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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

#201

Post by bombcar »

jacktribe wrote: post #35
afpx wrote: post #3

Is Paris considered a great place to live? I've been there a couple times in the last few years, and it just seemed like every other big western city. (except for the police walking around with assault weapons.)

I'm surprised, to me it always looks & feels very different than most other Western cities, in part due to low-rise buildings and almost exclusively independently operated restaurants and shops. Most other large European cities allowed for high rises and chain coffee shops & restaurants, to the point where they've started to become indistinguishable from one another.

Paris has the CBD called La Défense which looked like most cities to me. Apparently tourists and residents alike hate it.

The rest of Paris is pretty "European city" and maybe I'm not tuned into the differences, but it seemed quite like Munich, Rome, or Barcelona except for the language, etc.

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

#202

Post by BWStearns »

datameta wrote: post #151
BWStearns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

NYC is wildly unaffordable compared to Paris even accounting for the earnings differences. That is the outcome and the failure, not the presence or absence of some specific policy.

I am not saying Paris' approach is transplantable directly to NYC, but rather that first principle analyses (such as gp's commentary) that say that the Paris approach doesn't work are flawed. I know these analyses are flawed because one can look at Paris and see that they have achieved their policy objective of Paris being affordable for a wide swath of incomes.

Policies should be pursued, adopted, changed etc based on their outcomes above their adherence to abstract models. Models are great but once you have data that a policy has failed you should change that policy and try something else.

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

#203

Post by Ragnarork »

mebazaa wrote: post #115
lou1306 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, when you are competing with the center of Paris, it is pretty hard to build a compelling alternative. Say what you will about the streets being loud, chaotic and dirty, the area between the II, III, V and VI arrondissements (Latin quarter, Pantheon, Beaubourg, Jardin du Luxembourg, Tuilleries, Notre Dame, Place des Vosges) is still just swell.

Yeah, and also you have the problem of job location. The regional government says they want to make the Paris area more "polycentric", but there’s a limit to that if jobs are heavily concentrated in one area. We are racing to open more subway lines, and that will surely help, but at some point, raw distance will remain a bottleneck.

This reminds of the project that aimed at creating a new business/commercial complex south-east of Paris in Noisy-Le-Grand. A real estate promoter had a big project, and a metro line was designed, then built, but the real estate project went into bankruptcy and never got out of the ground.[0]

The metro line was completed, inaugurated, but never opened to the public, and eventually mothballed. For quite a while, it was rumored that they operated trains once a month to keep the system working and maintained, not sure up until when.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-le-Grand_Metro

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

#204

Post by underlipton »

smeej wrote: post #169

> The program has allowed Mr. Chaillou and his wife to raise their two boys in the city. But he knows that the future of social housing will always face at least one big challenge: “The problem is that once you get in, you never want to leave.” I think this is the reason so many in the U.S. are skeptical of/resistant to such plans. Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwel…

>Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwelling if you can also wait 10 years, working but not pushing yourself, and someone else will pay for it for you?

Why would I have a problem with this if the "someone else" is a robot? Though I suppose, for the past 2-3 decades, it's been more like, "a worker whose productivity has been GREATLY increased by the advent if the Information Age." (I can see how the worker might be put off by that, but they also have the option of grabbing me and a few other people meeting witht he boss, and saying, "We're each going to do a small portion of my tasks, you're going to pay us the same as you used to, or nothing is going to get done at all.")

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

#205

Post by Amezarak »

sofixa wrote: post #71
ecshafer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US also has a per capita GDP 50% higher than Austria ($52,131 vs $76,399). At $52,131 a year per capita GDP, Austria would be neatly in second to last place as the poorest state in the Union, as it would beat Mississippi at $47,190 but be beaten by West Virginia at $53,852. So perhaps the US policy is doing something correctly.

