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Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

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Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High rises are built because people want to move to places with better opportunity. Should we simply not allow anyone to move to places with high opportunity? Are people who were born in rural areas or small towns not allowed to seek a better life in a big city because some people already live there? If you think people people should be allowed to move to places with better opportunity, then you need a solution on ho…

On the one hand, there's people with money who want to move to a new area. They have plenty of cash and resources, and they want to move primarily out of a lifestyle desire. On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax i…

Building new housing isn't about "giving rich people a cozy pad" its about allowing millions of people from geographically disadvantaged areas live in high opportunity areas. I grew up in a small farm town 3 hours from the nearest city so I'm just supposed to live there the rest of my life? I'm not allowed to move to a city cause I got a good job offer? Sorry but your attempts to dehumanize new arrivals isn't going to convince many people, what about the millions of immigrants who come to this country, are they just banned from living in areas with jobs under your scenario because some people already live there? You're still not providing a solution to this problem, you've just ignored it.

You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.

Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.

Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.

So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#312
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to spew toxic carcinogens into the atmosphere so that wouldn't matter?

You should live next to a dog food factory or a bunch of chicken houses. Things don't have to be dangerous to create a situation that you don't want to be living next to.

Or a farm using natural fertilisers... They do look lovely part of the year, others not so much.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#313
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A little off topic, but these ports don’t usually store so many empty crates, so why do we have them now? Are we not exporting at the same rate? Is that even what empty crates are used for? I’m assuming they aren’t sent back to (mostly?) China empty. My understanding is that the us doesn't send all that much back to china, and that it was a problem for a while but wasn't the bottleneck until recently.

I'm surprised it isn't worth it at some level to send a boat load (literally) of empty containers back? I know not every ship will just do the round trip China LA but presumably at least some number of them would.

The same podcast included a story about an entrepeneur _trying_ to ship empty containers but none of the shipping lines would eliminate the part of the lading contract that says they own the containers when you're done with it.

Anyways, right now the bottleneck isn't shipping containers in China, that was an early pandemic logistics story.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#315
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the demand exists to build high rises then those people would already be pushed out at an ever faster rate. If you take a plot of land that previously had 4 units on it and turn it into a high rise with 100 units, then you can fit 96 higher income people onto that plot of land. In the scenario where you don't build that high rise, those 96 higher income people simply go into the existing housing stock and push tho…

Why are the higher income people wanting to live in the worse accommodations in the high rise? If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses. It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one

Living in a newly built high rise in more attractive to some people than a decades old house that might not be in the best shape. You can't "redirect demand", that's just not how the world works. When a bunch of jobs are centered in a city, then people will move to that city to work. You need to have a solution that can accommodate the population growth. Just telling people to go away is xenophobic and denies the reality of the situation.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in in…

> If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? I think you have just affirmed what I have said. USA is world's biggest, but an extremely fragile economy which is full of businesspeople too used to bailouts from a caring government. It's a bigger miracle it never seen major crisises from "encounter with reality" before. > We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale…

I don't disagree that the US made a huge mistake when it outsourced its production (for all the reasons you mentioned). But the solution is not to rip off the bandaid and view millions of businesses as collateral damage. You'll notice that the Chinese government is great at playing a long game, eg: Taiwan. We need to do the same.

The only way we can get better at long games is to examine what's driving our current weakness in that area. My guess is that it has to do with the dynamics of presidential terms. To get re-elected, you have to achieve something big in the first four years, and anything big will piss off the other half of the country and will make you lose the congressional elections at the end of your second year. So the solution is to either do something big that buys you favors with both political parties (literally nothing comes to mind), or to get it done in the first two years. China, in comparison, has been plotting the takeover of Taiwan for decades, and is very strategically, step by step, moving in that direction. If this was the US, the only option would have been a quick invasion or a start-stop effort every 4-8 years.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#317
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone feasibly charge for storage of them offsite?

Yes, and they do. But remember this is in the middle of Los Angeles where property is insanely expensive and ordinances limit how high you can stack your containers. So in order to make any kind of real dent you either need an astronomical capital outlay or you need to get a bunch of containers to emptier land outside the city (i.e. 40+ miles away), and you need to do it without violating customer contracts on where…

So like... is it just really hard for an outsider to come in and arrange contracts to do this right now?

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#318
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet commercial zoning regulations exist for some reason. if "natural forces" prevent all negative outcomes, why do they exist ?

I don’t see how I claimed that natural forces prevent all negative outcomes. Sorry, you don’t seem interested in understanding each others’ views here…

your view seemed to be pretty clearly, "commercial zoning is unnecessary for the problem of building factories next to schools", based on your phrase "Gigantic factories don’t want to be on small residential streets anyway because they cant fit the trucks in, so I think that argument cuts the other way - there are natural forces that deter that stuff. ", meaning, "natural forces" would "deter" "that stuff", in this case "that stuff" being building factories next to schools. Sorry to be pedantic but I'm not quite sure what it is I'm not understanding.

if you're saying, "I was just arguing that one exact example, i didnt say natural forces help for all kinds of other problems that commercial zoning is meant to help", well OK, so I think commercial zoning is necessary for even a less-than-gigantic, but nevertheless distruptive, noisy, and polluting manufacturing facilities being built inappropriately close to schools and residential areas which may nevertheless still be on roads that are fairly or fully accessible by truck traffic". After all the truck traffic could enter in the front of the building's property and the back and sides of the building's property abut said schools and homes in any case. just go look at any commercial property with a lot of trucking and movement going on, it doesn't take much imagination to see how such a thing can and quite often does abut residential areas in any case.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#319
post #291

I am a member of ILWU 13. A couple thoughts after reading the comments: The zoning change is for TEU storage outside the port. The port itself was not subject to that rule. The Port of Los Angeles is a landlord and is not directly involved in operations. Private companies, such as APM, EverPort, and others, rent piers/berths and are responsible for the actual operations and logistics. Some speculation: recently I’ve…

> ... recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty. If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?

Shit is going to take longer and be more expensive to come from China because when there isn't a TEU available you have to wait for one to be fabbed and pay for it.
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