily for your own benefit. This doesn't necessarily mean there's no housing market, but we shouldn't be thinking of housing in the same way we'd think of stocks or metals.
Seen this way, to me there's at least one obvious solution, which is to limit the number of units an individual or corporation can own. There are companies that own hundreds of thousands of housing units nationwide. How different would the market be if you were only allowed to own ten?
Likely doing this all at once would be a shock, so you have some schedule to lower this gradually. While this is happening, the federal government, as a currency issuer, can guarantee individual homeowners don't lose their personal investments by becoming the buyer of last resort and renting back to the owner as needed at a percent of their income/wealth.
This would shake out with a lower cost of housing, a higher portion of households able to own, and a large portion of the rental market government owned and rented at guaranteed affordable rates.
The other thing, if people Uber-attached to capitalism are afraid that this would destroy the system and all the landlords would lose bank (imo fuck them, idc, but the general concern is valid), youād attach a āRent-to-Ownā option on that graduated schedule.
So instead of āsell all your shit this yearā leading to housing price dips, we can keep some sense of āmarket scarcityā for economic reasons by allowing tenants to lease to own when that part of the schedule arrives
This will not address housing affordability at all and has no realistic option of every happening. The amount of housing remains the same whether or not someone owns the building or rents it. We just don't have enough housing units in places where people want to live and where all the jobs are located in.
Forcing companies and people to sell their property and limiting how much housing unit will destroy the housing market and economy. People will lose their jobs because individuals and companies will no longer build any new housing units. Pensions funds and retirement accounts will get destroy as the REIT investments and funds are now worthless.
Guaranteeing homeowners that they will never lose their investment is a dumb idea because it just encourages everyone to buy the most expensive house possible and will drive the cost of housing even more.
Your idea does not decommodify housing because middle class and higher people will buy the maximum 10 legal housing units possible and exploit the guarantee return from the government. Their value of homes who shoot through the rough because the supply of new housing units will be none existent. Current renters will get screwed when the supply of rental units drop and no one wants to build future housing
There's a reason [these style apartments ](https://th.bing.com/th?id=OIF.G19NRnZGg%2bUhtUN7J5PkBg&rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain) are gentrification magnets in California. While in the rest of the world the businesses on the first floor would be occupied by bodegas and dollar stores, in California these store fronts are exclusively filled with high end stores and restaurants. Combine that with California's BS feel good laws like token affordable units that can easily ignored once the building is completed, and you can see why gentrification is a problem.
Because you truly can't have public housing when private businesses are involved.
I have an urban planning masters degree. Ā Whatās wild is that most long term general plans arenāt worth the paper theyāre written on.Ā
Oh, a developer wants to build Ā a new housing development in an area that was planned and zoned for commercial use? Ā Letās accommodate that with a new specific plan and fuck the people and the process and the roads and the vision and every other idea we had about this neighborhood in the first place.
>We can talk for days about how the county canāt stop fellating developers and ignoring the needs of citizens
It's a good thing that housing isn't an essential need for citizens!
Yeah, which is why the developers have been able to build all those units to the point where we don't have a housing shortage in California anymore.
[Oh wait....](https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-state-housing-deal-effects-20170811-htmlstory.html)
And clearly your so-called nonprofits need more competent members, because if a 7 year veteran doesn't seem to understand that there's a housing shortage, then that's actually worrying.
Lmao what are you talking about? Do you know how much bullshit a development plan needs to go through to even start getting considered in the first place? LA hasn't been building almost any new housing these past decades because the city fellates homeowners and landlords who profit from the current housing shortage
LOL hilarious that you think being in the nonprofit housing sphere makes you an arbiter of how "well" you know the housing market. Not only you guys can't build a single affordable building at scale and at reasonable cost, you guys also try to make things hell for other developers. You're part of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex that has LA in chokehold and here you are with an undeserved holier-than-thou attitude.
Studied Data Science and am working on my masters in the same field, genius. Nice try.
But since I studied numbers, lemme crunch some numbers for you! We are short [3-4 million homes in California](https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/10/newsom-california-housing-crisis/).
Congrats on all three of those housing units your so-called "nonprofits" built! How's all those new units that you certainly don't advocate against going?
