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.
slg 1 days ago [-]
>The massive downzoning of the 1980s...
To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.
dv_dt 21 hours ago [-]
That 10M is a theoretical back of the napkin number. The city would have had to make multiple major infrastructure improvements, including major public transportation improvements, as well as secure major new sources of water for that to occur. To even accommodate the current modern number of people, there had to be fairly aggressive public water conservation regulations and campaigns - which amazingly did keep the water consumption fairly static. But if you were to more than double the residents, it's really not clear where the water would come from.
epistasis 19 hours ago [-]
That infrastructure was still built, just out in the Inland Empire, at a far far higher cost per capita than if LA had stuck to its "theoretical back of the napkin number." (That's how zoning works, it's theoretical back of the napkin numbers that block buildings.)
Densification of existing land use is exceedingly cheap. People use far less water, fewer miles of sewer, fewer vehicle miles, fewer miles of wire and pipe, all while having access to a far greater set of amenities. That's what downzoning took away from everyone.
dv_dt 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but I would hypothesize that in the Inland empire there was a net reduction of water use transforming agricultural acreage to suburban acreage. Water rights drives a lot of california development, anyone suggesting oh just divert water from x to y doesn't understand or is glossing over the massive fights historically and in coming up over water- as climate change has shrunk the historic supply
HEmanZ 20 hours ago [-]
Do humans without lawns consume that much water? Have you worked on something where this problem came up in some unexpected way? Yes pipes need to be updated if a lot of tall complexes are built, but is total water that much at all?
I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.
I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.
MisterTea 20 hours ago [-]
> Do humans without lawns consume that much water?
Do you assume humans with a lawn consume more? My lawn only consumes what the sky gives it.
HEmanZ 19 hours ago [-]
That’s great! You’re an outlier in the US still.
Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.
lwansbrough 1 days ago [-]
Same story in San Francisco of course, and the rest of the US pretty much aside from a few cities in recent years.
TomGarden 1 days ago [-]
At least we have parking lots. Ah, so many parking lots
hackernud3s 1 days ago [-]
There's still Houston but that's it as far as I know.
pjerem 1 days ago [-]
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.
stasomatic 21 hours ago [-]
I've lived in LA on and off for over a decade cumulatively. If Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Burbank, North Hollywood count as "L.A." :)
I love the climate and nature there, besides the fires. Ocean, lakes, mountains, deserts, all within 1-3 hour drive.
It is a dehumanizing city to commute in, and is expensive, but it's the best one I have lived in (NYC, Brooklyn, NJ cities, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami) and I want to return when finances allow.
enopod_ 1 days ago [-]
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.
kfarr 2 days ago [-]
And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.
bingohbangoh 1 days ago [-]
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.
andrewmutz 1 days ago [-]
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.
anonymousiam 1 days ago [-]
Under Proposition 19, some people can still move without penalty, as long as they're over age 55, and move to a new property located in California.
"People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax." - this just means that older and retired people would get kicked out of stable living situations, driven by property tax assessments which are often driven by real estate market boom/bust cycles. And housing prices would be just as high as with prop 13.
The bad part about prop 13, is that it never should have applied to anything other than primary residences of people. Having it apply to rental & commercial properties is what warps the market.
Cities should be cutting their police budgets - most small towns have nearly 50% of the budgets tied up in police. All while there has been a multi-decade decrease in crime.
biophysboy 20 hours ago [-]
Old people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where property tax is based on current market value? It sucks to move, but luckily they have an extremely valuable property to sell
parineum 19 hours ago [-]
Young people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where the market value is lower. Sucks to not live in the heart of the city but luckily they have their entire lives ahead of them to accumulate the wealth required.
biophysboy 17 hours ago [-]
yes, they just need to accumulate wealth until they're 47, just like previous generations. no need to rethink land use or property tax
bingohbangoh 10 hours ago [-]
Do you think cities would make the taxes fairer (e.g. spread them out over more residents) or just raise taxes on the these previously protected properties?
