The future of LA
Curious what SoCal guys think the future holds for LA. The change here is staggering.
Tech companies are flooding in. Snapchat, Amazon, Google and others all have major presence in Venice, playa vista, and South Bay. Not to mention SpaceX and Tesla.
Downtown has a new skyscraper going up every way you look. And the expo line now connects downtown to santa monica.
Culver city is seeing major deveopment. A lot due to the expo line running through it.
Seems like every industrial property in the city is being converted to creative office.
The giant new NFL stadium will be going up in Inglewood.
This flooding of money and high paying jobs has been driving up the price of housing and displacing many natives, even in places like echo park and highland park.
What does this all mean for LA? What will it be like to live and work here 5-10 years from now? Pretty exciting times. I wish i had some money to put down on housing in some of these up and coming locations.
LA just got either the 2024 or 2028 summer Olympics too.
All this as I was trying to find a reason to not spend the money to go out there for ULI's Fall Meeting....
If they could get some type of public transportation that quickly connected all of the cities that would help tremendously. If one wants to go from Playa Vista to Avenue of the Stars in Santa Monica they have to either sit in traffic on the 405 or sit in traffic on Lincoln. There's a shortage of housing so people are going to get priced out and there's a similar effect in Orange County as well and I assume will be, if it hasn't already, be happening in San Diego next.
The MAGICALTUNNELS created by INNOVATIONGOD Elon Musk will UPEND and DISRUPT LA's transportation ECOSYSTEM
Shows how well you know LA when you think Avenue of Stars is in Santa Monica....
Fair fair, I think of Avenue of Stars and Santa Monica Blvd so I think Santa Monica every time
You can bring all the jobs you want, but it's still impossible to get around Southern California. That's pretty much the reason it will never become like SF.
Right, because there's no traffic from San Jose to SF in the morning
Sure. But if you live in the city there are multiple ways to get around SF. There's about 1 1/2 in LA.
Sounds like you're forgetting skateboarding, surfboarding, hopping on the back of taco trucks, hopping on the back of the Bluth family staircar, and white Broncos. Just sayin...
I've been living in LA for a little over 3 years, and I always thought the difficulty of getting around is exaggerated IF you have a good paying job (which applies to most of us here as well as most of the tech workers flooding in).
If you have a good paying job, you can afford to live in a desirable area that is within 20 minutes of work (unless you work downtown, in which case you can take the Expo line and live in Culver City or Santa Monica). Another thing that I think gets looked over in LA: once you're older and want to buy a house, you can buy a house in the city vs. in the suburbs. If you are living in NY, Chicago, SF and buy a house in the suburbs, you have to commute all the way back to the city on the weekends when you want to have fun. If I live in LA, I can buy a house in Manhattan Beach or Brentwood and be 5-10 minutes from where I want to be.
I've taken the Expo line to get downtown and to Santa Monica and I actually think it's better than some PT i've taken because it is all above ground with great cell service and sun light. Not to mention you'll never be waiting outside in the rain or snow for it. I also worked downtown for a year, and if I got off past 730pm it would take me 25 minutes to drive to my apartment in Santa Monica. I think most of us here are getting off past 730pm.
Most of these tech guys will be working near the beach where they can get a nice apartment and walk to work and have everything they need in the general area. If they feel like going out in hollywood or weho for the night they can take an uber with no traffic.
Not to mention this new wave of work from home employees. I have many friends that work from home 4 days a week. They live in the South Bay or Santa Monica in an apartment by the beach. They rarely have to drive anywhere and take lunch breaks to surf or play volleyball.
Either way, none of this will matter in a few years when our lord and savior Elon Musk invents a way to relieve traffic.
I've always told people: LA is great if you have money, but hell if you don't.
When is there no traffic from Venice/ SaMo to WeHo??
What part of LA have you been living in for 3+ years that you don't think traffic is a problem? Even if you have a good paying job (of which there are less than in other metros, as has been addressed already in this thread) the housing costs are disproportionately high. Have you ever taken the Expo line? I used to live in Culver and worked Downtown, and can tell you this is not a desirable situation. If you're working late, the frequency of the service is not ideal. If you don't ever need to leave your neighborhood, LA is great - South Bay, SM, etc. If you ever need to leave those said areas, whether it's a weekday or a weekend, a large portion of your life will be eaten up in travel times. Also, I'm sorry, but your comment about buying a house in Manhattan Beach or Brentwood is a little absurd. Do you know how much the average home there costs?!?!?!? Spoiler alert, it's 2.2 and 2.4 M, respectively. That's almost 500K down if you are planning on putting 20% down. I know that most of us on here do pretty well, but that's not exactly affordable and the average finance/CRE guy will have to work for a few years to afford that, unless you are at a later stage of your career.
LA traffic sucks, everyone knows that. But has anyone lived anywhere else? It's really not that surprising. Most metros in the US have pretty bad traffic. I went to school in LA and experienced LA traffic, but i've lived in Asia, NYC, and I currently live on the east coast in a smaller city. You know what's common? Everyone hates commuting and constantly complains about it. People I work with take an hour to commute each way.
