This is a dialogue re Measure ULA with Joan Ling, former executive director for Community Corporation of Santa Monica (a nonprofit housing developer) and a staff attorney for Public Counsel. www.planningreport.com/2025/09/18/r...

The coalition behind Measure ULA just released a report attacking UCLA research on the tax. They’re claiming it “debunks” the research. It doesn’t even come close. 🧵

Is @citylosangeles going to be ready for the Olympics? Spoke w/ a colleague at the LA County Dept of Public Health today. They said they were expecting a crush of applications for new restaurants, hotels and bars to be open by 2028. Instead, apps are down.

I think we should spend less time worrying about how affordable brand new homes are and more time worrying about how affordable existing older homes are.

For those curious how steep transfer taxes like L.A.'s Measure ULA and Santa Monica's Measure GS impact permitting, look at what happened in Santa Monica after Measure GS was enacted in 2023. 2023: 593 units permitted 2024: 30 units permitted Poorly designed transfer taxes kill housing.

Today the @uclalewiscenter.bsky.social published our analysis on Measure ULA's effect on multifamily housing production in Los Angeles — a report that has been more than a year in the making for me and my coauthor Jason Ward at RAND. A thread on our findings below. www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/tax...

Some context on the claims in this quote aboute Measure ULA: - 9 projects have received ULA funds. Only 4 are under construction -- all started a year before ULA was in effect. - The dip in sales has been persistent, even after the court challenges to ULA were lost

UCLA report claims the ‘mansion tax’ stifles commercial development in L.A. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Measure ULA hasn’t raised nearly as much money for affordable housing as expected, so what happened and how do we make it better? @shanedphillips.bsky.social and @mottsmith.bsky.social discuss during an April 10 ULI event. 🎟️RSVP now! la.uli.org/events/de...

Measure ULA was supposed to raise at least $600m annually for affordable housing. It has raised less than half that. Michael Manville and @mottsmith.bsky.social explain where the so-called “Mansion Tax” may have failed, and propose recommendations to fix it. www.lewis.ucla.edu/r...

LA’s Measure ULA passed with good intentions: tax high-value property sales to help low-income renters. But the early evidence is sobering: transactions have collapsed, revenues have fallen far short, and housing projects are harder to build.

What will it to take to rebuild after the #wildfires? Money, yes, but also a new City Hall approach to permits. Important, says @mottsmith.bsky.social, is to "consciously change our city culture from a culture of ‘no’ to a culture of ‘yes.'” More for @lamag.bsky.social. lamag.com/news/build-b...

Want to streamline building permits in fire-ravaged L.A.? If we do nothing else, we should do this. Offer architect/engineer self-certification for single family and small commercial building permits

Someone on Bluesky is impersonating me. Please report this to the moderators if you have a moment.

I'm good at a lot of stuff. But one thing I am not good at is scheduling meetings using my phone calendar while flying over new time zones.

Is Google trying to tell me something?

WTF: There is higher frequency of bullet trains between Tokyo and Kyoto than on any Metro subway or light rail line in Los Angeles

Who's done the best writing and research on California's dearth of condos near jobs? I'm looking for articles by reasonably neutral parties, like journalists or academics without financial ties to either side of the debates between builders & attorneys.

California Asm. Ward has introduced a bill to ask the state to study allowing buildings up to 10 units in the IRC (these keep getting more ambitious…), and also to study cost drivers in multifamily codes and standards generally leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNa...

Something that you find among a lot of building code reformers and few code insiders: foreign language skills and a lot of interest and experience in other countries

The UPS person made my day today.

ULA is poorly designed - just what you’d expect from performative activists who think trying to understand policy makes you a neoliberal tool. A knock-on effect is reduction of assessment resets which only happen upon sales under Prop 13, so it’s possible the net revenue effect of ULA is negative.

New Measure ULA data drop! Just got all LA County transactions above $1 million, back to 1/1/2020 -- about 160,000 data points. It lets us compare what happened in LA under Measure ULA to Culver City under its Measure RE transfer tax. The difference is staggering.

