781–790 of 1001 posts
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Can't produce more land. Best we can do is tax people for hoarding it
Best we can do is certainly not increase the cost of land, and thus increase the required price of rent/housing to break even. Less regulatory obstacles to increase supply, i.e. build housing, is the correct answer.
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> NYC gave up on violent crime. It's Democrat's policy. Could you explain that? Crime is trending down in NYC over the last 20 years. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
Even according to this, murder and manslaughter is significantly up in the last 2 years. But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers. NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were applied.
Housing and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing the same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock and charging according to income, and renting to a representative distribution of tenants so to prevent guettos. Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost…
> (...) there should be heavy state intervention (...) This has been tried so many times throughout different cultures and time periods, and by different means. It will not benefit whoever is actually living on the properties, but will detract from their situation. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt has several concrete examples of attempted interventions, and is written to give a basic intuition on why this ha…
It's not without its flaws, but Singapore has an extremely effective public housing program run by the government's Housing & Development Board (HDB) where 89.9% of Singaporeans are homeowners.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/664518/home-ownership-ra...
The "just build more" supply argument doesn't hold water when you have an unlimited source of demand from institutional investors and speculators that use housing as a place to park their money.
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Can you supply some evidence that it is a conspiracy theory? Because I read this article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h... "But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times." Sorry, but I trust the Atlantic over you unless you got some fa…
Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your Atlantic article references: > Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are 3.5 millio…
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Part of the problem is that most people would rather move to an existing desirable city than try to improve their own to make it more desirable, myself included. In most major cities, less than 20% of people vote for mayor, let alone city council. Most of those who do vote in local elections are much old. http://whovotesformayor.org/
I don't blame them. It can take decades for the kind of change that urbanists want to fully play out, and I bet they would rather experience good city life while they can enjoy it.
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The metro in DC is pretty underrated and you can live car free pretty far out into its suburbs even.
The problem with almost all public transit is that it converges on a center and branches out into legs that do not connect with each other. This is the DC map: https://www.wmata.com/schedules/maps/upload/2019-System-Map.... If two friends move to the outer edges of different legs of the system, then your travel time and inconvenience multiplies a lot. It is the same reason Manhattan is so popular compared to the oute…
Having said that, yes, it could still well be (too lazy to figure it out properly) that inside this city core the Paris Metro is still more dense than the Underground in London – but on the other hand beyond that, where the vast majority of inhabitants of the whole urban agglomeration of Paris live, you have similar problems regarding radial travel as elsewhere:
https://www.ratp.fr/plan-de-ligne/img/rer/Plan-RER-et-transi...
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> In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from Manhattan East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are usi…
None (or at least few) of the folks you’re gonna see on HN are going to be in the income bracket where they’re going to be living in East Harlem. It’s about half an hour from the places where things happen, at least, and might as well be an outer borough for most intents and purposes, given transit times, even if it’s technically within the stated geographical limits of Manhattan.
(There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)
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Singapore?? To New York????? Sorry what? Singapore is fine as far as a hot place with incredible food and good hotels to spend a few nights, but it’s also quite possibly the most boring major city I’ve been to outside of that and there doesn’t seem to be any cultural life beyond shopping - based on my own experience and that of friends who’ve lived there. I could also take issue with comparing Sydney to NY, but I’ll…
In defense of sg, the only reason you said this is you never left orchard rd. You can experience worlds of culture just eating food at any given neighborhood coffee shop or going to a wet market in the morning. It just is a different culture, one that doesn't try to emulate America too much (hipster shit like live music or public art or things like that).
All that said, I like spending a few days there - again, the food! - but I’d rather be in Bangkok or KL for longer, e.g.
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There are big city fixes for this. For example, most big cities offer bikeshares with docking stations all over the most popular places. So you can just use one of those bikes and not have to worry about theft.
This is not a fix. It's exactly the sort of extra thing I don't want to deal with when I'm cycling. It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it. I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey, small things like this add up.
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> NYC gave up on violent crime. It's Democrat's policy. Could you explain that? Crime is trending down in NYC over the last 20 years. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
Garbage in, garbage out. People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend that crime hasn’t gotten worse in the last few years. The reality on the ground is much different, most people just don’t bother reporting crime, because it’s not worth the effort and the police probably won’t come anyway.
