Tokyo is a public-transport-centered city and has an interesting structure. The land value depends directly on the distance to the metro or train station and the importance of the line. The train station is the center of a self-contained community and most of the services like shops, restaurants, supermarkets, etc use to be next to the station. Also, the buildings tend to be taller the closer they are from the station. I find it a quite convenient way to organize a city.
Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
131–140 of 151 posts
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#132I may live in the densest neighborhood of any HN participant: North Battery Park City [1] in Lower Manhattan. As an example, my son's 500 kid elementary school serves 9 buildings. And I'm here to tell you, the future feels great. Specifically, living vertically has all sorts of wonderful aspects in terms of community (the kids can trick-or-treat without leaving the building), access to resources (my kids can ride the…
High density doesn't always equate to pleasantness though. It still has to be done right to be livable. I spent last year living near Columbus Circle (the southwest corner of Central Park in Midtown Manhattan) which is probably equally dense as Battery Park, and didn't care for it much primarily due to its mixed use. The population density is quite high there, but it is mixed in with office buildings that suck the ch…
Yep. I landed in the Upper East Side in a small apartment with bad lighting - the main window faced a building. The way it was built, I saw into my next door neighbor's kitchen and bedroom. I was really depressed that whole first winter cause of how cavelike my apartment felt.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#133I may live in the densest neighborhood of any HN participant: North Battery Park City [1] in Lower Manhattan. As an example, my son's 500 kid elementary school serves 9 buildings. And I'm here to tell you, the future feels great. Specifically, living vertically has all sorts of wonderful aspects in terms of community (the kids can trick-or-treat without leaving the building), access to resources (my kids can ride the…
High density doesn't always equate to pleasantness though. It still has to be done right to be livable. I spent last year living near Columbus Circle (the southwest corner of Central Park in Midtown Manhattan) which is probably equally dense as Battery Park, and didn't care for it much primarily due to its mixed use. The population density is quite high there, but it is mixed in with office buildings that suck the ch…
At least for Greenery, Singapore does a great job of this.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#134"land-use regulations in the West End of London inflate the price of office space by about 800%; Milan and Paris the rules push up prices by around 300%." I live in Milan so I think I'm qualified to write about this. The office space one wants is close to home or to metro or train stations, unless one lives outside the city. In that case the best office space is close to the highways on the same side of the city you'…
> my ideal of a city is not a large archaeology You mean arcology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
Yes, thanks.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's odd is that Manhattan's population density has on a long timescale been declining rather than growing, despite quite a bit of construction. In the 1900 census the population was 1.85 million (density ~80,000/sq mi), and it reached its peak of 2.33 million (~100,000/sq mi) in the 1910 census. Since then it's on the way down, with some bumps here and there: 1.96 million (~85,000/sq mi) in 1950, and all the way d…
Here's a great illustration of the falling density in Manhattan from 1910 to today: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-de...
Interesting...based on that illustration, it seems like #2 is the dominant factor. The areas of previously highest density are the Lower East Side and East Village, formerly working-class immigrant enclaves with more tenements than highrises.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#136Ah skip to the last paragraph.
It's just the usual "things would be better if only we took away more of people's money by force" article.
Ignore it. It's just pro-tax stupidiy
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#137Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. So allow people to cluster in high quality virtual environments.
Yeah, it surprises me, whenever I stop to think about it, that this isn't more common by now. In the group I work in we make heavy use of email, of course, and we do have a few remote people who call in via VOIP to meetings, and sometimes we do screen sharing with them, but that's about as far as it goes. We rarely do video, though all our laptops have webcams. We do have a room with a fancy videoconferencing setup w…
I actually work in a completely remote team, in the sense that everyone works remotely (about 50 people). So there is no hierarchy of remote people being second-class team members, as you seem to be describing.
For minute-by-minute chats we use IRC, and that works well. For longer conversations, mailing lists. And we have twice weekly video conferences, and twice yearly physical meet ups.
This works well. I suspect it wouldn't work well if half the people were sitting in a room together and had conversations that were not accessible to the remote workers.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest that the underlying value of the land is zero, or so close to it as to be statistically insignificant. The market value of land is overwhelmingly dominated by proximity to improvements. If you subtract the value of improvements on the land itself from the market value, you are still left with the value of being near the improvements on all surrounding properties. The true underlying value is the value it wo…
Actually it isn't that hard. The land value is simply the property value minus the value of the depreciated physical capital (buildings etc.) on it (LV = PV - K). This calculation is already done in the market in order to determine the size of a home owners insurance policy. Property tax values aren't ideally precise, but are already common enough that replacing them with and land value tax wouldn't greatly impact ta…
You either didn't read my entire comment or chose to talk past it. I said that the result of your calculation (LV = PV - K) actually still includes the value of improvements adjacent to or near the property. The value of some improvements bleed across property lines.
As such, that result still represents the improved value of land.
Roads increase the value of lands adjacent to the road, even if they are not on the land itself. Parks and greenways increase the value of land within a certain distance. Schools increase value. Shopping centers increase value. Police stations, fire protection stations, restaurants, theaters, museums, public transportation, and other improvements all affect the value of living near those improvements. There is even some value in living next door to an expensive-looking house rather than a shabby one, or an abandoned, empty lot.
I contend that if you factor out all those improvements-by-proximity--if you erect a magical barrier that prevents all human influence from passing it--the inherent value of a hectare in a city or suburb is about the same, or perhaps less, than a hectare in the middle of a cornfield--a field without an irrigation system, and far from any roads.
For the most part, the inherent value in land is as a place to put the improvements.
A location tax does not encourage efficient land use (by discouraging inefficient use). It discourages living closer to other people, which itself is a more efficient use of land. When home is where you hang your hat, people gather around the hatracks. As long as you are taxing desirable location rather than land area, you are addressing the movement of the people rather than the use of the limited resource.
If high-density housing is a more efficient use of land than low-density housing (a rhetorical conditional), then it is counterproductive to tax people for being closer together in more efficient cities, rather than less-efficient suburbs.
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there anyone preventing you from doing that?
there are no high-quality virtual environments (except for killing each other)? you literally cannot even throw an idea up on a whiteboard and have it be there two weeks later: there is no such thing online. (virtual second-life collaborative spaces.) online collaborative meetings are a joke compared to real life - as a piece of evidence, if they weren't you wouldn't have teams having to scramble to move to silicon v…
Re: whiteboard - Shouldn't Lync + OneNote solve this?
Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it surprises me, whenever I stop to think about it, that this isn't more common by now. In the group I work in we make heavy use of email, of course, and we do have a few remote people who call in via VOIP to meetings, and sometimes we do screen sharing with them, but that's about as far as it goes. We rarely do video, though all our laptops have webcams. We do have a room with a fancy videoconferencing setup w…
I actually work in a completely remote team, in the sense that everyone works remotely (about 50 people). So there is no hierarchy of remote people being second-class team members, as you seem to be describing. For minute-by-minute chats we use IRC, and that works well. For longer conversations, mailing lists. And we have twice weekly video conferences, and twice yearly physical meet ups. This works well. I suspect i…
Do you think/feel this affects how close-knit a team can be in your company?
From what you say you don't seem to use video much (for one-on-one), so a lot of visual/non-verbal is lost (also there are no non-work regular meetups, e.g. lunches, which I think helps with nurturing a bit of informality).
Also when someone is sitting next to me the threshold for asking a question is rather low, and when working remote I tend to waste more time looking for answers on my own. So my guess is that would affect productivity also.
But still I wonder if there are many of these completely remote largish (> 15, say) companies. It's a very interesting model.