The upper picture was taken in April. The second one I took at the open house last week. That’s framing to Zillow in two months. This ain’t your grandmas accessory dwelling unit. Granny flats will be granny-free in three years. Sooner, perhaps. For this kind of rent money, people will let her sleep on the living room couch.
In its own halting way, Van Nuys is going Sherman Oaks. Sherman Oaks is going West Hollywood, which is going Tokyo.
In a related development, one of my neighbors put new siding on his house.
And the City of Los Angeles chipped up some perfectly good wheelchair ramps and filled them back in again. Because the money has been appropriated progress.
Ask the city for basic beautification and neighborhood street lighting and you will be told there is no money at all. The City is broke. Broke! The field deputies rattle their chains of poverty the way my mother used to wail over her $100/month land payment. But when it comes to Keynesian ditch-filling stimulus, the bucket of Monopoly money is bottomless.
Monopoly money……Keynesian stimulus. So much of it is an ungodly waste. Why, it’s almost as if no one thinks it will ever have to be paid back. At least during FDR’s era we got some handsome post offices, courthouses and high school basketball gyms.
Meanwhile, the Robot Historians of the future will gaze upon the concrete stumps of what were to be High Speed Rail overpasses with the same quizzical looks we give Easter Island statues.
The Doom Porn I read suggests that we can’t keep the spinning plates in the air any longer, that they will crash to the floor any day now. I’m not so sure. I think we keep extend and pretend going for quite some time. Inertia, if nothing else. Sooner or later it will be a problem. It just won’t be MY problem.
Doom Porn…I wonder how often I fall under that description. More than I should or not enough? Orca, you may well live to see a lot of the problems we are foreseeing. They are coming faster than we think. Demographic collapse amongst millennials is real.
Orca – you beat me to it. Fiat currency hallucinated out of the ether can in fact persist for a really long time. Decades. Possibly a century or two. It’s been carrying on for my entire life, and I’m no longer young. But eventually… all the complexity creates too much dead weight.
Mr. Up In The Valley – I know many local government officials all over the country, including your fair city. The feds can and do dole out endless streams of funny money for pork barrel projects that make no sense. But the locals don’t have the same printing press down at City Hall. They’re constrained by both legal mandates and legal prohibitions. Prop 13 on one side, police and fire fighter unions on the other. It’s not pretty. Hence the reliance on bass ackwards projects paid for with smoke and mirror funds from the higher ups.
Local governments still retain their own backdoor printing press in the form of vaguely worded mandates embedded in programs, Medi-Cal being a great example of mission creep. Everything from couples counseling to free phones to summer camps for at risk youth are covered under it. Try to say no to the ephemera and the agencies will parade kids in wheelchairs in front of an eager press. The budget grows automatically. As long as Apple sells 800,000 phones a day, California can cover it. Q12019 is the first year over year drop in iPhone sales.