
Who Owns Los Angeles? - cl3m
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1224
======
addisonj
Out of curiosity, I wondered what sort of data my home county (Salt Lake
County) kept and if I could get access to it.

It was easy to find... but apparently will cost me $1000 dollars to access
it...

Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it
seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers
isn't freely available for download.

The article doesn't mention it, but it looks like LA County charges as well.

~~~
rmc
> it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by
> taxpayers isn't freely available for download.

One really nice thing about the USA is how much public and open data there is.
In Europe you can't even get access to maps, which is why OSM was created in
Europe.

~~~
AdamCraven
You can get access to a lot of data in Europe, including maps (ordinance
survey). In fact the UK has more open data available than the US, according to
OpenDataBarometer:

[http://www.opendatabarometer.org/report/analysis/rankings.ht...](http://www.opendatabarometer.org/report/analysis/rankings.html)

~~~
adventured
That doesn't appear to be a very good counter point, your own link confirms
what the parent said.

There's one country ahead of the US in that list, half of Europe averages
middling scores, and the other half is either not even listed (eg Bulgaria,
Moldova, Croatia, Belarus) or posts incredibly bad scores (eg Poland, Greece,
Hungary, Belgium, Iceland).

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choward
Whoa. That escalated fast. I thought I was reading an simple article about
property data. And then, BOOM! All the sudden we're discussing file formats,
and then making database queries. And out of nowhere this monster appears:
[http://robrhinehart.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/01/spherical...](http://robrhinehart.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/01/spherical_harmonics.png)

~~~
tfgg
That equation is rather unnecessary showing off, I don't see it being used
later on, and the author doesn't bother trying to explain it. It looks like
(going by the GM/r) that it might be the gravitational potential for a mass
distribution described by a bunch of spherical harmonics.

~~~
johnloeber
The equation is barely even showing off: if you decode it, that's just a bunch
of algebraic manipulations. There's not even any calculus in there.

~~~
nitrogen
Calculus is basically algebra with a bigger vocabulary of operations.

~~~
eru
Depends. Calculus deals with limits and integration. Algebra is more
interested in how groups, rings and fields and other structures work.

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gxs
I absolutely love these top of articles. I went in with no expectations, so I
wasn't as upset as other readers about where the article took.

Loved seeing the queries and results, along with the commentary.

I am a product manager now, but I miss the days when I was analyst and would
put similar queries together to drive various business decisions.

I've bookmarked the site to look for interesting content in the future.

Also, would love to see a similar analysis for the bay area.

~~~
prawn
Absolutely. Someone went in curious, shared their work, provided interesting
commentary and it's useful whether followed in detail or skimmed.

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bkeroack
Great article.

I have the firm belief that Los Angeles is actually the largest city by
population in the USA (as opposed to NYC). Due to an accident of history, what
people colloquially call "LA" is still divided politically into something like
80 independent cities. New York City consolidated into the five boroughs in
the late 19th century, prior to that Queens, Brooklyn, etc. were separate
cities. If you look at the city borders of official Los Angeles, it's a
complex mapping of the spaces around and in-between the various independent
cities.

In most of the US, unincorporated land is extremely rural. In LA,
"unincorporated" land blends seamlessly into the urban landscape. Often if
you're in an unfamiliar area you can't tell what "city" you're in without
looking at the street signs.

While not 100% of LA county residents can be counted as living in "LA", it's a
close-enough approximation. ~10 million vs NYC's 8 million.

~~~
whatusername
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_the_United_States)

Lists NY as ~23 million, LA as ~18 million.

It's amusing -- in Australia we list cities populations like this by default.
I never consider the population of Melbourne to just be the area covered by
Melbourne City Council - it has always included the greater metro area.

~~~
oxryly1
That's generally true here in the US as well. I guess the distinction is being
made in this case because the city data is split into separate jurisdictions
and databases... there is no "greater metro area" database for land use and
population.

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justin66
An interesting bit of naivete from Rob Rhinehart here:

 _Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to
maintain this data_

Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate,
inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be
at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it
this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those
counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford
better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on.

I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of
GIS.

~~~
madeofpalk
Why do counties deliberately obfuscate corrupt this data?

~~~
justin66
Regarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from
a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for
determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given
property.

There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally
accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to
extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the
basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other
property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the
record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when
people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better
equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints
had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested
parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit
a small number of people equipped to exploit them.

I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of
examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume
that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which
is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing
relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.

~~~
pixl97
Working with landmen and title companies in Texas has taught me that even the
best kept computer GIS records are probably wrong. This goes for regular
property as well as mineral leasing. The amount of records for one sublease
are simply staggering. We are currently doing a digitizing and OCR of
historical well records from 1980 to current and the amount of paperwork fills
a 40x30 storage building ceiling to floor. This is only for a few thousand
wells. I've seen title searches for large families where there wasn't a will
set up end up with a sack of near 1000 printed pages. Detangling property
rights in areas with a lot of history, and mineral rights separated from land
rights is a damned nightmare.

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lkbm
#1 Children's Hospital Los Angeles: Non-profit teaching hospital.

#2 Kaiser Foundation Hospitals: Non-profit hospital

#3 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Non-profit hospital

Are non-profit hospitals property-tax exempt? I know non-profits normally
aren't, but there are exceptions (e.g., low-income student housing co-ops in
Texas).

~~~
joshuaheard
Yes. You pay taxes on profits. Since a non-profit entity makes no profit, it
pays no taxes.

