As a Parisian, who is generally angry at the city’s housing policy (build taller!), I find the public housing of the past few years to be a great achievement. In general, public housing sits on the outer edges of Paris, but the city has been agressive in reconverting buildings in posher neighborhoods. It doesn’t really lead to reduced rent (because no additional supply), but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.
The problem with charging below market prices for anything is that it necessarily leads to a mismatch of supply and demand. So the question is how do you allocate that supply?
One way is to have hidden costs. This could range from straight up bribes, to paid consultants to fill out a lot of forms or talk to the right people, to just knowing someone
Another way is a lottery which benefits a tiny percentage of people. Sure it's "fair" but the incentive to rig it is huge
But even with a lottery it's still inefficient. If you give someone an apartment with a market rent of 4k for only 1k you're effectively giving them a 3k apartment subsidy. But if you handed them 3k, maybe they would spend 1k dollars on extra apartment and 2k for something else.
There are other distortions. Overall these are the worst kinds of policies because it's all hidden costs. If we realized that with a system like this we're giving 1 out of 1k eligible people the equivalent of a 30k a year transfer, we'd likely realize it's a ridiculous policy. But instead we just say how nice it is so and so is paying only 600 Euros to live in the center of Paris
I used to think like you but no longer do. A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Yes those people who live in that most central subsidized housing are in some ways winning a lottery ticket, and the real policy is to build a lot more housing as close to the city as possible. But Paris are doing that! AND adding new public transit etc etc. This multifaceted approach is better than just sterile economista policy. Vienna does it very successfully as well. Almost no one owns their home there, they're all renting very cheaply very high quality beautiful homes, including inside and very close to the city.
Interesting, so to put this in market terms, the city is allowing the value that such people add to it to be offset against the cost of their rent. This would mean that cities like Paris choosing to do this is entirely rational and GP's calculation fails to reach this conclusion because it ignores the actual trade that is being made in these cases?
Or to make a clichéd example: being cool and arty isn't particularly rewarded by salaries because there are a limited number of opportunities for this to improve a company's profitability. But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society.
But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society.
Well, some people do. But everyone is paying for it, even if they'd rather save.
If the value your espousing is, "No one should ever pay to have others live better than them off a livelihood that they don't support," a great portion of the remainder of America's middle class gets Thanos snapped. A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat.
A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat.
If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers, then that's fine. If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them, that's the issue I'm mentioning.
there is no job on this planet that isn't subsidized by taxes
how do people show up to work at Google, Apple etc?
through everything from "not dying from preventably disease in adolescence" to "being educated in public schools" to "being carried to work on roads and transit paid for by the public"
there is no job on this planet that isn't subsidized by taxes
As in if I am a private plumber who does jobs for people, my job is subsidised by taxes?
Yes. Who do you think laid the infrastructure for people to get water and sewers in the first place?
That depends on the city. If it was originally a company town, probably the company. If it's a new build, probably the property developer. But either way, something that already exists is not subsidising the plumber's salary. The plumber is paid by the customer.
Anything built post-GD (which is going to be the vast majority of what you service) was likely touched by government subsidy in some fashion, whether grants, loans, or municipal bonds (tax-exempt, so effectively a subsidy). "Company towns" built before then were often subsidized, in effect, by companies not having to bear the financial burden of their many, many instances of illegal or rights-infringing behavior.
That's not considering your customers, who are likely also subsidized by the government in some fashion - if their jobs do not involve federal or state government contracts or supplying or servicing companies holding such contracts, they're almost certainly taking advantage of advantageous tax rebates or deductions.
You could equally say that tax money is all private money, so really it's all private. It's silly to talk about the provenance of money in these topics.
You absolutely cannot. That's the entire point.
If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers
If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them
Yes.
If they're subsidised, they're not paid for by voluntary customers.
False dichotomy. Labor can be funded by multiple sources at the same time.
I mean, OK, you could say the same about literally every public expenditure?
I'm passionately opposed to private automobiles and the fact that my tax money goes to subsidizing them (including stupid road upkeep etc)
unfortunately I don't get to choose not to pay for that (but I can choose to live in a place like Paris where the Mayor is taking active steps to support not only private automobiles but give equal importance to other modes of transport)
If you want emergency services vehicles to be able to access and help at any location, you want roads. That's what you're paying for.
Yeah because you ardent motorists care so much about emergency vehicle access right?
I don't have a problem with roads, I have a problem with roads being gridlocked and destroyed by single occupancy private automobiles and the resulting unnecessary deaths and road upkeep.
Yeah because you ardent motorists
You need to be able to speak without classifying people into groups. I'm not an ardent motorist. I don't think it's good to allow myself to be indoctrinated into any of the (frankly bizarre) transportation-obsessed groups that exist.
I guess ideally people who live in the city pay for such subsidies through various municipal taxes. People who do not value this policy and choose to live in a different city that aligns with their values would not pay for it. Everybody gets what they want.
People who do not value this policy and choose to live in a different city that aligns with their values would not pay for it. Everybody gets what they want
Well, not necessarily. People stay for jobs, family and friends. They will just pay for something they're not bothered about if it's not so expensive they're forced to move. That doesn't mean them staying is anything to do with the thing some people want.
I live in Southern Europe. A lot of the people I talk to (about half I would guesstimate) would rather live somewhere else but can't. Some would even prefer to move to a cheaper place but can't (work, elders, kids, mortgages, are some of the reason).
What do you mean cities need it not to die? Would you say Monaco is dead? What about Zurich? Oslo?
Monaco, absolutely yes, because most of the workers commute from France, they don't live in Monaco.
Zurich and Oslo, I don't see the connection, they both have workers of all kinds, old and young people. They're organic and alive cities.
Who cares if most of the people working there drive in from France?
The point in Monaco farthest from France is like a 10 minute drive away.
If the workers don't live in the city, how can they be considered part of its lifeblood? All of their cultural pursuits happen elsewhere.
Well, they don't live there, but they spend probably 10 hours/day there, or 60% of their waking hours. Where someone sleeps doesn't seem too important.
I would say what a person does with their life outside of their working hours is rather important actually, particularly when we're talking about the life and culture of a city.
Monaco is artificially restricted from growing, how can you build a factory there if the state border can't be moved?
Don't those all have a reputation of being rather dull and culturally insignificant in comparison to Paris?
Are you suggesting there's a strong correlation between the number of low-salary workers living in the city and the presence of the Louvre or the Centre Pompidou?
Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793? Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings?
Also, mixed income housing in Paris has a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793?
No; I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. In fact, that seems like a fairly strange statement given that I mentioned the Centre Pompidou (opened in the 1970s) in practically the same breath.
Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings?
No; again, not sure where that's coming from.
My point, which you didn't address at all, was that you seemed to be implying that there was some kind of correlation between lower-income housing in cities and their cultural significance. Was that your goal? If so, can you explain further?
