Live data from Hacker News

Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

nytimes.com

441–450 of 662 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vienna has had the luxury of having had relatively little demand for housing for over a century. The population peaked in WWI and still hasn't recovered (it was 2.24m in 1916, 2.00m in 2023).

Vienna actually had a terrible housing crisis before the Austromarxists of Red Vienna built housing en masse. See this article for example: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-au...

Right, that makes a lot of sense because the city absolutely exploded during the preceding decades. But having the population stagnate has certainly made it easier for them to catch up than if the population had kept increasing.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [increase friction for cars...no improvement to public transport] Hmm...aren't you forgetting something? Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more. The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.

Sure, if you live in the city proper. But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance. Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may…

Safe (locked) bike parks are popping up everywhere in Paris

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

It just wouldn't make any sense to tell people "you burn X calories when walking/running/whatever for an hour" if they had to subtract their base metabolic rate from the number.

I agree it should state the excess calories burned. I think the author probably misunderstood the formula.

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived in an actual third world country for a couple decades, I personally can't take statements such as "xx is becoming more like a third world country" seriously. I get the sentiment behind it though. If I compare, for example, my experience living in cities in China vs cities in Europe, I would argue that the relative freedom of movement forces residents in Europe to confront the inequality in their everyday…

This is stupid argument. He/She was talking about something relative, that is, relative to what it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. You can't come along and pick some worse example from another place. With the same logic you could say wages don't need to increase for the next 20 years, or police can be defunded because more crime is not so important, because the 3rd world is off way worse...

> with the same logic you could say...

The comment I replied to said "it's feeling more like a third world country", I replied "no it's not even close to an actual third world country". I don't see how you could then derive that I meant "therefore it's not important".

Are third world countries the only place where things need fixing?

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

#445

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.

...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…

But, they are closing roads making them one way etc, that creates the traffic problem. It's bad governance - creating pain to allow government to administer the preordained 'solution' - no cars!

Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.

How is that good government?

And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".

Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.

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

#447

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…

That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)

Paris is building a lot of transit enhancements right now.

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

#448
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

yeah, make sure you move out of the city and go run hiding in the countryside somewhere if you stay in the city, the globalists WILL come for you, they WILL put you in 15 minute cities where everything you need is easily available within walking, bicycling or high quality transit distance (oh no!)

Lol. I'm not worried. I just it's funny think it's funny how people live to line up on the side of the unelected global governance system and think that voting matters and believe everything they were taught in school/on TV etc.

"I'm choosing to give up my car, and you will choose that too!"

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

#449
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…

We don't have to define basic necessities as "success". We can all have them.

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

#450
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even further: extremely affordable technology now exists such that the leaders of our "democracies" could ask the public's opinions on such matters in a wide variety of fine-grained ways, or even better: facilitate a high quality moderated public conversation that actually involves the public on these and other matters. This may even be a requirement for a healthy society. Unfortunately, current styles of "democracy"…

> ask the public's opinions on such matters this would be a disaster take how Hidalgo is deprioritizing private automobiles on the streets of Paris most of the public was passionately and intensely opposed to that, but she did it anyway now, people can't imagine ever going back to how it was before - families being able to walk and ride bikes along the Seine and Rue de Rivoli is too nice = asking for peoples opinion…

> this would be a disaster

It depends how you do it. For example, if you ask their opinion and then carry out that opinion without thinking about it, it would probably not yield optimum results, because humans almost always hallucinate (our culture teaches them this behavior). But with patient guidance I believe it is possible for people to improve over time.

As it is, we are at the mercy of bureaucrats with questionable ethics and goals, who also also always hallucinate (again, because of culture), so this is not a fantastic position to insist on maintaining either.

It has been well demonstrated that under very specific conditions, humans can achieve a state of high coherence. We've only managed this in a few select domains so far, because of hard work and counter-cultural attention to detail, and mainly: because a few individuals thought it seemed like a good idea, and made it happen against the odds. I personally think we can make it happen again, but not if no one tries.

> now, people can't imagine

Not quite. In fact, people cannot stop imagining, the problem is that they do not have control over it, or realize they are doing it. But we are in luck: we have children and teenagers, who have yet to fall victim to the hypnosis/Maya that has spread throughout the adult world. They could teach adults how to do it in a controlled manner, as we could in the past, or ideally even better (children and teenagers have never had enough say in decisions if you ask me, they are waaaaaaaay better than adults at specific forms and domains of thinking).

> asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to...

Do you still believe this?

Post reply on HN