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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

#581

Post by dantheman »

TimPC wrote: post #65
krona wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Correct. Therefore, subsidized housing is good and more of it is better? No, it does not follow. What you say is correct, to a degree. Beyond that, it is incorrect. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

If you agree the city dies without people of all ages backgrounds and income levels what is your alternative proposal to subsidized housing. It's just a fact that some income levels are being priced out of the city and certain occupations may become entirely unavailable without some mechanism of solving that gap.

Building more types of housing. It's simple - allow people to build, allow denser construction, allow smaller apartments, etc. Hell most of NYC would not be allowed to be built today because the apartments are too small -- yet these are the most desirable areas...

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

#583

Post by linehedonist »

mlrtime wrote: post #554
staringback wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're terribly inefficient with its social spending because have politics is so adversarial and nobody is interested in doing any due diligence. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the United States having a very unhealthy population and pays doctors the highest salaries in the world.

8% of healthcare spending is salaries, is that your smoking gun?

That number seems impossible on its face. Healthcare spending presumably consists of salaries and overhead, and I can’t imagine overhead is 92% of all spending.

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

#584

Post by rayiner »

closeparen wrote: post #552
rayiner wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?

If we are going to develop the state capacity to override inexorable forces of nature, like the productivity and desirability of the metropole over the hinterlands, might I suggest we first give the people a good show by turning off gravity? Bring the Mediterranean climate to Chicago? Maybe do something about climate change?

I don’t know if I’d call it “inexorable forces of nature” as much as economic financialization and industry consolidation run amok.

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

#585

Post by creer »

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?"

More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.

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

#586

Post by creer »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #508
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…

But why are French cities so densely populated? The country is twice the size of the UK with roughly the same population.

There was a semi-arbitrary building height adopted during the Haussmannian reorganization in Paris. My feeling is people noticed it led to perfectly liveable blocks. (Most places go a bit higher than this by now but Paris is strongly attached to the "roofs of Paris" and actively protects them. So Paris is a mix of Haussmannian building heights and higher.)

In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).

And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.

Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.

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

#587

Post by devilsbabe »

jamiek88 wrote: post #495
rastignack wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In France? How when the top tax rate is 45%?

That's only income tax. There's also social contributions including pension, health insurance, and unemployment insurance. This adds up to around an extra 20% tax (although pension contributions are capped so could be less for very high salaries).

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

#588

Post by ipaddr »

harimau777 wrote: post #469
ipaddr wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is filled with high rises. Where are you from?

What do you mean? In my experience outside of the few major cities (New York, LA, etc.) there are only high rises in the very downtown of large cities.

Highrises are just apartments.

Very large like Columbus Ohio?

https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/

Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be...

Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html

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

#589

Post by closeparen »

rayiner wrote: post #584
closeparen wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are going to develop the state capacity to override inexorable forces of nature, like the productivity and desirability of the metropole over the hinterlands, might I suggest we first give the people a good show by turning off gravity? Bring the Mediterranean climate to Chicago? Maybe do something about climate change?

I don’t know if I’d call it “inexorable forces of nature” as much as economic financialization and industry consolidation run amok.

The arc of urbanization is thousands of years old! Once we figured out how to produce food at scale without much labor, it was pretty much over for decentralization.

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

#590

Post by adolph »

jeffbee wrote: post #498
adolph wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-load…

The problem — again, in America — is that residential rents are by far the largest component of unreported income. Exemptions mean nothing to petty criminals who are already not effectively taxed. The market mechanism that precludes tax pass-through is the price is already set as high as the market will bear. If landlords could raise the rent to pass through a new tax then they would have done so already without the…

Where do you find that residential rent is highest unreported income? Last figure from IRS I see is 2014-2016 and rent was a quarter the size of non-farm proprietor: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1415.pdf#page23

What percentage of total rents are unreported? One would expect that the majority of rents are collected by professional management companies subject to reporting requirements that make underreporting unfeasible. Maybe that is an incorrect baseline?

What makes you think that rents are already as high as the market will bear? After all, rents keep rising, right?

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