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I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on t

I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on the design and permitting process immediately. Despite it being in populated Los Angeles, we need a septic system, to widen the road and add curbs, move a power pole, relocate 3 trees, and extend a water line. We won’t have gas as we want to go all solar. All of this the city is making us pay for. Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve. The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening). The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k. The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too. We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already. I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building! Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.

jeffbee 5y ago
Sounds bad but objectively Los Angeles has the fastest permitting process and the lowest fees of major California cities according to data compiled by the UCLA Lewis Center. Not to say you are lucky, only that this problem is actually much worse than you've described. The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  Yeah LA isn’t “bad” compared to most places. Try to build a house in Boulder Colorado hahah
throwaway48375 4y ago
My girlfriend's parents have been trying to build a house on undeveloped land in LA county for over five years now. It wasn't until one of their kids got a job that made them connection in county government that they started getting things approved. It is absolutely ridiculous here.
xvector 5y ago
The problem is that there is no incentive for a government service to perform as its existence is not at risk. There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well. The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc. Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve. They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.
- EricDeb 5y ago
  I generally agree but also the local residents (who do vote in local elections) don't want permitting to be speedy. In fact they want it to be slow because there is a lot of NIMBYism and protectionism around property values. So in this case I think it actually is what voters want.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well." I have been to the DMV in Ca, NV and NM in the last few years. All of them had appointment systems. In all three states I got there at the appointment time and had my car registered and a new license in between 30 and 60 minutes. I would rate the service better than at most private companies, competition or not.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Sure, once you get an appointment. Last time I tried they were booked a month out. Then when I got there I forgot one piece of paper and another month before I could get the next appointment. Before appointments I just walked in, and worst case was only an hour wait.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
zbrozek 5y ago
This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here. I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever. It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  Completely agree. I bought land in 2019 with the hope of building. Not only is the government painfully slow, no builder will take on the project unless the budget is north of $5m. That’s what I was told. $5m and they’ll sign a contract to start in 2025. Anything less than $5m and they aren’t interested. This is the case for around 6 builders I’ve talked to. I’m probably going to just end up selling the land.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    At those prices it might make sense to fly out workers from the Midwest and house them.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      House them where though? CA is short housing, that's one of our worst problems. And local homeless people have already put up tents and parked RVs everywhere. Could we have avoided this problem by building housing while labor could still afford it? Sure. But we didn't, and now we reap what we sow.
    - ryanSrich 4y ago
      There isn’t anywhere for them to live. Luxury ski towns are feeling this pretty hard throughout Colorado. Get this. If the average rent is north of $3k/month for a 1bd. And the average house costs $3.7m. Where is a ski lift worker making minimum wage supposed to live? Or the person running the only local gas station? Or the food service workers? They can’t live outside of these towns because the prices are still within 50% of the prices above. It’s just entirely unsustainable. Now take this and apply it to larger cities, where even teachers making $50-$80k/yr can’t afford to live within an hour commute. I’m all for a free market, but at some point you need to protect critical workers, and the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs. Most places have neither unless you’re borderline homeless poor. Middle class continues to be gutted.
jimmaswell 5y ago
Why do you even want to live there?
- oblio 5y ago
  Job, family, a million reasons. I really hope you're not gatekeeping.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    No, it just seems like such an arduous process that I would pick somewhere else if it were me. I'm personally likely aiming for Montana.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      You'll still need a septic permit in Montana and only certain excavation contractors are certified to install septic systems.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Sure, but the cost of a permit is cheap, and the certified contractors are charging a fair price. I think you are allowed to install yourself if you have certified plans that you work to.
unnamed76ri 5y ago
Much of what you describe is specific to California and to a lesser degree democrat run states in general.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Mostly correct, but many republican counties are far more reasonable. Meanwhile, in the bay area a building permit is required to replace a water heater, toilet, or dishwasher. moreover, When you do a renovation yourself, the fees are based on the typical cost materials and labor, even if you do the work yourself.
  - gnopgnip 5y ago
    A building permit is not required for a toilet or dishwasher replacement in the Bay Area, in Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley at least
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      In San Mateo County they do. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://planning.smcgov.org/sites/planning.smcgov.org/files/documents/files/Kitchen%2520Remodel.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwid2YiZ09P2AhX0D0QIHUKCDpMQFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1PsCq1z371UqZ5Or0E6O7q https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - unnamed76ri 5y ago
    They make you get a permit to replace household appliances? My goodness…
    - 5y ago
eximius 5y ago
