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Why Britain doesn’t build

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Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#461

Post by prottog »

alphager wrote: post #351
prottog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar. I hear about this every now and then, but is it an issue in any real number? Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread…

> Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric. It's not just distance and cost, but time. Someone working 3 jobs simply doesn't have time to stand in line for hours.

Nobody has time to stand in line for hours to vote. Not even retired people would do that!

> Someone working 3 jobs

According to the BLS[0], less than 5% of working-aged people hold more than one job, and presumably a fraction of that have three jobs. Surely society shouldn't optimize for a small minority of the population.

> doesn't have time to stand in line for hours

Data on this isn't great, but one source I found[1] puts a cursory total average across all states in 2020 at around 15 minutes, with the worst average wait time being Indiana at 42.1 minutes. It's confirmed by a 2020 academic paper[2] which puts the nationwide median at 14 minutes.

I can imagine that there are outliers who have to wait unpleasantly long, and that same paper referenced above indicates that people may have unequal voting wait times based on where they live. Ideally voting should be easy for all those eligible to vote.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm

[1]: https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-polling-place-lin...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00024.pdf

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#462

Post by lotsoweiners »

Detrytus wrote: post #430
throwaway2037 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence. Eh. "Many" is such a vague term. Like, 5% could be considered many. UK is a driving country, period. where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life. This is true in all highly developed countries if you live outside the largest cities. You need to drive. It is baked in the cost of your life. Renting is much cheaper outside of the city, b…

Such problems only exist in third world countries, such as US or UK. My country solves this by issuing a plastic ID card to each citizen. You apply for it at your local town hall, and it is free of charge. You can use that ID for voting, or any other interaction with the government when they need to confirm your identity. Hell, they even issued a smartphone application recently, that can be legally used as ID.

And in the US if you don’t want/need a driver’s license then you just get a state issued ID card. Easy peasy.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#463

Post by aetherson »

andyferris wrote: post #313
aetherson wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you build new housing (as in, increase the number of units of housing that are available in total), you make your lot more valuable, which makes other lots less valuable. So a developer makes makes money by making their lot more valuable, but they do not "make real estate more valuable" generally. This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have…

With shoes, sure. With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).

That's been repeatedly empirically shown not to be true. New housing depresses the price of existing housing (very slightly), even hyper-locally.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#464

Post by peterfirefly »

mhh__ wrote: post #242
WalterBright wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great Britain has 67 million people. 14,000 people is unlikely to swing any election, even if they all voted in lockstep.

14,000 in the right places could easily topple a government in a tight election because of FPTP - although one can obviously not choose in reality. In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500. We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.

That would have been 2500 in exactly the right places. 2500 in exactly the right places could also have given the Conservative Party even more seats.

If we are talking about 0.25% on average then I doubt it could have changed much in these local elections (back in May in England and Northern Ireland).

If anybody wants to play with the data from the General Election in 2017 they can do so here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2017_United_Kin...

Sort the table by "Mjrty." in ascending order. Right at the top we see wins for SNP, Labour, SNP, Labour, and Labour that easily could have been wins for Lib Dem, Tories, Tories, Tories, and Tories.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#466

Post by throwaway894345 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #398
throwaway894345 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of huma…

>It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right? But in some places population is the same or even declining and prices are still going up.

Sure, there are definitely other factors as well—for example, the local economy may be growing such that there is more intense competition for housing in close proximity to downtown. This is also a pretty “blind force” (rather than homeowners marketing their homes).

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#467

Post by lotsoweiners »

leoedin wrote: post #328
jgon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the older generation "hates" youth, I don't think they think about them at all really. In the conversations I've had with Boomers and older people, although there is the standard derision for youth that is stereotypically expected of older generations, I would say there is more an immense blindspot and unwillingness to consider even a slight sacrifice of any type, even for their own children. The e…

This pretty much sums it up. I doubt it's some special boomer mentality as much as a "people" mentality. People are fairly selfish and don't want to reduce their quality of life. What's shifted over the last few decades is that people live longer. Boomers basically just got lucky - they didn't have a huge older generation above them, so the cost of social security was fairly low when they were young. They managed to…

You forgot to mention that boomers had high mortgage rates. According to https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-... my parents, boomers, would likely have had 16%+ and 12%+ rates when they bought their first homes. Contrast this to myself, a borderline Millennial/Gen X, who bought houses after the 2008 crash and currently have a 3% mortgage. Makes me wonder why Boomers are the always the primary target of younger generation's ire.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#468

Post by parthdesai »

charlie0 wrote: post #275
parthdesai wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This often comes up, and I'm genuinely curious, is space really that much more important when it comes to kids? I grew up in an apartment sharing a bedroom with my sister, and tons and tons of kids grow up in an apartment all over the world; all the older European cities, Asian cities (Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc). Netherlands has the happiest kids in the world, where in Amsterdam a lot of kids would be growing…

In the States that seems to be the case. I surmise that's due to our strong sense of individualism in our culture. Hard to see whether prosperity causes individualism or the other way around.

Define prosperity though. If it's strictly financial prosperity, then sure. But various studies have found people in western countries to be lonelier and less happier than their asian/european/south american counterparts where sense of community is higher.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#469

Post by nerdawson »

asdff wrote: post #212
nerdawson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their homes New housing is directly against the interests of existing homeowners. Any plan that relies on people seriously disadvantaging themselves in order to benefit other people they don’t know is doomed to failure.

New housing means the area is worthy of investment. Homeowners should want that for their communities, it makes their homes more valuable than those in communities that developers pass over. Plus the more people living in an area, the more pressure on housing, the more your single family home would fetch compared to a less dense area. Ask yourself if as an investor you'd rather own a single family home in some New Je…

Given the shortage of land available for new housing, there are very few areas developers wouldn't choose to build.

As a homeowner, I'd be opposed to most new housing developments in my area. New developments aren't backed by the same level of investment in local services such as transport, schools, and GP surgeries.

> Ask yourself if as an investor you'd rather own a single family home in some New Jersey farm town, or a lot in Manhattan?

I think this is the key flaw in your argument. I chose to live in a village, not a city.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#470

Post by nvarsj »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128
ggm wrote: post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…

It's basically The Wire in the making here in the UK. In 10-20 years, if not now already, we are going to have full blown ghettos I'm sure. Whereas 10 years ago I felt safe in most parts of London.

Crime has noticeably gone up and I'm sure it's just going to get worse as gangs increase. Even in safe areas, muggings and knife violence are on the rise.

My children went to a really terrible comprehensive which I had to move them out of. The kind of stuff going on there is just making the next generation of criminals possible. And it's not the school's fault - they just don't have the resources to manage with bulge classes and staff stretched to the mental breaking limit.

It's an utter shambles the state of this country. Without strong leadership it's not changing either - we need an Obama or similar charismatic leader with progressive (or hell, even moderate) ideas at this point to make some change.

One thing this country has going for it over the US is that governments have a mandate to make large changes. In the US, nothing can ever change because of gridlock in congress with filibusters. So we still have some hope here, although lack of proportional representation makes it very difficult to get proper representation.

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