A really easy thing to confirm by travelling to literally any other country is that The United States and people in it are extremely wealthy by world standards. We use our wealth very badly in terms of translating to quality of life, but in terms of absolute "do people here have lots of money" we do
the per capita GDP of Canada is lower than every US state besides Mississippi. Euros are mostly markedly poorer outside of like Switzerland and the batshit tiny microstates. To say nothing of your real middle income countries. Pop down to Mexico sometime!
America's destruction of its cities to replace them with car mandatory suburbs have made housing and transportation are huge drag on quality of life. Suburban sprawl is ludicrously expensive to subsidize and maintain bsky.app/profile/frac...
There's both a cost of living crisis and a major spending habits problem with Americans. It's all kind of downstream from chiefly housing costs exacerbating the impacts of discretionary expenditures.
LA needs 50k units/yr. The 5k units/yr in the form of ADUs are quite a bit more than a drop in the bucket. But yes we need a lot more upzoning to get us where we need to be and RHNA allocations are way too low.
Oh sure but the MFH space is dominated by large projects currently and that is not working out great. ADUs show that small projects can be built at scale and small developers will flood into the space if given the chance. Small projects can also go from land acquisition to completion much faster.
My father in law is a contractor and recently did the "lot split + 2 ADUs on each lot" thing at a house he bought in the valley, managing the construction projects himself.
Lot of that stuff going on, it's basically free money if you have a skillset that combines "filing the correct paperwork" and "managing a medium size construction project." According to him, it basically made the new house that they'll live in on that lot net out to free.
yup. that houston-type configuration where you have 3-8 townhouses built perpendicular to the street seems like a good fit for LA. seeing a few of those in san diego in the small area where they're permitted by zoning.
absent height limits could also be townhouses stacked over ADUs just as easily. if you show a californian the type of 4 story townhouse theyre building in the maryland suburbs their brains would explode
ya my preference is always "build a building right up to the sidewalk, covering half the lot with a yard in back," brooklyn-style but this seems to be the typology that makes people maddest out here
I don’t know why people say zoning reform won’t do anything
Houston is the perfect example where they allowed townhouses, reduced min lot size from 5000sqft to 1800, allowed garage apartments — housing inside the loop exploded after this
