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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

#331

Post by gxs »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #106
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…

> build taller As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.

This is a huge problem with housing in general that is mostly ignored.

Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.

Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.

30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.

Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.

You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.

Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.

The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.

Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)

This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.

All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.

It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.

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

#332

Post by orwin »

triceratops wrote: post #323
verisimi wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We just like to be vocal and share our disagreements publicly. It used to force a bit of honesty (it's not working much right now)

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

#333

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> How much my home is worth should not be capped by whatever government thinks

What's your take on anti-price-gauging laws? Should the government "cap" the price of food and bottled water after a natural disaster, or should the seller determine how much it's worth, as determined by supply & demand?

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

#334

Post by robertlagrant »

underlipton wrote: post #229
robertlagrant wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers, then that's fine. If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them, that's the issue I'm mentioning.

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

#335

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#336

Post by leereeves »

circlefavshape wrote: post #328
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.)

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.healthli…

Don't forget that the person would be burning calories even if they weren't walking.

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

#337

Post by mrguyorama »

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 ,…

>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

Unless you are gay, trans, not the right kind of christian, have mental issues, are progressive in any way, are willing at all to contradict their absurd views of reality, want cheaper electricity through green energy, want any form of public transit, their family member has beef with you, you dared to question the authority of the local PD, you dare to question that drag queens are a threat, you think maybe gun control could have prevented the local school shooting or that the PD in that town could have done better and should be fired.

The belief that actually rural people are really nice and altruistic is just laughable. Having grown up with them, they will only help you if you are the "right kind" of person, IE, if you are useful or beneficial to them. My white, catholic, french mom in a city of 9000 was completely ostracized, despite knowing every single family, and being a very generous and nice person, because she didn't have the right last name.

Insular rural communities are all about local tyrannies, and local cliques, and if for ANY reason, no matter how tenuous or bullshit or even made up, you WILL be excluded if the local popular club doesn't like you. It's basically high school, which makes sense when you remember most rural communities are entirely made up of people who didn't do anything past high school and basically have not grown beyond that as people.

>It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community.

These are the same concepts. Being unwilling to help outside your community IS being unwilling to help.

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

#338

Post by amelius »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #260
amelius wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ...

Rich people need to keep encountering not-rich people, rather than just live in a rich-person bubble. They need that, whether or not they want that.

Of course, because what does it mean to be rich if you can't show it off to poorer people.

Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.

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

#339

Post by MichaelZuo »

Aromasin wrote: post #320
vladvasiliu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade. The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality. So increasing density would requi…

The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution. They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, f…

‘ making public transport any better (outside of London)’ is not really under the government’s control until after the local electorate agrees to it.

So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.

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

#340

Post by not2b »

kazinator wrote: post #317
Jensson wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware…

That's only true if we hold the population constant, and get everyone to scrunch together onto smaller lots built taller. The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.

No, the aim is to have that one million people occupy a smaller area, so that there's more space for parks, open space, farms, etc.
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