Who Owns Los Angeles?

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1224

by cl3m • 11 years ago

400 82 11 years ago

robrhinehart.com

antidaily• 11 years ago

Noah Cross.

lkbm• 11 years ago

#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).

zorpner• 11 years ago

That's correct, per section 214 of the CA revenue and taxation code: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=rtc&gr...

There are a number of conditions that must be met for exemption, and being a non-profit hospital generally fulfills them.

jnosCo• 11 years ago

Yes, within a definition of non-profit. http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/pdf/ah267.pdf (page 19)

joshuaheard2• 11 years ago

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.

_delirium• 11 years ago

Property tax is a tax on property, not on profits. Even a business that's losing money (negative profit) has to pay property tax, if it owns property. Some states do exempt charities (or some types of charities) from property taxes as well, but it doesn't follow automatically from non-profit status.

rtpg• 11 years ago

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)

caycep• 11 years ago

Cedars, while "non-profit" in category, certainly isn't by spirit...

choward• 11 years ago

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...

tfgg• 11 years ago

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.

7952• 11 years ago

Yes, especially as one of the key advantages of using a projection is that you don't have to worry about this stuff. You can just work with a Cartesian coordinate system and the results will probably be right.

johnloeber• 11 years ago

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.

zerocrates• 11 years ago

It's just a copy-paste of the equation from the Wikipedia article on the geoid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid#Spherical_harmonics_repre...

saraid2162• 11 years ago

And immediately preceding that equation is this sentence:

"If it sounds simple, it is not, but if you’re interested it’s a great reason to learn spherical harmonics."

The entire point of showing off that equation is to say "This stuff is actually really deep and complicated and it's a rich subject to dive into on its own if you want to go for that, but I'm not going that route."

contingencies• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

skuhn2• 11 years ago

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.

mikey_p• 11 years ago

While this is obviously a bit of a popular lore, I suspect it may be partially true, if only at a city level. Hollywood perhaps?

CamperBob2• 11 years ago

There are certainly cases where churches own a vast portion of urban real estate, all tax-free. I'd be amazed if churches didn't own a plurality of the land in the greater Oklahoma City area, for instance. It's funny how "The power to tax is the power to destroy" doesn't apply to any of the other entities mentioned in the First Amendment.

Scientology is probably too small to own much of LA. Clearwater, FL, on the other hand, may be a different story.

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

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...

I really wonder what those folks are up to today.

kylek• 11 years ago

Masons

jkot• 11 years ago

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

greeneggs• 11 years ago

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

wallaceowen• 11 years ago

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

72deluxe• 11 years ago

Genius!

mooreds• 11 years ago

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(?)).

bkeroack2• 11 years ago

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.

jessriedel• 11 years ago

If you're going to include all that into LA, shouldn't NYC lay claim to Yonkers, Jersey City, and dozens of other places? The New York metropolitan area is certainly larger than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I'd wager that there's no circle of radius R in the US, for R between 1 mile and 1000 miles, that contains more people than one centered appropriately on lower Manhattan.

WillNotDownvote3• 11 years ago

A key difference is that the actual City Of Los Angeles is quite sprawling and surrounds many of the areas that are incorporated as their own municipalities.

xxpor• 11 years ago

If you're going to go down that route, you'd also have to consider sections of NJ and Westchester County. The density of say, Jersey City is 16,736.6/sq mi. There's the Hudson River in between, but so what?

whatusername• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_t...

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• 11 years ago

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.

benihana• 11 years ago

The New York metropolitan area spans three or four states (depending on who you ask) which might have something to do with it.

beachstartup• 11 years ago

however, i don't think that includes large parts of orange county, which is adjacent to LA. OC has a distinctly different feel but it's all smushed together, there isn't like a large open expanse of nothing like between OC and SD.

akgerber2• 11 years ago

Greater NYC still includes a lot of very dense conurbation well beyond the city limits. For example, some of the densest cities in the US are those in Hudson County, NJ, and some of the suburban downtowns (for example, White Plains) have skylines that rival midsized Midwestern cities. Newark, though down at its heels, is linked to NYC by a 35-minute rapid transit trip at 10-minute headways, the commuter rail network is even more extensive than that, and bus commuters come to NYC from Allentown and the Poconos in Pennsylvania.

