141–150 of 185 posts
There's a great reddit thread exploring much the same issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Ugh, I remember that one. Painful to read. For an extra level of irony, where do wealthy Angelenos go for vacation? Paris, for its great, walkable neighborhoods that allow exactly what their city rabidly bans.
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It'd be perfectly reasonable to mandate that for one high value luxury house, a developer has to build a certain number of affordable homes. I guess it'd be the nimbys that would try and prohibit such legislation.
maybe I'm missing the big picture here, but I don't see why it's actually desirable to have a wide range of incomes within a specific neighborhood. poor people can't afford to shop at {expensive grocery store} or dine at {fancy restaurant}. and wealthy people generally don't want to shop or eat at the places their poor neighbors could afford. if you "urban plan" them into the same neighborhood, now you need two (or m…
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In the book The Affordable City [0], this is illustrated with a really powerful analogy: Every year in the United States, the Toyota motor company sells about 2 million regular Toyota cars and 300,000 expensive luxury Lexus cars. Suppose that we introduced a law that each motor company can only sell 300,000 cars a year. Which cars would Toyota continue to make? [0] https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city [1] ht…
Precisely why the law should really say that making X affordable cars per year buys you right to sell 1 luxury car. You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
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maybe I'm missing the big picture here, but I don't see why it's actually desirable to have a wide range of incomes within a specific neighborhood. poor people can't afford to shop at {expensive grocery store} or dine at {fancy restaurant}. and wealthy people generally don't want to shop or eat at the places their poor neighbors could afford. if you "urban plan" them into the same neighborhood, now you need two (or m…
Because you need people to fill a wide variety of jobs and roles, like teaching, transportation, retail, food service, sanitation, etc. that can’t be done remotely. Unless you are planning for those jobs to be equally lucrative as CEO of Megacorp, you can’t build a functional society without people from various socioeconomic strata. Some neighborhoods can get by with shoving off people in those roles to nearby locati…
I think I see your point though. at a high level, the neighborhood composition could be optimized for everyone to walk to work (wide range of incomes), or for everyone to walk to everything outside work (narrow range of incomes), but not both. or there's the US suburb approach where no one can walk to anything.
imo, assuming you're reasonably connected to work by transit, quality of life maximized by the latter arrangement (homogeneous incomes at the lowest level of organization). even if it's a little inconvenient, I will figure out how to get to work everyday. outside of work, a little inconvenience is the difference between doing or not doing all kinds of spontaneous activities.
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Precisely why the law should really say that making X affordable cars per year buys you right to sell 1 luxury car. You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
There exists a market equilibrium (2 million regular cars, 300k luxury cars, in the Toyota analogy). You're proposing to construct a regulatory scheme to reach a different equilibrium. Why? What's wrong with the market equilibrium?
In the context of cars, arguably nothing.
In the original context of real estate, all kinds of things, because having somewhere to live is essential to quality of life and reserving more of the finite real estate available for development for a few luxury homes means a lot more regular homes that could house a lot more families can't be built there instead.
Points #3 and #4 seem to be arguing that regulation is the problem here. In the UK, developers aren't allowed to build a new development (of >5 [some areas] or >10 dwellings [everywhere]) without providing sufficient affordable housing. This is usually a mixture of shared ownership properties and affordable rent properties (which must be no more than 80% of market rent, incl charges) which must be built alongside the…
The UK is well known for unaffordable, poor-quality housing. I'm not sure why you're holding it up as a good example.
Because it has the regulatory requirements I detailed in my post for housing developers.
> The UK is well known for unaffordable, poor-quality housing
And houses in the states aren't poor quality? Do builders over there even know what bricks are?
Freeholds in some areas have a reputation for being unaffordable, sure. I'm not so sure that the shared ownership and affordable rent properties I refer to have this reputation, but it is clear that there's not nearly enough housing stock for demand.
Quality is definitely variable across all housing stock, but I'm not sure I'd say all new builds are of a poor quality.
Points #3 and #4 seem to be arguing that regulation is the problem here. In the UK, developers aren't allowed to build a new development (of >5 [some areas] or >10 dwellings [everywhere]) without providing sufficient affordable housing. This is usually a mixture of shared ownership properties and affordable rent properties (which must be no more than 80% of market rent, incl charges) which must be built alongside the…
Experts say that helmets will improve crash outcomes in passenger cars. Do you advocate for mandatory helmeting in passenger cars?
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Precisely why the law should really say that making X affordable cars per year buys you right to sell 1 luxury car. You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
The solution isn't to put a band-aid on it. But to get out of the way as much as possible. If you prohibit most profit you prohibit most progress.
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Precisely why the law should really say that making X affordable cars per year buys you right to sell 1 luxury car. You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.
There exists a market equilibrium (2 million regular cars, 300k luxury cars, in the Toyota analogy). You're proposing to construct a regulatory scheme to reach a different equilibrium. Why? What's wrong with the market equilibrium?
In a world (kind of like the one we live in right now...) where Toyota only had components to build 500k cars a year then they'll make 300k luxury cars and 200k regular cars and buying cheap low end cars becomes almost impossible.
If the market equilibrium in an unrestricted market is 2mil:300k, or roughly 6:1, regular to luxury cars then an argument could be made that regulations should be but in place to retain that market equilibrium even during a restricted market, assuming we believe it is important that everyone can own a car.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the book The Affordable City [0], this is illustrated with a really powerful analogy: Every year in the United States, the Toyota motor company sells about 2 million regular Toyota cars and 300,000 expensive luxury Lexus cars. Suppose that we introduced a law that each motor company can only sell 300,000 cars a year. Which cars would Toyota continue to make? [0] https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city [1] ht…
Precisely why the law should really say that making X affordable cars per year buys you right to sell 1 luxury car. You actually want it more complicated than that, maybe something like for every dollar of affordability you sell (under $X), you earn the right to sell $0.10 worth of luxury.