I saw a comment about someone complaining about staying late and having to take the metro? ga901 . Come'on dude, just download a transit app so you can see the departure time and you can properly time what time you leave work so you're not sitting around waiting for 20 minutes. I take the bus everyday where I live. It's a 2 mile commute in a city with 300k people and guess how long it takes to get to work? 30 minutes. I took the bus to work one year in LA. It's really not that bad. Yes, there's always some crackhead doing some stupid-ass stuff on the bus but you just learn to ignore that guy. Part of the problem is LA is people are too arrogant to utilize public transit. It's not the greatest when compared to London, but it's not like you're living in a third world country.
I'd say most metro have traffic for commuters. The difference is affordability. Obviously if you seek more affordable housing by moving further away from work, you're going to have a terrible commute. But if you were in a city like Cleveland, there's likely a marginal increase in your commute time by moving further from work than in a place like LA.
Tech nerds picked out another place to ruin? Just great.
LA is ridiculous. Saw some study from UCLA that said it is now the most unaffordable major city since the jobs don't pay what they do in NYC / SF. Hoping that the newer companies moving in bring with them a bigger paycheck.
"And the places where rents are climbing fastest tend to be places with strong job growth. Zillow said rents are up nearly 20% in the last year in Santa Monica and Venice, where tech jobs have surged. "
LA is still going to be LA. The change is still amazing though, but the traffic still sucks.
When the SNAP lockup ends, there's going to be so much money flooding LA, i think real estate is going to go crazy. Also on the VC side, we are expecting SNAP liquidity to generation a lot more angel investment and seed investment, which I think will also drive the startup scene.
Unless Zuck can get their share price down even lower within the next couple weeks.
SNAP has 1,800 employees, many of which don't live in LA and many more of which joined late enough for their packages to not be FU money. There will be people with money able to buy houses for sure, but its silly to think that such few people are going to make LA real estate go crazy.
DELTE
That's interesting. I haven't been down there in over a year. Always thought it'd be amazing to work in Irvine in live near Laguna or Newport, but OC never had enough city amenities for me. Maybe that will change soon. I notice a ton of the RE job postings are in Irvine/OC.
You're not wrong, but this has all already largely happened. If you were going to make a play in Irvine and wanted to get the biggest pop, you would have had to be in before Don Brenn and Irvine Co. Still not a bad investment, but you're not going to see a ton of outsized returns for that much longer, at least in this cycle.
A little context is deserved in order to exonerate LA city planners of yesteryear. LA planners originally envisioned a collection of self-sufficient, smaller urban cores. This was before automobiles blew up. The idea was that you'd live, work and play in your neighborhood. If you worked in Santa Monica, for example, you'd also live in Santa Monica and go out at night and on the weekends in Santa Monica. No one imagined people would be blasting all over LA to fulfill specific needs at very specific different places. You do have a series of nuclei today, but minus the self containment. Maybe the plan was poorly thought out, or it wasn't updated fast enough to adapt to freeways and cars, or individual municipalities' planning commissions screwed the pooch with short termist protectionist NIMBY policies that didn't allow development to keep pace with demand - forcing people to move further and further away while still driving into said neighborhoods to spend their time there (guess which one is my theory??), or maybe the totality of all the individual decision making just overwhelmed the ability to plan around it. I don't think anyone intended for it to be this way
Not saying that they weren't well intentioned, but any way you slice it there's a huge issue. You have the 2nd largest MSA in the country with a transit/freeway system that was predetermined based on cattle grazing routes, and probably couldn't even handle Seattle's population surge which is obviously a much smaller population.
EDIT: There was some article that came out a while ago (can't find it now) that talked about how if LA wanted to create a system similar to what Chicago or NY have now, it would cost over $1 T.
Of all events to happen that would bring a level of capital that would be as close to $1T, it's the Olympics. So maybe there's hope.
I would argue LA is going through a renaissance. All of downtown is either a brand new skyscraper or one is being built, transit is being looked at and incorporated (an imminent domain just happened on Century Park East), and Tech is entering the scene.
To further add onto the thread started by ga901 , NPR/KPBS did a story about Amazon and Seattle, where people are using their experience received from the company to move to a desirable area where 'Cost-of-Living' (COL) is more affordable. Tech companies in general have ruined local economies (given the minimum wage hike of up to $15 in some places), where local natives are not making enough to survive rent-wise and living paycheck to paycheck.
Did we see this happening with GM and other car companies in the past? Or am I wrong?
Any chance you have a link to the story?
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/jul/17/tech-workers-brace-for-seattles-pl…
Interesting story.
Yeah it will be interesting to see what the next 10 years brings down there. Have friends who have been in LA for 10+ years who are now making the move to Portland, Denver etc because they've been priced out. I still don't think it's as acute as the Bay but certainly much more diversity of professions and income streams down there. It would be good if the city could find someway to integrate all the neighborhoods a bit better. When I lived down there ('06-08) it always felt like things were very discreet and people from one community rarely ventured into another. Maybe that has changed...?
I just moved out after having lived there for about five years, we ventured out everywhere as often as possible. We both had hit our strides and wanted to live up our mid 20's... it was a good time.
Moving to LA soon. Very interested to hear more about this.
What hood?
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