In a sentence: artists are poor. Hence the correlation. You can see this on a smaller scale with neighbourhoods in a given city. The culturally cutting edge neighbourhoods of NYC aren't the ones where all the rich people live.
Isn't it practically the same in Oslo, with rent control?
And I don't know about Zurich, but Monaco is clearly dying. Luckily they can build on the sea (and do so), but it suffered greatly from covid and Russia invasion of Ukraine, as without the Russian mob, a lot of 'amenities' aren't as available, which slow the 35yo+ fratboy life.
I don't get it either. Cities were dying for decades until people with money decided to move back into them and then they began to thrive. In fact, the actual data shows that as a city becomes more expensive it becomes more desirable and attracts more people and the city begins to grow. Places that were once considered off limits become spaces that are coveted. It's a flywheel that brings more and more prosperity. The best way to ruin that is to introduce masses of poor people to these areas. We did this in the starting in the late 1950's and the cities began to empty out because of the crime that came with it.
As the poor constituency builds greater numbers they attract politicians that promise them things by stealing from those with money. This in turn chases those people away and the city is left poorer and poorer and becomes worse and worse. Once nice areas become undesirable and decay sets in.
In general, I'm against govt interventions like this, but in the case of housing, I agree with you. For a society to function in a healthy way, it can't be divided in social class "gettos". It is the responsibility of the State to spend public funds to avoid that. This is not about fairness and equality. It's about the long term survival of a society.
Even further: extremely affordable technology now exists such that the leaders of our "democracies" could ask the public's opinions on such matters in a wide variety of fine-grained ways, or even better: facilitate a high quality moderated public conversation that actually involves the public on these and other matters. This may even be a requirement for a healthy society.
Unfortunately, current styles of "democracy" not only do not do this, they instead engage in deceptive propaganda to make it appear like they do this and more (how you can tell: observe how people praise "democracy", based on clearly silly memes). I often wonder if the quality of these institutions in an absolute sense (as opposed to a relative comparison to literal fascist dictatorships, the only other option dontchaknow) may have something to do with some people thinking they should be eliminated and replaced, a sentiment which is always and without exception represented as being dumb/etc.
Note also that these institutions also control school curriculum, which "denies" the public the skills needed to realize any of this is going on, how utterly riddled with error and deceit/delusion the public conversation is, etc.
Local democracies on housing questions are extremely consistent the world over: no more people near me. If there absolutely must be more people near me, they better be exactly like me.
exactly! nimbyism is human nature, the irony is that no one appreciate they themselves are the person others don't want around, lollll
if people are given the choice of anything, the answer most of the time will be "no"
Massive quantities of evidence exist demonstrating that human beings have at least some capacity to believe that they have concern for the well being of other humans.
Prime example: do you remember that big pandemic a few years ago? Do you remember how passionate most people were that everyone should go get their vaccinations, to protect each other? I sincerely think that these people genuinely believed that the feelings they were experiencing were sincere, and human belief even if non-genuine is an incredibly powerful force, maybe even the most powerful of all forces.
The charitable impulse in municipal housing politics gets you a cluster of tiny trailer homes on a parking lot surrounded by a 8 foot fence in an industrial part of town far away. Maybe, if you are feeling especially magnanimous, a servant’s outbuilding in the shadow of your house.
It’s not in human nature to give charity that would elevate others to the same or, God forbid, higher status as compared to the benefactor.
Wherever a young person, newcomer, or upstart has a reasonable chance of attaining what the incumbents enjoy, you’re probably going to find them taking it through market competition, not having it allocated to them by a vote of the incumbents.
I totally agree with you. But then, consider how different it would be if:
a) we had a political system that was capable of enacting the will of the people
b) we had an education system that improved people so they were capable of making more optimal decisions
I agree. But then on the other hand, there is a wide variety of ways that can be brought to bear to "encourage" humans to change their minds.
Alternatively, we could [1] consider waking up for even a short period of time and put some mental effort into considering whether our most sacred operating system may not actually be what it is advertised (and thus: believed) to be.
Is it not rather funny that thousands of incredibly smart programmers, systems analysts, etc are not able to even consider whether the system that controls our lives and well being, not to mention the literal continued existence of many thousands of innocent people throughout the world could maybe be substantially improved?
Day after day we engage in the pointing of fingers, funny how the fingers never get pointed at ourselves.
[1] Well, I am speaking a bit loosely: the laws of physics in this environment support it, but that does not guarantee that it is completely supported.
ask the public's opinions on such matters
this would be a disaster
take how Hidalgo is deprioritizing private automobiles on the streets of Paris
most of the public was passionately and intensely opposed to that, but she did it anyway
now, people can't imagine ever going back to how it was before - families being able to walk and ride bikes along the Seine and Rue de Rivoli is too nice
= asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to result in locking in status quo because people don't really know what they want, but they're usually pro status quo and opposed to change
this would be a disaster
It depends how you do it. For example, if you ask their opinion and then carry out that opinion without thinking about it, it would probably not yield optimum results, because humans almost always hallucinate (our culture teaches them this behavior). But with patient guidance I believe it is possible for people to improve over time.
As it is, we are at the mercy of bureaucrats with questionable ethics and goals, who also also always hallucinate (again, because of culture), so this is not a fantastic position to insist on maintaining either.
It has been well demonstrated that under very specific conditions, humans can achieve a state of high coherence. We've only managed this in a few select domains so far, because of hard work and counter-cultural attention to detail, and mainly: because a few individuals thought it seemed like a good idea, and made it happen against the odds. I personally think we can make it happen again, but not if no one tries.
now, people can't imagine
Not quite. In fact, people cannot stop imagining, the problem is that they do not have control over it, or realize they are doing it. But we are in luck: we have children and teenagers, who have yet to fall victim to the hypnosis/Maya that has spread throughout the adult world. They could teach adults how to do it in a controlled manner, as we could in the past, or ideally even better (children and teenagers have never had enough say in decisions if you ask me, they are waaaaaaaay better than adults at specific forms and domains of thinking).
asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to...
Do you still believe this?
Subsidies always have a cost on public finances.
In Paris' case, the financial situation is bad and getting worse with a debt on track to reach EUR10 billion.
So it seems to me that Paris is borrowing like there is no tomorrow. This usually does not end well.
It entirely depends on how the money is spent. If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base, it's a good prudent strategy, certainly better than the supposedly more fiscally responsible do-nothing strategy that can just as easily lead to financial ruin as irresponsible drunken-sailor spending.
If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base
Obviously, this is not what they are doing, debts growing with quite high tax rises at the same time ("taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year).
Paris is often depiected as a great model, especially by liberal foreign media, but the reality is rather different, and I believe that the Mayor's approval rating is currently abyssmal...
