"When Los Angeles was originally massively populated in the 1880s, rich people didn’t want to live near the ocean, fearing that dampness would give them tuberculosis. So they preferred inland places like Pasadena."
And this was true worldwide - Sydney, London had old docklands in the centre of town in the 1980s that we have since realised were perfect location for waterfront properties. Your question is looking for architectural arbitrage: I think in London that there are too many half-hearted highrise buildings of 20 stories or so. Why not make them 100 stories, you get so many more rooms, and they are exciting.
Given the permitting issues currently being experienced by victims of the Palisades fire I am not sure it would be a good idea to tear down anything functional in LA as the chance of replacing it within our lifetimes seems remote. This is especially true for anything under the control of the dreaded California Coastal Commission unless one has very deep pockets.
I was going to nominate RFK Stadium in DC, but it's supposed to be replaced next year with a $3.7B stadium in a crummy part of town that's not easy to get to from some directions.
Obama tried to push zoning changes on suburbs to increase their density, so maybe we shouldn't go there. The affluent Left loves high density housing almost as much as public outdoor dining.
A lot of very rich people on the slopes of Beverly Hills, etc. don't want their ocean views blocked.
Realtor Arvin Haddad reviews ultra-luxury home sales tours on youtube, mostly in SoCal & NYC. He's said similar things about water views and being too high, so you're on solid ground. How stable is the beach there, and where's the bedrock?
As a lifelong Floridian, I particularly dislike high-rises on the beach. Fortunately the beach high-rises have passed their half-lives and begun to self destruct, even though that means homeowners' insurance has gotten out of reach for many Floridians.
Many office buildings in east coast cities are going to be demolished according to some city real estate guys I watched recently. The assessed value is set to fall by 30% because of weak demand.
Dunno. Working from Home seems be on the decline as more and more companies order workers back to the office. Somewhat offsetting this, and lowering demand for offices, is the loss of many white collar jobs, which hopefully will prove transitory.
Most any of these urban-planning thought-experiments in the USA will run up against the Race issue, limiting practical and real-world implementation of good ideas.
There is a sense in which US cities are primarily about maintaining racial harmony, often by means of lowering standards in some way. Partially abandoning commons, conceding "parts of the city fully" to disorder, and "all the city partly" to disorder (or implied disorder).
Stated more simply: Cities do not quite WANT nice things.
This is quite starkly observable by train travel and intra-regional rail travel and what huge wasted potential there is with it.
> Most any of these urban-planning thought-experiments in the USA will run up against the Race issue, limiting practical and real-world implementation of good ideas. <
Well said. There is "this could be better even as things stand". And the much more utopian--but way more important--"man, imagine what this could be like without our demographics." Brass tacks ... it is demographics that matter.
And not just in the USA. Probably the biggest under-utilized/wasted real-estate opportunity in the world--South Africa. (What it could have been--ignoring the siren call of "cheap labor!"--and the sad reality of what it is.)
A plea to all the "immigration!" numnuts: Please wise up! The sooner the better.
Of course, there are examples like Boston. The rich whites in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill don’t want anything to change, the ethnic whites in the North End, East Boston, & Southie don’t want anything to change, the rich Asians in Charlestown don’t want anything to change, and they’re all near the water and the blacks and Hispanics from the South End on down to Mattapan are just sort of there. Yeah, it’s unaffordable and insufferably full of its virtue and its de facto segregation is comical, but it’s pretty safe and has managed to hold on to a lot of Nice Things.
There are some unbelievably tacky '60s era apartment buildings along the water in Santa Cruz. But the hippies who live in them would riot if anyone tried to tear them down.
Unlike Steve, I kinda like the 2 BR 1 BA California bungalows that dot the beach towns up and down the state. They are a reminder of what CA used to be.
Eventually Steve will get around to repeating his argument of why the Santa Barbara coast should have a high-rise forest like Antalya, Turkey. I can't get down with that.
The Very Slowly Falling Millennium Tower in San Francisco probably just needs to be brought down now instead of instantly and catastrophically later.
Supposedly the smartest and most expensive engineers in the world have devised a fix but I don't think anybody knows yet.
I remember wondering how you would actually bring it down and figured that it would be opposite the way it went up. So you would start from the top down and the outside in. I think it's too high and the area is too dense to implode it.
I wouldn't buy one of those condo units for fifty thousand dollars. I'm not sure you could even give it to me.
It would probably make sense to take it down but I am sure there is so much litigation around this that it will stand for decades even while largely empty.
An absolutely catastrophic situation would have occurred if one of the World Trade Center towers, probably the South Tower, had collapsed on 9/11 while the other remained standing. True, it would have saved the lives of the 200 or people, mostly firefighters, who were on the lower floors of the North Tower at the time of the collapse - most of those trapped on the upper floors were dead by then - but the aftermath would have been a nightmare beyond imagination.
