Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

There is plenty of history showing the long term effects and outcome of dense housing run by the Government. Dense housing ran by private companies will always be a race to capture the most amount of profit. While Government ran dense housing will be affected by an ever decreasing budget and ever increasing cost. OP is right. We need to invest in “fly over” states. There is an abundance of land and opportunity to achieve the American dream. Humans living in a tiny cube and commuting in a tiny cylinder (bus, subway) to a tiny office cube ad nauseam is the worst.

Credit has to be given to the governor Gavin Newsom here. He's made some questionable policy choices, particularly with seemingly random vetoes (which the legislature could override but they haven't done in decades because that would take up time in the next legislative session).

Prop 13 was about the absolute worst thing to ever happen to California housing. Rising property prices make people feel like they're richer but really they're not. You typically still own one housing unit of wealth in almost all cases. It's just the nominal value is higher. For this benefit, eye-wateringly massive subsidies have been given to Disney, institutional property holders and the very wealthy for absolutely no gain.

But this goes to show how powerful NIMBYs are and the level of delusional self-interest people possess.

For those unfamiliar, Prop 13 capped the annual property tax increases to 1-2%. Property tax rates are reset when the property is sold. Property held in LLCs is never reset because the LLC not the property is sold. This is why Disney's property tax rate was basically set in the 1960s and never been adjusted for current values. The net effect is that incumbent property owners from the 70s and 80s pay a tiny fraction of the assessable property tax on their properties and this has been a massive drain on state budgets. This was sold as not kicking seniors out of their houses. Texas handles this a lot better: property taxes can be deferred until death or the sale of the property.

But it gets worse: this beneficial tax rate can be inherited. It's just locking in generational wealth. It's also not allowing people to move because they can't keep this beneficial tax rate.

Recently, there was a very minor partial rollback on this known as Prop 19. What is it? It limits this beneficial property tax rate inheritance to only one property. That's right. If you owned 10 properties then your family could inherit all your tax rates prior to this. So this only affects people who bought multiple properties in the 20th century and sat on them. That's probably less than 1% of CAlifornians.

Prop 13 passed with only 51% of the vote. 49% of voters rejected this very minor reform. That's how powerful the NIMBY brain rot is.

Now against this force, which tends to overtake all local cities, towns, councils and planning boards, there have been a whole bunch of reforms: stopping the abuse of CEQA to block any development, increasing density without years-long planning approvals in certain cases (eg on major roads), all CA municpalities having to plan for how they're going to build more housing (aka the housing element) with real consequences for not complying (eg the builder's remedy) and so on.

Passing any of these given the power of NIMBYism with voters is a major accomplishment and I think these are starting to have an effect.

This kind of anti-logic usually goes along with arguments like "well, they keep building lots of units and prices haven't gone down, so obviously it's useless to do anything but enact rent control for current residents and give the middle finger to anyone else who ever wants to live in that place", while ignoring that prices can't go down until we catch up on the literally decades of underbuilding in most US metro areas.

Neither the article nor the comment you are referring to were talking about government housing.

And you’re entitled to not want to live in a dense urban environment, but you might need to open your mind to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do.

If height limits were raised with zoning for multi family housing, those investments would sky rocket faster than under NIMBY