Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
lax-skyline.parcelscope.net
lax-skyline.parcelscope.net
LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.
To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.
Densification of existing land use is exceedingly cheap. People use far less water, fewer miles of sewer, fewer vehicle miles, fewer miles of wire and pipe, all while having access to a far greater set of amenities. That's what downzoning took away from everyone.
I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.
I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.
Do you assume humans with a lawn consume more? My lawn only consumes what the sky gives it.
Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.
Also it’s an American city made for cars so it doesn’t help me to like it.
I love the climate and nature there, besides the fires. Ocean, lakes, mountains, deserts, all within 1-3 hour drive.
It is a dehumanizing city to commute in, and is expensive, but it's the best one I have lived in (NYC, Brooklyn, NJ cities, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami) and I want to return when finances allow.
Or do we think that property taxes would go up while other taxes stay put?
This feels like the argument at play when people criticize Prop 13. Not saying it’s good but California hasn’t ever cut taxes meaningfully and I’m not convinced raising property taxes would solve anything. California would still be expensive to live in.
People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax.
The tax burden would be much fairer: instead of the police and schools being funded by newcomers, everyone would be contributing their fair share to fund the city, instead of the longest tenure residents mooching off the rest of us.
Unproductive use of land would be discouraged. If a tract became highly desirable, it would be expensive to let it sit in an unproductive form
Cities could raise taxes as high as their residents wanted them to be, instead of being limited by the opinions of non-residents. Some people want to have better funded police and schools, and local government would actually be allowed to deliver that. Citizens who didnt want to live in expensive cities could vote with their feet to cheaper towns.
https://www.ocassessor.gov/tax-saving-programs/savings-senio...
The bad part about prop 13, is that it never should have applied to anything other than primary residences of people. Having it apply to rental & commercial properties is what warps the market.
Cities should be cutting their police budgets - most small towns have nearly 50% of the budgets tied up in police. All while there has been a multi-decade decrease in crime.
My money is on the latter. Nobody is getting a tax cut if Prop 13 is repealed. Everybody's taxes will just continue to go up.
The housing market would become more liquid because people would move out of homes if their values rose too much and they could no longer afford the taxes. This would be a shock initially, but over time it would just be seen as part of life like it is in other areas: mostly, empty nesters would downsize to a cheaper, smaller house with lower taxes. Gentrification might be more problematic though.
In practice, probably some phased rebalancing would have to happen to avoid the sudden economic shock, but, politics notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to suggest it could be done and that the end state might be overall ‘better’ for most people. The end state would be how property taxes work almost everywhere else.
That's what I'm saying _won't_ happen. The high property taxes as-is will stay high and previously protected properties will have their taxes shoot up. That is my prediction and nothing about the state of California, or the US broadly, suggests otherwise to me.
On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds.
That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home.
People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes
Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13.
They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism.
Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
Pairs nicely with the permitting processes that basically boil down to "thou shalt pay the guild"
Yes and yes.
And I pay 10K less a year than my neighbor for the same value house. And I pay 10K more a year than my other neighbor.
I get a huge advantage from Prop 13, but I still think it needs to get replaced with a much fairer system.
You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
The point of Prop 13 is to let people have their cake and eat it too: you get to keep the equity you gain from increased housing prices, but not pay the property tax that comes with them.
The approach in Washington works well. There is a senior property tax exemption based on age and disposable income. To qualify in King County (where Seattle is) in 2027 you need to be 61+ and have a household disposable income under $101k.
That gets you (1) a freeze on the assessed value for taxes equal to the current assessed value, and (2) an exemption from the statewide school tax and from "excess levies" (basically city and county levies that are voted on).
If income is under between $76k and $89k they also exclude from tax 45% of your assessed value or $70k, whichever is larger, but not more than $200k.
If income is below $76k they exclude 80% of your assessed value or $80k, which is larger.
The income levels are based on median county household income so vary from county to county.
Disposable income is basically everything that goes into AGI plus a list of other things (like any Social Security that is not already in AGI). There are also a bunch of deductions, mostly medical including Medicare premiums, with a $7500 deduction you can elect to take instead of taking any of those specific deduction. Income includes all adults living in the house.
