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

#321

Post by digging » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #306

bluefirebrand wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.

...This is the state of people living under car-dependency, not dense urbanism supported by public transit and walkable areas. Car noises stress people out, make them irritable, impact their health. Driving in traffic makes people angry/furious/insane (literally - it is not sane to pull a gun on someone driving past you but it happens). Prioritizing parking and roads is a colossal misuse of land which causes crowded public spaces; imagine if every parking lot was an additional market or park.

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

#322

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #310

jeffbee wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

how could/would they not? everything is paid by the renters, and if the price is not high enough (to turn a risk-weighted profit) it will be removed from the market. (if there's a high enough vacancy tax and/or security costs against squatting, then eventually it will be sold. which is a one time boon for the market, but it ends up crowding out new developments for a while, and altogether this just leads to crazy wai…

I don't know anything about the French rental homes market but in the USA there's ample headroom in lessor profits to take a haircut without triggering the second-order effect that you hypothesized. Landlord income as a share of GDP (again, in the USA) stands at a post-War high, having increased 15x from its low around 1990.

Landlords have a huge and largely unearned cashflow and the thing about taxes is it's best to try to raise them where the money is.

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

#323

Post by triceratops » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #306

bluefirebrand wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.

> People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live

You might be thinking of packed slums in a developing country.

> But it is easier to govern people.

Ah yes, like the French, a famously docile people who never, ever rise up against their government.

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

#324

Post by orwin » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

bugglebeetle wrote: post #62

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.

Oh yes, it’s much better to make 53K a year and live in West Virgina than Vienna. This is a sentiment with which everyone would agree.

To be honest West Virginia is the best US state (I also am close with back to landers communities, and visited through their lenses, so I am biased). Homemade booze (I don't drink, but still), homemade goat cheese (best cheese I had in the US), best kayaking rivers, great hiking trails, great people, great horses, great musicians. What's not to love.

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

#325

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:15 PM UTC

jajko wrote: post #176

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.

You can put this on whole France, this is general approach at least for past few decades. Ultra rich easily bypass all those populist moves to 'tax rich', poor have sometimes unreasonable protections (ie you can just stop paying rent, give big FU to the owner, change locks and maybe, theoretically after 6 months of courts he can evict you on his costs, while you trash the place into nothing without any recourse - som…

> Its outright the worst possible place in whole Europe to be rich

I guess it's a good thing Europe has free movement! They are free to be rich in Amsterdam, Berlin or Brussels. If the wealth is generated in France, then they should put up with the French inconveniences.

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

#326

Post by digging » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:15 PM UTC

kcorbitt wrote: post #184

rcpt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't very noisy. Cars are

I don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had: - The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away. - We had a neighb…

Theoretically all those interactions breach the social contract and could be acted upon by making complaints. However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".

Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.

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

#327

Post by walthamstow » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #253

walthamstow wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monaco, absolutely yes, because most of the workers commute from France, they don't live in Monaco. Zurich and Oslo, I don't see the connection, they both have workers of all kinds, old and young people. They're organic and alive cities.

Who cares if most of the people working there drive in from France? The point in Monaco farthest from France is like a 10 minute drive away.

If the workers don't live in the city, how can they be considered part of its lifeblood? All of their cultural pursuits happen elsewhere.

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

#328

Post by circlefavshape » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #171

rsynnott wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.)

A 155lb human burns 177kcal when walking at 2.5mph[1], so that's 71kcal per mile

There are 340kcal in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour[2], so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat

Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg [3], so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e

Driving a vehicle powered by gasoline produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile [4]

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/calories-burned-walking#Wa... [2] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/health-promotion-knowl... [3] https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/9... [4] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

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

#329

Post by orwin » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #41

seper8 wrote: post #19

[flagged]

I wouldn't describe Paris as a super nice place by any means, more "gritty but cool," but the area near the Eiffel Tower is a tourist zone and always has been. Average Parisians rarely go there. I wouldn't call Times Square a nice place either. Your comment would be more convincing if you said Le Marais, Belleville, or the 13th were getting bad.

(the 13th and the 17th are getting better imho, but it's probably because I don't live there anymore :))

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

#330

Post by javier_e06 » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

Hong Kong has some is highest skyscrapers next to housing that rents cages for people to sleep in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedspace_apartment People live in the same neighborhood and there is a cruelty factor of understanding and accepting that in your city poor people live in cages. And people in the US live in tents. At least nobody profits from that.