So like what California did, which resulted in only a couple hundred thousand units over half a decade when they were hoping for/needing a couple million statewide.
Not the mention that ironically, the private owners with the space to build an ADU on their lot are the ones most likely to already be wealthy, and not actually rent it out to anyone below their socioeconomic bracket.
I can’t agree with this statement because One Battle After Another is actually a movie about fatherhood and the lengths you go to to raise a child, and very explicitly makes fun of how many “fight the power” movements are often ineffective or devolve into making the problem you’re fighting against worse.
It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.
I agree that it paints both sides as silly, but it does so incredibly badly. This is evidenced by, eg., the comments on Letterboxd, who all seem to either think their outgroup is lampooned (yay 5 stars) or their ingroup is slighted (grr 1 star). The movie set out to combat division and failed catastrophically. At least that’s my charitable interpretation. It’s also too long, lol.
Well, Hollywood is not the end all be all of Los Angeles (though that is the image Hollywood projects out onto the world).
It’s not even Los Angeles’ biggest industry. Everything from China enters through the Port of Los Angeles, which is the biggest in the United States. In fact, the top two busiest ports in the USA are both Los Angeles and Long Beach (which directly borders Los Angeles).
This is just one example, but Los Angeles, despite its own external projections and self-mythology to the contrary, is much more than just a one industry town. Aside from shipping and logistics, it’s also a center for auto+aerospace manufacturing, and a major healthcare hub. Downtown Los Angeles, which actually serves as a glorified rail freight hub, is still far and away the nation’s capital of garment manufacturing, with over 80%(!) of the nation’s made-in-USA clothing produced here (this is downstream of being the biggest port in the US). Los Angeles has always existed as a center of industry and agriculture before Hollywood, and while the decline of Hollywood certainly hurts the city, it will not kill it.
SF, ironically, is actually moreso a factory town: if one day its tech champions decided to up and leave, there wouldn’t be much left relative to its current GDP. But one thing that may protect both SF and Los Angeles from ever becoming Detroit are their beautiful weather and geography. People will always want to live here, despite the costs. See Santa Barbara, a real city with no major industry to claim as its own, yet it still boasts some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
I meant Hollywood as the collection of all of the film/TV people and industry that are geographically located in that area.
This was never about the city itself. Nor was it in comparison to, or competition with, San Francisco, but I guess projectors are inexpensive on Amazon these days.
Fundamentally the issue, aside from lack of density, is Prop 13. In LA, and every other part of California, your tax rate will get frozen (forever, essentially) at what you buy your home for. So you have some people who now have a $7m home paying taxes as if it were $300k, because they bought it in 1978.
With a setup like that, of course SFHs, no matter how high they’re valued, will not provide enough tax revenue on their own
I’m pretty sure Los Angeles is a city in which residents would _gladly_ vote to tax themselves for better streets if they’d actually get done, like Orange County has.
In 2024, when Measure HLA passed via ballot measure (basically, legally requiring that the city must adhere to its own already decade-old repaving and mobility plan that had only been 3% implemented), the city tried to spook the public by saying it could ultimately increase taxes and cost $2bn over 10 years. That only increased support, with almost 66% of the city voting for it in the end. It’s worthwhile to note, measure HLA did not actually mandate anything new, just saying that the city must follow its own street plan, because for a decade the city has been pulling stuff like this rather than actually building ADA ramps or repaving.
People want their sidewalks and streets and will gladly pay for them, not to mention the city already lost a Federal ADA lawsuit requiring this too. The city just won’t do it. I’m hoping this is the year the city finally gets sued under HLA (which carries a bounty award for any litigant who lives on a street ignored by the mobility plan if they do a faux repaving and don’t adhere to the law), now that the 2-year grace period is up.
4 years gets you, historically, an 8-plex built in San Francisco. If you’re lucky. The ship is slowly turning, but that’s what institutional investors would call a short-term win in the most economically productive state in the USA.
I’m a supporter of it regardless of the cost, but for a “long term” project look at the California HSR, which was directly approved by voters 19 years ago and we’re still debating how to fund the majority of it, let alone actually build what we voted to construct and open in its entirety within 10 years.
Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state.
Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
For long distance trains, sure. But there’s plenty of shorter Amtrak routes outside of the NE Corridor where it could make as much or more sense than flying, to be fair
Los Angeles - San Diego: 2.5hrs downtown to downtown (less if you’re going to one of the many suburbs or beach towns in between), which is on par with driving and sometimes even faster than traffic. Also, a ticket is only $30-50, so about a tank of gas. This is likely why it’s Amtrak’s busiest and most profitable route outside the NEC. If the second phase of the California High Speed Rail ever gets built (lol), this trip is to take somewhere between 30-45 minutes.
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