321–330 of 413 posts
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Do you? Most newer buildings go without external staircases (typically have two+ internals firewalled apart from each other)
I believe there are two different requirements for residential: 1 is egress (fire regulations), and the other is natural light requirements for each room.
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A definition of demand: Demand is an economic concept that relates to a consumer's desire to purchase goods and services and willingness to pay a specific price for them. The poor do not have the willingness to pay a whole category of prices, as they are unable to finance it. Creating luxury accommodation can increase supply, but as the decrease in price does not necessarily put the older accommodation within reach,…
Undesirable areas are full of cheap mansions, slowly decaying because no one wants to live in a place with no jobs. Housing is not that special, when there is a lot of it, it gets cheap.
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I never understood the need to concentrate all the offices in the single focal point of the city. And currently with WFH it seems to make even more sense to distribute office spaces in local "co-working" spaces and in the end mix residential with work making it intertwined (zoning in the USA, from what I understand, is weird as hack…)
Fair point if WFH is and remains the primary means of working. On the other hand, if we believe the offices have value, as in people working together in one place has value, having offices in centralized locations because it is more of a known quantity for commuting. Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job. And from the perspective of…
I think you're looking at Europe too much through rose-tinted glasses here. There might be more "hamlets" with "good trains" than in the US, but they're still not the norm, and compared to city centres those decentralised office and light industry business parks are mostly still a pain to get to on public transport, unless you happen to live in the right direction (which is where your "Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job." problem comes in).
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And my point is that desirable doesn't matter much if the goal is to get people housed. Yeah, you'll get less rent for the inner apartments, but that's how you make affordable housing - you make things cheaply and make sacrifices along the way to do so. Unless you don't want to live with the "poors"... Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"
I dunno I think legal regulations on what is safe housing are pretty good, actually. For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes. Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually…
Not every regulation is about safety. And not every safety regulation achieves additional safety in practice
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No, it's just basic supply and demand.
A definition of demand: Demand is an economic concept that relates to a consumer's desire to purchase goods and services and willingness to pay a specific price for them. The poor do not have the willingness to pay a whole category of prices, as they are unable to finance it. Creating luxury accommodation can increase supply, but as the decrease in price does not necessarily put the older accommodation within reach,…
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A definition of demand: Demand is an economic concept that relates to a consumer's desire to purchase goods and services and willingness to pay a specific price for them. The poor do not have the willingness to pay a whole category of prices, as they are unable to finance it. Creating luxury accommodation can increase supply, but as the decrease in price does not necessarily put the older accommodation within reach,…
If there are 10 houses available and there are 12 families looking to buy then the they will bid up and the 10 wealthiest families win. If you build 2 luxury homes, it doesn’t matter if poor families 11 and 12 can’t afford them, because 1 and 2 can, which makes them not bid on normal house 1, 2, …, n lowering all housing prices.
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Due to fire code, to divide a high-rise into 4 corner units, you need to take up almost ~50% of the space for elevators, stairs and hallways. So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous. You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500. The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a numb…
> The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons. And when you're paying that much money, you probably don't want to live in a building that wasn't even designed to be lived in...
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The main advantage of living in a converted factory (there are a lot of these in the rust belt) is that you end up with an absolutely enormous space made out of cool materials. I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its peri…
Concrete and exposed metal are hardly what most of us think of as "cool materials". The notion of living in an abandoned factory is just dismal. Tear them down and start over.
Why would you want to live downtown though? Previously downtown living was attractive because of the short walk to the office. If you're WFH you might as well live somewhere nice.
I love living in the city. I can walk to two different movie theaters, two grocery stores, a huge number of restaurants and stores, and a number of my friends' houses within 15 minutes. I can hop on a bus or the subway and expand that even more. I don't have to waste half a day every weekend mowing a pointless lawn or trimming tree branches, but I have parks, rivers, ponds, etc. easily accessible any time I want to enjoy them.
I grew up in a place where you had to drive 30+ minutes to go anywhere. It was incredibly isolating and I'd never want to go back to that.
It's fine for people to want to live like that, but it's obvious that for many (if not most) people, cities are somewhere nice to live.
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If there are 10 houses available and there are 12 families looking to buy then the they will bid up and the 10 wealthiest families win. If you build 2 luxury homes, it doesn’t matter if poor families 11 and 12 can’t afford them, because 1 and 2 can, which makes them not bid on normal house 1, 2, …, n lowering all housing prices.
why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family?