I joined the county's 2020 lidar building footprints (LARIAC) to the assessor roll, so every one of the 1,129,558 buildings inside the City of LA has a footprint, a height, and a year built for 98% of them. (All public info, but kind of a pain to grab.)
The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its address, year, height, and footprint. Some things I found: the 1950s, not the 1920s, is the biggest decade still standing; the Valley visibly snaps into existence after the war; and downtown's 150-foot height limit shows up as a hard ceiling until 1957. Zoomed out it draws a 100 m grid because a citywide view can't carry a million polygons, and heights are exaggerated below street level zoom (the corner label says by how much).
Stack: DuckDB spatial for the join, tippecanoe to PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, all static files on R2 with no server. City of LA only, since the parcel polygons I pulled stop at the city line.
Happy to answer questions about the data or the rendering.
Especially with this sort of map regarding this specific city. For example, Beverly Hills is a separate municipality contained entirely within the borders of Los Angeles. It appears here like an empty black space no different from the ocean, lakes, mountains, and parks also scattered around the city. The styling of this map makes it impossible to tell if an area is truly undeveloped and if so, why. Throw in the way there appears to be arbitrary selection criteria for some buildings outside city limits that make them appear as lone buildings in undeveloped space, and I think it adds up to potentially give people a wrong picture of the area.
Great, I'm sure getting more data for a complete picture of the area is a huge undertaking, but simply switching to the light map that shows the geography more clearly is a big improvement.
I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.
I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.
This is one of those 'hey, I can vibe code this in a weekend' projects. Just look at how the AI decided to the entire map in dark mode, making it nearly impossible to tell the ocean and the land apart.
Having moved to LA this february, the sprawl is really something I had no true appreciation for until I moved here for real, and tried to run errands across town. It's a gigantic, beautiful, complicated place.
The density at least means you don't have to really run across town for much and can stay within a certain radius for most all your needs and wants. I mean look at the density of costcos alone. Many other metros might have 1 or 2 for the entire area. Then again a lot of other metros you basically can drive end to end in 25 miles.
8200/sqmi on average. Even the single family home areas punch above their weight compared to the rest of the country because lots are mostly only 50ft wide and most all build-able land is put to some sort of use already.
LA is the densest major urban area in the country. The MSA isn't dense cause it includes all of Los Angeles County which is half desert and mountains. But the built up area beats Chicago and New York cause it has consistent, medium suburban density, 7400 people per sq mi. The others have dense city, New York City is 29,000 people per sq mi, but the far suburbs drop off.
One the experiences for me that never gets old is coming in to LAX (flight path East to West) and the sprawl just goes on forever. The other crazy thing that 60% of the population speak a language other than English at home. So I think it has one of the best options for cuisine in the world, because it's all there (somewhere!)
A family member lives near Pasadena. We asked if they wanted to go to a restaurant near Santa Monica. They sort of scoffed at the idea of going over to the west side unless it was really important.
I think a not insignificant amount of it is literally just pavement too. Absurdly wide roads and parking lots everywhere. It’s a bit of a hellscape really.
It's a bunch of cats (mid-sized, and generally mid all-around, cities) fighting under a blanket. The history of the place is a reaction against New York, where the city is dense and had a bunch of super tall buildings. LA, as a region, said "well we don't want that and enacted a bunch of building codes to hamstring any single city in the region from potentially being a successful, mature urban center.
Pretty infuriating to visit Barcelona recently and see that there was a perfect example of good urban planning sitting right there for decades that LA could've simply copied. In the long run this region is simply incapable of maintaining its infrastructure with its tax base, even today you can see it starting to collapse.
early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity
when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour
but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying
and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)
Paradise? LA was a big giant horrible underdeveloped wasteland in Spanish/Mexican times which, at the time in 1849, had 1,600 residents. Most of them had a largely pastoral life and life was brutal there.
LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city.
Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
Was it that a big, giant, horrible wasteland because it was undeveloped? That is, was there something bad about it other than being undeveloped? Personally, I love living in the city AND land in its natural state.
I think the best intro to LA is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner (it's really about the entire West and its relationship to water, but I think the first few chapters explain LA better than many other books.)
It'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.
They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years.
You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident.
This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
I’m not sure why people are downvoting (without commenting), but I agree.
The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
That makes it sound like the increase was due to some inexorable natural force. California's per capita budget is over twice Arizona's, and they're running a huge deficit on top of that. If taxes are too high, cut taxes. If that means you need to cut spending, cut spending. But don't play "hey, let's tax the other guy!" games and expect that to work.
A lot of this also comes down to prohibiting growth. In Seattle, every time we build a new building, everyone else's property tax payments decrease. High growth years lead to lower bills. The same would work in California, they just don't build much of anything because they've made it nearly impossible to.
So people were getting so wealthy that they couldn't pay the property tax on their wealth. Yes. The problem is, if you let them decide to tax other people instead of themselves for the spending they themselves approve, they will.
It really isn't. You could—and we did!—solve that problem by letting people defer property tax payments or borrow against their equity. California literally has a property tax postponment program for seniors. If we just wanted to keep people from being pushed out of their homes by rising house prices, we'd just expand that program.
The point of Prop 13 is to let people have their cake and eat it too: you get to keep the equity you gain from increased housing prices, but not pay the property tax that comes with them.
With postponement you then can get the opposite problem of people getting stuck in their houses because if they sold they would have a huge deferred tax.
The approach in Washington works well. There is a senior property tax exemption based on age and disposable income. To qualify in King County (where Seattle is) in 2027 you need to be 61+ and have a household disposable income under $101k.
That gets you (1) a freeze on the assessed value for taxes equal to the current assessed value, and (2) an exemption from the statewide school tax and from "excess levies" (basically city and county levies that are voted on).
If income is under between $76k and $89k they also exclude from tax 45% of your assessed value or $70k, whichever is larger, but not more than $200k.
If income is below $76k they exclude 80% of your assessed value or $80k, which is larger.
The income levels are based on median county household income so vary from county to county.
Disposable income is basically everything that goes into AGI plus a list of other things (like any Social Security that is not already in AGI). There are also a bunch of deductions, mostly medical including Medicare premiums, with a $7500 deduction you can elect to take instead of taking any of those specific deduction. Income includes all adults living in the house.
In my county the levies that are not "excess levies" are county roads, sheriff, conservation, mental health, veterans relief, fire district stuff, public utility district stuff, and regional library. The "excess levies" are a couple of school district levies. Overall the excess levies are about 28% of the property taxes in my county. The statewide school levy that is exempt is another 10%, so the bottom line is that the property tax rate for seniors under the income limit is about 60% of the non-senior rate.
Yes, your property tax is high ($17k) because of prop 13 - you are effectively subsidizing others who have sat on their residential and commercial property for 20-30+ years who are paying 25-50% of what you pay for any similar property in the same calendar year!
Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13.
They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism.
Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but one clarification: you don’t even need a trust to pass the tax break down to your kid when you die. Sure, a trust can streamline that process, but it’s not required. At least everyone lucky enough to inherit benefits, not just those whose parents had the foresight (and the means) to create a trust.
Do people really think that if we revoked Prop 13 that other taxes would go down with the new money from property taxes?
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.
To keep tax revenue equal, property taxes for those who purchased recently would go down, and property taxes for those who’d purchased in the past would go up.
The housing market would become more liquid because people would move out of homes if their values rose too much and they could no longer afford the taxes. This would be a shock initially, but over time it would just be seen as part of life like it is in other areas: mostly, empty nesters would downsize to a cheaper, smaller house with lower taxes. Gentrification might be more problematic though.
In practice, probably some phased rebalancing would have to happen to avoid the sudden economic shock, but, politics notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to suggest it could be done and that the end state might be overall ‘better’ for most people. The end state would be how property taxes work almost everywhere else.