My money is on the latter. Nobody is getting a tax cut if Prop 13 is repealed. Everybody's taxes will just continue to go up.
bloppe 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
jrmg 1 days ago [-]
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.
bingohbangoh 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
That's what I'm saying _won't_ happen. The high property taxes as-is will stay high and previously protected properties will have their taxes shoot up. That is my prediction and nothing about the state of California, or the US broadly, suggests otherwise to me.
tikhonj 1 days ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 1 days ago [-]
It would increase liquidity in the housing market.
syspec 1 days ago [-]
Do you own your home? Here in Ca? You know that property tax is 1.4ish % and goes up by 2% a year, pretty much no matter what?
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
isubkhankulov 1 days ago [-]
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.
fatcatsbestcats 1 days ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 1 days ago [-]
> It’s feels like icky European feudalism.
Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
jedberg 1 days ago [-]
> Do you own your home? Here in Ca?
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.
1 days ago [-]
dbmikus 1 days ago [-]
That is close to the average rate of inflation, though. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
codemac 1 days ago [-]
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.
stouset 1 days ago [-]
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.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
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.
tikhonj 1 days ago [-]
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.
tzs 1 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
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.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think you read my comment very carefully
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
What if I did?
lokar 19 hours ago [-]
I was clear that I don’t actually support prop13
Schiendelman 16 hours ago [-]
I understood that. What about my response seems like I didn't? :)
MarkusQ 1 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
You're not wrong, but the irony of positioning Seattle as having good zoning policies is almost unbearable.
Schiendelman 20 hours ago [-]
Oh, I'm with you. I think this needs to be overturned wholesale. Seattle is bad. Still better than California.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
Prop13 was a big tax cut. The people behind it were minimal government conservative libertarians.
And the state did slash spending in the years following. In particular funding for the university system was hit very hard.
MarkusQ 1 days ago [-]
They did not slash spending. At most the rate of increase slowed down for a year or so before continuing to rise at an even faster rate.
That’s not a great measure. The state was still growing very fast. The better metric would be state expenditure as a fraction of state gdp
MarkusQ 18 hours ago [-]
It's exactly the right measure to use if the claim is that they "slashed spending". They didn't. They continued increase may or may not have kept pace with other measures (GDP, population, whatever). But they didn't slash spending.
As it turns out, even your new goal posts fail the test of facts. In the years immediately following prop 13, the GDP grew at an APR < 15% [1] while the budget grew and an APR > 15% [2]. The per capita spending did slump briefly in the early 1980s (as shown in the graph on this article[3]) but that was more of a reversion-to-the-trend (which continued upwards thereafter.
While there may be some remaining tortured reading of the data under which you could claim they "slashed spending" it would be manifestly disingenuous to do so. At best the rate of increase slowed briefly.
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
Schiendelman 20 hours ago [-]
It's also a solved problem by not deferring anything unless that person is past working age and low income. Letting people sit on wealth that they cannot pay a wealth tax on is generally bad for everyone with less wealth.
skywhopper 24 hours ago [-]
You realize government services that support that home cost money, right? You act like if you own your home that your living there doesn’t impose any costs on your neighbors.
tikhonj 1 days ago [-]
I do own a house in California and I pay closer to $30k in property taxes. The previous owners of my house paid $7k. My neighbor—who has a bigger, more expensive house!—pays $9k.
It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
MikeNotThePope 1 days ago [-]
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?
xmprt 1 days ago [-]
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.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
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.
mitxela 1 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
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.
esikich 1 days ago [-]
Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?
prawn 11 hours ago [-]
They're asking if there's an end game. If the single family homes get rezoned to three storey blocks, does that just become 10-storey towers and then arcologies, each more efficient than the other.
Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.
WD-42 1 days ago [-]
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.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
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.
21asdffdsa12 1 days ago [-]
There must be a incredible incentive to build "pod-housing" basically take a overpriced suburban home, excavate out into the depths and build sleeper-coffin like homes, then in the morning, its 3 minivan of shuttleb-busses going "to schools" - and in the evening back.
