Newsletter: Opinion: And you thought living in L.A. was expensive

Good morning. I'm Paul Thornton, The Times' letters editor, and it is Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. Here's a look back at the week in Opinion.

Take heart, overspent Angelenos, your New York City counterparts are spending far, far more on housing than we are — and they're getting much less.

That's one takeaway from Constantine Valhouli's exhaustive breakdown of real estate prices in New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods into average dollars-per-square-foot amounts. One particularly interesting (or dismaying) nugget of information might make a reader feel lucky to live in L.A.: For what you'd pay for a square foot of living space in, yes, Malibu, you'd spend a roughly equivalent amount to live near a toxic sludge-infested Superfund site in Brooklyn.

Valhouli writes:

I thought it would be illuminating to compare sales figures at a granular level between Los Angeles and another big city; I chose New York because there are so many New York transplants in L.A., and vice versa. It's probably not terribly surprising that while Los Angeles may now be less affordable than New York — relative to what the residents of each of these cities get paid — it's still cheaper in an absolute sense.

All the figures below are culled from Redfin, PropertyShark and Zillow. They're from 2014. And a caveat: Real estate numbers are inherently messy and often poorly suited to sweeping generalizations. In small neighborhoods, a few large sales can skew figures upward, and new development pricing can diverge wildly from existing house prices in the same market.

Let's start at the top. Santa Monica's North of Montana neighborhood had the highest median sales price in Los Angeles, at $3.1 million, comparable to New York City's Tribeca at $3.3 million. For context, Tribeca is in lower Manhattan, where residents can walk to work as well as the shopping and dining of some of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the city close to Wall Street and City Hall. In L.A., Hidden Hills, Holmby Hills and Brentwood were close behind, with a median sales prices of $2.5 million to $2.97 million, similar to that of SoHo, another lower Manhattan neighborhood.

But median sales prices don't tell the whole story. North of Montana costs $997 per square foot, while Tribeca averaged $2,338 a square foot. Similarly, Hidden Hills was $503 per square foot, while SoHo was $2,385.

So conventional wisdom is right: In Los Angeles, you get much more space for your money. While $2.7 million buys a 5,300-square-foot mansion in Hidden Hills, it gets you a compact, 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom apartment in SoHo.

» Click here to read more neighborhood-by-neighborhood price comparisons.

Sorry, kids, but "hate speech" is free speech. Michael McGough, The Times' senior editorial writer, examines poll numbers on college students' attitudes on freedom of speech and decides that many of them need a 1st Amendment refresher. There's a problem with the idea that people need protection from legally recognized hate speech, McGough writes: "There is no such thing." L.A. Times

Don't blame secularism — celebrate it. The Bill O'Reillys and Mike Huckabees who compulsively fault godlessness for myriad social ills, including the regular occurrence of mass shootings, don't have the facts on their side, says author and sociologist Phil Zuckerman. He writes: "It is the highly secularized countries that tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates, prosperity, equality, freedom, democracy, women's rights, human rights, educational attainment and life expectancy. (Although there are exceptions, such as Vietnam and China, which have famously poor human rights records.) And those nations with the highest rates of religiosity tend to be the most problem-ridden in terms of high violent crime rates, high infant mortality rates, high poverty rates and high rates of corruption." L.A. Times

Rubio and Cruz, master tacticians and running mates? The two Republicans, says Jonah Goldberg, have waited cunningly until the time was right for them to strike, just as Tolstoy's Gen. Kutuzov refused to attack Napoleon when the French emperor was at his strongest. Goldberg rides the battlefield metaphor into the electoral future: "You can see the pincers movement unfolding, with Rubio, the rebellious establishmentarian, and Cruz, the resume-building outsider, clearing out opponents in their strategic theater. And then, when one defeats the other, choosing his opponent as his running mate to unify a party at war with itself, ultimately pitting Hillary Rodham Clinton against 'los hermanos Cubanos.'" L.A. Times

Has Proposition 47 made us safer? Depends on whom you ask. L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell says unequivocally the answer is no (watch him explain here), while the Stanford Justice Advocacy Project comes to the opposite conclusion about California's year-old sentencing reform law. So who's correct? Editorial writer Robert Greene answers: "The Stanford folks are accurate, but read their statements carefully. They mean less than it may at first appear. And McDonnell? He's reaching the same conclusions that many in law enforcement are, but the link between those conclusions and the underlying numbers is sketchy." L.A. Times

Californians are spending billions to build a bullet train; they deserve straight answers on costs and the project's viability. That's what the editorial board says in response to a Times report that the California High-Speed Rail Authority might have downplayed a draft internal presentation that detailed higher-than-expected costs and then tried to keep it from public view. The editorial board says now is the time for fair but tough questions, among them: "Is the rail authority being frank and transparent with the public about the costs of the project?" L.A. Times

On high-speed rail, California should think, "Deutschland uber alles." Zócalo Public Square columnist Joe Mathews writes: "If California's high-speed rail can reproduce the German model and create a system that deeply binds the state together — and that's a big if — then even a $100 billion investment might be a bargain, given the economic and cultural benefits. But if high-speed rail can't create robust connections, then the worst predictions of its critics — that this is an epic waste of money — could well prove true." Sacramento Bee

No, the Rebel Alliance in "Star Wars" isn't a bunch of terrorists, and the Empire really is the bad guy. Ethicist Charles Camosy throws cold water on the burning sci-fi conspiracy theory of the day that Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca were really on the dark side of the battle, morally: "What about the rebel attack on Death Star II? It wasn't terrorism, but was it proportionate? If the history of the first battle station is anything to go by, the rebels could be confident that an unmolested Death Star II would have gone on a genocidal killing spree by destroying dozens of planets. The rebel attack, therefore, saved billions of lives, and was therefore a proportionate response." L.A. Times

Thanks for reading; thanks even more for your feedback. Send it to paul.thornton@latimes.com.