I wonder what the cost of the fines would be if you built anyway. If they didn't make you tear it down and the fine was less than the difference in costs, it might be optimal to skip.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I had a similar experience. After 20 years off the power grid, we wanted to connect to the grid and the nearest line was about 1/4 mile away. The state and PG&E wanted ~500k and several years to extend the power to the home. Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Sounds like a City problem, not an "American" problem.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  It's an American problem to the extent most of the economic opportunity is in that kind of city. (The recent growth of remote working does help.)
umvi 5y ago
Don't project California's/LA's inefficiencies on the rest of the USA!
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Sounds the same as what we've got going here in Wisconsin. Permitting is murder here. It's horrible and takes forever.
  - umvi 5y ago
    I built a house in Idaho, and it was pretty painless
    - zbrozek 5y ago
      You have to live in a red state to build anything at all. I want to move to one to quit wasting lifespan trying to work my parcel. Sure I disagree with many of the social values, but those are abstract problems. I'm male, so I will never need an abortion. But I do need permits, so I want out of CA.
x3iv130f 5y ago
Americans need a better voting system. Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design. Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
- gjvnq 4y ago
  I would recommend Ranked Pairs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself. No, it won't. Any system with single member districts as the sole basis for representation in the legislature has minimal impact on the problem. If you want to fix it, you need a system that structurally promotes proportionality. That doesn't have to be a party list system; I personally prefer small (5-ish) multimember districts with STV. (Incidentally, I find the way Instant Runoff Voting proponents have shifted to preferring the name Ranked Choice Voting for the very worst of ranked choice methods annoying.)
999900000999 5y ago
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-house-single-homeless-person-83072411 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.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Really all across California, there seems to be this huge battle between the status-quo and the demand for change. 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.
ransom1538 5y ago
"Residential Construction Permits require an average of 5 to 7 working days for approval or response. Commercial Construction Permits require an average of 14 to 21 working days for approval." First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.
always2slow 4y ago
>the USPS sucks No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather. Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver. FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation. UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.
- Cerium 4y ago
  USPS is great. I run a small ecommerce business and each year a package or two is lost (out of hundreds, maybe this year thousands). So far USPS has been responsible for one and UPS the rest (I don't ship on any other carrier). As you mentioned, the USPS carriers are almost always friendly and helpful.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  It depends on where you live. USPS regularly leaves mail in the wrong mailboxes in my location. FedEx and UPS never do. And the people delivering the mail here are incredibly rude. My neighbors and I have to regularly swap mail. No amount of complaining fixes anything.
  - hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
    Mail delivery to my home has gotten worse over the past ten to fifteen years. I complained to the local post office about this, and they said part of the reason is that this route no longer has dedicated carrier.
- hfjfnnf 4y ago
  It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine. Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes. Whats worse, USPS has some PO boxes in some condo complexes, residents of which rent PO boxes that are at their physical residence and USPS delivers mail to these PO boxes. Its also sprung a private business who collects mail from PO boxes amd deliver to physical addresses for a small fee. I simply dont understand why its the case here.
rootsudo 4y ago
"Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?!" They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with. By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity. You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.
nostromo 4y ago
> The American bureaucracy is insane. This is an California issue, not an American one. > Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Again, this is a California issue. We know the bureaucracy is broken, but we vote for the same incompetent people over and over again.
- lbriner 4y ago
  I think bureaucracy is broken generally. It is a fallacy that all problems can be avoided or solved by "due process" since life is infinitely more complex. How many people have been told by a Local Authority that something is 5mm too wide or 30cm too close to the road? I think the only solution, like we have in UK Courts, is that you need people who are trusted with an amount of knowledge and wisdom (i.e. the Judges) who are permitted to, for example, visit a property and take a holistic view. "Is the drain slightly too close to the road? Yeah but realistically 90% of the other properties have a contravention that is not enforced so just get on with it". We used to have something similar in Local Authorities in the UK where the "Borough Engineer", pretty much had the last call on roads, street lighting etc. If you wanted to make representations, you wrote to them and they decided whether they cared about what you were complaining about. No appeals. As the article says, where this gets unfair, people think that by adding process or sign-off, you get the best of all worlds but the truth is, that only works if everybody wants the same thing, otherwise as OP says, people game the process even if they can't win as some malicious act to cost the builders money.
- lesam 4y ago
  NYC taking 17 years to build 3 subway stops doesn’t sound broken?
tonyedgecombe 4y ago
>It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. Corruption isn't the answer to these problems.
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  I like to think corruption isn't the answer to ANY problem. Is there a problem in which this isn't the case?
theNJR 4y ago
I’m curious why you are putting yourself through this? Given this is a multi million dollar project, why not purchase an existing home? I know inventory is tight, but you’d close on a place within 6 months.
eli_gottlieb 4y ago
>Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.
xnx 4y ago
One of the primary goals of homeowners (one of the largest voting blocs) is to prevent the decrease in the value of their homes. In this way, government is fulfilling its purpose beautifully.