Basically build affordable housing illegally
gradus_ad 2 days ago [-]
To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as well
kccqzy 1 days ago [-]
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.
returningfory2 1 days ago [-]
NYC zoning is less limiting than LA, but still extremely limiting.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
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.
tokioyoyo 1 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
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.
As Max Fisher puts it: American cities have been frozen in amber.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
This is such an amazing video. It collapses about three years of my casual research into housing down into just a few minutes. Thanks for sharing.
golem14 1 days ago [-]
There is also a completely unreasonable shortage of water for a much bigger city.
wdr1 1 days ago [-]
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.
jedberg 1 days ago [-]
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.
thrance 1 days ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 1 days ago [-]
Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
thrance 24 hours ago [-]
> You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
cucumber3732842 21 hours ago [-]
>Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
A few billion on this or that is pocket change compared to the economic and political cost of political policy with very obvious and well defined classes of losers. Taking things isn't free even if done domestically.
>1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water
Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
>I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is.
I'm jaded beyond caring about such things at this point.
>The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves.
>We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
I want you to do the math on what the capital owners actually make. Sure, they're filthy rich and putting their thumb on the scale in various bad ways but the rent they take is peanuts compared to the money just pissed away on goods and services that are far outside of whatever the critical path is.
For every dollar the CEO or board members or other large shareholder of some megacorp are paid the megacorp pays tens or hundreds to the "bloat" which you rightly identify as a problem in a lot of these project.
To use a metaphor, paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students.
Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful? Of course not.
At the end of the day we need to find a way to reduce the bloat and waste because the bloat and waste are not only why the nuclear desalination plant (or whatever) looks expensive and unattractive, it's also why the farmers care to hold onto the water. If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The past 50yr of regulation has been the kind of quasi centrally planned financial tomfoolery to incentivize the "right thing" (for who's definition?) and it's worked so poorly here we are in these comments discussing how LA has stagnated to the financial detriment of most there. No, I don't think "just one more centrally planned tweak" is gonna fix it whether we're tweaking water or something else.
thrance 20 hours ago [-]
> Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
cucumber3732842 19 hours ago [-]
You're focusing on a single micro level issue, namely water and farming in the arid west, and missing the big picture.
Say we do a better job growing crops. That just kicks the can. LA grows and then we're right back here. Something needs to be done to provide for LA's growth and scale with it without teeing up future political fights.
>Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
I don't give a shit about either party to that particular dispute. I give a shit that we approach these disputes in a way that doesn't just kick the can.
>That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
They bought the B29 straight from the blue prints. You, and everyone who thinks like you needs to stop and spend some time thinking about what roadblocks would arise, what lawsuits would fly, what waste would the system compel to occur, if a procurement short circuit like that were to be done today.
Public and private industry alike are hobbled by the same bloat (which I'll get back around to at the end of this comment) when back then neither was hobbled to anywhere near the same degree.
>What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
>You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done!
Lol. Tell me what I believe.
I've seen how this sausage is made. I've worked in defense. Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
Say it costs $100 for the government to build something or provide some service. The private sector might be able to do it for $95. Looks like a $5 cost savings, right? Sure. It is. But the real problem is that the numbers would be $61 and $60.55 if both sides were not saddled with god knows how much non-productive bloat.
And the private sector will never tell you that because they make money on the spread. Nevermind the fact that we'd all be richer if we could get more of the good or service we want in the first place. You can't eat dollars.
It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
thrance 13 hours ago [-]
I am focusing on that LA water issue because that's what the discussion was initially about. I don't think fixing inefficient resource allocation is "kicking the can down the road". You should read up on just how much water is wasted every year in that region.
When you see a leaky pipe, you don't think to build a second one coming from a different faucet (with more expensive water) before fixing the first pipe. It really is that simple. But anyway, unto the larger picture.
