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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

#411

Post by AnthonyMouse »

the_gastropod wrote: post #393
digging wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

> "NOISY FROM WHAT?"

Sirens, people yelling, loud music, construction, etc.

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

#412

Post by mortify »

snowwrestler wrote: post #227
jvanderbot wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> to provide protection and service equally

That is what the law says. It is not what they do.

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

#413

Post by dublinben »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #400
8note wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.

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

#414

Post by cm2187 »

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…

You seem to neglect the cost of it. The city is nearly bankrupt, parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time.

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

#415

Post by rastignack »

sangnoir wrote: post #325
jajko wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t worry I’m upper middle class and roughly 75% of my salary goes straight to taxes while everything that’s state provided (schools, hospitals, security, infrastructure) just collapses.

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

#416

Post by bedobi »

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.

I mean, OK, you could say the same about literally every public expenditure?

I'm passionately opposed to private automobiles and the fact that my tax money goes to subsidizing them (including stupid road upkeep etc)

unfortunately I don't get to choose not to pay for that (but I can choose to live in a place like Paris where the Mayor is taking active steps to support not only private automobiles but give equal importance to other modes of transport)

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

#417

Post by darby_eight »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #7

NY is a mess of policy failure and rampant corruption in the implementation of these policies, policies which have for decades been championed by the NY Times, frequently by naive portrayals of policies in Western European countries like this one. Once imported at 5 times the cost and half the quality these become irrevocable subsidies for well connected landlords and administrators. The city needs to get basic thing…

> security

Oh come on, the NYPD swallowed 5 billion in public funds, the most of any city on earth. Crime is near an all-time low. Hell, they could probably slash half that budget without causing the crime sprees the NY post implies could happen at any time. This is the worst excuse to avoid funding subsidized housing when the latter would probably have a greater impact on whether people were desperate enough to turn to crime. Saying NY needs to be more secure is just fear mongering at this point.

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

#418

Post by barbazoo »

cm2187 wrote: post #414
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…

You seem to neglect the cost of it. The city is nearly bankrupt, parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time.

> parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time

Is that a bad thing?

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

#419

Post by cm2187 »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #254
asimovfan wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building taller means people see the sky less. In my home city that is the case and you definitely dont want that. Where ive been living the last few years, no building is above 3 stories and its wonderful.

Not necessarily. There's a big difference between building a tall building with a large uniform floorplate that takes up much of a block and a tall building that is thin, only taking up a tiny slice of a block, and thus allowing sunlight to pass through. For this reason gloomy Vancouver for a long time mandated point towers, for the purpose of maximizing light. Paris' status quo of uniform 6 story streetwalls could a…

Most of New York has 10-15 floors buildings with wide streets. Light and fresh air isn't a problem. But you can't really widen Paris street and the uniformity of the architecture is what makes it a beautiful city. Tourists aren't flocking to Paris to take pictures of some boring glass and concrete buildings.

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

#420

Post by bedobi »

robertlagrant wrote: post #334
underlipton wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there is no job on this planet that isn't subsidized by taxes

how do people show up to work at Google, Apple etc?

through everything from "not dying from preventably disease in adolescence" to "being educated in public schools" to "being carried to work on roads and transit paid for by the public"

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