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Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

nytimes.com

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Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#151

Post by datameta »

BWStearns wrote: post #13
bko wrote: post #4

The problem with charging below market prices for anything is that it necessarily leads to a mismatch of supply and demand. So the question is how do you allocate that supply? One way is to have hidden costs. This could range from straight up bribes, to paid consultants to fill out a lot of forms or talk to the right people, to just knowing someone Another way is a lottery which benefits a tiny percentage of people.…

I get these arguments against it and I'm sympathetic to the reasoning, but the point of public policy is results and the Parisian policy certainly seems to just work better than most US housing policy. SF, Boston, NYC also spend a ridiculous amount of money ostensibly trying to achieve similar outcomes but their approaches just don't work.

Afaik 30% of all new luxury high rises are made low and middle income affordable and rent stabilized. In which ways is the NYC system inefficient? Do you believe that is due to policy, abuse by bad actors or some mixture of the two?

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#152

Post by mistermann »

bko wrote: post #72
dangus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, you’re assuming that this system is going to be like the underfunded and scarce public housing in the United States where a difficult to win lottery will be necessary to secure an apartment. In that sort of market of scarce supply, slumlords can overcharge for low quality rentals. But they couldn’t do that in a market where the government is offering a real alternative that you can actually get into. From…

Not Paris but NYC: > For many New Yorkers, the most desirable jackpot is not the New York Lotto, but to be selected in the city’s extraordinarily competitive affordable-housing lottery. Tens of thousands of people, and sometimes many more, vie for the handful of units available at a time. Since 2013, there have been more than 25 million applications submitted for roughly 40,000 units. Central planning has been tried…

The failure is not so much in central planning as it is in human cognition, across the board in every single person involved, operationally or in observance.

If we do not try to not fail, then we should not be surprised when we always fail.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-...

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#153

Post by kspacewalk2 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #130
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It entirely depends on how the money is spent. If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base, it's a good prudent strategy, certainly better than the supposedly more fiscally responsible do-nothing strategy that can just as easily lead to financial ruin as irresponsible drunken-sailor spending.

> If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base Obviously, this is not what they are doing, debts growing with quite high tax rises at the same time ("taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year). Paris is often depiected as a great model, especially by liberal foreign media, but the reality is rather different, and I believe that the Mayor's approval rating is currently ab…

Not at all obvious. What is obvious is that returns on many investments, such as vastly improving housing and transportation for city residents, have multi-year lags. Like, obviously when you just spent billions on improving your RER, properly redesigning your streets to not be deadly by design anymore, and buying up housing, you'll be in the read that fiscal year.

>"taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year

My French is rusty, but it was a 50% increase, it was previously the lowest of all cities in France, and it was not raised since 2011[0]. It is also peanuts compared to property taxes in Canada where I live, and especially compared to many parts of the US. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because property taxes pay for different things in different countries (i.e. in Canada provincial taxes pay for schools, in the US it comes out of your municipal property taxes). But still, we're not talking about one of the main taxes for an average French citizen, clearly.

[0] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-pa...

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#155

Post by rangestransform »

TwoFerMaggie wrote: post #85
seper8 wrote: post #19

[flagged]

Having lived in an actual third world country for a couple decades, I personally can't take statements such as "xx is becoming more like a third world country" seriously. I get the sentiment behind it though. If I compare, for example, my experience living in cities in China vs cities in Europe, I would argue that the relative freedom of movement forces residents in Europe to confront the inequality in their everyday…

I don’t want to be confronted with inequality every day

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#157

Post by UncleEntity »

Deprogrammer9 wrote: post #40

If the USA didn't endlessly fund war then maybe they could invest in their cities & infrastructure more. Probably not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of things.

I would absolutely love for European countries to pay the true cost of their defense so I can drive on nice roads and children could be taught by people who make a decent wage.

Probably not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of things.

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#158

Post by 082349872349872 »

bedobi wrote: post #105
082349872349872 wrote: post #98

Before the invention of the elevator, buildings were more naturally mixed-use: shops (and stables?) on the ground floor, posh tenants on the first, all the way up to artists and baristas in their garrets under the roof. By democratising travel within a building, ironically the elevator made it possible to have neighbourhoods for which service workers had to commute primarily from the outside along the x and y axes, n…

this makes zero sense, plenty of cities with housing built mostly after the invention of the elevator that have mixed use neighborhoods with tall, low and medium height buildings alike

Yes, and those cities also presumably don't have the problem of segregated neighbourhoods. (also those cities don't tend to occur in my Old Country, but perhaps they've made progress there since I've been gone? Protip: never attempt to live in a "city" which is younger than you are. Survivre plutôt que vivre)

All I was claiming is that the elevator is necessary but not sufficient: monocultural neighbourhoods were much less likely to arise back when number of flights of stairs put a significant natural gradient on the price point of each buildable unit.

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#159

Post by TimPC »

UncleEntity wrote: post #133
TimPC wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if you support 40,000 units and your demand is much higher you're going to have problems. That tells you the system is underfunded. Central planning hasn't universally failed in every aspect and every application. Central planning tends to do poorly at solving problems that market mechanisms solve effectively, but it's sometimes useful at solving problems that market mechanisms solve poorly. Centrally planned uni…

Calling the US health care system free market is quite the big stretch. I can honestly not come up with another industry that is subject to higher regulatory burdens. Maybe nuclear power?

Ah yes, the old libertarian cop-out. The most free market healthcare system in the world is too highly regulated and if we just take the regulations away it will perform better because ideology. This is despite the fact that if you look at healthcare systems in the world most performance metrics improve with more regulation but not less. But lets forget about being data-driven when ideological purity is at stake.

Re: Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

#160

Post by Ylpertnodi »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #80
dangus wrote: post #11

This article reminded me of a thought I’ve often had: that the USA is a great place to live for the upper middle class and above, but it’s one of the worst wealthy countries to live in when you’re poor. From the context of the USA it seems downright amazing to see a society where public housing isn’t automatically assumed to be a number of bad things: taxpayer waste, crime haven, and antiquated disrepair. The benefit…

Boutique shops and artisinal fares aren’t what poor immigrants to the USA are looking for. Being poor in the USA already means you’re better off than you’d be in most of those “wealthy countries’” in income. The bottom 10% in the US have a life index on par with or better than the top 10% in most European countries. The lowest 20% in America consume like an average person in a wealthy European country. Meanwhile my c…

>The bottom 10% in the US have a life index on par with or better than the top 10% in most European countries.

Not convinced.

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