> You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
> Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
What? No, that's not the source of the bloat. Much more income is generated via capital gains than though salaries, today. Shareholders are the "middlemen" I was referring to, not the workers trying to put food on their table. Everything is inefficient because everything is designed to provide 4% growth yoy to shareholders, when this is completely impossible to achieve in a sustainable way!
Teachers in for-profit schools are severely underpaid, where do the ludicrous tuitions go? In buybacks and dividends, and other fluff like sport teams and stadiums to attract investors.
> Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
I don't believe that, and I don't think you should either. For a single example, 18F was doing great work before DOGE cut them, so TurboTax could keep profiteering. Speaking of, with all the ruckus DOGE made, they just couldn't find much "waste, fraud and abuse" in public services, and just ended up slashing cheap programs on political grounds, to save face with their supporters.
> It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
Look, ultimately, I'm a historical materialist, I believe material conditions are the source of our societal structure, and "values" as you say. Culture doesn't grow in a vacuum, these issues don't just spontaneously arise. They are consequences of how our societies were structured yesterday, and our societies let capital concentrate more and more in fewer and fewer hands, with zero checks and balances.
Our current world is one of all-powerful capital, that has grown to wield tremendous power, and has permeated every facet of our governance, media and way of thinking. It's not a coincidence that all those regulations and red tape end up benefitting private contractors, who charge more and more for less and less in return. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our system does is transferring our public money into private hands.
It's why you end up with suicide nets on the Golden Gate billed at half the price of the damn bridge (adjusted to inflation), or single-use missiles at 15M a piece.
It's how we're unable to get a single politician willing to stand up to water rights holders in California, to correct an obviously inefficient allocation of natural resources. Everything is done to keep any threats to the interests of capital away. See how much vitriol someone like Mamdani receives from both sides, simply for not being 100% at the heels of capital.
21 hours ago [-]
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
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.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
CA has droughts, but not water shortages. Most of the water goes to highly inefficient and low value farming.
golem14 1 days ago [-]
Sure, but without that farming, how would we get our almond milk lattes?
lokar 20 hours ago [-]
I remember a segment on the national (PBS) news like 10 years ago (a drought year).
Part of it was on a farm with a tree farmer. He was lamenting how cuts were forcing him to spend a lot on fuel to pump from the aquifer (destroying it!).
With the reporter there he fired up the well. He was just flooding the field. Just soak everything.
There are better ways to grow nut trees.
kristopolous 2 days ago [-]
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...
Exactly this -- This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Everything demolished, burned, or replaced is invisible.
Probably should put that front and center.
blululu 1 days ago [-]
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.
3RTB297 1 days ago [-]
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.
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".
wathef 2 days ago [-]
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.
davidw 1 days ago [-]
> worked really well, especially for folks without much money
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".
bean469 23 hours ago [-]
The main reason as far as I'm aware was due to intense lobbying from car companies. It makes absolute sense from the perspective of Ford, etc. to have alternative modes of transport be removed from the streets
khazhoux 1 days ago [-]
The trams went away because of cars and buses, not because of racism.
cobbzilla 1 days ago [-]
It can be both. Highways didn’t get built for poor folks, but did get built right through many of their neighborhoods.
WD-42 1 days ago [-]
Fun fact: this is the plot of the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”
lokar 1 days ago [-]
It’s making a comeback
ZeWaka 2 days ago [-]
Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.
sgt 2 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
Yes, great point. What was torn down, burned, destroyed, etc. along the way isn't here. This is the surviving city, not the city as it was.
ericzawo 2 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
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!)
lokar 1 days ago [-]
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.
foco_tubi 21 hours ago [-]
To be fair, that is an hour-long trip in the best case scenario
lokar 20 hours ago [-]
I love how Google Maps directions for a trip like that (in the future) always estimate like 1h to 3h.