The bigger issue I come across is whether a donation to a non-profit
organization is tax deductible. For that, the non-profit entity must apply to
the IRS for IRC 501(c)(3) status and receive it before a donation to a non-
profit entity is tax deductible.

~~~
rtpg
>Since a non-profit entity makes no profit, it pays no taxes

Is this true in the strictest sense? I mean I've seen a lot of non-profits
make more money than they spend, but they're somewhat obligated to reinvest
the money next year.

My impression was that non-profit was sort of a "pinky promise" about how
you'll use your profits (with the IRS flying in if this is not the case)

~~~
joshuaheard
That's true. If profit is defined as income less expenses, some orgs may have
more income than expenses at the end of the year, which could be considered
"profit". However, a non-profit is organized in such a way as there are no
shareholders or other owners to distribute the profit. So, the precise term
should be non-profit-distribution, I guess. Of course, the principals of a
non-profit still take a salary, and you could probably sneak in a reasonable
bonus as well, and not call it a profit distribution.

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pavel_lishin
For those interested in the 2006-Libertarian-Loving-County story, I found the
New York Times story about it:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?pag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?pagewanted=all)

I really wonder what those folks are up to today.

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slackpad
That table of most expensive cities is interesting. Given how Proposition 13
works, the assessed value of places in various cities might be more a
reflection of how actively things are turning over than how much they are
actually worth. The old house we rent in Manhattan Beach has an assessed value
of like $88,000 since the landlord has owned it forever but if we bought it
the value would jump to like $1.7 million. It would be cool to integrate this
data with estimated house values from Zillow to see how much that skew is per
city.

~~~
thrownaway2424
You could just to a bileaner filtered surface over recently sold houses in
your town to more or less fake the same result. Just subtract the assessed
value from the height of the approximate surface.

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mooreds
Fascinating article. I'm no GIS wonk, but I've moved in real estate circles
for a while and understand how messy (truly truly messy) property data can be.
If Rob wants parcel data across the country, he can pay for it, otherwise its
a standartization nightmare.

I also love that this is a subtle pitch for a chief database architect (with
3-5 years of experience(?)).

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jkot
I expected story about John Sutter.At some point he owned half of todays
California. Then Gold Rush started and all those squatters moved in :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter)

~~~
greeneggs
According to the Wikipedia article, Sutter had title to 48,827 acres (76
square miles or 200 square kilometers).

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kylered
I've built GIS databases w/ parcel data, owner data, tax data and zoning
layers of high growth Virgnia and North Carolina jurisdiction. It's a very
time consuming and ad hoc process. Some jurisdictions charge a lot of money
for this data. If anyone has any interest in exploring a parcel based CRM
startup concept, contact me. There is a lot of demand for this service. I have
a few paying consulting customers and thinking about building it into a SaaS
tool to power real estate development.

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johnvschmitt
It shows that long term planning will indeed win out in the long term.

Meaning, if the extremist privatization politicians got their way, the gov't
would own zero. But, if the gov't holds the commons in receivership over a
very long term, the commons (as the gov't is ours if done well) will still
hold a strong position over time.

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wallaceowen
Jefferson Starship - they built it out of rock and roll, as I understand it.

~~~
72deluxe
Genius!

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antidaily
Noah Cross.

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kylek
Masons

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contingencies
I heard the largest landholder, once you strip back the entities, is actually
the Church of Scientology. Maybe that was just hearsay, or only visible in
Hollywood, where it's almost certainly true.

~~~
cmsmith
Your statement, which is just accepting an internet-rumor as true, contrasts
very strongly with the article itself, which is about going to great effort to
learn things from hard data.

~~~
skuhn
I don't see how the article addresses this point at all. The _owner_name_ is
simply text in a field, and could represent a subsidiary of another entity, a
front company or an LLC established simply to own that piece of property
(common in California business real estate).

Even a simple typo or difference in conventions at the time of data entry will
obfuscate that multiple parcels are owned by the same entity.

The article's method simply performs exact matches on _owner_name_ , which is
a place to start. It makes no attempt to delve deeper to piece together the
true ownership structures that this data represents, an admittedly far harder
problem.

~~~
wcfields
Exactly, an interesting query would be some regex to see if owner_name is like
address, e.g., "1234 Street Address Holdings, LLC"

~~~
WillNotDownvote
A surprising number of homes in my LA neighborhood are owned by trusts. I used
to assume they were trusts for the people living in them, but then I noticed
many of the trusts own a number of properties. There's probably an interesting
story or three to be told there with some data digging.

~~~
skuhn
My understanding is that the smart way to sell real estate in California is to
simply not sell it, and rather to sell control of the company that owns the
real estate.

There are non-tax benefits, such as bypassing probate, but as the value of a
property increases the 1% property tax becomes increasingly worrying. I
suspect this is part of the reason why it's more common with commercial real
estate.

The goal is to avoid tax reassessment when a property is sold, which is a big
deal since the average price of a house in CA in 1940 was $36,700 and is now
$211,500 (and much, much higher in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco).
Even at the average house price, it's the difference between a $367/yr bill
versus a $2,115/yr bill. Presumably commercial real estate has seen an
equivalent rise over time.

[http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/leopexclusions.htm](http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/leopexclusions.htm)

~~~
maxerickson
I have no need to become an expert on California property law, but the
exclusions at your link are very narrow. This related page discusses the
_transfer of ownership interest in a legal entity that owns California real
property._ triggering a reassessment.

[http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/leopcio.htm](http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/leopcio.htm)

I wonder if it frequently just isn't worth unwinding the corporation.

~~~
lurcio
Retain ownership in a trust or more perpetual vehicle

~~~
maxerickson
If the originator of the trust maintains a controlling ownership in the trust,
no sale has taken place. If they transfer control of the trust, the page I
linked says that triggers a reassessment.