Not at all obvious. What is obvious is that returns on many investments, such as vastly improving housing and transportation for city residents, have multi-year lags. Like, obviously when you just spent billions on improving your RER, properly redesigning your streets to not be deadly by design anymore, and buying up housing, you'll be in the read that fiscal year.
"taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year
My French is rusty, but it was a 50% increase, it was previously the lowest of all cities in France, and it was not raised since 2011[0]. It is also peanuts compared to property taxes in Canada where I live, and especially compared to many parts of the US. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because property taxes pay for different things in different countries (i.e. in Canada provincial taxes pay for schools, in the US it comes out of your municipal property taxes). But still, we're not talking about one of the main taxes for an average French citizen, clearly.
[0] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-pa...
Well, you can insist on looking at things through rose-tinted glasses or notpicking. But the facts I highlighted are inescapable...
And I won't even get into how ghastly areas around the Eiffel Tower (for instance) have become with crime, beggars, etc everywhere.
You highlighted no facts, actually. The one fact was off by a factor of 2 and missing all context. What you call "nitpicking" is in fact the process of forming an opinion using facts and context. You could offer valuable insights, presumably being a Parisian, but instead you switch topics to beggars and crime. Oh well.
Debts ballooning and tax skyrocketing are facts. Everything I wrote are facts except of a small error in number but of course you chose to argue that the tax rise was 50% not 100% like if that made a difference to the point.
As I mentioned, rose-tinted glasses can be very strong, especially in people who have no insight but are looking for ideological reinforcement because, frankly, articles about how great Paris is in the NYT only serve that purpose, the readers will not know a thing about the actual situation.
So I've thought about this before because the city I'm in has received the same critique. I'm in a 200-something thousand population city that's carrying a billion in debt, so about 5K EUR per inhabitant. Given your numbers that's pretty much about the same amount of city debt for each Parisian.
Big number scary, but looking at it on a per citizen basis is it really that big, or unreasonable a number? Assuming that this debt has been spent rationally on say infrastructure, social housing policies, QoL upgrades for xyz?
Yes, good fiscal policy to keep debt stable or reduce in the long term is necessary, but it sure doesn't seem as doom and gloom as people make it out to be.
You should see how much debt some countries are in... It's an order of magnitude more in the extreme cases.
A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die.
Correct. Therefore, subsidized housing is good and more of it is better? No, it does not follow.
What you say is correct, to a degree. Beyond that, it is incorrect. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
If you agree the city dies without people of all ages backgrounds and income levels what is your alternative proposal to subsidized housing. It's just a fact that some income levels are being priced out of the city and certain occupations may become entirely unavailable without some mechanism of solving that gap.
Either you willingly misunderstood my comment, or you are so absolutist in your thinking that you're incapable of understanding the concept of a limiting principle in social policy.
Whoa whoa, dude. You're being unnecessarily hostile. GP's question was a fair one, and not (by my reading) unkindly phrased. Even if I'm wrong about that, personal attacks aren't welcome contributions: flag and move on.
Being strawmanned in the most mundane and cliched of ways is deserving of opprobrium. HN is better than that. It's tiresome.
Building more types of housing. It's simple - allow people to build, allow denser construction, allow smaller apartments, etc. Hell most of NYC would not be allowed to be built today because the apartments are too small -- yet these are the most desirable areas...
Why does everybody need to concentrate in huge cities?
If Romans where able to relatively evenly spread their towns and population all over the place in the analogue age, then why aren't we able to do so in the digital age?
Did Romans enjoy walking to the coffee shop or the grocery store?
Because ~90% of the population was farming
While being "huge", good European cities are quite homogenous throughout most of the area with 4-6 floor apartment buildings, small businesses in almost every building, parks, schools, good public transport system. They don't feel exactly "huge".
The principles would be the same even if we concentrated on small cities. A city must promote social diversity to grow the quality of social interaction (even indirect interactions, like walking through a neighborhood built by different ideas and in different styles).
Rome may not have invented the apartment block (insula) but they sure were fond of their high density residential/commercial space...
Ok,think of the politician you dislike the most. Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide. Would you still support the system?
We should have a clear objective system of governance that allows even terrible people to oversee it
Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide.
How much room for discretion is there actually in promoting diversity? I suppose you could forcibly break up poorer immigrant communities which would be pretty harmful.
It's simple, there are laws in the US that state that you cannot discriminate based on sex, religion, nationality, race, etc. if you would want to allow certain programs to help certain groups based on those characteristics you would have to lift those laws.
Do you favor removing those laws?
Oh this is one of those conversations; I'm leaving
Suppose you get a job offer, or your adult child has a newborn, or your aging parent's health takes a turn for the worse. Instead of being able to simply move, this instead starts a decade-scale process that has a 1% of chance of allocating you a public housing unit in the end. What does that do for dynamism?
People's intentions about when and where to move are important. A housing system that removes all individual agency from this question, abdicating everything to a government lottery/waiting list system, can meet other desiderata but is clearly losing something important.
And yet Vienna is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the world, with its masses of public housing, while major U.S. cities have homelessness crises and TV shows about house flipping for profit. Perhaps we should stop debating things based on the hokum of Econ 101 textbooks and look at what in the real world has actually worked (e.g. abolishing most forms of zoning, massive investments in public housing, robust public transportation, drastically curbing real estate speculation).
The US also has a per capita GDP 50% higher than Austria ($52,131 vs $76,399). At $52,131 a year per capita GDP, Austria would be neatly in second to last place as the poorest state in the Union, as it would beat Mississippi at $47,190 but be beaten by West Virginia at $53,852. So perhaps the US policy is doing something correctly.
How is GDP per capita relevant, especially not adjusted for purchasing power parity? For Austria the GDP per capita PPP is at $67-69k depending on the estimate, which would put it somewhere between 27 and 33 place of US states, so roughly in the middle.
If you compare the Quality of Life Index, Austria is 9th, USA is 15th. Freedom Index - Austria is 93, USA is 83. HDI USA is 20th with 0.927, Austria is 22nd with 0.926. Another fun one is Cost of Living index which shows that Austria is significantly cheaper to live in compared to the US (66.8 vs 72.9 out of NYC).
I can go on, but it's frankly ridiculous that you think GDP per capita is relevant, or somehow directly impacts the lives of Austrians and invalidates the good choices Austria and Vienna have made.
I don't think most indices are very valuable - when you drill down into them, you usually find out there's a lot of decisions about what that really means made for you by some NGO or think-tank in order to get the desired result. That's not to say they still can't reflect some underlying true reality about "freedom" or whatever to some degree, but I don't think it's worth citing them in a discussion.
You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument. And there is some truth to this: visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European. I remember being particularly shocked by the state Germans live in and find acceptable.