With its top floors burnt out and its common foundation devastated the North Tower would have been so unstable that even approaching it would have been far too dangerous for anyone to attempt. There would have been no way to demolish it, as implosions require extensive building preparation and a conventional dismantling unimaginably risky. Removing debris from the South Tower would be impossible as well. I can very easily see a scenario in which the ruined hulk of the North Tower would have to be left standing and a substantial part of Lower Manhattan permanently evacuated.
"When Los Angeles was originally massively populated in the 1880s, rich people didn’t want to live near the ocean, fearing that dampness would give them tuberculosis."
And yet, during the 1920's and 1930's, Malibu already had Hollywood stars living there as second homes or places to enjoy on the weekends. There's a reason why it acquired the nicknames "the colony" or "Malibu colony". Apparently Hollywood Alisters weren't spooked about getting TB by living in Malibu.
Never thought of Malibu and other beach areas in SoCal as being particularly damp.
You can also see this in Miami in the 1920's. Plenty of rich people would winter in Miami Beach to escape the winters of the Northeast. Apparently they didn't factor in their fear of acquiring TB from building beach houses near the beach.
Sunlight kills TB so just being in a mostly sunny place and outside most of the time cuts your chance of acquiring it. I recall from Tombstone that Doc Holiday went to dry Arizona because he already had TB. Maybe the dry air made it feel better.
My recollection from talking to some family members (by marriage, not blood) who were longtime Angelinos is that Pasadena and San Marino were for Midwesterners to escape the winter, Hancock Park for native born WASPs., Beverly Hills for movie people, Bel Air for the megarich non-movie people, and Santa Monica originally for movie people's beach houses. If you look at movies shot in Malibu in the '60s, there is almost nothing there, and what is there is tiny and architecturally totally undistinguished, basically shoeboxes with windows. The Hancock Park WASPs used Newport Beach as their getaway.
Pasadena's famous Gamble House for instance was built for the Gambles of Proctor & Gamble, Steve's former most important client, so they could get out of Chicago in the winter.
There’s a rooftop bar in Wicker Park with a really cool nighttime view of the Chicago skyline from the west, rising above all of the lower rise buildings in front of you. I accidentally offended the waitress during last call and was afraid to drink what she brought me. Enjoyed the view, though.
As far as a building to demolish and replace - the Watergate is sort of cool and all, but think what could you do with that piece of real estate.
"When Los Angeles was originally massively populated in the 1880s, rich people didn’t want to live near the ocean, fearing that dampness would give them tuberculosis. So they preferred inland places like Pasadena."
And this was true worldwide - Sydney, London had old docklands in the centre of town in the 1980s that we have since realised were perfect location for waterfront properties. Your question is looking for architectural arbitrage: I think in London that there are too many half-hearted highrise buildings of 20 stories or so. Why not make them 100 stories, you get so many more rooms, and they are exciting.
Given the permitting issues currently being experienced by victims of the Palisades fire I am not sure it would be a good idea to tear down anything functional in LA as the chance of replacing it within our lifetimes seems remote. This is especially true for anything under the control of the dreaded California Coastal Commission unless one has very deep pockets.
I saw on X last night that disgruntled firemen were ordered away from completely extinguishing the original fire that became the Palisades fire.
Yeah, the story about the fire reigniting a week later sounded suspicious to me and likely a cover up for incompetence.
I was going to nominate RFK Stadium in DC, but it's supposed to be replaced next year with a $3.7B stadium in a crummy part of town that's not easy to get to from some directions.
Obama tried to push zoning changes on suburbs to increase their density, so maybe we shouldn't go there. The affluent Left loves high density housing almost as much as public outdoor dining.
A lot of very rich people on the slopes of Beverly Hills, etc. don't want their ocean views blocked.
Realtor Arvin Haddad reviews ultra-luxury home sales tours on youtube, mostly in SoCal & NYC. He's said similar things about water views and being too high, so you're on solid ground. How stable is the beach there, and where's the bedrock?
As a lifelong Floridian, I particularly dislike high-rises on the beach. Fortunately the beach high-rises have passed their half-lives and begun to self destruct, even though that means homeowners' insurance has gotten out of reach for many Floridians.
Many office buildings in east coast cities are going to be demolished according to some city real estate guys I watched recently. The assessed value is set to fall by 30% because of weak demand.
Dunno. Working from Home seems be on the decline as more and more companies order workers back to the office. Somewhat offsetting this, and lowering demand for offices, is the loss of many white collar jobs, which hopefully will prove transitory.
Most any of these urban-planning thought-experiments in the USA will run up against the Race issue, limiting practical and real-world implementation of good ideas.
There is a sense in which US cities are primarily about maintaining racial harmony, often by means of lowering standards in some way. Partially abandoning commons, conceding "parts of the city fully" to disorder, and "all the city partly" to disorder (or implied disorder).
Stated more simply: Cities do not quite WANT nice things.
This is quite starkly observable by train travel and intra-regional rail travel and what huge wasted potential there is with it.