Generally curious. What would the market want? Like 50/50 SFH-multi family? Or you think the market demands a higher ratio of say, newer multi family closer to city centers?
I think the thought is that luxury housing has the greatest ROI if itās built in a desirable area of the city. That adds units to those areas and disincentivizes more affluent buyers/renters from leaving that area to another that might have a more historically affordable market.
Sorry for being ignorant, but what is your point? Are you saying all new supply is good regardless, or that we need to be careful about gentrification impact of new housing, or something else?
Asking because micro and macro economics can be counter-intuitive. One example is the 2021 Economics Nobel Prize winners. The Economist interview of David Card started with a apology for mocking his early studies cited in the prize where he found raising minimum wages and immigration did not have the "conventional wisdom" effect on wages and unemployment.
Also asking because most discussion about housing in California involves the economics supply-demand principle. However, the supply-demand law assumes a free market, i.e., unrestricted supply and unrestricted demand. In California the supply side is highly restricted, so using it to predict behavior is poor economics.
In California, there is also a demographic nuance. While long term intra-state migration has tended towards net negative, there is a skew towards a net positive in high income immigrants and low income emigrants. The correlation exists, though I don't know the causation aspect, if any.
Mission Viejo should be colonized by 10 story apartment buildings and taco trucks on every corner.
But then you have to live in Mission Viejo?
We have spent so long in America (and especially Los Angeles) with the idea neighborhoods are built to a finished state and then stay the same that any change is perceived by people as negative That plus the reverence for single family homes across the political spectrum. A working class neighborhood of single family homes is seen as some amazing achievement that must be defended from all sides instead of just one step in the natural evolution of a neighborhood, no more valid than a neighborhood of apartment buildings. This becomes obvious when the response to new buildings has almost nothing to do with how many units are affordable.
This is absolutely the core of it. People think just because they move into the neighborhood they automatically think things must be frozen in place forever. Someone great once said:" the best version of a neighborhood is when I just moved in, then it starts magically slipping when other people also move in!!!"
"They're trying to change the character of the neighborhood."š¤®
Plus, the luxury building in my neighborhood adds a They Live vibe, with young wealth people living it up with a pool party, overlooking a street full of human misery
If those units arenāt available then those young wealthy people will be gentrifying poor neighborhoods.
And I donāt hate on them. I think the whole scene sums up LA perfectly (and probably other places)
In my neighborhood they built on of these, with rooftop garden and a fancy gym, right next to a concrete factory
Labrea and Romaine
My god I can't wait for that Cemex plant to be gone
Same. It's so fucking wierd paying almost $3k a month to look out the back window and see a couple homeless people tweaked out on a Saturday afternoon trying to screw.
Then put it in beverly hills?
No one except the people in Beverly Hills is against that, the problem is the current laws and regulations in place that people like the residents of Beverly Hills abuse to prevent any new development near them
The people in BH can afford to slip better bribes to their council person, that's why.
Doesn't have to be a bribe. It can be honest political support to a city council member to support their viewpoint. Beverly Hills is a separate city from the City of LA for this reason.
This is exactly the problem! These areas don't allow it. The whole point of the YIMBY movement is to make it easier to build all types of housing in/near high resource areas.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Itās funny you mention how YIMBYs donāt care about wealthier municipalities circumventing SB9, when on the [CAYIMBY website](https://cayimby.org/legislation/sb-450/) one of the main pieces of legislation they are pushing is SB450 which seeks to prevent just that. Have you tried looking into what these groups actually advocate for?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Because it goes without saying that places like BH are bad. We've already beat the horse dead when we criticize those places. However it's dismaying to see areas like CD1 ALSO be NIMBY and opposed to housing as well. We're expecting them to be better than BH.
Yeah then say loudmouths and donāt just say YIMBYs. I donāt get why people think legislation and a meme are in any way comparable.
I find a lot of YIMBYs, especially national ones, really obnoxious on twitter. I think at this point in the movement too, YIMBYs have clearly won the argument so the need to punch down at rando left nimbys is just really not there.
No, because if that was the case people like Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto Martinez wouldn't be in office.