How is GDP per capita relevant, especially not adjusted for purchasing power parity? For Austria the GDP per capita PPP is at $67-69k depending on the estimate, which would put it somewhere between 27 and 33 place of US states, so roughly in the middle. If you compare the Quality of Life Index, Austria is 9th, USA is 15th. Freedom Index - Austria is 93, USA is 83. HDI USA is 20th with 0.927, Austria is 22nd with 0.92…

I don't think most indices are very valuable - when you drill down into them, you usually find out there's a lot of decisions about what that really means made for you by some NGO or think-tank in order to get the desired result. That's not to say they still can't reflect some underlying true reality about "freedom" or whatever to some degree, but I don't think it's worth citing them in a discussion.

You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument. And there is some truth to this: visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European. I remember being particularly shocked by the state Germans live in and find acceptable.

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

#206

Post by BoiledCabbage »

jeffbee wrote: post #182
mumblemumble wrote: post #33

My understanding is that excise taxation is generally agreed upon as the preferred method for governments to manipulate the market, both because it incurs fewer deadweight losses and because it tends to actually work better. So, what if we get rid of all these complicated rent control and rent freezes and affordable housing schemes, and instead just implement a rent tax, to be paid by the landlord, and make it progre…

People who don't understand market pricing are against rent taxes because they think landlords can pass them through.

And people who don't understand supply and demand think rent taxes are a solution to a lack of housing stock.

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

#207

Post by spaniard89277 »

mebazaa wrote: post #115
lou1306 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, when you are competing with the center of Paris, it is pretty hard to build a compelling alternative. Say what you will about the streets being loud, chaotic and dirty, the area between the II, III, V and VI arrondissements (Latin quarter, Pantheon, Beaubourg, Jardin du Luxembourg, Tuilleries, Notre Dame, Place des Vosges) is still just swell.

Yeah, and also you have the problem of job location. The regional government says they want to make the Paris area more "polycentric", but there’s a limit to that if jobs are heavily concentrated in one area. We are racing to open more subway lines, and that will surely help, but at some point, raw distance will remain a bottleneck.

It's not a problem in the sense that nowadays we know how to make it. It's a question of money and political build. More housing, more offices, make it pleasent, connect it, etc.

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

#208

Post by AndyMcConachie »

smeej wrote: post #169

> The program has allowed Mr. Chaillou and his wife to raise their two boys in the city. But he knows that the future of social housing will always face at least one big challenge: “The problem is that once you get in, you never want to leave.” I think this is the reason so many in the U.S. are skeptical of/resistant to such plans. Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwel…

I'm so glad I left the USA and moved to The Netherlands. Public housing in NL isn't perfect, but the one thing I really really do not miss is listening to my fellow Americans share their opinions on the subject.

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

#209

Post by JBorrow »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #174
Ragnarork wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, if your property is eligible for preemption, you have to declare that you intend to sell (at the price you wish) to the city, which can then tell you that - they don't intend to buy, in which case you can proceed with the sale - they buy at the price you've set - they make a counter-offer, which you have the right to refuse but then you also renounce to sell If there's a dispute on the price (especially in…

I tend to lean lefty, but this scheme makes me understand why libertarians want less government How much my home is worth should not be capped by whatever government thinks. That's bs If government is counter offering all of my neighbors and they are accepting it, then I am screwed. I either accept the government counter offer or I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbor…

Whether you like it or not the government does tell you how much your house is worth through monetary policy.

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

#210

Post by bombcar »

TwoFerMaggie wrote: post #172
rangestransform wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(forgive me if it's sarcasm and I missed it) Nobody wants confrontation because it's uncomfortable. But inequality like this is literally the inescapable reality migrant workers live in. Your average locals might be able to turn a blind eye to it, they can't. Seems at least a little bit hypocritical to enjoy the life made easier by (often imported) cheap labor while not wanting to be aware of their troubles, or you k…

The people who have to live with them are not the rich or the people making the decisions by any means - it's just the middle class who has to put up with it.

The rich don't take the metro, they are driven from place to place.

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