It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices • Hacker News Board

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#221

Post by mnky9800n » Mon, Aug 19, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #204

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic? Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help. Noise? That’s an engineering problem. Teacher ratios? Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent. You’re distracted by change and upset that yo…

Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.

I don't really care about how much it costs to make America look like a modern, 21st century place like the rest of the developed world. Americans deserve to live in a place that gives them services like the rest of the world has.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#222

Post by kjkjadksj » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #218

kjkjadksj wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not designed to be economically viable. Its not a private business. It can be subsidized.

It's economically viable here in Japan, and most public transit here is run by private businesses. There's no way you're going to make public transit work in the American suburbs: you're better off hiring taxis and letting people use those for free, because at least the taxis won't create so much pollution and use so much fuel. Running buses every 10 minutes in the subways with 0-2 riders will never be practical.

Its economically viable due to the train operators subsidizing the books with real estate. Its not viable in an of itself in japan either.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#223

Post by shiroiushi » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 11:58 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #222

shiroiushi wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's economically viable here in Japan, and most public transit here is run by private businesses. There's no way you're going to make public transit work in the American suburbs: you're better off hiring taxis and letting people use those for free, because at least the taxis won't create so much pollution and use so much fuel. Running buses every 10 minutes in the subways with 0-2 riders will never be practical.

Its economically viable due to the train operators subsidizing the books with real estate. Its not viable in an of itself in japan either.

How is it not viable in Japan? It's clearly working fine here. No, they're not subsidizing the trains with real estate; their financials clearly show that (though they get more profit from the real estate, granted), but there is a network effect: operating the train line brings foot traffic to the station and the area around it, making the land around the station very valuable.

Maybe western countries should learn a lesson from this, instead of somehow expecting public transit to always operate at a loss. The transit itself makes land valuable, so why not use that as an opportunity for profit? Here, even inside the stations, they rent out space to convenience stores, vending machines, cafes, etc., so they make direct profit just from that, but over in the US they seem to be allergic to doing that (nor do they even have bathrooms in the stations!).