In my county the levies that are not "excess levies" are county roads, sheriff, conservation, mental health, veterans relief, fire district stuff, public utility district stuff, and regional library. The "excess levies" are a couple of school district levies. Overall the excess levies are about 28% of the property taxes in my county. The statewide school levy that is exempt is another 10%, so the bottom line is that the property tax rate for seniors under the income limit is about 60% of the non-senior rate.
And the state did slash spending in the years following. In particular funding for the university system was hit very hard.
As it turns out, even your new goal posts fail the test of facts. In the years immediately following prop 13, the GDP grew at an APR < 15% [1] while the budget grew and an APR > 15% [2]. The per capita spending did slump briefly in the early 1980s (as shown in the graph on this article[3]) but that was more of a reversion-to-the-trend (which continued upwards thereafter.
While there may be some remaining tortured reading of the data under which you could claim they "slashed spending" it would be manifestly disingenuous to do so. At best the rate of increase slowed briefly.
[1] https://files.ceqanet.lci.ca.gov/276991-2/attachment/cSe45La...
[2] https://sbud.senate.ca.gov/sites/sbud.senate.ca.gov/files/Ca...
[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/24/whats-behind-californ...
Let people defer increases until their house is sold. This what many states do.
It’s seems insane that we “protect” people whose property taxes are going up because their home is getting so valuable
It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day.
Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.
Some plots of land are very valuable due to their location, what you can access, etc. It's pretty straightforward to find out what the monthly cost of land is in any area, either from simple regressions on property values, or empty lot sales, etc.
When the land rent starts to excessively exceed average income of number of households allowed to live on that plot of land, that's pretty inefficient.
Owning land is society letting you say to other people: you're not allowed here. When we restrict land us so that people can not figure out their best use of it, eg 4 families building townhouses together, we start to restrict access to opportunity and basic economic freedom.
Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.
Of course they aren’t in LA proper. But it seems like people that want to live in SoCal want the suburbs. You talk like LA is this artificially small place except that it’s more like a neighborhood in the middle of sprawl at an almost unimaginable scale.
Not saying any of this is good. In fact it’s terrible. Personally I feel like the entire LA metro area is about as close as you can get to a real paradise lost on earth. Maybe one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, bulldozed over for a maze of 6 lane uncrossable suburban streets and cookie cutter McMansions.
If apartments, even small buildings, were legal in LA, they'd be building them everywhere and they'd immediately fill up.
The Mayor, Karen Bass, accidentally screwed up and made affordable possible to build, as in allowing it to get through the gauntlet of approvals. This resulted in a massive amount of extremely costly affordable housing to get built, merely because the approval couldn't be stopped arbitrarily:
https://www.pacificresearch.org/la-mayor-slowly-dismantles-h...
Ift that sort of project approval was opened up to not only affordable housing, but also for-profit housing, there would be a massive shift in the type of new housing in the area.
Basically build affordable housing illegally
The city’s original 1916 zoning regulation permitted a hypothetical maximum population of 55 million; after WWII the new zoning regulations essentially limited hypothetical maximum population to a little more than 10 million if everything is fully developed. Recent initiatives like City of Yes did too little to reverse the trend.
At least watch this money shot: https://youtu.be/kpK5HiCKfgU?si=YNQBxsn15NxGdQQ0&t=272 (wait for the video to reveal the construction years)
As Max Fisher puts it: American cities have been frozen in amber.
When I was in Vancouver, people kept saying if we got rid of rent control, houses will be built, rent will come down. But houses are expensive to build, and they need to make money asap in the “exit economy”. They won’t come up easily, unless they make it cheap to build, which isn’t happening. Rents just started coming down, but so far insignificant amount (I just checked, a place I paid $2500 for in 2019, is going for $3300 after the decrease!), and demand curbing had more influence on it. Personally, I think we shouldn’t force people to move to a different area because rents skyrocketed. I’m all in support of getting paid out though.