You can't just count an entire massive county as 'LA' while cutting off NYC at its city limits. The stub-ends of the subway lines at the Bronx border are dramatic, but the city doesn't just end anywhere— I wouldn't be shocked to see the subway extended beyond NYC at some point.

bkeroack2• 11 years ago

You could do the same with LA. "Greater LA" also includes the Inland Empire, Orange County, Riverside/San Bernadino. Total population (according to Wikipedia) is around 18 million.

I agree that you can draw the line arbitrarily to support whichever city you prefer as "winning". My sense is that a) if the City of Los Angeles consolidated as NYC did over 100 years ago it would have the highest official population in the US, b) if you do a more fuzzy "metro area" analysis the result is up for grabs depending on how you choose to draw the borders.

slackpad• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

gxs• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

addisonj2• 11 years ago

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.

frozenport• 11 years ago

>public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available

Perhaps it was free, they wouldn't have resources to compile it? Plenty of things that tax payer money supports aren't free, for example suburban swimming pools or perhaps more egregiously sports venues.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

my previous county listed lots, primary owner, and assessed value, when they first went live many years ago. Since then I think they only removed the owner's name; it usually was just last name.

why was it important, having someone who you don't want contact with could determine your home and possible income simply by searching the county tax records.

bbanyc• 11 years ago

Here in New York City, a lot of condos are officially owned by LLCs in order to keep the rich/famous owners' names out of the public record.

Full deeds are available free online (though only through a Java applet), dating back to the 1960s. I haven't seen this in many other jurisdictions.

chicofarm• 11 years ago

How about filing a FOIL request?

dba7dba• 11 years ago

What's also wrong is having to pay extra (on top of basic cable) to watch NASA produced videos.

justin663• 11 years ago

The interesting thing with charges like this is that they tend to be decided by one person. (in the case of things like court fees and record access, Clerks of Court often ignore state mandates, because they can) The easiest way to fix this might be to make an issue of this the next time the County Assessor has an election. Which might cost more than $1000, but if it were your main business...

bane• 11 years ago

It depends. Taxpayer dollars may only barely cover the cost of getting the data together, but distributing it could be fairly significant as a budgetary item. To cover that cost they may just charge some fee that has several uses:

- Keep taxes down and only support people who really have a serious need for it

- Cover the cost of packaging and distribution (and other associated costs)

I don't necessarily agree with this, but these are the kinds of justifications that are generally tossed around inside the government about these kinds of things.

pixl973• 11 years ago

A better question for the people that live there is 'are the cost of distributing the data artificially inflated?'.

In my own county the costs of document scanning and record storage were in the 1 to 2 million dollar range for years. Oddly this coincided with the county commissioner having a husband that work for Xerox at the time, the Xerox office also handled the counties scanning and document storage. Amazingly after the time that commissioner was no longer in the office the contracts were renegotiated and the price dropped over 25%. The biggest issue I have seen working at the local government level for over a decade now is very few people without a stake in the game ever review the use of technology by the counties. Politics has far more sway than best practices.

alexisnorman• 11 years ago

A group from Code For America came to my town recently (Tempe, AZ) and they address a lot of the issues with access to public data. Was really glad to see things like this exist. http://www.codeforamerica.org

saraid2162• 11 years ago

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.

I think those costs are there because the provision of that data is considered above and beyond the mandate of the Assessor's Office.

GigabyteCoin• 11 years ago

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.

Hear, hear!