> Most any of these urban-planning thought-experiments in the USA will run up against the Race issue, limiting practical and real-world implementation of good ideas. <
Well said. There is "this could be better even as things stand". And the much more utopian--but way more important--"man, imagine what this could be like without our demographics." Brass tacks ... it is demographics that matter.
And not just in the USA. Probably the biggest under-utilized/wasted real-estate opportunity in the world--South Africa. (What it could have been--ignoring the siren call of "cheap labor!"--and the sad reality of what it is.)
A plea to all the "immigration!" numnuts: Please wise up! The sooner the better.
Of course, there are examples like Boston. The rich whites in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill don’t want anything to change, the ethnic whites in the North End, East Boston, & Southie don’t want anything to change, the rich Asians in Charlestown don’t want anything to change, and they’re all near the water and the blacks and Hispanics from the South End on down to Mattapan are just sort of there. Yeah, it’s unaffordable and insufferably full of its virtue and its de facto segregation is comical, but it’s pretty safe and has managed to hold on to a lot of Nice Things.
Loop
There are some unbelievably tacky '60s era apartment buildings along the water in Santa Cruz. But the hippies who live in them would riot if anyone tried to tear them down.
Unlike Steve, I kinda like the 2 BR 1 BA California bungalows that dot the beach towns up and down the state. They are a reminder of what CA used to be.
Eventually Steve will get around to repeating his argument of why the Santa Barbara coast should have a high-rise forest like Antalya, Turkey. I can't get down with that.
The Very Slowly Falling Millennium Tower in San Francisco probably just needs to be brought down now instead of instantly and catastrophically later.
Supposedly the smartest and most expensive engineers in the world have devised a fix but I don't think anybody knows yet.
I remember wondering how you would actually bring it down and figured that it would be opposite the way it went up. So you would start from the top down and the outside in. I think it's too high and the area is too dense to implode it.
I wouldn't buy one of those condo units for fifty thousand dollars. I'm not sure you could even give it to me.
It would probably make sense to take it down but I am sure there is so much litigation around this that it will stand for decades even while largely empty.
I can promise you entire careers of insurance defense and coverage attorneys are being made off that thing.
An absolutely catastrophic situation would have occurred if one of the World Trade Center towers, probably the South Tower, had collapsed on 9/11 while the other remained standing. True, it would have saved the lives of the 200 or people, mostly firefighters, who were on the lower floors of the North Tower at the time of the collapse - most of those trapped on the upper floors were dead by then - but the aftermath would have been a nightmare beyond imagination.
With its top floors burnt out and its common foundation devastated the North Tower would have been so unstable that even approaching it would have been far too dangerous for anyone to attempt. There would have been no way to demolish it, as implosions require extensive building preparation and a conventional dismantling unimaginably risky. Removing debris from the South Tower would be impossible as well. I can very easily see a scenario in which the ruined hulk of the North Tower would have to be left standing and a substantial part of Lower Manhattan permanently evacuated.
"When Los Angeles was originally massively populated in the 1880s, rich people didn’t want to live near the ocean, fearing that dampness would give them tuberculosis."
And yet, during the 1920's and 1930's, Malibu already had Hollywood stars living there as second homes or places to enjoy on the weekends. There's a reason why it acquired the nicknames "the colony" or "Malibu colony". Apparently Hollywood Alisters weren't spooked about getting TB by living in Malibu.
Never thought of Malibu and other beach areas in SoCal as being particularly damp.
You can also see this in Miami in the 1920's. Plenty of rich people would winter in Miami Beach to escape the winters of the Northeast. Apparently they didn't factor in their fear of acquiring TB from building beach houses near the beach.
Sunlight kills TB so just being in a mostly sunny place and outside most of the time cuts your chance of acquiring it. I recall from Tombstone that Doc Holiday went to dry Arizona because he already had TB. Maybe the dry air made it feel better.
And Robert Louis Stevenson went to Samoa for roughly the same reason.
My recollection from talking to some family members (by marriage, not blood) who were longtime Angelinos is that Pasadena and San Marino were for Midwesterners to escape the winter, Hancock Park for native born WASPs., Beverly Hills for movie people, Bel Air for the megarich non-movie people, and Santa Monica originally for movie people's beach houses. If you look at movies shot in Malibu in the '60s, there is almost nothing there, and what is there is tiny and architecturally totally undistinguished, basically shoeboxes with windows. The Hancock Park WASPs used Newport Beach as their getaway.
Pasadena's famous Gamble House for instance was built for the Gambles of Proctor & Gamble, Steve's former most important client, so they could get out of Chicago in the winter.
The LA cathedral. Can't figure out how to insert a picture, but you know what I mean
There’s a rooftop bar in Wicker Park with a really cool nighttime view of the Chicago skyline from the west, rising above all of the lower rise buildings in front of you. I accidentally offended the waitress during last call and was afraid to drink what she brought me. Enjoyed the view, though.
As far as a building to demolish and replace - the Watergate is sort of cool and all, but think what could you do with that piece of real estate.