People look at Tokyo, and talk about “less-zoned build whatever, and no rent control, thus more or less affordable”. Which also depends*. YoY rents are going up by 10-15% right now, even more in some areas. It’s unreasonable for a good chunk of residents. Speculation is big influx of money from China. But you can actually challenge the rent increase in a good chunk of cases. So it’s a pseudo-rent control.
I’m not saying something is right or wrong, just saying everything has multiple layers of problems.
Tokyo, similarly, has hit the limit of what they allow to be built under the highest density of their stepped national zoning levels.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
A few billion on this or that is pocket change compared to the economic and political cost of political policy with very obvious and well defined classes of losers. Taking things isn't free even if done domestically.
>1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water
Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
>I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is.
I'm jaded beyond caring about such things at this point.
>The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves.
>We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
I want you to do the math on what the capital owners actually make. Sure, they're filthy rich and putting their thumb on the scale in various bad ways but the rent they take is peanuts compared to the money just pissed away on goods and services that are far outside of whatever the critical path is.
For every dollar the CEO or board members or other large shareholder of some megacorp are paid the megacorp pays tens or hundreds to the "bloat" which you rightly identify as a problem in a lot of these project.
To use a metaphor, paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students.
Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful? Of course not.
At the end of the day we need to find a way to reduce the bloat and waste because the bloat and waste are not only why the nuclear desalination plant (or whatever) looks expensive and unattractive, it's also why the farmers care to hold onto the water. If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The past 50yr of regulation has been the kind of quasi centrally planned financial tomfoolery to incentivize the "right thing" (for who's definition?) and it's worked so poorly here we are in these comments discussing how LA has stagnated to the financial detriment of most there. No, I don't think "just one more centrally planned tweak" is gonna fix it whether we're tweaking water or something else.
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
Say we do a better job growing crops. That just kicks the can. LA grows and then we're right back here. Something needs to be done to provide for LA's growth and scale with it without teeing up future political fights.
>Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
I don't give a shit about either party to that particular dispute. I give a shit that we approach these disputes in a way that doesn't just kick the can.
>That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
They bought the B29 straight from the blue prints. You, and everyone who thinks like you needs to stop and spend some time thinking about what roadblocks would arise, what lawsuits would fly, what waste would the system compel to occur, if a procurement short circuit like that were to be done today.
Public and private industry alike are hobbled by the same bloat (which I'll get back around to at the end of this comment) when back then neither was hobbled to anywhere near the same degree.
>What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
>You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done!
Lol. Tell me what I believe.
I've seen how this sausage is made. I've worked in defense. Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
Say it costs $100 for the government to build something or provide some service. The private sector might be able to do it for $95. Looks like a $5 cost savings, right? Sure. It is. But the real problem is that the numbers would be $61 and $60.55 if both sides were not saddled with god knows how much non-productive bloat.
And the private sector will never tell you that because they make money on the spread. Nevermind the fact that we'd all be richer if we could get more of the good or service we want in the first place. You can't eat dollars.
It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
When you see a leaky pipe, you don't think to build a second one coming from a different faucet (with more expensive water) before fixing the first pipe. It really is that simple. But anyway, unto the larger picture.
> You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
> Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
What? No, that's not the source of the bloat. Much more income is generated via capital gains than though salaries, today. Shareholders are the "middlemen" I was referring to, not the workers trying to put food on their table. Everything is inefficient because everything is designed to provide 4% growth yoy to shareholders, when this is completely impossible to achieve in a sustainable way!
Teachers in for-profit schools are severely underpaid, where do the ludicrous tuitions go? In buybacks and dividends, and other fluff like sport teams and stadiums to attract investors.
> Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
I don't believe that, and I don't think you should either. For a single example, 18F was doing great work before DOGE cut them, so TurboTax could keep profiteering. Speaking of, with all the ruckus DOGE made, they just couldn't find much "waste, fraud and abuse" in public services, and just ended up slashing cheap programs on political grounds, to save face with their supporters.