WD-42 1 days ago [-]
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.
nunez 1 days ago [-]
All the way to almost San Diego, which is insane
asdff 2 days ago [-]
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.
oblio 2 days ago [-]
I'm confused. LA doesn't strike me as dense. How dense can you get with huge areas of single family homes?
ianburrell 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
asdff 1 days ago [-]
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.
mullingitover 1 days ago [-]
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.
neilv 2 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
Did not think of that - yes that is a really interesting idea. Totally different way with interacting with data. I'm going to ponder that...
incanus77 1 days ago [-]
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:
I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.
bishopcapintel 18 hours ago [-]
Most of West Los Angeles was actually wetlands that were dredged to create areas suitable for development. This was a relatively little-known fact that I learned by attending the USC Library Archive Days, usually held in October. Most of what is now Culver City, all the way to the coast was essentially filled with water until it was dredged. We tend to think of LA as some sort of arid desert, yet, at least for the Westside, it was anything but dry land.
Also of note, LA actually had a fully functioning subway system up until the late 1920s/early 1930s, very similar to London and NYC, although not quite as large obviously. You can find photos of people standing on the crowded platforms during the Roaring 20s waiting to take the subway into and out of DTLA in the archives. There were also the Red Cars that ran until the late 1950s I believe. They took passengers as far as OC to the south, and out into the SFV to the northeast. So public transportation was abundant in LA even before the Redline and other various MTA rail projects, and long before motor cars became ubiquitous. Look up the history of the Miracle Mile and the tire shops and car lots to gain an understanding of LA's transition to the the automobile in the 1930s. It was a vibrant city long before cars and traffic took over. Charlie Chaplin even had an airfield in Hollywood in the 1920s around what is now Wilshire and Fairfax!
tcdent 2 days ago [-]
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.
computomatic 2 days ago [-]
Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?
tcdent 2 days ago [-]
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.
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.
toyg 2 days ago [-]
One's "underdeveloped wasteland" is someone else's untouched paradise. Particularly someone like Joni Mitchell.
Hnrobert42 2 days ago [-]
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.
Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
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.)
thisismyopinion 2 days ago [-]
Funny. It's concrete hell.
esseph 2 days ago [-]
It's part of a very popular song from the 70s by Joni Mitchell called "Big Yellow Taxi".
Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.
lotsofpulp 2 days ago [-]
Is there an alternative if 13 million people want to live somewhere?
toyg 2 days ago [-]
Somewhat sadly, the reason a lot of the ancestors of those 13 millions moved there was that they wanted an unpaved paradise.
Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
socalgal2 1 days ago [-]
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
21asdffdsa12 20 hours ago [-]
Could one- theoretically- after the Big One - rezone a ton of flattened land to mixed use - and have europe style appartment blocks?
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.
esseph 2 days ago [-]
LA county has about the same population as Sweden.
enjoyyourlife 2 days ago [-]
Nice! Would be better if it shows the difference between the ocean and other land
suncemoje 2 days ago [-]
Agree, I personally also think dark mode never goes well with a map-based app...
slg 2 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
Yes, good point. The LA City data was rich, but the other communities have data in other places. I will see what I can do.
slg 1 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
Good idea! Let me work on that...
burningChrome 1 days ago [-]
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.
andretti1977 1 days ago [-]
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.
thomasfl 1 days ago [-]
This shows not only how highly inefficient the land use is in LA, it also shows when it started happening. Towns that were planned before cars were introduced, have a much more efficient use of land. I.e. less space used for roads, but more greenery and the same amount of people and businesses. Barcelona and Paris was planned and built around 70 years before cars become commonplace. The city of the future is built around peoples quality of life and what is good for the economy, except the car industry. US car industry is slowly dying anyway, so the US should start making the country just as attractive to live in as Europe. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the architectural uprising in Norway.
sevennull 1 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 1 days ago [-]
I added LA County data, and checked it against where I group up and where my mother and father grew up. Seems reasonably accurate so far.
andai 2 days ago [-]
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.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
Yep, that was my misconfiguration of the CloudFlare cache. Hopefully fixed now.
physhster 19 hours ago [-]
Seems to be blocking users outside of the US, FWIW...
