Photo: North Hollywood houses awaiting demolition.

Peter McFerrin, to quote his own description, “is a PhD student in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California, where he studies transportation policy. A native of Illinois, he currently lives in the Mar Vista district of Los Angeles. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a registered Democrat, and a firm believer that the best tacos are on wheels.”

He is also the publisher of a fascinating new blog, “Clueless and Slightly Slack” which expounds on his own interests in urban neighborhoods. He has photo essays on Carthay Circle, Hancock Park and Koreatown.

He thinks in economic rather than purely aesthetic ways about how to solve LA’s housing shortage: “Bernard Parks would have been a terrible mayor, but he was the only one running who had the right idea about the city’s housing affordability crisis. Rather than creating all sorts of gimmicky, kickback-laden programs like Antonio Villaraigosa’s affordable housing trust fund, Parks proposed just “glutting the market” to drive down occupancy rates (currently somewhere between 98 and 99 percent). First-year microeconomics teaches that it’s much less costly to simply remove constraints on supply than to engage in subsidization, let alone impose price controls.”

Surpisingly he is sympathetic to families who buy small homes, and tear them down to build something better:

“A family that drops half a million dollars on a piece of land probably isn’t going to want to live in a cramped, thin-walled, low-ceilinged house with ancient fixtures and inadequate storage space, regardless of the size of the backyard. Sometimes, renovation can address these problems, but often there just isn’t a whole lot that can be done to make a small postwar tract house fit modern demands. Nobody should be surprised that, especially in greater Los Angeles, much of the housing stock built between the late ’30s and the early ’60s is wholly inadequate for contemporary buyers.”

He believes that LA should rezone many of its R1 single family lots as R2 to allow duplexes, triplexes and multi-house lots. Yet this solution might destroy some of the loveliest areas of LA like old Studio City and Hancock Park. North Hollywood has already been ruined by thoughtless up-zoning.

HIVN believes that LA should rezone the single story retail stores along its boulevards, to build residential housing over shops. We need to also pursue imaginative re-uses of industrial lands to integrate housing with warehouses in the NE San Fernando Valley.