You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument
It is, because they were implying that Austria having the social housing policies that it does, it severely impacts GDP; but it doesn't. A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc. And again, this is assuming GDP matters for the average person's life... and it doesn't.
visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European
At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc.
Austria got screwed by WWII for sure, but it still had a literate, educated, relatively wealthy population and was once the center of a great empire that amassed great wealth. And, I mean, Vienna was practically the cultural center of Europe for a brief period.
At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
I'll be the first to argue that the American safety net needs improvements, but Social Security, (retirement and disability benefits), Medicare (65+ government health insurance), Medicaid (poor, unemployed, and disabled health insurance), and unemployment insurance all exist in the US, and together with other benefit programs constitute the majority of US spending. Indeed, US government spending per capita on health care is higher than many European countries. It'd be a good example of where having a higher nominal dollar value doesn't buy as much even adjusted for PPP, since obviously despite this the US doesn't have universal public health care.
This is considered uncouth to say, but household debt is sometimes due to horrible exigencies, but it's much more often the result of easy access to debt and material consumption. It's really shocking to see the people you know cannot be making more than 40-60k driving around 50-70k vehicle, and who also have a nice boat and a huge house. But even people not doing these things tend to live more materially comfortable lives than most Europeans I know.
GDP Per capita isn't pa particularly good metric, but it is a measure for how productive a country is. So when the original poster laments that Vienna has this model of subsidizing housing while the US needs to "get rid of econ 101 hokum", I think it does do a good job as showing that for their differences, the US does do a good job at things (creating economically productive value in this case).
I have worked for some time in Austria and I have many friends who are US citizens.
While the latter have indeed revenues that seem much higher, I would say that there is no doubt that the quality of life of my former Austrian colleagues was higher, based on purchasing power, balance between job and personal life and quality of food and environment.
I look at the numbers and think they demonstrate how much more efficient Austria is compared to any US state. I would prefer living in Austria to Mississippi.
Less than 5% of households in Austria have air conditioning, vs 93% in Mississippi. Granted it gets hot and humid in Mississippi, but the average summer highs in Austria is a sometimes-muggy ~27C and it will probably get worse with climate change - heat waves up to 40C have already happened. I'll take the AC and the other conveniences the Americans have, though it would be nice to have the social atmosphere Austria has too. To a large degree, Austrian efficiency is just getting by with less than an American does.
I would rather compare education and healthcares since I value those more than A/C.
This is one of those things that are harder to compare. Mississippi, like all of the US, has free public K12 education. The public university system also extends automatic full scholarships for academically qualified (and the qualification is not that high) students, and also admits basically anyone else who is able to pay, though without academic qualifications they will have to take advantage of Pell Grants (free money but not much) and federal student loans. Of course, you could argue about the results of the system, and admitting students who are not going to succeed in college and thereby saddling them with debt in exchange for nothing is a failing of the US system.
For health care, there are many publicly owned hospital systems in Mississippi, and of course Medicare is available for everyone 65+. Mississippi is not a Medicaid expansion state, so while Medicaid (free health care) is available for children, pregnant women, and the disabled, there is a coverage gap between that and qualifying for the ACA subsidies for health insurance (aka "Obamacare") which is sort of similar to the German system if you wave your hands; I think Austria has something similar, but I'm not familiar, but obviously the coverage is broader.
European lack of AC is mostly that they historically haven't needed it. It's not like they can't afford ACs. Also, 27C (80° in freedom units) as your normal peak temp is pretty firmly in "why bother with AC" territory.
Oh yes, it’s much better to make 53K a year and live in West Virgina than Vienna. This is a sentiment with which everyone would agree.
To be honest West Virginia is the best US state (I also am close with back to landers communities, and visited through their lenses, so I am biased). Homemade booze (I don't drink, but still), homemade goat cheese (best cheese I had in the US), best kayaking rivers, great hiking trails, great people, great horses, great musicians. What's not to love.
The rates of childhood poverty and food insecurity, for starters.
What's wrong with West Virginia?
If you used housing prices an an indication of desirability (and an attempt to stay on topic) people much prefer to live there than the smallish mid-western town that I bought a house in.
I mean, trees and mountains instead of miles and miles of corn...
When comparing two developed countries only using GDP/per capita, make sure that the person you are debating with is way less educated than you are.
A more relevant measure might be median income per capita/household, adjusted for purchasing power. On that basis Austria does quite well.
Additionally, quality of life amounts to more than measures for disposable income etc. If you consider access to education and healthcare the picture might take on greater depth.
Only an American could make this argument. Vienna tops global comparisons for quality of life all the time. Life expectancy is higher in Austria, as are safety, education standards and all other meaningful indicators.
Who cares about some silly numbers on a bank account? We live good lives.
I think that just goes to show how misleading GDP can be!
Vienna has had the luxury of having had relatively little demand for housing for over a century. The population peaked in WWI and still hasn't recovered (it was 2.24m in 1916, 2.00m in 2023).
Vienna actually had a terrible housing crisis before the Austromarxists of Red Vienna built housing en masse. See this article for example: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-au...
Right, that makes a lot of sense because the city absolutely exploded during the preceding decades. But having the population stagnate has certainly made it easier for them to catch up than if the population had kept increasing.
Manhattan's population dropped 25% from its peak in the early 1900s. Pre-war was just a different era, this is more of a function of changing living standards, people live larger, not of contemporary housing dynamics.
vienna also had a lot of buildings destroyed in the war which increased the demand. population was as low as 1.5 or 1.6m in the late 80s/early 90s. it grew back to 2m in just a few decades, and it is going to continue to grow, so i'd argue that it has recovered quite well.
Basically, you’re assuming that this system is going to be like the underfunded and scarce public housing in the United States where a difficult to win lottery will be necessary to secure an apartment. In that sort of market of scarce supply, slumlords can overcharge for low quality rentals. But they couldn’t do that in a market where the government is offering a real alternative that you can actually get into. From the article it seems like the Parisian government has such a large supply of public housing that it is a serious market force that can influence the rest of the city and the makeup of its neighborhoods.
Your description of the situation sounds more like America where a tiny inventory of antiquated public housing units built ~40 years ago (the last time any American politicians cared to lift a finger to address poverty and inequality) are made available by a bleak lottery.
Just because the public housing system doesn’t work in America where it’s basically an afterthought doesn’t mean that it isn’t working in other places.
Not Paris but NYC:
For many New Yorkers, the most desirable jackpot is not the New York Lotto, but to be selected in the city’s extraordinarily competitive affordable-housing lottery. Tens of thousands of people, and sometimes many more, vie for the handful of units available at a time. Since 2013, there have been more than 25 million applications submitted for roughly 40,000 units.
Central planning has been tried over and over and has failed and led to more scarcity. It's like fitting climate change by regulating thermometers. Maybe this time is different?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nyc-affordable-h...
