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.
the 100% affordable dealie in LA should have made it clear the number one problem is risk and time. What development/developers really crave is predictability. "I can build x on this lot, and have permits within y days, and a CO in z days"
Yeah that's not even the zoning or land use regs (unless they are trying to get variances which will blow up your timeframe) but a lack of govt capacity. Trying to even get inspections in a timely manner is often next to impossible due to staffing shortages.
