191–200 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We really need more public transit, though there also exist pavements that reduce road noise (most of it comes from tires) considerably… it’s just that it’s more expensive (and more effective) than noise walls… but government mandates say noise walls are “adequate”.
Public transit isn't economically viable when you refuse to build densely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm probably one of those people you're referring to, and quite honestly it's not that I don't realize or understand - it's that I don't care. The community you love wasn't always that way - it changed to become what you enjoy, likely to the similar anger/detriment of the previous residents who like the "old" community. I imagine racial segregationists and apartheid advocates used disconcertingly similar arguments.
> it's that I don't care Ok. So hoefully you can see why people who like their homes and their town will rationally do everything possible to oppose a person who is an outsider and comes in saying they don't care about anything the residents enjoy and just wants to change it all (destroy it)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For some reason, some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants. As if a community should be expected to want to ruin what makes their space attractive so interlopers can infest it? I don't understand the notion that that community exists in a vacuum where they're entitled to be insulated from the world changing around them.
I don't think that it's entitled to be insulated from the world changing around it, but I do think that the residents of, say, Palo Alto, should have more say about the planning and permitting in Palo Alto than I do (living 3000 miles away from there), no matter how much "some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants." I don't live there; I shouldn't have any say…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could never understand why some people don't understand that people buy into a community because they like the community in the state when they bought into it. And that making large changes to the community would alter the community and what people liked about it will be diminished. Not to mention the practical aspects like utilities, road capacity, schools, etc. as you've pointed out. For some reason, some people…
I could never understand why people expect everything to be static and never change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places It's not enough to have land, though. The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land. And the new homeowners will need access to food and supplies, i.e., stores. You need an entire community.
Very true. There are many areas in the US (Detroit for example) that have lost population over the past 50 years that wouldn't have to start from scratch with new development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, but the ideological challenges prevent that. So, instead, we gnash teeth and say there is no solution while we slowly build more housing stock and hope that'll catch us up eventually. It will, eventually, as immigration slows, and the death rate exceeds the birth rate…
> The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, Not really a fix. When people's location becomes free from their jobs, they don't move to remote locations where land is cheap. They move to cities they want to live in, or cities where they have friends and family. The subset of people who prefer to move to the midd…
Nearly 40% of the United States is public land, supported by taxpayers and managed by federal, state, or local governments. -- https://headwaterseconomics.org/public-lands/protected-lands/public-land-ownership-in-the-us/ Allocating a few more percentage points of that for housing could have a large effect on prices.
Having a stable, rather than growing, population would go along way to reducing the price of housing. Competition would be much reduced.
So basically, if you're an individual, or a contractor who reinvests their earnings into the housing market, you face two challenges: getting competitive financing, and finding a plot of land to build on. Question: is finance screwing up capitalism? Real estate is supposed to be one of the most competitive and dynamic markets. If you can turn even this very simple and basic market into a quasi-monopoly, then there is…
This Matt Stoller guy paints a misleading picture of the dynamics of what is to be in the industry. I grew up in the housing industry as the son of a homebuilder. Not to date myself, but I wrote what was probably one of the first cost accounting spreadsheets on the nascent PC of the day using VisiCalc. The spreadsheet took into account all costs associated with building a starter single family home, including land ac…
Part of the issue is that the big guys have pushed out players like this. But another part of the issue is the onerous code process in place today. Could you even get a few guys together to build a home without having a certified electrician or engineer? And even if you could, does the present generation of able bodied workers even have the knowhow as my grandparents generation? The guy would spend all the time I waste on TV or the internet working out projects and plans until the day he passed practically. Seems present generations are a bit distracted by the digital world to pick up so many useful analog skills.