Or tech companies could pay taxes that allow for proper urban development just like real companies do? Apple, I am looking at you and your $200bn pile of not taxed money and I am not impressed!
The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but was the decrease in demand greater in magnitude than the increase in sales due to less competition? I'de disagree, but getting numbers on these things is very difficult since it's a long time ago. Most of what you'll get is "general ideas" that the industry was "fairly big/small".
Agreed. Which puts the claim that 'decreased competition in markets from flattened economies of the losers helped American manufacturing', in an equally foggy light.
Hmm, i've definitely heard that story about decreased competition being a factor in USA post-war prosperity, but I seem to have been misinformed, since after looking at [1], it was due to a lot of things - namely increased fertility and farmers learning how to do more economically valuable jobs - but not from them winning the war.
What's very sad is when you read a little further on about the USA economic decline after 1970 to today...
Anyway thank you for letting me know I was being a dingus!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#63Now everything’s changed. In 2016, the San Francisco metro area was the top location for venture capital investment in the country, hauling in $23.4 billion—more than triple the VC investment in Silicon Valley proper. Interesting numbers, what seems to be evidence of inflation chasing inflation. There's no logical justification for such a concentrated purse of investment dollars benefiting so few people. Furthermore,…
>> They built in the burbs because that is where they could establish equity.
I thought they wanted to build sprawling campuses because they didn't want to feel like an old stodgy company in a tall office building downtown?
Not to mention hardware companies like Intel/Apple probably couldn't get the warehousing and manufacturing footprint they need in a big city.
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Renting has been the standard model for suburban office parks too. Most companies do not own their own office buildings For small business, sure. But is that really true in SF for mid-size to major companies? I know this is a midwest-skewed perspective, but most mid-sized and large companies really do own their suburban office buildings / HQ buildings here. The only office space I know of that they rent, is the exp…
> most mid-sized and large companies really do own their suburban office buildings / HQ buildings here I'd love to see some statistics on that because it doesn't jive with my experience in large companies in the midwest. Ownership of land was considered a major negative when I was working in large companies but its definitely been a while and the sample size is small.
A lot of companies (or at least the owners of the company) do own the building they are in, through a holding company of sorts that the company then rents from.
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were the Japanese auto manufacturers a large player prior to the war? I thought the domestic production there was essentially nothing before the ramp up to war in the 30s.
I'de say it was rather large, since looking around, it's believed that it was very big pre-WWiII, but a quick look for numbers isn't revealing any good sources. I suppose it'll just have to float around as a "general belief" that the Japanese automotive industry was "rather big" pre-WWII. WWII definitely effected the US less than a lot of countries though that is for sure. But I think certain industries benefited mor…
Japan was not a big player in the global auto marketplace prior to World War II.
Toyota had made less than 2000 vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AA#Toyota_passenger_car...
Neither was Germany. Hitler started pushing the people's car in 1934 or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932.E2.80.931938:_...
They were building nice cars in Germany, they just weren't building a lot of them.
Meanwhile Ford had produced ~15 million Model Ts and 4 million Model As prior to 1932 (when production of the Model A was stopped).
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#66The author's recommendations are certainly apt, though I wonder if he realizes how much of a political nightmare trying to get cities like Berkeley to build more housing is. Berkeley is probably the staunchest NIMBY city of the major Bay Area cities. The mayor and city council recently outright denied a simple rebuild of a house on Haskell St (heh) that would have added a couple extra units of housing. We believe thi…
I love what you're doing, so let me tell you what's holding me back from jumping on board.
Traffic. You want more housing, but that almost always means more cars - and how do you handle that? But it's more than just traffic - broadly speaking it's the principle of Chesterton's fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...). Before making rapid changes, let's understand why the status quo is the status quo.
The reason I can't support YIMBY is because it comes off as too much like reverse stupidity - let's just do the opposite of those nasty NIMBY's and then things will be all right! That never works.
As for your claims about Berkeley, I've been frequenting Berkeley since 2014 and I've witnessed a pretty significant amount of construction on Shattuck - and I'm left wondering - how on earth are the roads going to accommodate the massive increase in traffic?
One thing people should consider is banning automobile ownership for residents of new buildings. That would address the concerns of critics like myself and lead to a whole lot less opposition to new construction. Plus, it would create stronger demand for public transportation and car-sharing - both of which are conducive to the goal of greater density. And honestly, a lot of tech-savvy millennials don't even want to own a car.