I have looked at various online records offices for various properties located in cities across the USA and most every single one was a horrifyingly slow, blast from the past type experience. I'm talking minutes for basic queries to complete. And expensive to boot. Usually $5 to $10 per query.

Someone• 11 years ago

$1000 doesn't sound expensive to me, for the first request. Somebody has to think about the question whether there is confidential or copyrighted information in there, somebody has to to write a decent disclaimer, think about any security implications, etc.

Having said that, a government nowadays should have an open data policy. You shouldn't need to make a freedom of information request for 'bureacratic' data.

Also, any 'for the people' government should allow the free download of such information, and 'the people' should realize that that costs some money. That, I think, is a problem in the USA, from both sides.

eddietejeda• 11 years ago

I started a company that works extensively with geospatial data and I often interact with cities from across the country (https://angel.co/civic-insight). Learning how to get access to government data was probably one of most challenging parts of starting up, but I've seen a significant evolution in the thinking of governments in the past few years.

I was a Code for America Fellow in 2012 (I am still heavily involved in the space) and back then any talk of publishing datasets, shapefiles or having "APIs" was thought to be an exotic topic reserved for fancy cities with large budgets like San Francisco and Boston. It was something that smaller cities would love to have but don't have the resources to do anything about it.

But that's not the case anymore. Even a lot of the smaller cities now understand that opening up now gives them access to a new ecosystem of tools and technologies that are rapidly developing.

Hence, our startup.

Also, the California Supreme Court ruled that Shapefiles must be made available to the public at almost no cost. See summary of case here: http://www.ocregister.com/taxdollars/county-519947-landbase-...

Oh, and when it comes to SLC. Here ya go:

http://gis.utah.gov/data/sgid-cadastre/parcels/

ftp://ftp.agrc.utah.gov/UtahSGID_Vector/UTM12_NAD83/CADASTRE/UnpackagedData/Parcels_SaltLake/

addisonj2• 11 years ago

Awesome!

It is really easy to be cynical about government policies and feel like there is little that can be done to change them, but it seems like what you are doing and orgs within the government, like 18F, are having success in changing the game, at least when it comes to tech.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

rmc• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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...

nextw33k• 11 years ago

Whilst the Open Street Map is free its important to note that the Ordinance Survey maps are some of the most detailed in the world. They offer a free access option and a paid option. Whilst the organisation is operated out of public money I am not opposed to its usage terms that are in effect a tax on business use.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/help...

johnvschmitt• 11 years ago

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.

justin663• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Why do counties deliberately obfuscate corrupt this data?

justin663• 11 years ago

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.

olefoo• 11 years ago

So you can't figure out just how much land the county commissioners wife really owns...

Literally. And if you should attempt to disambiguate all the trusts and LLCs and special purpose vehicles to figure out who really owns what in your county; you can expect a visit from law enforcement.

The US may look clean and consistently score low on measures of corruption; but it's there, especially at the county level.

jcrawfordor• 11 years ago

I think it's a bit far to say that most counties are deliberately obfuscating data. That said, many counties, such as the one I live in, run on a shoestring budget and can't keep up with the current request load - the overhead for modernization or even corrections doesn't seem to exist, and the whole situation is made worse by the standard "pace of government." There's nothing like local politics to delay any kind of large-scale project.

The end result is that I wouldn't be surprised if, nationally, enormous binders are more common than GIS. The property records in my county are in the form of yellowing pages in 20-pound leather post binders on those rolling high-density shelves. People complaining about 2 minute query times? Here you drive to the county clerk's office, ask them your question, and they might be able to tell you which of the giant binders to look in first. The upside is that if you ask nicely they'll let you use their photocopier.

Perhaps we're unusually backwards, this is New Mexico after all, but we're not the smallest county in this state by far - and certainly not in the nation.

lurcio2• 11 years ago

Many countries don't even have a single working system of address...let alone town planning.

kylered• 11 years ago

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.

Who Owns Los Angeles?

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