Comment by imtringued
8 hours ago
The problem is that you're camouflaging the implicit position of "I'm going to stay in my home, even if I have to see the world burn." as the seemingly reasonable position "I'm going to stay in my home", while being utterly ignorant to the consequences based on absurd levels of wishful thinking.
You're saying the government is going to fail, but actually it's not really going to fail. Someone is going to bail you out every single time. If the government failed, but I'm still in the house, it didn't fail hard enough. They should get better and more competent at failing. The failure needs to be more absolute and its consequences should be unavoidable. The bare minimum required is that they thoroughly crush my spirit and desire to keep living in this place.
People with a semblance of sanity left in their brain understand that getting the things they want, also means dealing with the associated costs and that if they insist on those things, they also implicitly insist on the costs associated with those things. When people refuse this cost benefit trade off, they will end up losing the things they want.
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
>costs are spread over more people
I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.
On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.
There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.