Yes if you support 40,000 units and your demand is much higher you're going to have problems. That tells you the system is underfunded. Central planning hasn't universally failed in every aspect and every application. Central planning tends to do poorly at solving problems that market mechanisms solve effectively, but it's sometimes useful at solving problems that market mechanisms solve poorly.
Centrally planned universal healthcare is generally effective and much cheaper than other systems. The US has out of control healthcare costs with its free market system. The next most expensive country to the US has less than 50% of the administration costs so the free market has actually come up with a bureaucracy that is more expensive to administer than what the government creates.
In general, central planning fails when market mechanisms are replaced by using force to allocate something. That doesn't mean opt-in programs with voluntary registration are going to experience the same type of failure. We know replacing salaries with a gun and telling people what they have to work on is a bad idea. That doesn't mean all central planning ever is a bad idea. I don't think anyone seriously argues we should abolish federal, state, city governments and let my local neighborhood manage it's own policy but that's the logical extreme of all central planning failing.
Calling the US health care system free market is quite the big stretch.
I can honestly not come up with another industry that is subject to higher regulatory burdens. Maybe nuclear power?
Ah yes, the old libertarian cop-out. The most free market healthcare system in the world is too highly regulated and if we just take the regulations away it will perform better because ideology. This is despite the fact that if you look at healthcare systems in the world most performance metrics improve with more regulation but not less. But lets forget about being data-driven when ideological purity is at stake.
healthcare systems in the world most performance metrics improve with more regulation but not less
This claim is almost always because american lifetime expectancies are bad. But thats because Americans are unhealthy, not because our healthcare is bad. Do you have a different reason to make this claim?
“Americans are unhealthy” is an outcome of a bad healthcare system, not an excuse for it.
I have 100% government provided healthcare (aside from dental) and I won't go see a doctor unless I'm literally going to die or want them to pull cancer off my arm. My diet would probably horrify you. Healthy as a horse except for another bit of suspected skin cancer I need to get checked out.
No. It is the outcome of a culture that values individualism to a toxic level and has accepted decisions that make your life shorter as normal. Really very little to do with healthcare at all. Americans dont value their lifespan like others do but apparently that means our healthcare is bad? Like there are plenty of things to complain about with our healthcare why choose something that isnt even true.
I don't have any real issue with regulations per se but with people claiming that a highly regulated market is 'free market'.
I'm actually quite happy with my socialized health care aside from the last time I went to the emergency room they sent me home to die and when I came back a day later they were rapidly pulling out faulty body parts before I did indeed die. Well, then there's the Phoenix VA death list scandal.
I know I shouldn't complain as it not like I risked life and limb in service of my country and earned it as a direct result of military service or anything.
My issue is less with what we call the individual markets in the experiment. It's more with looking at healthcare across a large data set of countries and finding a general trend that more regulations lead to better cost structures and better health outcomes for the population and then somehow jumping to the conclusion we need no regulation for everything to work. That's just inconsistent with empirical reality and it's one of these purely ideological fantasy-land claims.
I would very much like to see a study from a credible source who came to this conclusion based on a survey of different health care systems.
What I believe is more likely is people looking at the kind of regulations being used and concluding that the correlation between good and bad regulations can be directly tied to the profit motives behind said regulations. A purely state run health care system has zero incentive to impose regulations that seek to raise costs and hurt competitors because, by definition, there is no completion. A purely private health care system has a lot of incentive to regulate the amount of doctors (to keep wages high) or make reporting costs extremely high to push out the smaller hospitals and increase their market share &etc.
I suspect that reality falls somewhere in the middle no matter what system you look at and everyone wants to argue from the extremes (or accuse someone else as being an extremist as you so helpfully demonstrated) so there is no real dialog for trying to fix anything.
The failure is not so much in central planning as it is in human cognition, across the board in every single person involved, operationally or in observance.
If we do not try to not fail, then we should not be surprised when we always fail.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-...
Your top comment sounded pretty sensible and fair but in your responses to comments you now just sound like a troll.
Central planning works very well: that's how every corporation, city, and state works. It works well as long as you apply it to a small enough market and e.g. don't try to plan the whole economy.
The problem in NYC is that there is not enough affordable housing. 40k units is nothing in the housing supply, and the rent inflation has been way too high lately.
So the question is how do you allocate that supply?
To adress this specific question for Paris, they put an upper limit on your income to rent specific housing with lower rent.
I'll scale down your caricature of an example though, the offers you can see are usually 15% to 20% under market price, not 75% like you seem to imply.
Not exactly sure what is your point otherwise, the difference in terms of giving someone an apartment with a lower market rent vs. giving that money outright will eventually lead to the same thing, except that the former is also a way to curb the very high rent inflation (among other things), and results in both cases in a significant increase in purchasing power, at a given income.
If we realized that with a system like this we're giving 1 out of 1k eligible people the equivalent of a 30k a year transfer
This is not equivalent because giving someone that money doesn't mean they'll chose to live inside Paris, and this is a measure that goes beyond financial support. It's also a city policy aimed at achieving a specific population distribution.
This is not equivalent because giving someone that money doesn't mean they'll chose to live inside Paris, and this is a measure that goes beyond financial support.It's also a city policy aimed at achieving a specific population distribution.
I don't know, I would prefer the autonomy to choose where I live and how I spend my money. Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off? Why do we want to essentially force them to live somewhere expensive when they would prefer to use that money elsewhere? They're not some pawn you can use to feel good about yourself. "Oh look at all these people from different cultures that live here". They're human beings
This doesn't force anyone's hand. If people don't want to live in Paris, that's their choice. No one is kidnapping them and shoving them in these apartments.
On the other hand, if they want to, they have an avenue to do this (and it's still going to be difficult, supply isn't nearly as plenty as the private market), even if they don't have the income needed to find housing in the same area otherwise.
They're not some pawn you can use to feel good about yourself
That's not the reason Paris is doing this. There are benefits to encouraging diversity, among which fighting against getthoisation/communitarianism and prejudices, things that France has quite a poor records with in the last 50 years, and that had direct consequences on society cohesion.
Let's not use euphemisms. You're encouraging a certain racial and identity makeup of a city. It's literally the same policies that led to ghettoization. I don't want (often unelected) bureaucrats to put their finger on the scale on who can live in an area. It's not wrong because it was used to exclude [group] from certain areas, it's wrong on principle. And if we allow that power to the state, there's no reason it won't be used by someone with ideals that don't align with yours
First things first, we're talking about income-based public housing attribution. Not racial. Although if policies in the past means ethnic minorities have been disadvantaged all other things considered, then that will overlap, but as a consequence, not by design.
Secondly, Paris' policies are decided by the mayor of Paris and the city council, and they're elected (mayor directly, city council semi-directly). Not by "unelected bureaucrats".
