“money can’t buy happiness” is such a baby boomer concept like…. I don’t want excessive wealth to buy a golf plated toilet seat Karen, I just wish I wasn’t crying because I can’t afford both spaghetti and rent after working 40 hours a week
Now see, I reaaaally want to use this post to bitch about not building enough housing units keeping the rents high where the jobs are in the first place.
Anonymous asked:
I am so glad I don’t own any property in Las Vegas.
2017: People identifying their gender as NB
2027: People identifying their gender as NIMBY
Houston flood mitigation info thread. Interesting read.
I feel like we could use a Twitter, but with a 320 character limit instead.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.
In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.
It isn’t a 100% positional good.
You can actually build more housing units, if you’re allowed to.
Not uncoincidentally, this would also lower housing costs and the risk of gentrification in the first place, or at least lower damage associated with it.
Or we could just continue not building new housing units and simultaneously say white people leaving an area bad and also that white people moving into an area is bad. Surely this will help the poor, somehow.
I get really annoyed when I hear that “housing is a positional good” stuff. No, it isn’t. First off, obviously not having a house sucks. (Ok yes presumably no one is saying that “housing at all” is positional.)
But second off, no, even “nice housing” isn’t a positional good. I currently live in a nice house in a nice suburb. This would be no less of a boon to my quality of life if more people got to do so. (I can hear you guys revving up the “well it’s impractical to structure society so that everyone can live in a suburb” arguments, but that’s not my understanding of what a positional good actually is.)
Anyway, I have an actual, real, non-social-status interest in having things like “a bunch of rooms as opposed to two” and “a decent-sized kitchen” and “a nice backyard” and “a placid neighborhood that is quiet and that you can walk around at 3AM without running into anybody”. (Well ok it’s sometimes not quiet but that’s neighbors’ lawns being mowed/leafblown/whatever by presumably-poorly-paid immigrants.)
Anyway the point is, “having trees around” (I live on a hill with plenty of trees) is actually Just Nice, regardless of whether I have more trees nearby than other people.
Again, you can scream “status!” all you want when looking at pictures of my neighborhood, but that doesn’t do anything to diminish the aesthetic and practical value of living here. (And yes, I’m in walking distance of a grocery store and the town center, about a mile each, so the “can’t do anything” argument falls apart too.)
(I guess this has bled over into being annoyed at the suburb-hate; not sure if the suburb-haters just have totally alien preferences or if they’re thinking of different styles of suburb. But I can attest that the one I live in is quite nice, and the “suburbs are hell” objection always rang false to me for that reason. Maybe most of them are hell, and I lucked into one of the nice ones.)
I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.
I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.
Well, logically, if one demands unlimited right of reproduction, then that could be the conclusion one comes to.
But I think it’s being driven more by other concerns. These anons going in to Argumate’s blog seem to be totally unaware of the idea that one can build taller (which is also a way to get more square footage).
Land is a lot more limited, but it’s possible to build buildings with dozens of floors.
There’s this idea that “there’s only so many housing units to go around” and “the rich are hoarding them all” or something along those lines. That isn’t really true, and the rich aren’t necessarily as rich (or perhaps, there aren’t as many of them) as people think there are. There is no adequate stock of rich people houses that we can just seize and be done with it.
And quite frankly, it ignores a really, brutally obvious policy that could be applied if rich people keep building “too many” big rich people houses while poor people don’t have enough housing units - pass a luxury tax for large or expensive housing units and award that money as tax credits to developers building more affordable housing.
I’m not saying that’s an optimal policy, either. It’s just way less dumb than not building new housing because rich people might do it.
People might object, too, that the taller buildings won’t have enough transport/etc infrastructure - so make them take out an infrastructure deposit into the municipal fund instead, again, this is a problem that can be solved.
Now, it’s true that there will still be some fighting over hot spots. But that hurts way, way less if the rest of the housing is outrageously priced.
[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]
The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.
Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.
There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.
If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be
Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.
We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.
For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).
At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.
Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…
Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency, any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.
Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.
Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.
In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.
Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.
It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).
However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.
(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)
How do we get there?
That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.
I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.
For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.
Anonymous asked:
But how would you send it on Anon? …I guess I better make some room in my askbox.
Anonymous asked:
I may have to, although I suspect “it’s been tried before” includes “…and they botched it”.
(I did read about the Hulme Crescents, although that may not be close to what you have in mind.)
But as for right now, I’m focusing on my (largely unrelated to urban planning) fiction writing, and for reading, I have that book by LKY arriving soon. (I don’t actually read that much. I’m not really a good person, you see.)
Anonymous asked:
Maybe not every community has to be the same.
Not everyone actually likes cities for what they are. Suburbs aren’t evil in themselves, they just have too much infrastructure per taxpayer… and particularly if we remove the need for large numbers of automobiles, the math on them changes.
Anonymous asked:
I dunno man, what if we made special separated-grade high-speed bike accelerator lanes. Would that be wild or what.