I just learned about something called polyvagal theory. It posits that our level of physiological arousal as regulated by the vagus nerve -- calm, fight-or-flight, etc. --drives how we feel, perceive events and relate to others. In other words, what happens in the vagus doesn't stay in the vagus.

Holy sh*t. Why isn't Mountain View building housing? Maybe because they tried to charge $295,000 PER UNIT with this builder's remedy project. And because the final settlement was $34,000 per unit -- still outrageous.

Absolutely devastated by the privatization of public space in Seville. The ravages of neoliberalism!

Really unfortunate that LA building and zoning codes force designers to put few windows on the facade with the best light, air, and views (that is, the front!), and instead almost all of the windows must face the side, where they’ll be heavily obstructed if a similar building is built next door

Keeping inclusionary zoning voluntary forces policymakers to get the balance of costs and incentives right and eliminates the risk of rendering projects infeasible.

The absolute most important element of inclusionary zoning is that it must be voluntary. If everything else is poorly designed and it's voluntary, it's harmless. If anything else is poorly designed and it's mandatory, it breaks your local housing market.

It would be cool if urban planners could actually use regulation to create pleasant neighborhoods but instead they micromanage private property through zoning while we cede control over the public realm to car-brained traffic engineers, lazy utility companies, and fire officials with no expertise.

New UCLA Lewis Center report on LA's housing element rezoning program (CHIPs) illustrates urgent need for legislative oversight + clarification of housing-element law. L.A. is on the wrong track, headed for a wreck. escholarship.org/uc/... 1/10

In Los Angeles, most new apartment buildings are kind of ugly because the city requires a two lane wide driveway for parking garages and because the power company wants to put huge transformers right in front of every building.

Everyone talks about the effect L.A.'s deceptively-named "Mansion Tax"Measure ULA is having on multifamily development. But how about its effect on jobs? I analyzed Assessors data on commercial/industrial property sales from 2022-2024. Bottom line? ULA has thrown a MASSIVE wrench in deals. 1/

Only because Bluesky doesn't have polling functionality yet, I posted this question about L.A.'s Measure ULA on X. Please vote if you have thoughts about it! x.com/mottsmith/st...

“Unlike most other cities, New York requires metal piping instead of cheaper plastic piping in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Elevators also can be four or five times costlier to build in the United States than in several European countries.” www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/n...

On the LA Metro Purple Line from DTLA to NoHo. It really is about time they added some more trains ....

At Asm. Buffy Wicks' hearing in L.A. on permit reform to support infill housing. That silhouette is UCLA Prof. Michael Manville, testifying to the panel.

Note that this excellent little building does not have the types of materials variation, facade articulation, or off-street parking that are required of new construction in most American cities.

These stories are psychotic. A local sheriff arrested & jailed a GA mom because her 10-year-old…walked less than a mile by himself. The state is now trying to force her to sign a “safety plan” that would require putting a location tracker on her son. Do you feel safer? reason.com/2024/11/11/m...

Michael Weinstein's Prop 33 on repealing Costa Hawkins and expanding what local governments can enact as rent control ordinances failed in every single county in California, including San Francisco.

L.A.'s deceptively titled "Mansion Tax," Measure ULA is a massive flop. And harmful. The quote below is particularly dumb. Sure, 60% of voters approved it. But 100% thought it was a mansion tax -- not what it turned out to be, a tax on progress. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Free range kids are safer in the long run than those subject to helicopter parenting.

Good meme

What is happening in Seattle? Seattle Set to Double Down on Arbitrary Parking Mandates www.theurbanist.org/2024/11/08/s... via @urbanistorg

Hello urbanist, Bluesky! (Thanks, @stephenjacobsmith.bsky.social for being my gateway drug.)

Developers aren't building in Los Angeles In August through October, an average of 13 new apartment buildings (543 units) pulled building permits each month Extrapolated to a year, that's only ~6,500 units The status quo isn't working

More evidence of the New York Times' strong anti-LA bias.

The plaza at Frank Gehry's the Grand LA is as confusing and lifeless as California Plaza and the Bonaventure. Major lost opportunity.