City Planning

More than 20 years ago, I was building houses. I was also designing them and collecting data from the building department, Multiple Listing Service, and other sources to determine what kind of market to design for. Once I had the data graphed, one projection became glaringly obvious to me: we were headed for a serious homeless problem.
Lot costs had been going up faster than incomes, and have continued to do so. Since banks insist on lending on houses that cost four times the value of the lot to build, houses have gone up in price proportionate to the lot costs. The average "dingbat" (the industry term for a bare-bones cheapee), 25 years ago, was a 1,000 sq.ft. box with three bedrooms and linoleum in the entry. Today, the average dingbat is a 2,000 sq.ft. 2-story box with 4+ bedrooms, a familyroom, formal dining, and oak flooring in the entry. These houses are selling, but more and more people are getting excluded from the market. Rents are also going up, driving more and more people into the streets or onto to the welfare rolls.

How did we get there?

This is a tiny piece of a long border between Los Angeles and the San Andres Mountains. The city has grown, helter-skelter, to the very edges of the mountains. There is nothing left but for property costs to run through the roof, while the environment rots. City Planning has failed. A radically different approach is needed.

Urban Growth Boundaries: Hey, I'm all for protecting the environment and preserving greenspaces. Unfortunately, we are building out the most valuable and most productive land and preserving the least valuable and least productive. We are bulldozing orchards, farms, and stands of exotic trees to plant subdivisions. Sorry, but that's backwards. It places very impractical limits on the available land, and an inordinate burden on available farm land.

Building Codes: I won't dispute that we need standards in construction. Uniform Building Code, which is the most widely used, also places strict limitations on how high you can go with any particular type of construction, instead of offering structural and fire protection provisions for additional stories. Planning departments and subdivision CCRs set lot size and setback minimums. Everything is designed to permit only horizontal expansion. We cannot keep doing that. If you can't expand horizontally, you must expand vertically, and we must protect remaining farmlands.

The street plan was clearly not followed. Instead, a half block of pavement and sidewalk leads only into a blank wall. There is no attempt at explanation, except for a mute "YIELD" sign, leaning over as if to say: "Move on."

Zoning: Here, the original intent was to protect upper and middle-class housing from getting smoked out by industial pollution. Lower-class housing still does. Courts became biased in favor of industry, to suit Bar Association priorities, so beaurocracies were created to fill the gap, also serving the Bar Association's designs. Zoning developed into a system of designating where builders and other businesses may place different types of housing and business, and the lot sizes required for each. Again, if you can't expand horizontally, you must expand vertically, or otherwise increase density.

Most of the rules and regulations governing this were written in the '40s and '50s, or were written since to expand on the earlier rules. As such, they serve to impose requirements fitting a lifestyle, that for most of us, is long gone. The old ideal of Mom staying at home, raising the kids, cooking the meals, mowing the lawn, etc., simply does not work for most of us anymore.

Sorry, but most people don't live that way anymore. We have more single people than ever before and in most couples, both partners have to work to make ends meet. This means less time for manicuring the yard, and increasing demand is placed on child care facilities. Meanwhile, city "planners" are ignoring the changes in people's lifestyles, and are seeking to impose the conditions of a lifestyle most of us don't have anymore.

The combination of these factors mean that buildable land is getting scarce, and the powers that be require us to use that land inefficiently and inappropriately, driving up housing costs, and driving more and more people into the streets.

This is NOT planning; this is anti-planning. This is a bad pretense without vision or forethought, driven only by pathological need to control. It serves no-one. It serves only to express the blind incompetence of a psychotic, legalistic outlook on life. At the very forefront of this blind incompetence is the lawyers, themselves, acting not in the public's best interest, but in the service of their psychosis, and that of their masters, the Rothschild banking family.

An Intriguing Alternative:
The Arcology Theory
A "WE THE PEOPLE" interview with Paolo Soleri and Jerry Brown