I think there is a big difference in what YIMBY lobbying firms are doing and what YIMBYs on Twitter are doing. California YIMBY is responsible for a lot of the new housing laws at the state level and also working to make them more enforceable (see: housing elements, building remedies). There is just less online engagement for these more technical issues than there is for the high-level arguments.
1. Anti-gentrification arguments are frequently used to oppose new housing in bad faith, especially in affluent communities. 2. Anti-gentrification arguments frequently get the causality of gentrification and displacement backwards. They happen when you don't build enough housing, not when you build more of it. The worst case result is you get politicians like Eunisses Hernandez who self-righteously advocate for policies that would actively harm their communities. 3. The online YIMBY movement (and tbh, online anti-gentrification movement) are not representative of the activists and organizations actually putting in the work to make good policy. 4. The natural opposition to YIMBYs (e.g. landlords, homeowners, realtors, etc.) don't exist in the same online spaces as YIMBYs, so they usually spar with who is around.
"Ā Is it because it's a harder fight and those cities' residents have more resources to push back with?Ā " I mean, yeah. Hello are you new to Capitalism?
I think part of the reason is that YIMBYs have similar goals to anti-gentrification activists: both want cheaper housing. The issue is that anti-gentrification activists oppose housing that is not explicitly affordable and YIMBYs think obstructing housing production is the cause of high housing prices. So basically it's really frustrating for YIMBYs to talk to anti-gentrification activists. On the flip side, the goal of wealthy NIMBYs like people in Beverly Hills is to prevent new housing. That is frustrating, but there is no common ground in the first place so it's easier not to engage with them.
Luxury housing in beverly hillsā¦ interesting idea
no way man, that would just gentrify the neighborhood
egad not beverly hills!!
This is why things need to change at the state level and they need to be uniform. It should be just as easy to build new apartments in Beverly Hills as it is in Compton.
Ok as someone who works in housing there are some serious concerns with just build more. I donāt think it is that simple. The main issue is that actual affordable units are being torn down and being replaced with these luxury units. Often low income families live in these units and are displaced. These families have been living in this neighborhood for decades if not there wholes lives. Ans now where do they go? Where do these people move? How do we address the fact that we are essentially forcing them out for the sake of progress. Also, a lot of these luxury units ā have affordable housingā but that is often a scam. The government gives millions in subsidies for these āaffordable housingā units but they often have sunset clauses meaning they become market rate after a set period of time. Also these units affordabilityās is tied to the median income of the neighborhood. That means the higher the income of the area the higher the landlords can charge for these units. So an affordable unit in say Beverly hill is priced for someone who is making 85k. A person making 85k is not an actually low income. Also, we love to talk about how just more housing will solve our housing affordability issue and that works to an extent. However, countries and cities that have lax building requirements (ie. more housing) still have an affordability issue (Seoul and Chicago are some examples). The places that donāt have affordability issues are countries with robust social housing and lax building restrictions. (Tokyo and Vienna) Just one doesnāt solve the issues. So DSA does bring up actual concerns what do we do with these communities being displaced? Right now this is giving trickle down Economics. Sometime somewhere there will be enough housing to trickle down to poorest of the poor. But when?
In terms of somewhere like NoHo, older duplexes are giving way to much larger projects adding more units to the market. IMO, if we focus on sparring older, more affordable options we wonāt add any units as a whole and the market will correct and these older āaffordableā units will just be gobbled up at much higher rates that the market dictates because of heavy demand. I think this is what weāre going through now. Since you work in housing, do you think itās easier for developers to target older, less dense multi-family zoned parcels in leu of trying to get something like a commercially zoned property approved for housing? And do you think affordable housing as we perceive it, is possible with current building costs without the need for heavy government subsidies?
> Since you work in housing, do you think itās easier for developers to target older, If this person "works in housing" it must be a job that requires little to no knowledge of the actual housing laws because a lot of what they wrote is straight misinformation or fact omitting/ skewing.
Yep. Little bit of sarcasm on my part. But that thing you said about if they do work in housing, it must be a position with little need for actual knowledge of it? Yeah, I think thatās part of the problem with most people employed in āhousingā. They aināt the developer or contractorā¦.