2 days ago [-]
gregjw 1 days ago [-]
What is that huge gap near Venice?
mark242 1 days ago [-]
To the north is Santa Monica, its own city.
valiant-comma 2 days ago [-]
Very cool, but I think it'd be even better if the new buildings popped up rather than faded in.
mark242 1 days ago [-]
The obvious next step here is to do LA county, since so much sits outside the city limits.
rustywasm 1 days ago [-]
Just added LA County. I spot checked a few places I know, seems to be pretty accurate.
kevo1ution 2 days ago [-]
SF version would be quite boring
ck2 2 days ago [-]
wild to see that, reminds me vaguely of the amazing ariel photos by kite of San Francisco after the earthquakes in 1906
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)
sshussain270 1 days ago [-]
Very cool, what ddi you build this with?
quaddoggy 1 days ago [-]
Is this actually representing homeless encampments?
silexia 14 hours ago [-]
Nothing built lately due to massive overregulation.
SachaSOL 23 hours ago [-]
It's impressing to see how people's expansion so fast
shevy-java 24 hours ago [-]
That takes too long!
globular-toast 1 days ago [-]
Like mould growing in a Petri dish.
HardCodedBias 1 days ago [-]
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.
Brilliant.
theycallmeritik 1 days ago [-]
it's amazing
fsckboy 1 days ago [-]
the Wilshire Corridor view is completely wrong, it should be the stretch of tall buildings a bit above Century City in the Century City view.
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.
[Just a fun project, no commercial relevance.]
drivers99 2 days ago [-]
Didn't realize you could zoom in until I saw this. It looks really cool when you zoom in and it replaces the boxes with actual building shapes.
axionbraid 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
entelechy0 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
losteric 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
oijkuij 2 days ago [-]
If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved.
I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
The waves are partly real and partly me.
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!
rustywasm 2 days ago [-]
This started as a data puzzle. There is a lot of public data but it's hosted by for-profit companies and the data models don't seem to be coherent (probably lots of good reasons for the data models being the way they are, so no criticism, and it's wonderful they are public.)
So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data.
So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of
* MyLA311 service requests
* Permits
* Construction Enforcement
* Crime
* Parcels Id with Polygons
* Lidar
So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.)
So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked.
So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind.
I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving.
As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria.
The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.
kfarr 2 days ago [-]
It’s great! Agreed don’t feed the trolls.
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.
The other thing I learned is that some of the data sets use a destructive insert, so unless someone is doing a data snapshot data elements can be lost. (The vendors charge extra time-series option.)
fortran77 2 days ago [-]
No need to justify yourself to some bitter, petty, sad troll. Let the upvotes and discussion speak for itself. I love seeing other people's vibe-coded projects come to life. I've re-started a bunch of stalled hobby projects thanks to AI.
dvt 2 days ago [-]
> What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve?
Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc.
> or is it just pretty?
People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.
lackoftactics 1 days ago [-]
Pretty great day for HN. You can’t just shut off people anymore with „machine did it, not you” as we live in new reality. Comments below make even more sound argument, for data viz we probably don’t need novel problem solving, just people interested to see viz
2 days ago [-]
tjwebbnorfolk 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 10:14:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Densification of existing land use is exceedingly cheap. People use far less water, fewer miles of sewer, fewer vehicle miles, fewer miles of wire and pipe, all while having access to a far greater set of amenities. That's what downzoning took away from everyone.
I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.
I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.
Do you assume humans with a lawn consume more? My lawn only consumes what the sky gives it.
Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.
Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
I love the climate and nature there, besides the fires. Ocean, lakes, mountains, deserts, all within 1-3 hour drive.
It is a dehumanizing city to commute in, and is expensive, but it's the best one I have lived in (NYC, Brooklyn, NJ cities, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami) and I want to return when finances allow.
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.