Then your comment makes no sense. Policies favoring social diversity are the exact same policies that led to getthoisation? Do we agree on what getthoisation means? Because those two things are exclusive.
You say you don't want bureaucrats to put their finger on the scale of who can live in an area, that's your opinion. But if you're saying this should be purely left to supply and demand, then somewhat it is still a (non-)decision to put the finger on the scale, at one extremity, and it will have a certain outcome. Whether this outcome is good or bad will be a matter of opinion in certain cases, but not in others, e.g. what impact this has on the local economy for example, whether this leads to a more or less appeased society, and so on.
I think it's totally fair that a program designed to support people of a certain income living in Paris requires those people to live in Paris. If you want autonomy you can have it, just don't take the money/apartment. This feels like a cake and eat it to attitude. Government is totally allowed to have aims and reasons behind programs. Having low income people live in Paris ensures there are people available who can do work that can't afford to pay high wages. This is important to having a vibrant city and something reasonable for a government to aim for. If people could just take the money and screw off to anywhere in the country, then we'd effectively see people take a $30,000/year subsidy and go somewhere they could live entirely on that without working, which would accomplish very much the opposite of what the whole program was trying to do.
Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off?
This has to be facetious. They're perfectly free to go live in the country or move to Italy. I've never seen a desirable apartment I couldn't afford and then thought to myself how much I'm being respected by not being able to live there.
And with regard to the last point, no one is suggesting this as a means to have some peasant zoo in the city, a city needs a labor force. If you price out everyone who isn't a dev or a financier then you're not going to have a lot of the things that make a city nice. To some degree this is a subsidy for employers, because otherwise they'd need to pay more for their employees to afford living nearby.
To adress this specific question for Paris, they put an upper limit on your income to rent specific housing with lower rent.
Why would you ever want to incentive people to not earn more money? Stay poor and we'll give you a house - sounds like a bribe.
When someone rents a small apartment in the center of Paris for 4k on the private market in all likeliness they're paying more than 3k of pure rent profit to the owner.
The rent can be levied by the owner however the owner actually did not provide any of the investment or labor required to give the apartment the value it has. The apartment has value not because of anything inside the apartment or the building. It has value due to its location, something that the owner has no control over and did not spend a single penny to make more attractive.
This is obviously a huge inefficiency in the economy. Why should someone profit from the attractiveness of a location they haven't actually built? This is a positive externality.
Part of the solution of our huge housing crisis across most developed cities is obviously that there should just be more housing. This would bring prices down overall. However, new construction is extremely difficult, and that is due the in part to lobbies of wealthy owners which seek to keep prices high by maintaining scarcity.
Turning private rent housing into public housing is a good way to eliminate the economic inefficiency of rent in that one case and it also drives the price of nearby housing down too, as the private market has to compete with the public offering.
You've left out a few things the landlord does and the risks they assume (at least here in the USA, I'm not sure about Paris):
- mortgage costs
- property taxes
- insurance
- utilities
- repairs
- maintenance
- savings for large future capital outlays (new roof, furnace, etc)
- renters not paying
- empty rental units
- loss of investment opportunities of the capital locked up in the building
- possible loss of all income due to fire, etc
- 34 other things I'll leave out
Landlords (in the USA at least) are wildly subsidizing renters, because they're so hungry for the appreciation benefits.
You can test this anywhere the rental prices are below about 1% of the purchase price.
It has value due to its location, something that the owner has no control over and did not spend a single penny to make more attractive
To be fair, the owner is paying property taxes - which do go towards improving the location.
The apartment has value not because of anything inside the apartment or the building.
I think you'll find, in basically any city, that the quality of a building does correlate to it's rent price or value. You'll also find that owners do invest in increasing the quality of their buildings, which does improve the value or "niceness" of the location. If this wasn't true, gentrification couldn't exist.
Why should someone profit from the attractiveness of a location they haven't actually built?
If you're claiming that since no real identifiable person or group "built" the attractiveness of a location, and that therefore no one should get to profit from it, you'd be seriously tampering with the signal that the natural markets supply/demand provides in the form of rental prices. That's going to lead to some significant "economic inefficiencies" for the area in the medium to long term.
I get these arguments against it and I'm sympathetic to the reasoning, but the point of public policy is results and the Parisian policy certainly seems to just work better than most US housing policy. SF, Boston, NYC also spend a ridiculous amount of money ostensibly trying to achieve similar outcomes but their approaches just don't work.
Afaik 30% of all new luxury high rises are made low and middle income affordable and rent stabilized. In which ways is the NYC system inefficient? Do you believe that is due to policy, abuse by bad actors or some mixture of the two?
NYC is wildly unaffordable compared to Paris even accounting for the earnings differences. That is the outcome and the failure, not the presence or absence of some specific policy.
I am not saying Paris' approach is transplantable directly to NYC, but rather that first principle analyses (such as gp's commentary) that say that the Paris approach doesn't work are flawed. I know these analyses are flawed because one can look at Paris and see that they have achieved their policy objective of Paris being affordable for a wide swath of incomes.
Policies should be pursued, adopted, changed etc based on their outcomes above their adherence to abstract models. Models are great but once you have data that a policy has failed you should change that policy and try something else.
Paris housing works better than SF, Boston, or NYC because it is much denser, not because of public housing. American cities artificially limit density which drives up prices as everyone wants to live in the high demand area that cant densify.
It doesn’t take much to destroy a city with money, I can see it happen in a few cities in Europe now. Foreign money, mostly from non EU countries like Russia keeps pouring in raising the market value until no local can afford renting or owning an apartment anymore. Look at places like Sylt or some nicer towns in Switzerland or France, they basically got overrun by rich a••holes buying everything they could. Boggles my mind why people think it’s fair that local families compete with shady millionaires for living space.
Local families are the ones getting rich by having their houses surge in price. And they are probably also the reason why new houses are not being built.
Assuming they aren't renting.
Allocating public housing could be done through an auction system. Bidders would submit offers for annual rent. The surplus, after deducting costs, could then be allocated to buying or building additional housing for this program. Alternatively, it could be used directly to subsidize rent for low-income individuals.
In the end, this would solve the allocation problem while maximizing the available public housing. It would take a couple of years or decades to reach an equilibrium state I guess.
I'm probably missing something obvious here. Can somebody point out my mistake?
You've literally described a market system.
A developer charges as much as they can for their rental units. If profitable they take that surplus and build new units up until the point that the marginal cost of providing an apartment is equal to the marginal revenue for renting such a unit. This isn't due to benevolence but how you maximize profit. The developer also pays taxes which pays for public services
So yes, I am in favor of this system.
The problem with this so called 'market system' is it allows people to chose their neighbors through bidding only on properties they know the poors can't afford.
If the French wanted citizens to have the freedom of (dis)association they would have written it into their constitution.