Multiple good things would happen without prop 13:
People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax.
The tax burden would be much fairer: instead of the police and schools being funded by newcomers, everyone would be contributing their fair share to fund the city, instead of the longest tenure residents mooching off the rest of us.
Unproductive use of land would be discouraged. If a tract became highly desirable, it would be expensive to let it sit in an unproductive form
Cities could raise taxes as high as their residents wanted them to be, instead of being limited by the opinions of non-residents. Some people want to have better funded police and schools, and local government would actually be allowed to deliver that. Citizens who didnt want to live in expensive cities could vote with their feet to cheaper towns.
I've never heard anybody say anything like that when criticizing prop 13. It usually has more to do with housing prices and the fact that 2 people with the same home value should pay the same in property taxes. If you wanted to create a hereditary landed gentry, it would be hard to come up with a better policy to achieve that than prop 13.
Prop 13 massively distorts the real estate market and creates some strong incentives for home owners. Those distortions and incentives would go away regardless of whether abolishing Prop 13 led to a net increase or decrease in total taxes.
NYC has had so much downzoning too. The icon of the city, the Empire State Building, now has a floor area ratio about double what’s permitted in that district. Many historical buildings, just like ESB, simply could not have been built today under current zoning regulation.
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.
Everything has a gigantic depends* on it when it comes to RE. People want to find one reason why things are bad, but it is always a big bag of mixed things.
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.
It's simpler than you're implying. Vancouver, like most cities, has dramatically limited what land you can build on. More than half the city is restricted to nothing larger than individual houses.
Tokyo, similarly, has hit the limit of what they allow to be built under the highest density of their stepped national zoning levels.
By what measure are you saying they've taken the opposite approach? It seems to me their approach has been nearly identical, just a little less restrictive.
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?
this is the same fallacy of saying there's no point getting a 10x faster server because you'll just have 10x more load and your site will still be slow.
Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition.
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.
If you're really interested: as density increases, population growth decreases. High density places become a sink for populations from elsewhere. You end up reaching a regional equilibrium, where some of the lowest density places start emptying out entirely. Japan is a great example of this, small towns there disappear regularly, as Tokyo grows. Suburban life around Tokyo remains very stable as the center increases and edges decrease.
There's a really great way to think about this that doesn't get enough attention: land rents.
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.
I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.
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.
You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
It's not only energy though. Desalination takes space, and you have to do something with the salt. Last I saw, to have enough DeSal capacity for all of California, you'd have to replace every beach with DeSal plants to have enough capacity, and then you'd still have a salt problem.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
Dense, newer housing needs a lot less water. If Los Angeles had densified rather than sprawling into the Inland Empire, etc. overall water usage would be far lower.
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.
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.
My impression of LA when I got there was that I would never live there, even in the nicest spots. Which confirms my intuition that the richest have no taste.
Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
Interesting, I did not know that. Sure helped create the massive urban sprawl that LA is today, I mean it's basically one city all the way to San Bernardino, almost 100 km to the east.
I was just down there and saw multiple massive development projects going on. Like huge new neighborhoods.
Of course they aren’t in LA proper. But it seems like people that want to live in SoCal want the suburbs. You talk like LA is this artificially small place except that it’s more like a neighborhood in the middle of sprawl at an almost unimaginable scale.
Not saying any of this is good. In fact it’s terrible. Personally I feel like the entire LA metro area is about as close as you can get to a real paradise lost on earth. Maybe one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, bulldozed over for a maze of 6 lane uncrossable suburban streets and cookie cutter McMansions.
It only seems like that because every other type of housing is literally banned.
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:
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.
A complementary view of one point in time is the LA Noire video game's attempt to recreate a (condensed and simplified) 1940s LA environment, with 3D architecture, cars, and ongoing expansion.
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Some early neighborhoods (like palms) have been completely replaced building by building so they really appear as dark here when they weren't. It had a downtown in the 1890s but all those buildings are gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms,_Los_Angeles#/media/File...
