-Cities can't grow without new housing. More units constantly have to be built for two main reasons
a) To handle the inward migration
b) To handle the natural increase in demand from people aging into renting and homebuying age.
People have to move into a city for it to keep thriving. If a company wants to move to the area, where are the new workers they attract suppose to live? If a company attracting high-paid workers, they will just outbid locals for housing and if you don't have enough housing units to accommodate everyone, you get storage of housing supply and you get.....a homelessness crisis. In urban economics there is actually a calculated tipping point where the median cost of housing exceeds a certain level of monthly income, you see homelessness skyrocketing.
So if LA wants new businesses to come, or the ones that were to stay and grow, their workers need somewhere to live. A city doesn't provide that, then they are just asking for more homelessness to happen.
Think about it, if they don't build new units, where are people's kids suppose to move to? Why should they be forced to live at home indefinitely, or be forced to move miles away from their communities and be made to drive (in increasing air pollution) just to visit friends, family, or access services closer to city centers? I don't see how it is rational to try to build up places like Barstow instead of building more multifamily units in and around LA and Southern California first.
Denser cities are easier to run. You have a larger tax base when needs the city is less likely to go into debt, public services are easier to access because of the short distances, they are more energy-efficient, denser cities are easier to integrate (even though we do a **** job of that right now, but the burbs are an even worse exclusionary hell), public transportation can get to more people, in turn, making it cheaper to build out and run (construction cost is another problem by itself though). Denser cities and burbs just provide more bang for the buck from an economic standpoint.
So I'm saying that we should focus on may our current cities and suburbs denser before we build more suburban sprawl like we currently do. This will affect LA, the cities around LA, LA county, the suburbs, and cities adjacent to there. It is not about just packing everyone into LA, but making sure everyone has access to affordable decent housing in the area. And that is easier to do when more multifamily units are allowed to be built everywhere.
The suburbs are completely ****ed up too. It is not a matter of making everyone live in cities, it is making sure that a city can hold the maximum amount of people it can. Then the adjacent suburbs hold as much as it can. If someone wants a large single-family home, then go live in the outer suburbs and the exurbs
fd around and found out
Finesse queen