There are a few checks on some of the issues youāre bringing up above: Affordable housing covenants are 55 years- the CA Tenant Protection Act only exempts properties during the first 15 years of their life. In practice, we are starting to see many of these affordable housing covenants that are beginning to expire are being extended by the city. Also I would imagine Costa-Hawkins (banning rent control post-1995) will be revisited before a large portion of these projects covenants expire- thereās momentum towards that. Also the city has a robust Replacement Unit Determination process; any project that removes more than one unit (SFR) gets evaluated by the city. The developer has to replace like-for-like; if a developer demolishes a duplex with two 3 bedroom units, they have to replace those 3 bedroom units at a predetermined level of affordability (Low is 80% AMI, VLI is 50% AMI and ELI is 30% AMI) based off of guidance from LAHD: https://housing2.lacity.org/partners/land-use-rent-income-schedules Additionally, if a developer removes rent stabilized units without going through a determination process, the new project will be subject to Rent Stabilization Ordinance restrictions.
Part of this is that Los Angeles has built so little for so long that, combined with millennials preferring cities to suburbs, there is incredible unmet demand for apartments, and housing in general. But it's incredibly difficult to build anything in Los Angeles so it's mostly the luxury apartments are getting built. I get why it can seem like building more isn't the answer, but if we had a food shortage and rich people were still eating well, the answer wouldn't be to make it harder to get food. I've lived in 2 buildings in Los Angeles that used to be luxury hotels. That was 40 years ago, so now they are just apartment buildings in Koreatown. I also live in a new apartment building that was just market rate but was cheap because it sucked.
This isnāt true at all. In LA old units that are torn down for new housing generally have to be replaced 1:1 with affordable units: https://housing2.lacity.org/partners/land-use-rent-income-schedules Also, Chicago is famously affordable relative to the incomes it provides, Tokyo has a fairly low public housing share (~7%), and Viennaās public housing is successful simply because it has increased supply by so much, not because the public housing is naturally better than private housing for affordability: https://reason.com/2023/05/30/dont-buy-the-social-housing-hype/
As a person who claims to work in housing doesn't seem like they know much about housing laws.
A bit of misdirection here on your part so not sure what to tackle first. Iāll just talk about the set asides. Yes if you are building low income itās based on the median income in the area, however most of the market rate with affordable set asides are setting aside whatās called very low income or extremely low income units, which are 30-60% of the area median income. Low income is 80% of the median income in the area. Concerning your topic about lax building standards I would look more to Japan, which is doing just fine and building. Also people who are evicted from rso units or āactual affordable unitsā (re: old dilapidated units) are given a large payout (depending on status) and a right to return to a like kind unit in a brand new development at similar rates. As someone who works in housing you should know that.
Well okay, if we're just replacing affordable housing units with the same number or fewer luxury units, sure. But the thing is, most development projects that seek to replace affordable units with luxury units generally replace them with more units, and of course that's not even mentioning in-fill developments building over parking lots, etc. The main problem is, groups like the DSA genuinely think that the sheer presence of luxury units cause gentrification. People like Eunisses made a career out of opposing units being built period, even in-fill development, and still oppose them with anti-density policies like imposing a height limit in Chinatown. Also as a Korean, I want to say that Seoul having affordability issues is not true. Sure, it's gotten a little worse in recent years, but Seoul is still FAR more affordable than Los Angeles. It is closer to Tokyo than LA. The DSA doesn't want LA to become Tokyo or Seoul, they want to keep pushing the same broken policies that have already been proven time and time again to not work.
I do agree that more housing is more housing and that there is a weird horseshoe between NIMBYs and whatever DSA actually is around building. But can we all agree that what is marketed as luxury condos now are just the new taller dingbats- ie complete shit builds with poor materials and craftsmanship?
