Texas is a very large state. Of course, the size of Alaska is on a whole other level.

Happy birthday!

As a native of Texas, the distance trivia fact that I grew up knowing is that Texarkana is closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso.

This situation seems to come up with every municipality when a higher level of government legislates almost anything, just as companies selling consumer products will advertise things required of them by law as if they’re done out of the goodness of their hearts.

bsky.app/profile/muha...

One thing I’ve been thinking about for a while is how corner stores under apartments should be seen by developers as amenities. Sure, they might not be profitable, but neither is an apartment building gym.
I just want to be able to walk down the block to get a quart of milk when I need it.

Some of them (in Texas, for example) want to not only cap property taxes, but completely eliminate them. With no state income tax. It’s as if they’re saying, “I see what Prop 13 has done to California over the last 47 years, and I want that times infinity for my state.”

It is true that people have been using the phrase “housing crisis” at least since the early 80s. But just because a big problem is longstanding doesn’t mean it ceases to be a crisis.

I did some simple division last week, and found his latest $1T pay package amounts to shareholders giving him $1.67M for each death caused from his elimination of USAID, based on the 600,000 figure I saw recently.

Yes. There’s the City of LA’s Small-lot Subdivision Ordinance, but that doesn’t apply unless it’s already zoned for multifamily.

...as each one has to match the prevailing size, frontage, etc. of the existing lots on the rest of the block.

You could subdivide the parent lot using a conventional subdivision process, and then use SHRA on the resulting smaller parcels, but the initial subdivision would have to be into 3 lots to stay under the 0.51 acre max for SHRA on vacant R-1, and that's not possible in most cases in LA,

Having both a minimum and maximum density leaves a relatively small range of lot sizes where it works, especially on vacant R1 parcels.

It reminds me of a provocative lecture by José Torero in 2012, a professor of fire engineering at UCL, in which he says that the problem of fire has basically been solved, and the main task of the field now should be cost optimization www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJx8...

The whole point of camouflage is to hide.

And yet, half a century later, there are politicians out there now trying to do the same to other states and their people. Are people not aware of how disastrous the strategy of artificially limiting property taxes is?