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A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

freerange.city

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Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#81

Post by s1artibartfast »

rickydroll wrote: post #50
Permit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's very, very much more bad than it is good Is it? I don’t have a clear picture in either direction. What does an environmental impact assessment for a housing project typically result in?

Well, I've witnessed this on dozens of houses in the town where my ex-wife grew up. The local river was slow-moving in a shallow river valley. Every spring, it would flood, and houses built within a half-mile of the main river would flood up to the second floor. Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."

That's not what an environmental impact assessment is. Environmental impact assessments look at potential harms to the environment, not the property. It would look at if building a house would impact the wildlife, and sometimes other related phenomenon

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#82

Post by kasey_junk »

cyberax wrote: post #66
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments. It’s really weird to flip that around as an externality. (Disclaimer: I moved from New York to Wyoming. Thanks for your subsidies, I guess.) There absolutely are jobs in remote places. But the people there aren’t as valuable as…

> Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments No, they're not. It's the other way around, in fact. Suburbs subsidize cities (on average, again). The dense city cores produce most of the _corporate_ income tax, because that's where the companies are headquartered. But most of _personal_ income tax comes from suburbs. This is only now getting close to flipping around. Cities al…

Do you have any citations on that? Very curious because it’s a very heterodox viewpoint you are expressing.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#83

Post by exabrial »

> If units... "affordable housing"...

Stop. Trying. To. Fix. Prices.

The only way to "fix" prices is to increase supply, which the plan does really well otherwise!

This was the subject of extensive proof in a recent HN thread, where shockingly... the only thing that moved the needle was... shockingly... increasing supply. No matter of "well yeah, but we can do it differently this time" will fix it. You can only increase supply. Its the only lever you have.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#84

Post by triceratops »

rickydroll wrote: post #51
triceratops wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they have cheap housing. I'll take ugly suburbs over people sleeping on the street.

But I suspect you'll find ugly suburbs and people sleeping in the streets.

Los Angeles, whose population is only 50% higher than Houston, has 25x as many people who are homeless (75k vs 3k).

If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing.

1. https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele...

2. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1051-lahsa-releases-final...

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#85

Post by cman1444 »

cyberax wrote: post #64
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing clusters of productivity and economies of scale. It sounds like your solution to the housing crisis is people should be poorer?

This is not "economy of scale", this is more of a "pollution death spiral" and "unpriced externalities". A factory that dumps raw waste into rivers is more efficient and can produce widgets more cheaply than a factory that takes care to clean up the waste. A firm in a dense city core can get talent more easily, and it'll have advantage (on average, in the long run) over a firm that has a fully remote workforce. The n…

That article has cherrypicked dates.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ

Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#86

Post by cman1444 »

cyberax wrote: post #60
cman1444 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've heard of this locational jobs crisis. Where did you learn about this? I would like to read more about it

There is not a lot of good literature, actually. I'm not saying anything even remotely factually controversial. Housing units per household: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv It's also not controversial that major job density increases are happening in a few select metros: https://www.route-fifty.com/workforce/2019/06/job-density-re... or if you look more broadly, that smaller cities in the US are dying out.…

That st louis fed link doesn't seem to show any clear trend to me. Looks like we're actually on a downturn after a peak.

Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#87

Post by nullocator »

triceratops wrote: post #84
rickydroll wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I suspect you'll find ugly suburbs and people sleeping in the streets.

Los Angeles, whose population is only 50% higher than Houston, has 25x as many people who are homeless (75k vs 3k). If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing. 1. https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele... 2. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1051-lahsa-releases-fi…

These may be accurate and real, but I also wonder if this might partially be because Houston sucks in terms of lived experience for the homeless so they tend to end up elsewhere?

Texas has a recent and storied history of just busing people out of state or into other cities for people it deems are problematic or they don't want to deal with. So it would not surprise me if some of the stats are cooked or they've partially swept the problem under the rug.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#88

Post by triceratops »

nullocator wrote: post #87
triceratops wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Los Angeles, whose population is only 50% higher than Houston, has 25x as many people who are homeless (75k vs 3k). If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing. 1. https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele... 2. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1051-lahsa-releases-fi…

These may be accurate and real, but I also wonder if this might partially be because Houston sucks in terms of lived experience for the homeless so they tend to end up elsewhere? Texas has a recent and storied history of just busing people out of state or into other cities for people it deems are problematic or they don't want to deal with. So it would not surprise me if some of the stats are cooked or they've partia…

I gave actual stats. They also match my impressions driving around both cities. If you have stats about the scale of busing people out of state please do share.

What you've suggested may account for some of the difference. But "Houston has liberal zoning and builds more houses" is a far simpler explanation for the staggering 25x difference in homeless population between the cities.

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#89

Post by [deleted] »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #69
tpm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting - naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production.

> naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production It depends on the city—some cities do indeed handle rainwater with the normal sewer system, but most have an entirely separate system for rainwater [0]. But either way, if you pave more roads, you're always going to have more rai…

[deleted]

Re: A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

#90

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

tpm wrote: post #71
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production It depends on the city—some cities do indeed handle rainwater with the normal sewer system, but most have an entirely separate system for rainwater [0]. But either way, if you pave more roads, you're always going to have more rai…

1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads. 2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer…

> 1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads.

Yes of course, I forgot where I was in the thread, sorry.

> 2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.

I'm mainly familiar with smaller buildings, but I know that it's illegal to drain rainwater into the main sewer system, so presumably the bigger buildings are hooked up to the storm sewer system.

The climate here is kinda bizzare though: it's fairly common to get a few days of +15°C while there's still 3' of snow on the ground, and as you can imagine, that causes a ton of runoff from all the melting. And very little here is more than a century old, so everything is comparatively modern.

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