jeffbee 5y ago

Sounds bad but objectively Los Angeles has the fastest permitting process and the lowest fees of major California cities according to data compiled by the UCLA Lewis Center. Not to say you are lucky, only that this problem is actually much worse than you've described. The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!

ryanSrich 5y ago
Yeah LA isn’t “bad” compared to most places. Try to build a house in Boulder Colorado hahah

throwaway48375 4y ago

My girlfriend's parents have been trying to build a house on undeveloped land in LA county for over five years now. It wasn't until one of their kids got a job that made them connection in county government that they started getting things approved. It is absolutely ridiculous here.

xvector 5y ago

The problem is that there is no incentive for a government service to perform as its existence is not at risk. There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well. The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc. Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve. They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.

EricDeb 5y ago
I generally agree but also the local residents (who do vote in local elections) don't want permitting to be speedy. In fact they want it to be slow because there is a lot of NIMBYism and protectionism around property values. So in this case I think it actually is what voters want.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well." I have been to the DMV in Ca, NV and NM in the last few years. All of them had appointment systems. In all three states I got there at the appointment time and had my car registered and a new license in between 30 and 60 minutes. I would rate the service better than at most private companies, competition or not.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Sure, once you get an appointment. Last time I tried they were booked a month out. Then when I got there I forgot one piece of paper and another month before I could get the next appointment. Before appointments I just walked in, and worst case was only an hour wait.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

zbrozek 5y ago

This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here. I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever. It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.

ryanSrich 5y ago
Completely agree. I bought land in 2019 with the hope of building. Not only is the government painfully slow, no builder will take on the project unless the budget is north of $5m. That’s what I was told. $5m and they’ll sign a contract to start in 2025. Anything less than $5m and they aren’t interested. This is the case for around 6 builders I’ve talked to. I’m probably going to just end up selling the land.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  At those prices it might make sense to fly out workers from the Midwest and house them.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    House them where though? CA is short housing, that's one of our worst problems. And local homeless people have already put up tents and parked RVs everywhere. Could we have avoided this problem by building housing while labor could still afford it? Sure. But we didn't, and now we reap what we sow.
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    There isn’t anywhere for them to live. Luxury ski towns are feeling this pretty hard throughout Colorado. Get this. If the average rent is north of $3k/month for a 1bd. And the average house costs $3.7m. Where is a ski lift worker making minimum wage supposed to live? Or the person running the only local gas station? Or the food service workers? They can’t live outside of these towns because the prices are still within 50% of the prices above. It’s just entirely unsustainable. Now take this and apply it to larger cities, where even teachers making $50-$80k/yr can’t afford to live within an hour commute. I’m all for a free market, but at some point you need to protect critical workers, and the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs. Most places have neither unless you’re borderline homeless poor. Middle class continues to be gutted.

jimmaswell 5y ago

Why do you even want to live there?

oblio 5y ago
Job, family, a million reasons. I really hope you're not gatekeeping.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  No, it just seems like such an arduous process that I would pick somewhere else if it were me. I'm personally likely aiming for Montana.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    You'll still need a septic permit in Montana and only certain excavation contractors are certified to install septic systems.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Sure, but the cost of a permit is cheap, and the certified contractors are charging a fair price. I think you are allowed to install yourself if you have certified plans that you work to.

unnamed76ri 5y ago

Much of what you describe is specific to California and to a lesser degree democrat run states in general.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
s1artibartfast 5y ago
Mostly correct, but many republican counties are far more reasonable. Meanwhile, in the bay area a building permit is required to replace a water heater, toilet, or dishwasher. moreover, When you do a renovation yourself, the fees are based on the typical cost materials and labor, even if you do the work yourself.
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  A building permit is not required for a toilet or dishwasher replacement in the Bay Area, in Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley at least
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    In San Mateo County they do. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://planning.smcgov.org/sites/planning.smcgov.org/files/documents/files/Kitchen%2520Remodel.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwid2YiZ09P2AhX0D0QIHUKCDpMQFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1PsCq1z371UqZ5Or0E6O7q https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- unnamed76ri 5y ago
  They make you get a permit to replace household appliances? My goodness…
  - 5y ago

eximius 5y ago

I wonder what the cost of the fines would be if you built anyway. If they didn't make you tear it down and the fine was less than the difference in costs, it might be optimal to skip.

newaccount2021 5y ago

s1artibartfast 5y ago

I had a similar experience. After 20 years off the power grid, we wanted to connect to the grid and the nearest line was about 1/4 mile away. The state and PG&E wanted ~500k and several years to extend the power to the home. Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Sounds like a City problem, not an "American" problem.

