241–250 of 662 posts
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.
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And people who don't understand supply and demand think rent taxes are a solution to a lack of housing stock.
Not everyone agrees there's a shortage: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-... A few choice paras (if people don't read the full article): "The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum. The evidence, however, does not support this…
I know lots of places where there are empty, cheap houses. They're not close to any good jobs, the only Internet they have is 3G, and the schools suck because the county is poor (because no one wants to live there).
I also suspect housing consumption per-capita is up as people move out younger and marry later. Especially in population centers.
I'm not sure what they're pointing to as the reason for housing prices if it's not supply and demand.
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I look at the numbers and think they demonstrate how much more efficient Austria is compared to any US state. I would prefer living in Austria to Mississippi.
Less than 5% of households in Austria have air conditioning, vs 93% in Mississippi. Granted it gets hot and humid in Mississippi, but the average summer highs in Austria is a sometimes-muggy ~27C and it will probably get worse with climate change - heat waves up to 40C have already happened. I'll take the AC and the other conveniences the Americans have, though it would be nice to have the social atmosphere Austria h…
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It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?
It causes congestion if the city refuses to invest in public transportation - which is more a problem in US cities - though some European cities could be behind on keeping up with changes to different degrees
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.
The reality of this housing policies is that it is currently bankrupting the city of Paris with a skyrocketing debt and growing local taxes. They spent enormous sum of money to buy old buildings at the historical peak of their price, buildings ill-fitted to house poor wide families and sometimes in very expansive neighborhood where they have to travel far to get access to cheaper groceries. Also the delta between the…
Can you provide some sources on the Paris city’s budget and debt? I couldn’t find anything on it. France’s debt looks roughly linear, which I imagine would support Paris a lot
It's a comparison of the debt per capita of France compared to the rest of the EU (in USD). It looks to me like France started to take on more debt per person around 2007/08 and as recently as 2022 had $13k more debt/capita than the EU, or +40% more debt per citizen.
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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 cor…
It is, because they were implying that Austria having the social housing policies that it does, it severely impacts GDP; but it doesn't. A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc. And again, this is assuming GDP matters for the average person's life... and it doesn't.
> visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European
At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
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> 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 ...
It's effectively doing just that - tax the entire city (which taxes are usually mainly paid by the richer people) and use the taxes to subsidize poor people. So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works. It should work.
That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?