Yes. The description is quite misleading. The fact that it is simply an overlay of the current map is also misleading. Looking at the west side, it completely skips the canals period of Venice. Marina Del Rey evolved considerably into its current form. Ballona creek was only dammed in the 30s. Etc.
Also noticeable as the first buildings show up - each one isolated and miles from anyone else? Generally not how human habitation clusters up, even if it was all farms to start.
Wow this is inspiring. I would love to see a very similar visualization for Stockholm, Sweden. I think there is a beauty in seeing a summarized history of expansion, and in reality I can't help but think this is a very fast population boom. One I am sure most metro areas would struggle with. Makes a lot of criticism of LA planning in hindsight feel very unfair.
Los Angeles had the largest public transportation network in the United States until we paved over it[1]. We had over 1,300 miles! You could've gone from Huntington Beach to Downtown and all the way up to Burbank. You can see many of the maps of Los Angeles at the public library[2]. I don't live there anymore, love that place though.
My mom (who is 97) has a vivid memory of seeing FDR in 1935 -- the whole extended family took the the Red Car from Compton to downtown to see his motorcade. She remembered the electric trams worked really well, especially for folks without much money.
This is super cool. Seems to be quite laggy for me though, when the timeline reached 2026 and stopped, buildings still kept popping in for the next 30 seconds.
Well done! What an illustration of the amazing spirit of the founders, followed by the glacial movement as we allowed NIMBYs to take control through more and more laws.
Interesting visualization. I feel like it's misleading though because the presentation shows only Los Angeles City boundaries, not the area in general. LA City has that strange vertical shaft down the the port so the city could keep the taxes from the port, but the visualization shows the rest of the area as empty, which of course it is not. It also excludes Orange County, Riverside County, and the whole area north, the San Fernando Valley, and those all arguably are just as important to the story. In the end, I think the visualization ends up being a net negative in it's current form since it's very misleading
As others have pointed out, this is more about the age of existing buildings than the construction of the city, but it's pretty neat.
About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:
Funny, I built the same thing 9 months ago for Denver, CO - nothing too interesting other than 1 subdivision that exploded in growth over 1-2 years in the 70s. A lot of the older areas around Denver built up pretty quickly.
Just started reading Shawn Levy's book, "The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont" which relates the history of the hotel, but I found the history of Hollywood and LA fascinating. Its a huge part of the story of the hotel and development of the areas surrounding the hotel.
As an Italian I am always amazed when I remember that cities like LA or San Francisco are just 200yo. Here in Italy (but it’s the same for quite any city in Europe) every city can trace its roots back at least two thousand years.
[OP] rustywasm | 14 hours ago
The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its address, year, height, and footprint. Some things I found: the 1950s, not the 1920s, is the biggest decade still standing; the Valley visibly snaps into existence after the war; and downtown's 150-foot height limit shows up as a hard ceiling until 1957. Zoomed out it draws a 100 m grid because a citywide view can't carry a million polygons, and heights are exaggerated below street level zoom (the corner label says by how much).
Stack: DuckDB spatial for the join, tippecanoe to PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, all static files on R2 with no server. City of LA only, since the parcel polygons I pulled stop at the city line.
Happy to answer questions about the data or the rendering.
[Just a fun project, no commercial relevance.]
drivers99 | 13 hours ago
enjoyyourlife | 14 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 14 hours ago
suncemoje | 13 hours ago
slg | 13 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 12 hours ago
slg | 9 hours ago
tcdent | 14 hours ago
computomatic | 13 hours ago
tcdent | 13 hours ago
ZeWaka | 14 hours ago
sgt | 12 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
djmips | 14 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
And here is one that is just fun to watch because of Huell Howser --
Tallest Building | Visiting with Huell Howser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ
tomjakubowski | 10 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
ericzawo | 13 hours ago
asdff | 13 hours ago
oblio | 12 hours ago
asdff | 10 hours ago
ianburrell | 10 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 12 hours ago
nunez | 8 hours ago
lokar | 7 hours ago
WD-42 | 6 hours ago
mullingitover | 10 hours ago
Pretty infuriating to visit Barcelona recently and see that there was a perfect example of good urban planning sitting right there for decades that LA could've simply copied. In the long run this region is simply incapable of maintaining its infrastructure with its tax base, even today you can see it starting to collapse.