abecedarius 4y ago
It's an American problem to the extent most of the economic opportunity is in that kind of city. (The recent growth of remote working does help.)

umvi 5y ago

Don't project California's/LA's inefficiencies on the rest of the USA!

bilbo0s 5y ago
Sounds the same as what we've got going here in Wisconsin. Permitting is murder here. It's horrible and takes forever.
- umvi 5y ago
  I built a house in Idaho, and it was pretty painless
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    You have to live in a red state to build anything at all. I want to move to one to quit wasting lifespan trying to work my parcel. Sure I disagree with many of the social values, but those are abstract problems. I'm male, so I will never need an abortion. But I do need permits, so I want out of CA.

x3iv130f 5y ago

Americans need a better voting system. Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design. Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.

gjvnq 4y ago
I would recommend Ranked Pairs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself. No, it won't. Any system with single member districts as the sole basis for representation in the legislature has minimal impact on the problem. If you want to fix it, you need a system that structurally promotes proportionality. That doesn't have to be a party list system; I personally prefer small (5-ish) multimember districts with STV. (Incidentally, I find the way Instant Runoff Voting proponents have shifted to preferring the name Ranked Choice Voting for the very worst of ranked choice methods annoying.)

999900000999 5y ago

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-house-single-homeless-person-83072411 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.

_fat_santa 4y ago
Really all across California, there seems to be this huge battle between the status-quo and the demand for change. 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.

ransom1538 5y ago

"Residential Construction Permits require an average of 5 to 7 working days for approval or response. Commercial Construction Permits require an average of 14 to 21 working days for approval." First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.

always2slow 4y ago

>the USPS sucks No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather. Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver. FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation. UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.

Cerium 4y ago
USPS is great. I run a small ecommerce business and each year a package or two is lost (out of hundreds, maybe this year thousands). So far USPS has been responsible for one and UPS the rest (I don't ship on any other carrier). As you mentioned, the USPS carriers are almost always friendly and helpful.
light_hue_1 4y ago
It depends on where you live. USPS regularly leaves mail in the wrong mailboxes in my location. FedEx and UPS never do. And the people delivering the mail here are incredibly rude. My neighbors and I have to regularly swap mail. No amount of complaining fixes anything.
- hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
  Mail delivery to my home has gotten worse over the past ten to fifteen years. I complained to the local post office about this, and they said part of the reason is that this route no longer has dedicated carrier.
hfjfnnf 4y ago
It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine. Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes. Whats worse, USPS has some PO boxes in some condo complexes, residents of which rent PO boxes that are at their physical residence and USPS delivers mail to these PO boxes. Its also sprung a private business who collects mail from PO boxes amd deliver to physical addresses for a small fee. I simply dont understand why its the case here.

rootsudo 4y ago

"Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?!" They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with. By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity. You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.

nostromo 4y ago

> The American bureaucracy is insane. This is an California issue, not an American one. > Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Again, this is a California issue. We know the bureaucracy is broken, but we vote for the same incompetent people over and over again.

lbriner 4y ago
I think bureaucracy is broken generally. It is a fallacy that all problems can be avoided or solved by "due process" since life is infinitely more complex. How many people have been told by a Local Authority that something is 5mm too wide or 30cm too close to the road? I think the only solution, like we have in UK Courts, is that you need people who are trusted with an amount of knowledge and wisdom (i.e. the Judges) who are permitted to, for example, visit a property and take a holistic view. "Is the drain slightly too close to the road? Yeah but realistically 90% of the other properties have a contravention that is not enforced so just get on with it". We used to have something similar in Local Authorities in the UK where the "Borough Engineer", pretty much had the last call on roads, street lighting etc. If you wanted to make representations, you wrote to them and they decided whether they cared about what you were complaining about. No appeals. As the article says, where this gets unfair, people think that by adding process or sign-off, you get the best of all worlds but the truth is, that only works if everybody wants the same thing, otherwise as OP says, people game the process even if they can't win as some malicious act to cost the builders money.
lesam 4y ago
NYC taking 17 years to build 3 subway stops doesn’t sound broken?

tonyedgecombe 4y ago

>It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. Corruption isn't the answer to these problems.

b0afc375b5 4y ago
I like to think corruption isn't the answer to ANY problem. Is there a problem in which this isn't the case?

theNJR 4y ago

I’m curious why you are putting yourself through this? Given this is a multi million dollar project, why not purchase an existing home? I know inventory is tight, but you’d close on a place within 6 months.

eli_gottlieb 4y ago

>Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.

xnx 4y ago

One of the primary goals of homeowners (one of the largest voting blocs) is to prevent the decrease in the value of their homes. In this way, government is fulfilling its purpose beautifully.