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When did New York start building slowly?

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#111

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cplusplusfellow wrote: post #27
adam_arthur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty obvious from first principles that added cost to the builder necessitates higher housing costs to justify building something. Alternative is lower margins, but they aren’t that big in typical development projects anyway (in normal times)

I encourage everyone to go attempt to build a house for themselves. It takes away the armchair quarterbacking once you add up the Home Depot receipts.

The Stud Pack channel on YT is now essentially a father-son general contracting duo who recently relocated to Houston from somewhere in Louisiana, and are building a new house (and demolishing an old one).

They have excellent general contractor skills, but no experience in whole house construction. It has already been an interesting ride (as of now, they have dealt with soil conditions and dug grade beam trenches for the garage foundation), and there's still 98% of it left to play out over time.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#112

Post by dclowd9901 »

Isn’t this always just a result of existing architecture and kludge? Doesn’t this same thing afflict us here in software engineering?

You can’t build fast on a city that’s been around for a while. There’s too much shit already there. And not just infra, but also simply people, and culture and everything else that comes with human beings occupying a space.

You could probably build the entirety of Manhattan out in the middle of Wyoming somewhere in 10 or 20 years from scratch with a reasonably sized set of resources because there’s nothing around and so little to deal with. It’s just the nature of a place with a lot of people.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#113

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cyberax wrote: post #103
bigDinosaur wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You accuse others of 'swallowing urbanist propaganda' but that's both highly uncharitable and also grossly ignorant given the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.

"pre-war"? WTF? > the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas. Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes. This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "densi…

Tightening of the rules to what, precisely ?

"Nope, sorry, your company's locating here would push downtown density past the limit, you should find a greenfield site on the edge of town and build something new there"

???

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#114

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

debacle wrote: post #57
nukeman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France has unions out the wazoo, yet you don’t see nearly the level of cost increases.

France has real unions. The US has graft disguised as organized labor, and New York has some of the worst.

Graft, maybe, maybe not, but the real hallmark of US unions is their general refusal to be political organizations, unlike their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.

Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#115

Post by renewiltord »

wozniacki wrote: post #105
klooney wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

With Italy, we may not want to use 'quickly' and 'cheaply' too soon. The collapse of the Ponte Morandi / Polcevera Viaduct was just a few years ago and is still fresh in the minds.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi#Collapse [2] Police release new footage of doomed Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V479srTBlAk Genoa motorway bridge collapse caught on camera https://ww…

Yeah, but Americans built a bridge that fell on people. American rails can't keep their trains on them (a crucial functionality of trains and Rails) and American pipes have poisoned thousands.

Fast, cheap, good. Pick none. The American construction mantra.

So far it's worked because of the reserve currency and technological progress. But the time of the American monopolar world is coming to an end. In twenty years, the bill will come due and instead of acting to liberate themselves, Americans will fall over themselves to justify their status quo - unable to reconcile the existential shame they feel at the thought that they inherited power the likes of which the world had never seen before and transformed it to impotence.

"The billionaires", "we do it to be safer", "the X are ruining it". All the while they drift into irrelevance, raging hopelessly at shadows while their own choices drive them to destruction

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#116

Post by ryan_lane »

cyberax wrote: post #87
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis). Roads are a bad value for wha…

> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. "Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch". If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric. Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minut…

Texas has one of the highest drunk driving scores, and New York has one of the lowest: https://zutobi.com/us/driver-guides/the-us-dui-report. That's just one of the things that makes living in cities with public transportation and less sprawl so much nicer.

> Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC.

I'd take a 33 minute train commute over a 26 minute car commute any day. I'd take a 1 hour train commute over a 26 minute car commute even. When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time. On a train, I can read a book, use my phone, etc. The experience of commuting by car absolutely sucks, and is considerably more expensive.

> Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300).

You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer ($3100/m vs $2200; see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...). Also, using average here is misleading. You can live in the outer boroughs and pay a lot less than that, and some areas in manhattan drive the average up a lot.

You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city. I live in Tokyo and used the train once so far this week. I'll be using it again today. On a normal basis, I have everything I need within a 5-10 minute walk.

>> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.

> You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.

On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used, when it's ubiquitous enough to be used as a primary method. You can increase throughput by increasing train frequency, which improves commute times. When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#117

Post by localplume »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
winter_blue wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's their secret? How do they keep their standards up, but still build so fast, and so cheap (compared to the US)? It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†. † to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries

There is no secret. They're pretty normal developed countries. The weird outlier is the US!

[dead]

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#118

Post by bwilli123 »

CPLX wrote: post #34
Arainach wrote: post #6

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…

There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…

“The consulting industry has infantilised government”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVBoWsGLJs

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#119

Post by cpursley »

chitowneats wrote: post #8
Arainach wrote: post #6

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0

https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l...

And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#120

Post by d4rti »

Arainach wrote: post #89
CPLX wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…

> building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over. This is how things were done for a long time, but anywhere the government delivers value is quickly "privatized" the next time a conservative government is elected.

There’s a difficult asymmetry in that it takes much longer to build in house expertise that it does to privatise it.

Privatisation also often allows a short term financial boost at long term net expense.

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