A few days ago, I visited downtown Long Beach. The city of Long Beach is located in LA County, right on the Pacific. It has a population is 456,000 and is fairly expensive. The city should be booming, but instead it seemed sort of depressed. What went wrong?

I saw one fairly new high-rise residential building, but mostly it was just block after block of older low rise commercial and residential buildings, with very little construction underway. There are a few homeless people walking around, although not so many as in LA. Given the high rents and housing prices in coastal California, why isn’t Long Beach experiencing a boom in redevelopment?

I suspect the problem is regulations. California has such strict regulations that it is now extremely expensive to build in California. Thus the state no longer sees the dynamic economic growth it experienced during the second half of the 20th century.  And these regulations are not protecting beautiful old historic neighborhoods; downtown Long Beach is rather bland and unattractive.  A hundred new high-rise residential buildings in DTLB would attract new restaurants and shops, making the city far more attractive.  A few of the poorer residents would have to move a few miles inland, but there would