| You're in one of the worst ran cities in all of America. I rant here often about how horrible LA is, wonder why they're so few new homes getting built in LA. Well now you know. The cost to build anything is so astronomical. The only thing that gets builts are luxury apartments/condos are multi-million dollar McMansions. To see an extreme example of this, just look at how much money was spent per each homeless shelter unit. Each of these units can only house one family or so, the city somehow spent $600,000 to $700,000 on each one. This source article uses a high estimate, some of these units are costing 800k. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/la-spending-837000... I wish you the best of luck with finally getting your house built, but just factor in you're going to have to deal with these problems in every single aspect of living in Los Angeles. I decided to leave, and in every aspect of my life I'm doing much better. I make more, my housing is cheaper, I don't need a car, and frankly everyone's nicer. PS: If you want know WHY things are this bad, look at Prop 13. This allowed home owners to lock their taxes to when they purchased their homes. So say you currently own a house worth $800,000, you bought it 15 years ago when it was worth 200,000. You have no motivation to ever move, even if it would be better for you aside from the taxes. So You end up with a very large contingent of homeowners who are going to be in their properties for their entire lives, and are extremely resistant to any change. NMBY level Max. Many people in LA don't want you to be able to build your house in any efficient manner, the easier it is to build a house. The cheaper houses are. If I'm a home owner, I don't want competition. |
On the one hand you have the obvious demand for change. Housing if far too expensive, far too difficult to build and thus costs and astronomical amount which skews the economics of home building to the higher end of the market.
The top wants this change. The citizens want this change (for the most part). The solutions penetrate down levels of government until they are stopped dead at the lowest level. The bureaucracy at a certain level realizes they are on the chopping block and halts progress on change. They push back, their unions push back, the works.
So what you end up with is a bloated government agency, bloated for the sake of being bloated, making life miserable for the majority of residents, all of the sake of keeping itself in it's current bloated state.
The only thing that i see fixing the mess in California is if the guys at the top eliminate these many of these agencies. But they won't, because these agencies workers have unions, lobbies, the works. So the system will likely stay. Politicians will stay in the good graces of bloated government agencies which will only become more bloated and oh...the citizens? Who cares them.