Posted on 10/08/2007 10:10:06 PM PDT by Lorianne
In 2000, my husband and I moved out of our mid-1970s three-bedroom town house in Los Angeles and into a brand-new three-bedroom town house in Uptown Dallas. At the time, the two were worth about the same, but the Dallas place was 1,000 square feet bigger. We’ve moved back to L.A., and we’re glad we kept our old house. Over the past seven years, its value has roughly doubled. By contrast, we sold our Dallas place for $6,500 less than we paid for it.
It’s not that we bought into a declining Dallas neighborhood: Uptown is one of the hottest in the city, with block upon block of new construction. But the supply of housing in Dallas is elastic. When demand increases, because of growing population or rising incomes, so does the amount of housing; prices stay roughly the same. That’s true not only in the outlying suburbs, but also in old neighborhoods like ours, where dense clusters of town houses and multistory apartment buildings are replacing two-story fourplexes and single-family homes. It’s easy to build new housing in Dallas.
Not so in Los Angeles. There, in-creased demand generates little new supply. Even within zoning rules, it’s hard to get permission to build. When a local developer bought three small 1920s duplexes on our block, planning to replace them with a big condo building, neighbors campaigned to stop the project. The city declared the charming but architecturally undistinguished buildings historic landmarks, blocking demolition for a year. The developer gave up, leaving the neighborhood’s landscape—and its housing supply—unchanged. In Los Angeles, when demand for housing increases, prices rise.
Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
The reason the motion picture industry moved from the east coast to Califoria in the early 20th century was due to good climate that allowed shooting with sunlight and cheap land.
CA (and NY) will go the same way that Eurabia will, and for the same reasons. My only hope is that they will not drag the rest of us with them. But it will be ugly...
Interesting graph.
Note that TICs (Tennancy in Common) really have taken off in San Fran over this time period, and they’re starting to migrate outward into Silicon Valley. It is one way to get the land-use strangleholds loosened, because there is a definite need for a minimum amount of rental housing.
I don’t find much to disagree with in the article.
The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing. Instead of inviting newcomers, this approach rewards longtime residents with big capital gains and the political clout to block projects they don’t like.
Interesting. So that’s why they don’t mind all the illegal immigrants. They have artifically created a situation where the “undesirables’ can’t afford to move into their neighborhoods.
While proclaiming their diversity, and using their votes, in their own elitist way they’ve shut them out.
I thought it was to avoid paying fees to the owner of the technology, A.G. Bell, who invented the hardware necessary to create movies, and was entitled to a share of the profits. The west coast was relatively remote from the east coast back then, and Bell's lawyers had much dificulty tracking down the miscreants.
Or so I was told.
Sure. Nicer California neighborhoods don't see even the slightest downside from illegal immigration - they come in to do the gardening and cleaning and then go home to...somewhere. A place the homeowner is unlikely to ever set foot, anyway. ;)
In LA there is resistance from locals to someone taking a home on a 1/4 acre lot and putting in a duplex or fourplex because it adds to the congestion and traffic, the same reason there is resistance to taking any open land and putting in condos or apartments...local services and roads can only accommodate so many people and most were not designed for the numbers already there.
So all this talk about elitism and whatnot is just hooey. What you see are basic economic principles and quality of life issues at play that you see anywhere.
I was in the RE business in LA when CA. voters approved a proposition setting up the Coastal Commission to control growth along the coast. This was about 30 years ago. We had some land near the beach in Ventura county that we were going to build condos. Before the law we could build 20 units on the property selling for around $100,000 each. After the law was passed we could only build 10 units which we sold for around $200,000 a piece. Exactly who benefited from this law is hard to say. Certainly not the purchaser, at least in the short run.
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