It has a far more diversified job base and is much better-planned than SD County is. That $599K avg price for new construction represents an attached condo price in 2015.[/quote]
Considering most of LA was built up before the late 80’s, why would there be CFDs?
Oh? I’m curious what way you find LA County better planned than SD County? Certainly can’t be the traffic or the limited public transit east of DTLA.[/quote]
Myriad, the massive SGV portion of (Eastern) LA County, where I was looking at RE extensively last year, appears to have been completely built out in ’85 or ’86, depending on city, town to census tract designation (many cities/towns were built out much earlier than that). All their open space has been left intact, and, much like the Silicon Valley, it is extensive …. comprising almost half the land in this region of over 2M people. The County has erected flood control devices on a lot of it, to prevent avulsion. With the San Gabriels in the close or distant background (depending on location) it is spectacular despite the high temperatures there 8-9 months per year. The average SFR lot size there is ~7500 sf compared to SD’s 5000 sf.
Of course, some of the westside cities are much denser, especially the small coastal cities and towns. There hasn’t been any subdivision land with which to build on in more than 35 years in most of the westside of LA County, again, because all their open space was (properly) preserved by previous Boards of Supervisors and city councils.
It is all as it should be.
OTOH, over the past ~25 years, especially, San Diego County and its cities have essentially allowed Big Development to cut off the tops of any hill or mountain which they considered “buildable” (or even barely buildable with extensive rock excavation). In almost every case, the developer and respective city/county partnered to form a “CFD” for the purposes of funding buildings for physical municipal or county services for future inhabitants of that new development. This money WAS used to build the physical buildings used for public service for these outlying areas but did not provide for the extra public personnel’s salaries, benefits and pensions to service those areas. In most cases, city and county staffs have not grown appreciably in the last 15+ years and some cities had to lay off hundreds of workers in 2008-09 (when too many parcels in their jurisdiction were delinquent on their property taxes) and haven’t hired them back to this date.
Hence, we see the bankrupt cities of San Bernardino and Stockton who allowed rampant building as San Diego County cities did but didn’t have the job base and tax base (their parcels had a much lower value) as SD County cities did to support paying for the public services needed by the new population influx of tens of thousands.
All this unchecked rampant growth has affected the quality of life of longtime existing residents adversely by way of perpetually clogged freeways, long lines at public facilities (ex: post offices) and long waits for city services such as tree-trimming, street maintenance and street sweeping, etc.
It isn’t that crowded out in the SGV. Yes, the freeways are congested out there in large part because they have the truck traffic that SD does not and will never have. There are multiple regional and municipal bus lines in the SGV which coordinate with one another and the Metrolink has built several new train stations of late, the newest being within the “City of Industry” (a comm’l subdivision of Walnut, CA):
The Metrolink connects with Amtrak at Union station in LA and also to regional airports and transportation to LAX. It is an excellent and economical way to traverse most of LA County’s sub-regions. From what I can tell, public transportation is very good around there.
LA County was better planned because the vast majority of it was (very wisely) legally preserved PRIOR to the passing of the Mello Roos Community Facilities Act:
Hence the residential properties there are worth more money (on an apples-to-apples comparison) then those in SD County. You pay for what you get in this life. I believe the quality of life there is probably better than that of SD if one doesn’t have to commute on a freeway to work.
I feel it is unfair to blame “locals” for clogging SF Bay area and OC/Ventura/LA County roads (as well as roads within the IE). The roads in these counties are heavily used by travelers, both in and out of state to/from their homes in another county/state as well as by thousands of long-haul commercial drivers daily. SD doesn’t have anywhere near as much “traveler traffic” daily because it is located at the bottom of the state and country … that is unless those travelers entering SD County from elsewhere are headed into MX. SD has much less truck traffic than those other jurisdictions as well, for the same reason. The major coast-to-coast trucking companies offload at Vernon (LA County) and bring a smaller rig into SD to stock our stores, UPS, Fed-Ex, etc, here. SD County (along with several other CA jurisdictions) does not permit the entrance of triple tractor-trailers.
We in SD County have LA County to thank for providing the roads and space to do our “dirty work” for us so we can have timely pkg delivery, mdse in our stores and cleaner air to breathe 🙂