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.
https://www.ocassessor.gov/tax-saving-programs/savings-senio...
The bad part about prop 13, is that it never should have applied to anything other than primary residences of people. Having it apply to rental & commercial properties is what warps the market.
Cities should be cutting their police budgets - most small towns have nearly 50% of the budgets tied up in police. All while there has been a multi-decade decrease in crime.
My money is on the latter. Nobody is getting a tax cut if Prop 13 is repealed. Everybody's taxes will just continue to 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.
That's what I'm saying _won't_ happen. The high property taxes as-is will stay high and previously protected properties will have their taxes shoot up. That is my prediction and nothing about the state of California, or the US broadly, suggests otherwise to me.
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
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.
Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the state did slash spending in the years following. In particular funding for the university system was hit very hard.
https://dof.ca.gov/about-us/history/state-budgets/
As it turns out, even your new goal posts fail the test of facts. In the years immediately following prop 13, the GDP grew at an APR < 15% [1] while the budget grew and an APR > 15% [2]. The per capita spending did slump briefly in the early 1980s (as shown in the graph on this article[3]) but that was more of a reversion-to-the-trend (which continued upwards thereafter.
While there may be some remaining tortured reading of the data under which you could claim they "slashed spending" it would be manifestly disingenuous to do so. At best the rate of increase slowed briefly.
[1] https://files.ceqanet.lci.ca.gov/276991-2/attachment/cSe45La...
[2] https://sbud.senate.ca.gov/sites/sbud.senate.ca.gov/files/Ca...
[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/24/whats-behind-californ...
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
It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
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.
Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.
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.
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.
Basically build affordable housing illegally
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.
Tokyo, similarly, has hit the limit of what they allow to be built under the highest density of their stepped national zoning levels.
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.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
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.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
A few billion on this or that is pocket change compared to the economic and political cost of political policy with very obvious and well defined classes of losers. Taking things isn't free even if done domestically.
>1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water
Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
>I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is.
I'm jaded beyond caring about such things at this point.
>The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves.
>We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
I want you to do the math on what the capital owners actually make. Sure, they're filthy rich and putting their thumb on the scale in various bad ways but the rent they take is peanuts compared to the money just pissed away on goods and services that are far outside of whatever the critical path is.
For every dollar the CEO or board members or other large shareholder of some megacorp are paid the megacorp pays tens or hundreds to the "bloat" which you rightly identify as a problem in a lot of these project.
To use a metaphor, paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students.
Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful? Of course not.
At the end of the day we need to find a way to reduce the bloat and waste because the bloat and waste are not only why the nuclear desalination plant (or whatever) looks expensive and unattractive, it's also why the farmers care to hold onto the water. If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The past 50yr of regulation has been the kind of quasi centrally planned financial tomfoolery to incentivize the "right thing" (for who's definition?) and it's worked so poorly here we are in these comments discussing how LA has stagnated to the financial detriment of most there. No, I don't think "just one more centrally planned tweak" is gonna fix it whether we're tweaking water or something else.
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
Say we do a better job growing crops. That just kicks the can. LA grows and then we're right back here. Something needs to be done to provide for LA's growth and scale with it without teeing up future political fights.
>Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
I don't give a shit about either party to that particular dispute. I give a shit that we approach these disputes in a way that doesn't just kick the can.
>That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
They bought the B29 straight from the blue prints. You, and everyone who thinks like you needs to stop and spend some time thinking about what roadblocks would arise, what lawsuits would fly, what waste would the system compel to occur, if a procurement short circuit like that were to be done today.
Public and private industry alike are hobbled by the same bloat (which I'll get back around to at the end of this comment) when back then neither was hobbled to anywhere near the same degree.
>What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
>You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done!
Lol. Tell me what I believe.
I've seen how this sausage is made. I've worked in defense. Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
Say it costs $100 for the government to build something or provide some service. The private sector might be able to do it for $95. Looks like a $5 cost savings, right? Sure. It is. But the real problem is that the numbers would be $61 and $60.55 if both sides were not saddled with god knows how much non-productive bloat.