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most mid-sized and large companies really do own their suburban office buildings / HQ buildings here I'd love to see some statistics on that because it doesn't jive with my experience in large companies in the midwest. Ownership of land was considered a major negative when I was working in large companies but its definitely been a while and the sample size is small.
A lot of companies (or at least the owners of the company) do own the building they are in, through a holding company of sorts that the company then rents from.
Thats clearly true of smaller companies. And there are larger companies that have significant real estate holdings as that is a major component of their business (McDonalds for instance).
But office/operations space being owned was generally viewed as inefficient for large companies that didn't have real estate ownership as a core function because its a pretty bad asset for a company both as a store of value and as an investment in innovation.
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this him doing just that? The creative class came back to the cities, changing what the problems are?
We needed better transit and affordable housing ten years ago too. Florida just didn't care at the time. That's what I think is missing -- a mea culpa for ignoring crucial urban issues and promoting the kind of growth that would muscle out the non-"creative" people a city needs to function. Big scare quotes for "creative", by the way. My other pet peeve with Florida is that he thinks creativity is the exclusive provi…
> (Florida needs to issue) a mea culpa for ignoring crucial urban issues and promoting the kind of growth that would muscle out the non-"creative" people a city needs to function
To his credit, he did sort of do that, about a year ago.
"I got wrong that the creative class could magically restore our cities, become a new middle class like my father's, and we were going to live happily forever after," Florida said. "I could not have anticipated among all this urban growth and revival that there was a dark side to the urban creative revolution, a very deep dark side."
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/texanomics/article/...
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271608/global-vehicle-sa... http://www.jato.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/JATO-Global-C... GM VAG and Toyota all have similar shares of the global market. Depending on how you want to nitpick you can make The Americans, Germans or Japanese look like the dominant player in global vehicle sales but it's really too global of an industry to draw the lines based on the country the CEO'…
Firstly the linked source is paywalled so that's ignored. Secondly, we are talking about post-war USA, so very generally '45 -> circa '70, not 2016 and the modern globalised world that are not representative of the world back then where even the internet didn't exist.
It wasn't paywalled via google.
Re: The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
#70The author's recommendations are certainly apt, though I wonder if he realizes how much of a political nightmare trying to get cities like Berkeley to build more housing is. Berkeley is probably the staunchest NIMBY city of the major Bay Area cities. The mayor and city council recently outright denied a simple rebuild of a house on Haskell St (heh) that would have added a couple extra units of housing. We believe thi…
Or you can move if you can't afford the area. There are plenty of places with lower costs of living. You can't live in what is perhaps the most desirable area in the world and then be upset that people want to protect/increase their property value or not change how their community is. Not everybody wants to live in a sea of imposing skyscrapers. -edit So I see a few comments discussing things like commuting, urban sp…
> We need mixed-use developed walkable neighborhoods. We need our work places to be mixed within our neighborhoods along with our parks, convenience stores, and everything in between.
I strongly endorse this. I'd argue that it's totally compatible with expanded housing, though.
The population density of Somerville, MA is 18,000 per square mile. It's the 16th densest municipality in America, only narrowly behind San Francisco itself (18,600). That's almost 3 times Berkeley, CA (6,400), and 7.5 times Palo Alto, CA (2,400).
Somerville is also a pleasant, human-friendly city devoid of skyscrapers. It's a perfect example of mixed-use urbanism. The tallest buildings are ~12 stories, and that's government housing on the edge of town - almost everything is far shorter. That's nuts - it says we can massively increase population density while maintaining a Strong Towns approach to urban design.
Somerville cheats a little bit, because so many residents work or go to school in Cambridge and Boston. (Workplaces obviously kill density, since they're sized per-person but exist parallel to residences.)
But Somerville's real advantage is being old - older than stupid zoning laws. There are only 22 residences in all of Somerville that would be legal to build today, despite those old, illegal residences being livable and massively in-demand.
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
I don't think there's really a dichotomy between "live in NYC/SF style skyscrapers" and "overpriced housing with urban sprawl". You can relax zoning restrictions without getting highrises and tenements. It just requires careful planning and a willingness to abandon suburban, parking-lot filled design.