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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

#391

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #250
bombcar wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works. 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?

> But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?

Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?

I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.

(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)

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

#392

Post by Jensson »

jimbokun wrote: post #353
93po wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paris syndrome is fairly over-hyped. From wiki: "Although the BBC reported in 2006 that the Japanese embassy in Paris had a "24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock",[4] the Japanese embassy states[clarification needed] no such hotline exists[clarification needed].[9][10] Also in 2006, Miyuki Kusama, of the Japanese embassy in Paris, told The Guardian "There are around 20 cases a year of the syn…

> Out of a million people who are Japanese that visit Paris every year That's a staggering number of people! Almost 1% of all Japanese people visit Paris every year?

Looks about right, if you look at pre-covid numbers. Post covid Germany still had 60k visitors per month from Japan, and covid slashed tourism by around 80%.

https://www.tourism.jp/en/tourism-database/stats/outbound/

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

#393

Post by the_gastropod »

digging wrote: post #128
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Light pollution is relatively easily solved, there's just not much will to do so. Noise pollution is best solved by reducing car-dependency which is a non-starter in most North American cities; I can't speak for Europe but I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.

Hear hear! Anytime someone argues something like "I could never give up my car and live in a city! They're so noisy!" I feel like a version of that Goose meme. "NOISY FROM WHAT?"

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

#394

Post by circlefavshape »

leereeves wrote: post #374
circlefavshape wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The figure for calories consumed when walking is excess calories consumed (compared to sitting still)

Are you sure? It doesn't say that.

I am sure. Think about it for a minute and you'll see why

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

#395

Post by adolph »

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.

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

If all rents are taxed, what is the market mechanism to avoid pass though?

It seems as if a more fair approach would be to increase tax rates on income from rents. That way a rentier would not defer maintenance, the costs of which would be deducted from income and not taxed, as opposed to front-loading the tax to the rent transaction and thus encouraging deferred maintenance to preserve income.

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

#396

Post by leereeves »

circlefavshape wrote: post #394
leereeves wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? It doesn't say that.

I am sure. Think about it for a minute and you'll see why

I don't. Could you explain what you mean?

Here's what I found: the formula given in the article is "calories burned = BMR x METs/24 x hour"

But the METs for lying quietly is 1. The author certainly forgot to subtract 1 from METs in that equation, and could easily have also forgotten to do so when calculating the given numbers.

https://pacompendium.com/inactivity/

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

#397

Post by walthamstow »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #358
walthamstow wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, they don't live there, but they spend probably 10 hours/day there, or 60% of their waking hours. Where someone sleeps doesn't seem too important.

I would say what a person does with their life outside of their working hours is rather important actually, particularly when we're talking about the life and culture of a city.

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

#398

Post by adolph »

patwolf wrote: post #14

> Every Thursday, Jacques Baudrier, the Paris city councilor in charge of housing, scrolls through the list of properties being exchanged by sellers and buyers on the private market. With some exceptions, the city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, buy the property and convert it to public housing. What are the mechanics of how this works? If I agree to buy a property for a million dollars, does…

> the city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, buy the property and convert it to public housing

Sounds like every property sale is a political calculation ready for grease.

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

#399

Post by bobthepanda »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #384
s_dev wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France already has some of the most densely populated cities in the world, Paris is #32. French cities feel less congested than the likes of US cities because it has better cycling infrastructure and public transport options. High population density is not a cure for the bias car infrastructure imposes on a city. So your recipe will need to take more in to account than just density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List…

How does that linked Wikipedia page not contain any cities in China, which in my experience are more dense than just about anywhere else in the world?

one is that Chinese "city" boundaries also generally include a lot of rural land, mountains, etc. Chongqing is the size of Austria.

The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.

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

#400

Post by AnthonyMouse »

8note wrote: post #345
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…

This doesn't sound right? If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to. For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit

Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles.

Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.

This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.

On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.

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