201–210 of 1001 posts
As annoying as NYC (and driving) are, there are downsides to unlimited housing and lack of zoning - as it turns out, the same states that do this sort of thing we all praise, are the same laissez-faire philosophies that oppose communal public transportation and walkable urban communities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's typically local residents who fight this. There's a "fuck you, got mine" tendency to pull up the ladder once you've made it.
It is more complicated than that. A few years back when my youngest entered 1st grade, I attended some meetings where the superintendent talked about school expansions in the pipeline due to confirmed property development projects. Namely, when new housing is added, there are infrastructure considerations and corresponding expenses that translate to higher taxes . Civil planners have formulas for how much the student…
In my experience, most retirees have more rooms/land than they can make productive use of. I feel that there should be some pressure for them to sell that property to families who can use it more productively. That's the stick, but I feel there needs to be a carrot, where builders are constructing homes that these retirees will be drawn to. There are retirement communities in the southern US like "The Villages" https://www.thevillages.com/, but as the population here ages, we need to build these everywhere so retirees can move into the communities that meet their needs without being forced to leave their cities.
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To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian. I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downto…
Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath. To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access…
Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink. I put this quest…
People move to where there is jobs and money. You can't build the housing first, in our society you need capitalists to invest into building businesses to make people want to move there. And because we have spent decades killing small business in favor of corporations, you need corporations to decide to build where there are no people and they have to pay a small short term premium to attract workers. Except corporat…
Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink. I put this quest…
You can't start a new city. I city exists for all the things you can do. Your new city will have nothing to do because nobody lives there and there are no jobs to attract anyone to move. that is why we build suburbs - they get anound this by being right next to a place with everything you want in a city
Think back to the old "company towns". Lowell, Massachusetts, built for a textile mill. Hershey Pennsylvania, built around a chocolate factory. Fordlandia, Brazil, a rubber plantation town. All of these were essentially cities and towns planned out around a central industry.
Similar things happened with the ghost cities in China with several of the big notable ones eventually actually growing into real, functional cities.
Once again, these have all kinds of messy histories and I'm not saying they're all good ideas. But just pointing out, it can be done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's typically local residents who fight this. There's a "fuck you, got mine" tendency to pull up the ladder once you've made it.
It is more complicated than that. A few years back when my youngest entered 1st grade, I attended some meetings where the superintendent talked about school expansions in the pipeline due to confirmed property development projects. Namely, when new housing is added, there are infrastructure considerations and corresponding expenses that translate to higher taxes . Civil planners have formulas for how much the student…
If the demand for housing is high, zoning fees can also be used to make developers pay for the infrastructure upfront. If done properly, their impact on housing costs should be minimal, as they mostly extract some of the added value created by the zoning from the landowner.
So glad we don't need to re-write the first chapter of almost every economics 101 textbook!
it's crazy that people nowadays seriously question basic market pressure being a thing
Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.
Meanwhile, California is also trying to build housing near transit, but Menlo Park wants to preserve the character of downtown by preserving dirty, cracked, flat, surface-level parking lots like it's 1950.