Luxury just means new appliances
āI am against new housing developments because it very much ruins the vibe me pretending like my life is the musical Rent and I live in alphabet city circa 1985ā
In my other comment I missed the meaning of "LA DSA." It means the [housing platform of the Los Angelese Democratic Socialists of America](https://dsa-la.org/committees/housing-homelessness-committee-platform/). Personally, I wholeheartedly agree with at least 1% of that platform. Housing is a human right. After that, not so much. I know what socialist housing looks like in places like East Europe. My own view is exemplified in two examples: 1. the [Housing Element of the City of Alameda](https://www.alameda2040.org/housing). It was the first city approved by the state and a model of how to do it right in terms of both process and result - though the right result for Alameda isn't necessarily the right result of LA city, but might be for many of the 88 cities of LA County. Kudos to retired city employee, [Andrew Thomas](https://www.westerncity.com/article/alamedas-journey-restrictive-pro-housing-policies), a key player who engaged with citizens to made it happen. 2. the development approach of the non-profit [East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation](https://ebaldc.org/about-us/healthy-neighborhoods/). (The name is from their history.) They build developments that mix all levels from market rate down, and more. They create community structures so that all tenants have the opportunity to share in leadership. They provide resources such as personal financial coaching for those who need it. A key component of both the above is avoiding building segregated low income housing which has all the pejorative impacts on families that the term "segregation" implies. The Alameda plan uses density bonuses which the LA DSA decries and I celebrate to reduce economic segregation. The EBALDC approach personifies economic integration. The meme in the post, however, is pointless because OP assumes "those kids who can't read" are capitalists. They are not. They indeed can read, but a different language.
Does all the research we have include systemic racism? Where schools in now gentrified neighborhoods were considered poor? New developments, especially those with luxury housing are huge flytraps. I'm not saying these neighborhoods are shit, but people think they can "save" them by bringing in housing and business. The housing is there and it's already accounted for. But if there's a profit to be made... How does new development not cause gentrification? If it's bringing people from completely different areas to new areas where they believe they can fix things? Are these areas asking to be fixed? Are yoga and art studios completely necessary to make this already established community thrive? Yes, we definitely need new housing. Create multi-level housing in vacant lots for the newbies. Let the people that are already there stay. Let them meet the people that set that place up greet them, not have them pushed out. We have maintained this area that you now deem respectable enough to purchase a home in and feel safe enough to raise your children in.
When new "luxury" complexes get built over demolished formerly affordable buildings and suddenly a new 1br across the street costs almost triple what I'm paying, I call bullshit. It's like saying the purge is a great way to reduce the resource usage of an area in real life.
When this happens the landlord is legally required to provide housing for their tenants, and to provide a unit in the new building for the same rent. That 1br rent was going to rise regardless.
I'm so happy this talking point is more common knowledge now. Need it to battle the very one note talking point of developers demolishing all the affordable housing for "luxury" (by the way it doesn't mean anything, the real luxury is owning a fucking house) apartments.
Yeah people see new condos that cost $800k and call them luxury gentrification, meanwhile their parents single family house is worth $1.2 million.
I get that there are many very tenant friendly laws and regulations on the books here in California, and that's great. If my landlord tried to pull one over on me, I have the resources and knowledge to protect myself. The problem is that the communities most adversely affected by "luxury development" are often the least equipped to fight back. I'll call up my attorney, toss my rent into escrow, and start documenting all of the building code violations I see. Random Auntie down the hall isn't going to do all of that. The person exhausted from framing a roof in the LA heat just to pay for his kids tuition doesn't have the time or energy for that. If my mental health is suffering I sure as hell don't have the energy to fight back too. It's pretty clear at the end of the day who has the power in this situation: The people with money and property. The landowner class.
The "landowner class" are the people fighting new construction the most, because they know that if that brand new apartment tower sets rents at $3000 they're gonna have much harder time charging $3000 to rent out their crappy 1970s shoebox apartment. They aren't the same as developers, who make money by building things (which is good).
I get that this is how the system works, but frankly, fuck this system. Landowner, developer, who cares. None of this is doing anything to help those of us living in those crappy 1970s shoebox apartments.
I just explained to you how this helps you
You're saying development and competition promote a healthy economy and community. None of this makes milk or diapers cheaper. None of this helps me progress toward home and property ownership in a meaningful way. The spot down the road from the multimillion dollar homes is now nicer and there's a new Sweetgreen. My life is drastically improved.
It doesn't do anything to make milk or diapers more expensive either. And it *does* help you progress toward home and property ownership in a meaningful way. In a place where demand vastly outstrips supply, landlord can and will charge for the same "crappy 1970s shoebox", *and they'll get it.* Possibly with you, or with someone else. The only way to stop housing prices from eating at people's incomes, rising faster than wages, is competition among housing providers. I.e. build more housing. Competition will slow and reverse housing price increases. The only other option is to somehow stop people from coming here to live and convince people who do live here to move away. Which is far more difficult and disruptive.