If the goal is to have a diverse economic mix of people to live in a city center, then let the results speak for themselves. If another city has the same goal and can achieve a better result with less resources then that’s worth considering.
The “they haven’t thought this through all the way” mantra you’ve espoused might be true. Also maybe you’ve not thought it all the way through. Maybe that has been tried and doesn’t work well for reasons. For example if you increase the flow of money into a market without increasing supply, prices tend to rise and the wealthier will absorb the rise better than the poorer. As you’ve helpfully pointed out, there are knock-on effects, however those effects don’t just apply to one side.
So that’s why I advocate for aligning and judging success on the goal and comparing like to like.
Market prices rarely (almost never) consider externalities - situations like this where it is a societal decision, it is difficult to define what we want, much less define a objective function that the market prices can optimize on.
Case in point - congestion pricing
I prefer excess housing / school / living infra which is subsidized by the society
The program has allowed Mr. Chaillou and his wife to raise their two boys in the city. But he knows that the future of social housing will always face at least one big challenge: “The problem is that once you get in, you never want to leave.”
I think this is the reason so many in the U.S. are skeptical of/resistant to such plans. Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwelling if you can also wait 10 years, working but not pushing yourself, and someone else will pay for it for you? And then once you have it, there's even less incentive to try to "move up" from there, because there's now a cliff in front of you. You have to make the whole jump in one go, because if you only take incremental steps, you lose eligibility for your subsidies.
American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck. As often as possible, we want to think it's earned. The idea of trying to make up for some of the luck factor by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant, even if it might lead to higher quality of life for everyone involved.
instinctively repugnant
To some.
In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses. When you have 100 cousins and 10 brothers, this is a viable option.
They frequent each others businesses, work on interconnected industries, and in general help out however they can.
It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community. That seems a more fundamental problem with tax-rich/give-poor mentality. These folks make tons of charitable donations in money, in kind, and in time, but oppose wealth redistribution.
by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant
I think the first part of this statement is crucial to the full meaning. It is not about charity[0]. It is about redistribution of wealth by force is repugnant.
[0] This 2022 reports states US is #3 in charity (giving). https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-resea...
Ah yes, the famous "actually americans donate a lot" nonsense. That report is based on SELF REPORTED donations.
IE, giving Joel Olstein $10k to help him buy a new private jet is considered "charitable giving" and is also considered more charitable than if you just chat up the Asylum family that was just settled next door and help them get integrated into the local community to help them network and find work and friends, despite being way more impactful to human beings than that fucking grifter.
That "research" will also consider donating to, say, an anti-abortion group or an explicitly anti-gay group as "donations", as long as you, the questionee, consider them to be.
Also, being self reported with zero verification of any kind, Americans might just lie more about how much they "give".
The IRS publishes statistics about claimed charitable giving. 2020 tax filers claimed about $150 million in charitable giving if I am reading the report correctly, so less than two dollars per American. That is definitely an undercount since most people who make small contributions do not itemize their taxes and probably don't report their charitable giving, but even that number will be tainted by a person "donating" their money to a charitable organization that they 100% control.
You're ranting incoherently. Americans give the most to non-religious organizations and charities by a wide margin (both individuals, corporations, and the government).
For instance, the US government allocates $7 billion+ annually to the UN World Food Programme [1]. The next biggest donor? $1.7 billion. It's not even close.
And no, $150 million in claimed charitable giving in 2020 is provably false. One ultra-rich individual alone is enough to top that figure.
P.S: I'm not an American.
Giving 7 billion to a food programme is irrelevant when you have policies that enslave Global South to monocropping and force them to import your exports with IP laws (GE seeds) or when you have protectionist subsidies (as U.S. notoriously does) that makes your own exports not competitive. The harm of U.S. policy to the aid recipients is far in excess of 7 billion+, as you claim here.
Of course, it’s always the US’s fault. The Global South won’t take responsibility for electing buffoons as leaders that continually ruin their economies.
Rule no 1 - always blame others.
The hidden issue here is the effort of people with means to shape their community by expelling or excluding people they don’t want to help. Then their voluntary donations etc only help those whom they want to help.
Well-known examples in the U.S. include the use of legal covenants, red lining, Jim Crow laws, and sometimes blatant intimidation to shape who can own which property where. Such changes persist for decades because of the illiquidity of property in general and the compounding effect of wealth discrepancies.
So “outside their communities” is not a neutral, or purely geographic concept. Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.
U.S. governments, in contrast, are ostensibly bound by the republican concept generally and the 14th Amendment specifically, to provide protection and service equally. Even if the citizens in question don’t fit the preferred local definition of “who we want to help.”
Edit add: I’m posting this because I think it helps clarify why some folks want government programs to exist to address social problems, as opposed to just counting on voluntary aid to solve it all.
I don’t want to leave the impression that I think government programs are perfect or without flaws. I actually agree with the comments above that point out how means-tested programs can create incentives to “stand pat” and not try for incremental improvements. It’s policy problem that is well known but hard to fix.
to provide protection and service equally
That is what the law says. It is not what they do.
Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.
I, personally, agree with your informative pseudo-rebuttal (it's polite and impartial so not really anti-them).
However, the philosophical difference is that
they are intentionally constructed
is precisely the point, they might say.
I've come to realize, after spending time with them and reading "righteous mind", that the difference is so fundamental it requires a lot more power to cross divides than I have. I simply have to recognize the right and good intent in what they do, rather than denigrate it as "not enough" or "in the slightly wrong direction even if enough".
I imagine a world in which they decline to pay, and therefore to receive, benefits from wealth redistribution, and urbanites who are highly paid like ourselves subsidize other urbanites who are not. I also realize this world would have "rural" covens of uber rich, and so it will not be more just.
In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses
Unless you are gay, trans, not the right kind of christian, have mental issues, are progressive in any way, are willing at all to contradict their absurd views of reality, want cheaper electricity through green energy, want any form of public transit, their family member has beef with you, you dared to question the authority of the local PD, you dare to question that drag queens are a threat, you think maybe gun control could have prevented the local school shooting or that the PD in that town could have done better and should be fired.
The belief that actually rural people are really nice and altruistic is just laughable. Having grown up with them, they will only help you if you are the "right kind" of person, IE, if you are useful or beneficial to them. My white, catholic, french mom in a city of 9000 was completely ostracized, despite knowing every single family, and being a very generous and nice person, because she didn't have the right last name.
Insular rural communities are all about local tyrannies, and local cliques, and if for ANY reason, no matter how tenuous or bullshit or even made up, you WILL be excluded if the local popular club doesn't like you. It's basically high school, which makes sense when you remember most rural communities are entirely made up of people who didn't do anything past high school and basically have not grown beyond that as people.
It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community.
These are the same concepts. Being unwilling to help outside your community IS being unwilling to help.
