AI Summary
5 min readWhy Building a Crosswalk in LA Is Kafkaesque
On a live episode of Odd Lots from the Vermont Theater in Hollywood, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway spoke with two figures who approach real estate from very different angles: Bill McBride, the longtime housing analyst behind Calculated Risk who called both the subprime bubble and the subsequent bottom, and Zach Lazary, founder of the Western Company, a developer trying to build something closer to a neighborhood than a collection of buildings. The conversation ranged from zoning and parking to the surprising difficulty of installing a crosswalk, and what happens when cheap money stops masking mediocre design.
The Developer as Curator
Zach Lazary comes from a theater and acting background, and he brought that sensibility to real estate after moving to Los Angeles around 2014. What struck him was how people reacted when scaffolding went up for new construction. "That's not the reaction that you should have when a new building is being built," he said. "It should be some excitement." Instead, the commercial real estate industry had become uninspiring, producing outcomes that felt generic.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:04) **Welcome and Guest Introductions** - Joe and Tracy introduce the live episode from the Vermont Theater in Hollywood, previewing conversations with housing analyst Bill McBride and developer Zach Lazary.
- 2 (03:05) **Zach's Vision: Infusing Art into Development** - Zach explains his background in theater and his goal to make real estate development more exciting and creative.
- 3 (04:17) **Why LA Has So Many Independent Businesses** - Tracy asks why LA still has so many mom-and-pop shops compared to New York, and the guests discuss density and affordability.
- 4 (05:46) **The Strip Mall Aesthetic and Curating Tenants** - Joe expresses love for the diversity of LA strip malls, and Zach explains his tenant curation strategy.
- 5 (07:37) **The Trade-Off Between Taste and Profit** - Tracy asks how Zach turns taste into actual profit, and he explains real estate's built-in resilience.
- 6 (08:49) **Zoning as the Biggest Puzzle Piece** - Bill explains how California's zoning rules and recent ADU laws are impacting housing supply.
- 7 (10:12) **Building a Community vs. Single Buildings** - Zach explains his strategy of aggregating multiple buildings to create a walkable neighborhood, inspired by Jane Jacobs.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Bill McBride did not just predict the 2008 housing bubble, he helped invent financial blogging with his Calculated Risk newsletter. Zach Lasry, meanwhile, is much newer to the scene, but in his career as a real estate developer, he is already responsible for building one of LA's hottest new neighborhoods — Melrose Hill. We spoke to both of them at our live show at the Vermont Hollywood, for a wide-ranging panel discussion on LA real estate. We talk about the difficulty of sourcing construction components, the Kafkaesque process of getting a crosswalk built in LA, and how self-driving cars might help reshape the city and solve its longstanding issues with parking.
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