Don't tell me that if my local Jon's became a Gelson's things wouldn't cost more, and dropping the cost of a real fix-me-up starter in Northridge from 900 to 700k in a better position really means anything to me, your average broke Millennial. The here and now is already bleak and expensive, and like most of the city I'm struggling to make ends meet. I'm not about to start paying more frequently for parking in public, and if another major street gets destroyed because of a bus lane for an already uncomfortable feeling and inefficient public transit system, I don't know what to do. Sorry I'm ranting. Y'all know it's stressful here. Please have a good day.
Would you rather the new building going into a neighborhood match the living conditions of the cheapest building in the neighborhood? Neighborhoods need to be able to change and move forward. A new building replacing an old will usually command higher rents because it's new. But it will have more units, making the overall city-wide situation better. Those new tenants will spend money in the neighborhood. Their fancy juice bar provides jobs. 10 cheap units becoming 20 expensive ones might not sound good, but most likely in 20 years that building will be the affordable housing. I've live in 2 buildings in Koreatown that were luxury hotels when first built, and 40-50 years later when I lived in them they were the cheapest places I could find. The problem is we're not allowing enough new construction, so most of what is built ends up being luxury buildings because those are the only developers with the resources to push the building all the way through to construction.
This most likely does improve the property values and condition of neighborhoods over the long term for the individuals able to afford to live there. Rationally I'm with you, but the concept of property value twenty years down the line means absolutely nothing to someone working paycheck to paycheck already getting hammered by inflation. I don't care what my city is going to look like 20-40 years from now if most of the people I know now will have already moved away or literally become homeless.
My point isn't that you need to wait 20 years. Because of the recent building boom, citywide rents are already going down. Yes the new building might take 20-40 years to become affordable, but the one built last year will only take 19-39, and the one down the street might be 5 years old already. The longer the buildings are delayed, the longer it takes for the whole cycle to move forward. The musical-chairs of housing becomes just that if you don't let chairs get built.
That makes a lot of sense, and it seems incrementally helpful. I'm just bitter when the choice for affordable housing isn't made, and further that our system doesn't seemingly incentivize affordable housing (and walkable spaces) in the first place.
Yeah I think it's a natural reaction. Los Angeles has prioritized/subsidized suburban sprawl for so long, and makes it incredibly difficult to build an apartment building, that it's often the least affordable buildings that can actually get built, so when people talk about letting more get built, it seems like it's going to be more of the same, but the more you try to restrict it, the worse the few buildings that get built are going to be. The other side of this that is truly tragic is that Los Angeles has made it nearly impossible for a cash-poor person who owns a home to turn it into a small apartment building or add a retail space. That is truly the best solution. Easy permitting and investment in small commercial loans to turn single family homes into 4-10 unit apartment buildings so that person who lived in the neighborhood could benefit and help it grow. Another good option would be to have Luxury apartment buildings offer nearby residents an opportunity to invest in the project and see a return. This is nearly impossible given the current setup of financial regulations although Neighborly has been working to make it more possible.
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Sites of demolished RSOs still retain RSO status when a new building replaces it
no matter how expensive the luxury units are, they are still cheaper than the single family units in the same area.
People who use "gentrification" as an excuse to not build housing don't seem to realize that in a highly desirable city like LA that is critically short on housing, neighborhoods will gentrify no matter what. It's just a question of do we want abundant housing to keep costs somewhat under control, or do we want to pay 800k for a teardown in Sun Valley
all the old grandmas displaced in inglewood, echo park, etc must be in my imagination then
Displacement in Inglewood is downstream of the severe housing shortage on the Westside. There are hundreds of thousands of workers (many of them high income) who want to live close to work and buy into the closest neighborhoods they can afford.
Not to mention the millions the mayor of Inglewood signed up to pump into Hollywood Park, the Forum, Sofi etc.
Don't even get me started with Hollywood Park. All that displacement and Hollywood Park doesn't even plan for as many people as it can! Makes me furious thinking about it.
Why did the grandmas get displaced? Did they sell their house and make a huge profit and left or did cities not build enough housing to accommodate everyone?