And the private sector will never tell you that because they make money on the spread. Nevermind the fact that we'd all be richer if we could get more of the good or service we want in the first place. You can't eat dollars.
It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
When you see a leaky pipe, you don't think to build a second one coming from a different faucet (with more expensive water) before fixing the first pipe. It really is that simple. But anyway, unto the larger picture.
> You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
> Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
What? No, that's not the source of the bloat. Much more income is generated via capital gains than though salaries, today. Shareholders are the "middlemen" I was referring to, not the workers trying to put food on their table. Everything is inefficient because everything is designed to provide 4% growth yoy to shareholders, when this is completely impossible to achieve in a sustainable way!
Teachers in for-profit schools are severely underpaid, where do the ludicrous tuitions go? In buybacks and dividends, and other fluff like sport teams and stadiums to attract investors.
> Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
I don't believe that, and I don't think you should either. For a single example, 18F was doing great work before DOGE cut them, so TurboTax could keep profiteering. Speaking of, with all the ruckus DOGE made, they just couldn't find much "waste, fraud and abuse" in public services, and just ended up slashing cheap programs on political grounds, to save face with their supporters.
> It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
Look, ultimately, I'm a historical materialist, I believe material conditions are the source of our societal structure, and "values" as you say. Culture doesn't grow in a vacuum, these issues don't just spontaneously arise. They are consequences of how our societies were structured yesterday, and our societies let capital concentrate more and more in fewer and fewer hands, with zero checks and balances.
Our current world is one of all-powerful capital, that has grown to wield tremendous power, and has permeated every facet of our governance, media and way of thinking. It's not a coincidence that all those regulations and red tape end up benefitting private contractors, who charge more and more for less and less in return. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our system does is transferring our public money into private hands.
It's why you end up with suicide nets on the Golden Gate billed at half the price of the damn bridge (adjusted to inflation), or single-use missiles at 15M a piece.
It's how we're unable to get a single politician willing to stand up to water rights holders in California, to correct an obviously inefficient allocation of natural resources. Everything is done to keep any threats to the interests of capital away. See how much vitriol someone like Mamdani receives from both sides, simply for not being 100% at the heels of capital.
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.
Part of it was on a farm with a tree farmer. He was lamenting how cuts were forcing him to spend a lot on fuel to pump from the aquifer (destroying it!).
With the reporter there he fired up the well. He was just flooding the field. Just soak everything.
There are better ways to grow nut trees.
it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/
Probably should put that front and center.
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".
[1] - https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an...
[2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
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".
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.
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.
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.
Also of note, LA actually had a fully functioning subway system up until the late 1920s/early 1930s, very similar to London and NYC, although not quite as large obviously. You can find photos of people standing on the crowded platforms during the Roaring 20s waiting to take the subway into and out of DTLA in the archives. There were also the Red Cars that ran until the late 1950s I believe. They took passengers as far as OC to the south, and out into the SFV to the northeast. So public transportation was abundant in LA even before the Redline and other various MTA rail projects, and long before motor cars became ubiquitous. Look up the history of the Miracle Mile and the tire shops and car lots to gain an understanding of LA's transition to the the automobile in the 1930s. It was a vibrant city long before cars and traffic took over. Charlie Chaplin even had an airfield in Hollywood in the 1920s around what is now Wilshire and Fairfax!
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
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.
Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.
Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.
Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and...
https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACount...
* 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)
Brilliant.
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.]
I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.
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!
So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data.
So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of * MyLA311 service requests * Permits * Construction Enforcement * Crime * Parcels Id with Polygons * Lidar
So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.)
So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked.
So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind.
I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving.
As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria.
The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.
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
The other thing I learned is that some of the data sets use a destructive insert, so unless someone is doing a data snapshot data elements can be lost. (The vendors charge extra time-series option.)
Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc.
> or is it just pretty?
People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.