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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

#611

Post by HenriTEL »

_3u10 wrote: post #569
HenriTEL wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, price increase is mostly due to inflation trends. When there is an inflation trend the house market follows, for example in London, after the start of the war in Ukraine things like gas and gasoline price went up which created a legit price increase for products that depends on those. But we've also seen an increase in rent. And that's because estate agents knew that since there was an inflation trend people were…

You’re wrong and you don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t mean to be rude but it’s more than just inflation. There is a mismatch between number of people and number of housing starts, it’s been this way for 20 years. Estate agents charge more because people will pay it because anyone who can’t afford it goes homeless or moves somewhere else. In London, where housing delivery has long trailed short of need, t…

A large part of the price in indeed related to offer vs demand but that's the basics for any market. Now it's funny because you also say "Estate agents charge more because people will pay it because anyone who can’t afford it goes homeless [...]". So it isn't just offer and demand isn't it?

When you think about it, even in areas like London the housing market is not liquid nor uniform enough for the offer vs demand model to apply. You don't rent/buy home like you buy strawberries.

In about 1 year there was no significant increase in demand and the supply stayed the same but everybody saw its rent increase.

Edit: Also we should not mix-things up, the housing market is very different in outliers like London compared to the more global market. Here we're in the context of those outliers (Paris, London, etc.)

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

#612

Post by Fradow »

harimau777 wrote: post #462
mpweiher wrote: post #361

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.

How do people deal with being sweaty at work? Do offices generally have showers?

Offices generally don't have showers.

People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).

To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.

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

#613

Post by rsynnott »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #164
rsynnott wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?

More people in a smaller area? Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic Edit: 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. Congestion

> Edit: 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.

Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.

Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.

In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).

Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.

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

#614

Post by presentation »

retinaros wrote: post #544
presentation wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t necessarily need to build taller, if transit (not bad in Paris already) is brought up to Tokyo levels (meaning an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else) then you just build densely outwards. Tokyo has far higher population but is mostly low-rise. A city like Paris has the bones for this.

impossible to brong it to tokyo level. our people are not educated like japanese people. add the strikes, the frequent infrastructure issues and we will never reach tokyo levels. also since covid transportation is worse since they figured out they could make more money cramping up less trains

lol then I guess Paris is doomed

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

#615

Post by rsynnott »

verisimi wrote: post #306
bluefirebrand wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people in a smaller area? Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic Edit: 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. Congestion

> 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.

I really think people underestimate how much of this is down to _taste_. Personally I've lived in pretty sparse suburbs of Dublin (by European standards, anyway; think semi-detached houses, as far as the eye can see), in the city centre, and in dense inner suburbs (walking distance to the centre, generally terraced houses and apartment buildings). I wouldn't consider going back to an outer suburb, never mind a rural area. But I know some people who live in the middle of nowhere and love it! Couldn't do it, myself.

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

#616

Post by AnthonyMouse »

digging wrote: post #553
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise. You can barely hear the tires unless you're standing right next to it. "Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 m…

> Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires. > "Elec…

> What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind?

Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.

> That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.

Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.

> Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant.

People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.

The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.

Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.

> You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example.

If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.

> EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is.

Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.

All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.

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

#617

Post by rsynnott »

alecthomas wrote: post #480
othello wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already the densest OECD city by quite a margin! (22,000 per sqkm in the inner 20 district, twice that of Manhanttan and 3 times that of Tokyo - and still 8,600 in the Petite Couronne, which includes 8 million people)

Manhattan has a population density of 28,154 per sqkm according to Wikipedia?

Yeah; they're probably thinking of New York City. If taken on its own, Manhattan is one of the densest cities in the world; the rest of NYC brings it down a lot.

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

#618

Post by robertlagrant »

bedobi wrote: post #523
robertlagrant wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want emergency services vehicles to be able to access and help at any location, you want roads. That's what you're paying for.

Yeah because you ardent motorists care so much about emergency vehicle access right? I don't have a problem with roads, I have a problem with roads being gridlocked and destroyed by single occupancy private automobiles and the resulting unnecessary deaths and road upkeep.

> Yeah because you ardent motorists

You need to be able to speak without classifying people into groups. I'm not an ardent motorist. I don't think it's good to allow myself to be indoctrinated into any of the (frankly bizarre) transportation-obsessed groups that exist.

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

#619

Post by robertlagrant »

underlipton wrote: post #561
robertlagrant wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the city. If it was originally a company town, probably the company. If it's a new build, probably the property developer. But either way, something that already exists is not subsidising the plumber's salary. The plumber is paid by the customer.

Anything built post-GD (which is going to be the vast majority of what you service) was likely touched by government subsidy in some fashion, whether grants, loans, or municipal bonds (tax-exempt, so effectively a subsidy). "Company towns" built before then were often subsidized, in effect, by companies not having to bear the financial burden of their many, many instances of illegal or rights-infringing behavior. Tha…

You could equally say that tax money is all private money, so really it's all private. It's silly to talk about the provenance of money in these topics.

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

#620

Post by pjmlp »

mrpopo wrote: post #442
vladvasiliu wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like in German cities? For the lucky 30 or something that managed to arrive earlier to the spot, and only on the main station.
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