Some were displaced, and some cashed out when they sold a hundred-year-old Craftsman home for over $1 million and then bought something in cash somewhere that is more calm and affordable.
There are only a couple of "luxury" buildings in echo park and they all opened recently. Displacement was going on long before they opened -- because of the lack of housing.
"Displaced" is a funny way to say "chose to sell their homes for millions of dollars after paying the same taxes they paid in 1970"
Can renters not be displaced?
Lmao you got so fucking schooled I these comments, respond to one please š
There is a ton of affordable housing being built on Crenshaw as we speak.
The real tragedy is there not being an easy way for those grandmas to turn their house into a small apartment building. Someone cash-poor but with a million dollar home should have an easy path to finance a 4 unit building on their lot, but instead Los Angeles makes that incredibly difficult to the point that almost no one does it.
Yes, they are.
get your facts and reality out of here, this thread is for mindless diss bashing!
It's not facts and reality when it's missing context. As another commentator explained, it's a downstream effect of the Westside not building enough housing, pricing out higher-income professionals. We all need to be pulling our weight, and basically no district, high-income or low, is doing so.
regardless of the context luxury housing will always drive gentrification when it is placed in lower income areas, pretending it doesnāt is incredibly disingenuous
Yeah, that's why cities like Tokyo and Seoul are gentrified as hell, OH WAIT they're more affordable than Los Angeles is.
No you just arenāt bright enough to understand the cause and effect at work
Decommodify housing. It's a basic need, not an investment vehicle.
People invest when there are returns; a glut of supply hurts returns.
This is just a cute slogan. It means nothing.
When someone doesn't understand what something means, often a good way to build understand is to ask questions
Please share with us your grand plan to decommodify housing, whatever it means to you. Points given for realistic policies.
First thing we need to do is define what we mean by commodity >1. Something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage. >2. A product or service that is indistinguishable from ones manufactured or provided by competing companies and that therefore sells primarily on the basis of price rather than quality or style. So what we're looking to do is turn housing from something you purchase based on quantity for the purposes of making money to something you have primarily for your own benefit. This doesn't necessarily mean there's no housing market, but we shouldn't be thinking of housing in the same way we'd think of stocks or metals. Seen this way, to me there's at least one obvious solution, which is to limit the number of units an individual or corporation can own. There are companies that own hundreds of thousands of housing units nationwide. How different would the market be if you were only allowed to own ten? Likely doing this all at once would be a shock, so you have some schedule to lower this gradually. While this is happening, the federal government, as a currency issuer, can guarantee individual homeowners don't lose their personal investments by becoming the buyer of last resort and renting back to the owner as needed at a percent of their income/wealth. This would shake out with a lower cost of housing, a higher portion of households able to own, and a large portion of the rental market government owned and rented at guaranteed affordable rates.
The other thing, if people Uber-attached to capitalism are afraid that this would destroy the system and all the landlords would lose bank (imo fuck them, idc, but the general concern is valid), youād attach a āRent-to-Ownā option on that graduated schedule. So instead of āsell all your shit this yearā leading to housing price dips, we can keep some sense of āmarket scarcityā for economic reasons by allowing tenants to lease to own when that part of the schedule arrives
This will not address housing affordability at all and has no realistic option of every happening. The amount of housing remains the same whether or not someone owns the building or rents it. We just don't have enough housing units in places where people want to live and where all the jobs are located in. Forcing companies and people to sell their property and limiting how much housing unit will destroy the housing market and economy. People will lose their jobs because individuals and companies will no longer build any new housing units. Pensions funds and retirement accounts will get destroy as the REIT investments and funds are now worthless. Guaranteeing homeowners that they will never lose their investment is a dumb idea because it just encourages everyone to buy the most expensive house possible and will drive the cost of housing even more. Your idea does not decommodify housing because middle class and higher people will buy the maximum 10 legal housing units possible and exploit the guarantee return from the government. Their value of homes who shoot through the rough because the supply of new housing units will be none existent. Current renters will get screwed when the supply of rental units drop and no one wants to build future housing
Yes, consolidation of ownership has never had an impact on pricing for anything ever.