> It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
Look, ultimately, I'm a historical materialist, I believe material conditions are the source of our societal structure, and "values" as you say. Culture doesn't grow in a vacuum, these issues don't just spontaneously arise. They are consequences of how our societies were structured yesterday, and our societies let capital concentrate more and more in fewer and fewer hands, with zero checks and balances.
Our current world is one of all-powerful capital, that has grown to wield tremendous power, and has permeated every facet of our governance, media and way of thinking. It's not a coincidence that all those regulations and red tape end up benefitting private contractors, who charge more and more for less and less in return. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our system does is transferring our public money into private hands.
It's why you end up with suicide nets on the Golden Gate billed at half the price of the damn bridge (adjusted to inflation), or single-use missiles at 15M a piece.
It's how we're unable to get a single politician willing to stand up to water rights holders in California, to correct an obviously inefficient allocation of natural resources. Everything is done to keep any threats to the interests of capital away. See how much vitriol someone like Mamdani receives from both sides, simply for not being 100% at the heels of capital.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
As it is, water usage in Los Angeles has had flat water usage for decades, even as its population grew by over a million people.
By downzoning so much, Los Angeles got the worst of all worlds: higher water usage, unaffordable housing, and unbelievably bad traffic because everybody has to drive such massive distances to the job centers.
Downzoning is an environmental disaster compared to the alternative, like allowing factories to dump their pollution into rivers type of disaster.
Part of it was on a farm with a tree farmer. He was lamenting how cuts were forcing him to spend a lot on fuel to pump from the aquifer (destroying it!).
With the reporter there he fired up the well. He was just flooding the field. Just soak everything.
There are better ways to grow nut trees.
it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/
Probably should put that front and center.
https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/
It genuinely is much more sporadic then you think. 1 or 2 houses, then empty blocks with streets there, then 1 more, then some building ...
For a modern version, look up california city - modest suburban homes respectably maintained with cars in the driveway surrounded by endless nothing.
I have to presume there's some people that look at this and say "wow, this is perfect".
[1] - https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an...
[2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
That's probably part of the reason they got rid of them. You still see that argument used against transit: "it will bring _____ to our part of town".
Pretty infuriating to visit Barcelona recently and see that there was a perfect example of good urban planning sitting right there for decades that LA could've simply copied. In the long run this region is simply incapable of maintaining its infrastructure with its tax base, even today you can see it starting to collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPh2AcmG2A
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:
https://medium.com/mapbox/visualizing-an-entire-citys-buildi...
I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi...
early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity
when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour
but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying
and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)
And here is one that is just fun to watch because of Huell Howser --
Tallest Building | Visiting with Huell Howser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
Also of note, LA actually had a fully functioning subway system up until the late 1920s/early 1930s, very similar to London and NYC, although not quite as large obviously. You can find photos of people standing on the crowded platforms during the Roaring 20s waiting to take the subway into and out of DTLA in the archives. There were also the Red Cars that ran until the late 1950s I believe. They took passengers as far as OC to the south, and out into the SFV to the northeast. So public transportation was abundant in LA even before the Redline and other various MTA rail projects, and long before motor cars became ubiquitous. Look up the history of the Miracle Mile and the tire shops and car lots to gain an understanding of LA's transition to the the automobile in the 1930s. It was a vibrant city long before cars and traffic took over. Charlie Chaplin even had an airfield in Hollywood in the 1920s around what is now Wilshire and Fairfax!
LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city.
Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.
Counting Crows did a cover in 2002.
Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and...
https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACount...
Brilliant.
The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its address, year, height, and footprint. Some things I found: the 1950s, not the 1920s, is the biggest decade still standing; the Valley visibly snaps into existence after the war; and downtown's 150-foot height limit shows up as a hard ceiling until 1957. Zoomed out it draws a 100 m grid because a citywide view can't carry a million polygons, and heights are exaggerated below street level zoom (the corner label says by how much).
Stack: DuckDB spatial for the join, tippecanoe to PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, all static files on R2 with no server. City of LA only, since the parcel polygons I pulled stop at the city line.
Happy to answer questions about the data or the rendering.
[Just a fun project, no commercial relevance.]