Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.

Or do we think that property taxes would go up while other taxes stay put?

This feels like the argument at play when people criticize Prop 13. Not saying it’s good but California hasn’t ever cut taxes meaningfully and I’m not convinced raising property taxes would solve anything. California would still be expensive to live in.

On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds.

That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home.

People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes

The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day.

Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.

Some plots of land are very valuable due to their location, what you can access, etc. It's pretty straightforward to find out what the monthly cost of land is in any area, either from simple regressions on property values, or empty lot sales, etc.

When the land rent starts to excessively exceed average income of number of households allowed to live on that plot of land, that's pretty inefficient.

Owning land is society letting you say to other people: you're not allowed here. When we restrict land us so that people can not figure out their best use of it, eg 4 families building townhouses together, we start to restrict access to opportunity and basic economic freedom.

If apartments, even small buildings, were legal in LA, they'd be building them everywhere and they'd immediately fill up.

The Mayor, Karen Bass, accidentally screwed up and made affordable possible to build, as in allowing it to get through the gauntlet of approvals. This resulted in a massive amount of extremely costly affordable housing to get built, merely because the approval couldn't be stopped arbitrarily:

https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-h...

Ift that sort of project approval was opened up to not only affordable housing, but also for-profit housing, there would be a massive shift in the type of new housing in the area.

The city’s original 1916 zoning regulation permitted a hypothetical maximum population of 55 million; after WWII the new zoning regulations essentially limited hypothetical maximum population to a little more than 10 million if everything is fully developed. Recent initiatives like City of Yes did too little to reverse the trend.

When I was in Vancouver, people kept saying if we got rid of rent control, houses will be built, rent will come down. But houses are expensive to build, and they need to make money asap in the “exit economy”. They won’t come up easily, unless they make it cheap to build, which isn’t happening. Rents just started coming down, but so far insignificant amount (I just checked, a place I paid $2500 for in 2019, is going for $3300 after the decrease!), and demand curbing had more influence on it. Personally, I think we shouldn’t force people to move to a different area because rents skyrocketed. I’m all in support of getting paid out though.

People look at Tokyo, and talk about “less-zoned build whatever, and no rent control, thus more or less affordable”. Which also depends*. YoY rents are going up by 10-15% right now, even more in some areas. It’s unreasonable for a good chunk of residents. Speculation is big influx of money from China. But you can actually challenge the rent increase in a good chunk of cases. So it’s a pseudo-rent control.

I’m not saying something is right or wrong, just saying everything has multiple layers of problems.

At least watch this money shot: https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 (wait for the video to reveal the construction years)

As Max Fisher puts it: American cities have been frozen in amber.

And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.

We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.

For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.

Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.

As it is, water usage in Los Angeles has had flat water usage for decades, even as its population grew by over a million people.

By downzoning so much, Los Angeles got the worst of all worlds: higher water usage, unaffordable housing, and unbelievably bad traffic because everybody has to drive such massive distances to the job centers.

Downzoning is an environmental disaster compared to the alternative, like allowing factories to dump their pollution into rivers type of disaster.

https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/

It genuinely is much more sporadic then you think. 1 or 2 houses, then empty blocks with streets there, then 1 more, then some building ...

For a modern version, look up california city - modest suburban homes respectably maintained with cars in the driveway surrounded by endless nothing.

I have to presume there's some people that look at this and say "wow, this is perfect".

That's probably part of the reason they got rid of them. You still see that argument used against transit: "it will bring _____ to our part of town".

Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.

Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.

Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.

LA genuinely built in bursts. The 1920s and the postwar decade each account for over 230,000 buildings still standing, and the 1930s and 1970s onward are much thinner, so even a perfect per-year animation would surge and pause.

But really it's for performance -- I group buildings into 5-year bins and fade each bin in over its span, rather than popping each building at its exact year.

A per-year filter on a million polygons re-tessellates every visible tile, which was too slow to animate, whereas fading pre-built layers is reasonably fast.

Glad you found your house!

I’ve helped with a few other zoning visualization projects recently, similar workflow. The only similarity is that each city/jurisdiction makes its data available in a different way. It’s usually accessible but it does mean there’s a lot of work munging the data to a usable format.

Here’s one of the projects: https://github.com/kfarr/zoningviz