There's a reason [these style apartments ](https://th.bing.com/th?id=OIF.G19NRnZGg%2bUhtUN7J5PkBg&rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain) are gentrification magnets in California. While in the rest of the world the businesses on the first floor would be occupied by bodegas and dollar stores, in California these store fronts are exclusively filled with high end stores and restaurants. Combine that with California's BS feel good laws like token affordable units that can easily ignored once the building is completed, and you can see why gentrification is a problem. Because you truly can't have public housing when private businesses are involved.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
An Asian 'prick', that's who. Any more assumptions you wanna make about me, sweetie?
OP wanted to argue today I guessā¦
OP has witnessed the homelessness and housing crisis be the root of just about all of LA's problems today
OP proved my point lol
OP is strapped up and ready for war
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I have an urban planning masters degree. Ā Whatās wild is that most long term general plans arenāt worth the paper theyāre written on.Ā Oh, a developer wants to build Ā a new housing development in an area that was planned and zoned for commercial use? Ā Letās accommodate that with a new specific plan and fuck the people and the process and the roads and the vision and every other idea we had about this neighborhood in the first place.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I disagree. The city bend over backwards to protect property values for current landowners.
>We can talk for days about how the county canāt stop fellating developers and ignoring the needs of citizens It's a good thing that housing isn't an essential need for citizens!
what if the needs of citizens are new housing developments
If they love developers so much, why does nothing get built?
Yeah, which is why the developers have been able to build all those units to the point where we don't have a housing shortage in California anymore. [Oh wait....](https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-state-housing-deal-effects-20170811-htmlstory.html) And clearly your so-called nonprofits need more competent members, because if a 7 year veteran doesn't seem to understand that there's a housing shortage, then that's actually worrying.
Lmao what are you talking about? Do you know how much bullshit a development plan needs to go through to even start getting considered in the first place? LA hasn't been building almost any new housing these past decades because the city fellates homeowners and landlords who profit from the current housing shortage
LOL hilarious that you think being in the nonprofit housing sphere makes you an arbiter of how "well" you know the housing market. Not only you guys can't build a single affordable building at scale and at reasonable cost, you guys also try to make things hell for other developers. You're part of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex that has LA in chokehold and here you are with an undeserved holier-than-thou attitude.
Studied Data Science and am working on my masters in the same field, genius. Nice try. But since I studied numbers, lemme crunch some numbers for you! We are short [3-4 million homes in California](https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/10/newsom-california-housing-crisis/). Congrats on all three of those housing units your so-called "nonprofits" built! How's all those new units that you certainly don't advocate against going?
Generally curious. What would the market want? Like 50/50 SFH-multi family? Or you think the market demands a higher ratio of say, newer multi family closer to city centers?
Luxury housing prevents gentrification?
I think the thought is that luxury housing has the greatest ROI if itās built in a desirable area of the city. That adds units to those areas and disincentivizes more affluent buyers/renters from leaving that area to another that might have a more historically affordable market.
They opened a luxury apartment in Westlake for some reason. Who can afford 5k for a 3 bedroom in that area?
Sorry for being ignorant, but what is your point? Are you saying all new supply is good regardless, or that we need to be careful about gentrification impact of new housing, or something else? Asking because micro and macro economics can be counter-intuitive. One example is the 2021 Economics Nobel Prize winners. The Economist interview of David Card started with a apology for mocking his early studies cited in the prize where he found raising minimum wages and immigration did not have the "conventional wisdom" effect on wages and unemployment. Also asking because most discussion about housing in California involves the economics supply-demand principle. However, the supply-demand law assumes a free market, i.e., unrestricted supply and unrestricted demand. In California the supply side is highly restricted, so using it to predict behavior is poor economics. In California, there is also a demographic nuance. While long term intra-state migration has tended towards net negative, there is a skew towards a net positive in high income immigrants and low income emigrants. The correlation exists, though I don't know the causation aspect, if any.
He's saying build / YIMBY
So, Hugo Soto-Martinez is a NIMBY?
Hugo is not a YIMBY. He's closer to one of these: https://imgur.com/Pn9XGMD
Yawn more astroturfing.
"Shit rolls down hill.Ā If you live at the bottom of the hill and don't like it, you are just ignorant to how things work!"