L.A.’s quest to reinvent itself holds national implications. Savvy urban planners and policy makers are watching to see how Los Angeles addresses the issues that are intensifying in many of their own cities. They know that a congested, unaffordable future awaits if they don’t intervene.

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Jonathan Nachmani, a managing director with Madison Capital, a commercial real estate investment and finance firm, said hundreds of billions in office building loans were coming due in the next two years. He said banks hadn't been selling loans en masse because they didn't want to take losses and there wasn't enough interest from big investors.

"It's because nobody wants to touch office," said Mr. Nachmani, who oversees acquisitions for the firm.

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Michael Hamilton, one of the heads of the real estate practice at O'Melveny & Myers, said he had been involved with a number of deals in which banks were quietly giving borrowers a year to find a buyer for a property -- even if it meant a building was sold at a substantial discount. He said that the banks were interested in avoiding a foreclosure and that borrowers benefited by getting to walk away from a mortgage without owing anything.

"What I have been seeing is the cockroaches are starting to come out," said Mr. Hamilton. "The general public does not have a sense of the severity of the problem."''

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The state government isn't exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8 billion Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves. In a post on X the day he signed the bill, DeSantis called this "restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots."

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"The types of [cooling] systems that we sold 10 years ago are not able to keep up with the weather we have," said Simi Hoque, an architectural engineer at Drexel University who studies how building design contributes to indoor heat.

As temperatures climb, air conditioners -- which work by sucking in indoor air, heating it via compressor and then dumping that heat outside -- must work exponentially harder. According to Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, keeping a home steady at 75F requires about 30% more power when outside temperatures creep from 95F to 98F.

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the core of the I.R.S.'s position is that Mr. Trump's 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Mr. Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower's construction with his worthlessness deduction.

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If the I.R.S. prevails, Mr. Trump's tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from "The Apprentice" and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the I.R.S. would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.

Well, of course Trump in effect generated a giant chunk of his latter-day fortune by harvesting bogus tax losses. On top of precedents such as the alleged tax dodges involved in the inheritance of his dad's estate, and the highly-questionable Seven Springs deductions, it's all likely par for the course for him. The only surprising thing is he might actually end up having to pay a big chunk of it back (apparently, only about half of the total value, since the IRS didn't react until tax year 2010, when it would have needed to go all the ways back to tax year 2008 to question the full breadth of the maneuver).

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Yet Mr. Kelly of J.P. Morgan lists various reasons that periods of U.S. economic growth may be elongated and less chaotic going forward. Federal deposit insurance, introduced after the Depression, sharply reduced bank panics and failures. Vastly improved information on inventory levels among goods-producing businesses, he said, has "tamed" the inventory cycle, preventing mismatches between supply and demand that can cause mass layoffs.

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[But] Mr. Herndon noted the work of the 20th-century Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who argued that business leaders feel "undermined" by the maintenance of full employment. Using their substantial influence over policy, Kalecki argued, they can help institute restrictive economic policies that bring times of economic expansion to an end and reset them with softer, more tolerable labor power.

And Mr. Herndon said he thought old-fashioned "bubble" manias and "credit cycles" remained a danger, too.