mottsmith
@mottsmith
Co-Founder of Amped Kitchens (http://www.ampedkitchens.com). Adjunct professor of Real Estate Dev. at @USCprice. Board chair, @InfillCouncil. Personal account.
It's actually much funnier than this: The urban planner world is awash with a conspiracy that a convoluted system of laws has mandated sprawl and banned apartments near transit, and the people directly responsible for those laws are...urban planners
The urban planner world is awash with people who believe in a conspiracy theory wherein a convoluted system of laws pushed by the auto industry has made us car dependent while also impeding the adoption of mass transit. It never occurs to them that many people just prefer cars.
> “I’m not a NIMBY” > “Prioritize development of AFFORDABLE housing; not luxury condos that destroy neighborhoods and displace long-term residents.” Dog, this is left-NIMBY canon
Not a NIMBY, go actually read my posts on development priorities. I'm pro-density, pro missing middle housing, pro mass transit... I am against tearing down existing, dense, affordable housing to replace it with luxury condos when the city has plenty of less dense, blighted areas…
The overwhelming majority of San Francisco’s celebrated Victorian homes were built with facade elements that were mass produced with power tools in off-site factories and ordered from catalogs. Basically none of them were “hand carved.”
San Francisco is well known for its beautifully constructed homes. But to hear some people tell it, it might sound as though The City’s architectural heyday has long since passed. sfexaminer.com/news/housing/s…
LA’s affordable housing linkage fee is anti affordability.
This under-construction 7-bedroom, $14mm mansion did not have to pay any affordable housing fee. If you built a five-unit apartment of the same size, it'd need to pay a $360,000 affordable housing fee. How do five small homes neg. impact affordability more than one mansion?
This under-construction 7-bedroom, $14mm mansion did not have to pay any affordable housing fee. If you built a five-unit apartment of the same size, it'd need to pay a $360,000 affordable housing fee. How do five small homes neg. impact affordability more than one mansion?
Santa Monica has a great pro-housing city council and fantastic pro-housing city staff. Yet SM permitted projects with 30 mixed income housing units in 2024 and 0 mixed income units YTD 2025. What's the lesson here? It's that there are multiple regulatory barriers and each one…
Laws change, housing gets built: Santa Monica edition.
Rephrasing this: The most effective housing policy is one that makes it more profitable to add supply than it is to renovate old buildings and hike up rents
If you want to get technical about it, the problem for housing regulators is how to get the risk-adjusted returns to development up above the risk-adjusted returns to lipstick on a pig value-add. If you can do this while credibly promising not to screw with the regulatory…
The collusion to create artificial scarcity in the housing market to keep property values and rents high is real. It’s just happening in your city’s planning department with zoning, not in shadowy corporate board rooms with fancy software. x.com/dirtydanima/st…
Oh yeah cutthroat property owners LOOVE to undercut each other. That’s why rent is always going up and when you ask why, they say “oh it’s just the market rate”. If you think these people and companies aren’t colluding to get as much money as possible, you’re naive
1/ It's time to bring back "designed in California, made in California.” Today, at @reindsummit, @ashleevance and I introduced Solano Foundry, the largest advanced manufacturing park in America, an hour north of Silicon Valley. Built by @CAForever with @JLL. 🧵