ck2 | 13 hours ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi...
early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity
when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour
but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying
and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)
toyg | 13 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 12 hours ago
toyg | 12 hours ago
Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
mag7269 | 12 hours ago
LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city.
Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
thisismyopinion | 12 hours ago
toyg | 12 hours ago
Hnrobert42 | 12 hours ago
Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
esseph | 11 hours ago
Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.
epistasis | 12 hours ago
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.
kfarr | 12 hours ago
syspec | 10 hours ago
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
dbmikus | 10 hours ago
codemac | 10 hours ago
You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
stouset | 10 hours ago
This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
lokar | 7 hours ago
The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
MarkusQ | 7 hours ago
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
fc417fc802 | an hour ago
lokar | 6 hours ago
And the state did slash spending in the years following. In particular funding for the university system was hit very hard.
MarkusQ | 4 hours ago
https://dof.ca.gov/about-us/history/state-budgets/
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
lokar | 6 hours ago
Schiendelman | 4 hours ago
refurb | 6 hours ago
Let people defer increases until their house is sold. This what many states do.
It’s seems insane that we “protect” people whose property taxes are going up because their home is getting so valuable
tikhonj | 6 hours ago
The point of Prop 13 is to let people have their cake and eat it too: you get to keep the equity you gain from increased housing prices, but not pay the property tax that comes with them.
tzs | 3 hours ago
The approach in Washington works well. There is a senior property tax exemption based on age and disposable income. To qualify in King County (where Seattle is) in 2027 you need to be 61+ and have a household disposable income under $101k.
That gets you (1) a freeze on the assessed value for taxes equal to the current assessed value, and (2) an exemption from the statewide school tax and from "excess levies" (basically city and county levies that are voted on).
If income is under between $76k and $89k they also exclude from tax 45% of your assessed value or $70k, whichever is larger, but not more than $200k.
If income is below $76k they exclude 80% of your assessed value or $80k, which is larger.
The income levels are based on median county household income so vary from county to county.
Disposable income is basically everything that goes into AGI plus a list of other things (like any Social Security that is not already in AGI). There are also a bunch of deductions, mostly medical including Medicare premiums, with a $7500 deduction you can elect to take instead of taking any of those specific deduction. Income includes all adults living in the house.
In my county the levies that are not "excess levies" are county roads, sheriff, conservation, mental health, veterans relief, fire district stuff, public utility district stuff, and regional library. The "excess levies" are a couple of school district levies. Overall the excess levies are about 28% of the property taxes in my county. The statewide school levy that is exempt is another 10%, so the bottom line is that the property tax rate for seniors under the income limit is about 60% of the non-senior rate.
isubkhankulov | 9 hours ago
Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13.
They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism.
Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
cucumber3732842 | 9 hours ago
Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
fatcatsbestcats | 4 hours ago
jedberg | 7 hours ago
Yes and yes.
And I pay 10K less a year than my neighbor for the same value house. And I pay 10K more a year than my other neighbor.
I get a huge advantage from Prop 13, but I still think it needs to get replaced with a much fairer system.
bingohbangoh | 9 hours ago
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.
groundzeros2015 | 9 hours ago
jrmg | 9 hours ago
The housing market would become more liquid because people would move out of homes if their values rose too much and they could no longer afford the taxes. This would be a shock initially, but over time it would just be seen as part of life like it is in other areas: mostly, empty nesters would downsize to a cheaper, smaller house with lower taxes. Gentrification might be more problematic though.
