Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by BWStearns » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #63

Ragnarork wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the question is how do you allocate that supply? To adress this specific question for Paris, they put an upper limit on your income to rent specific housing with lower rent. I'll scale down your caricature of an example though, the offers you can see are usually 15% to 20% under market price, not 75% like you seem to imply. Not exactly sure what is your point otherwise, the difference in terms of giving someone…

> This is not equivalent because giving someone that money doesn't mean they'll chose to live inside Paris, and this is a measure that goes beyond financial support.It's also a city policy aimed at achieving a specific population distribution. I don't know, I would prefer the autonomy to choose where I live and how I spend my money. Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off? Why do we want…

> Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off?

This has to be facetious. They're perfectly free to go live in the country or move to Italy. I've never seen a desirable apartment I couldn't afford and then thought to myself how much I'm being respected by not being able to live there.

And with regard to the last point, no one is suggesting this as a means to have some peasant zoo in the city, a city needs a labor force. If you price out everyone who isn't a dev or a financier then you're not going to have a lot of the things that make a city nice. To some degree this is a subsidy for employers, because otherwise they'd need to pay more for their employees to afford living nearby.

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

#222

Post by everforward » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #180

hollerith wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The higher the density, the more vehicles get in each others way. If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)

"it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile" I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?

I wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol.

My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).

The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.

Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.

The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.

I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.

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

#223

Post by justin66 » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

MeImCounting wrote: post #170

justin66 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except for the police walking around with assault weapons So you've never been to North America. Where is it you're comparing Paris to, such that it seems like every other big western city?

Having lived in america my whole life and been to many different major cities I can say that the police keep their long guns in the car generally.

In the United States the AR or shotgun will generally be kept in the car. It's fairly common to see automatic weapons in Mexico, depending on where you are.

(I don't remember how the Canadian police typically do things. I think I was dazzled by how attractive the police officers in Canada are compared to the United States, particularly in Montreal, but they definitely carry pistols and wear kevlar...)

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

#224

Post by globular-toast » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #164

rsynnott wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?

More people in a smaller area? Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion

I guess one person's congestion is another person's lively and bustling city?

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

#225

Post by amelius » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

mebazaa wrote: post #34

As a Parisian, who is generally angry at the city’s housing policy (build taller!), I find the public housing of the past few years to be a great achievement. In general, public housing sits on the outer edges of Paris, but the city has been agressive in reconverting buildings in posher neighborhoods. It doesn’t really lead to reduced rent (because no additional supply), but it decreases social segregation. That alon…

> but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.

So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?

Maybe they should start charging for that ...

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

#226

Post by lelandfe » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #165

bragr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately you have more people coming and going from each building, which means more people on the streets, and more demand for all utilities and public services. Building up doesn't build out those other things. That's why you have things like Air Rights in NYC to limit building.

People aren't very noisy. Cars are

NYC started making certain streets pedestrian-only during COVID. The silence was astonishing.

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

#227

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #173

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…

> instinctively repugnant To some. In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses. When you have 100 cousins and 10 brothers, this is a viable option. They frequent each others businesses, work on interconnected industries, and in general help out however they can. It's not instinctively repugnant to help ,…

The hidden issue here is the effort of people with means to shape their community by expelling or excluding people they don’t want to help. Then their voluntary donations etc only help those whom they want to help.

Well-known examples in the U.S. include the use of legal covenants, red lining, Jim Crow laws, and sometimes blatant intimidation to shape who can own which property where. Such changes persist for decades because of the illiquidity of property in general and the compounding effect of wealth discrepancies.

So “outside their communities” is not a neutral, or purely geographic concept. Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.

U.S. governments, in contrast, are ostensibly bound by the republican concept generally and the 14th Amendment specifically, to provide protection and service equally. Even if the citizens in question don’t fit the preferred local definition of “who we want to help.”

Edit add: I’m posting this because I think it helps clarify why some folks want government programs to exist to address social problems, as opposed to just counting on voluntary aid to solve it all.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I think government programs are perfect or without flaws. I actually agree with the comments above that point out how means-tested programs can create incentives to “stand pat” and not try for incremental improvements. It’s policy problem that is well known but hard to fix.

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

#228

Post by joelfried » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 4:01 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #225

mebazaa wrote: post #34

As a Parisian, who is generally angry at the city’s housing policy (build taller!), I find the public housing of the past few years to be a great achievement. In general, public housing sits on the outer edges of Paris, but the city has been agressive in reconverting buildings in posher neighborhoods. It doesn’t really lead to reduced rent (because no additional supply), but it decreases social segregation. That alon…

> but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive. So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive? Maybe they should start charging for that ...

> Maybe they should start charging for that ...

Let's call it "taxes".

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

#229

Post by underlipton » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 4:01 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #103

moconnor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, so to put this in market terms, the city is allowing the value that such people add to it to be offset against the cost of their rent. This would mean that cities like Paris choosing to do this is entirely rational and GP's calculation fails to reach this conclusion because it ignores the actual trade that is being made in these cases? Or to make a clichéd example: being cool and arty isn't particularly…

> But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society. Well, some people do. But everyone is paying for it, even if they'd rather save.

If the value your espousing is, "No one should ever pay to have others live better than them off a livelihood that they don't support," a great portion of the remainder of America's middle class gets Thanos snapped. A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat.

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

#230

Post by mrtksn » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 4:01 PM UTC

6bb32646d83d wrote: post #137

Unfortunately it means it's extremely hard to live in Paris if you're middle class. If you're upper middle class/rich, you can rent/buy. If you're poor, you get a chance to get public housing. If you're middle class, too bad for you.

That's the same everywhere in the developed world. If you are too poor you are taken care of through social programs(even in the USA), if you are rich you take care of yourself but if you are middle class you will have to fight for this privilege everyday.

It goes the same for the social norms. If you are poor you can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like, if you are rich you also can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like but if you are middle class you must have stable monogamous relationship with somebody of similar background and age(you can't just have sex with anyone between 18 and 80 and throw a scene, unlike the rich and the poor) and watch your mouth.