In practice, probably some phased rebalancing would have to happen to avoid the sudden economic shock, but, politics notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to suggest it could be done and that the end state might be overall ‘better’ for most people. The end state would be how property taxes work almost everywhere else.
andrewmutz | 9 hours ago
People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax.
The tax burden would be much fairer: instead of the police and schools being funded by newcomers, everyone would be contributing their fair share to fund the city, instead of the longest tenure residents mooching off the rest of us.
Unproductive use of land would be discouraged. If a tract became highly desirable, it would be expensive to let it sit in an unproductive form
Cities could raise taxes as high as their residents wanted them to be, instead of being limited by the opinions of non-residents. Some people want to have better funded police and schools, and local government would actually be allowed to deliver that. Citizens who didnt want to live in expensive cities could vote with their feet to cheaper towns.
anonymousiam | 7 hours ago
https://www.ocassessor.gov/tax-saving-programs/savings-senio...
bloppe | 9 hours ago
tikhonj | 6 hours ago
gradus_ad | 12 hours ago
oblio | 11 hours ago
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.
epistasis | 6 hours ago
returningfory2 | 10 hours ago
kccqzy | 10 hours ago
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.
tokioyoyo | 9 hours ago
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.
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
Tokyo, similarly, has hit the limit of what they allow to be built under the highest density of their stepped national zoning levels.
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
MikeNotThePope | 10 hours ago
mitxela | 10 hours ago
esikich | 9 hours ago
xmprt | 9 hours ago
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.
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
epistasis | 6 hours ago
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.
golem14 | 10 hours ago
wdr1 | 9 hours ago
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.
thrance | 9 hours ago
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
jedberg | 7 hours ago
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
lokar | 7 hours ago
golem14 | 2 hours ago
epistasis | 6 hours ago
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.
slg | 9 hours ago
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.
lwansbrough | 9 hours ago
TomGarden | 9 hours ago
hackernud3s | 7 hours ago
pjerem | 3 hours ago
Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
enopod_ | an hour ago
WD-42 | 6 hours ago
Of course they aren’t in LA proper. But it seems like people that want to live in SoCal want the suburbs. You talk like LA is this artificially small place except that it’s more like a neighborhood in the middle of sprawl at an almost unimaginable scale.
Not saying any of this is good. In fact it’s terrible. Personally I feel like the entire LA metro area is about as close as you can get to a real paradise lost on earth. Maybe one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, bulldozed over for a maze of 6 lane uncrossable suburban streets and cookie cutter McMansions.
epistasis | 5 hours ago
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.
neilv | 12 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPh2AcmG2A
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
[OP] rustywasm | 12 hours ago
kristopolous | 12 hours ago
it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
Probably should put that front and center.
blululu | 5 hours ago
3RTB297 | 4 hours ago
kristopolous | 4 hours ago
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".
valiant-comma | 12 hours ago
kevo1ution | 12 hours ago
CorvusCrypto | 12 hours ago
esseph | 11 hours ago
wathef | 11 hours ago
[1] - https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an...
[2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
davidw | 10 hours ago
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".
khazhoux | 10 hours ago
cobbzilla | 7 hours ago
lokar | 7 hours ago
WD-42 | 6 hours ago
andai | 11 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 11 hours ago
hughw | 11 hours ago
mark242 | 10 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 4 hours ago
tjwebbnorfolk | 10 hours ago
quaddoggy | 10 hours ago
HardCodedBias | 10 hours ago
Brilliant.
gregjw | 9 hours ago
mark242 | 9 hours ago
socalgal2 | 9 hours ago
fsckboy | 8 hours ago
incanus77 | 8 hours ago
About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:
https://medium.com/mapbox/visualizing-an-entire-citys-buildi...
I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.
sevennull | 7 hours ago
burningChrome | 6 hours ago
[OP] rustywasm | 5 hours ago
theycallmeritik | 4 hours ago
globular-toast | 3 hours ago
andretti1977 | 2 hours ago
sshussain270 | 45 minutes ago