Unless you are ...
This is a well-trod stereotype, probably for good reason, and it may also be your personal experience, so I'm not going to refute it generally. But this is not the case for the folks I was referring to.
Went looking for literature, this doesn't quite address in-group charity versus general causes, but FWIW:
All else held constant, rural respondents were almost 5.2 percentage points less likely to be a charitable donor, and donated less, on average, than urban donors, after controlling for human and social capital variables, such as education level, income level, health status, religious affiliation, family composition, and others. Rural respondents were significantly less likely to be donors to secular charities, and gave less on average to secular causes overall. These differences do not exist when comparing the religious giving of rural and urban respondents.
However, rural donors donated a statistically significantly higher percentage of their income to charity than did urban donors. Also, rural donors are more likely to donate to religious causes than secular causes. Frequent religious attendance is associated with a higher probability of giving for rural residents, as is itemization of deductions on income tax returns.
-- Comparing Donation Patterns of Rural and Urban Donors -- https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/00...
I think it is most repugnant when you are working really hard and (very slowly) building your life up.
It was really easy to be charitable when I was young and working meaningless jobs for $15/hr and I had my whole life ahead, and it will probably be easy when I am retired and no longer feel the strain of 50/hr workweeks.
For now though it is brutal watching taxes eat huge chunks of your income so they can spend flagrantly.
I'm in the working stage and it's the most charitable I've ever been, I finally have adult money. I can throw down anywhere from $100-$1000 to help someone on the regular and not even notice.
What makes it so different for you where you have strictly more money than when you were young but have less money in excess? Folks in the comments saying being middle class is harder than being poor are insane to me, this is way better than when I was broke.
Except for their gay cousin, their atheist cousin, their trans cousin, their mixed-race cousin…
Agreed. As David Harvey says, “wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism”. I suspect he would say that mutual aid is the highest, and counter to many common narratives in our society rural conservatives are very pro mutual aid. I would speculate that it’s primarily wealthy conservatives who own and influence the media that really drive the narratives against other forms of wealth redistribution, while poorer conservatives are more in favor of social safety nets.
American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck
Think it's more surprising how little of it is down to luck. Even working slightly harder reaps rewards quickly that outweigh the extra work.
It's most just most people are not even putting in the minimum.
I think this only looks true on a local level. It's easy to see why Jimmy pulls ahead of Johnny when Jimmy's working more diligently, but they're starting from a fairly even playing field.
A lot of the big cards are just dealt to you. Your parents, your skin, your religion, your school, your intelligence, your health, the neighborhood you grow up in--these things have a huge impact on what you do or don't have to overcome once you're old enough to take responsibility for your choices, and you don't get to pick them at the start. They have an outsized impact on what you even believe to be possible, never mind what you think is normal.
Is it me or are you going into the "You're no better than me. You are just lucky to have been taught good work ethic by your parents" territory?
No, I'm saying that on a population level, it's rational to assume the luck of the circumstances you're born into, on the whole, is likely to be reflected in your average income over time, and while it's a blunt tool, taxing the people on the higher end more than the people on the lower end is one way to try to mitigate the influence of that good or bad luck and level the playing field.
These are the times I wish we had a life simulator because I think people would really start to understand just how many advantages they have and the ways they contribute.
It's like how everyone says they would be anti-slavery if they grew up before the civil war despite the numbers just not supporting that. If I took away your advantages and made you do your life over you probably aren't going to break the mold and will end up roughly where everyone else of similar life circumstance ends up. What special spark could you even have? Because hard working and smart people are born in all walks of life but that only takes you to a local maximum.
You start having to consider that maybe white people are actually the superior race if you truly believe that it's not privileges because how else do you explain the vastly uneven distribution of success in the US?
Luck controls the biggest swings in some cases, but diligent hard work covers for quite a bit of the small changes.
Some people are just really bad at diligent hard work and lack the self control needed. The question is how to handle that without causing other issues.
Why do you think they're like that? Whether it's nature or nurture, doesn't luck still play a significant role in what nature or nurture they received?
American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck. As often as possible, we want to think it's earned. The idea of trying to make up for some of the luck factor by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant, even if it might lead to higher quality of life for everyone involved.
The US is in the ballpark of other OECD countries in terms of social expenditure: https://www.compareyourcountry.org/social-expenditure
The US government actually spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK or Japan despite it not being universal. We're terribly inefficient with its social spending because have politics is so adversarial and nobody is interested in doing any due diligence.
We're terribly inefficient with its social spending because have politics is so adversarial and nobody is interested in doing any due diligence.
And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the United States having a very unhealthy population and pays doctors the highest salaries in the world.
8% of healthcare spending is salaries, is that your smoking gun?
That number seems impossible on its face. Healthcare spending presumably consists of salaries and overhead, and I can’t imagine overhead is 92% of all spending.
Chicken, meet egg.
I ordered one of each on Amazon. I'll let you know...
People also don't like it because it in effect means the government is competing against you for property using your own money.
I.e. if the government buys up 10% of the posh neighborhood to add cheap housing, the number of posh units goes down 10% and you paid for the taxes to make that happen.
So you're paying taxes to give someone else the thing you want, and make it harder for you to get that thing in the future. Then you hear about some corruption scandal where the government was overpaying...
I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly. Admitting that success has a large luck component would mean admitting that the system isn't and cannot be made fair, and I just don't think that's an idea people can tolerate.
How does our justice system function if it admits that defendants in bad situations are there because they're unlucky instead of bad people? How do we justify income inequality if we admit those at the top were lucky and that it would be a different set of people in an alternate universe? Basically our whole society is built on the idea that the system is fair and everyone is where they deserve to be because of choices they've made.
Fairness is not the same thing as equality, and most people appreciate that.
I don't mean equality, I'm talking about the basic kind of fairness that I would hope we can all agree on.
Some children are going to grow up in abusive or neglectful homes, which isn't fair to them. Some portion of them are going to do poorly in school, which isn't really their fault, they're children. Those children then become adults who have to enter the workforce or try to get into college and be basically ranked in a lineup against everyone else, including people who had loving and supportive parents that bought them tutoring and what not. Where do we suddenly cross the line into being fair?
Repeat that situation across a variety of different attributes.
Sure everybody has to meet the same bar, but that doesn't imply the same odds of meeting it, or work to get there, or risk incurred to try. Is it fair to not build ramps on buildings because people in wheelchairs have equal access to the stairs? Is it fair to not give poor defendants attorneys because they have equal access to the market of lawyers?
I don't think equality of outcomes is desirable because of externalities, but I do think it's worth closing the gap between the haves and have nots out of deference to the inherent unfairness in the system. I don't care for the extremes of income inequality we've arrived at under the guise of the system being perfectly or mostly fair.
the government is competing against you for property using your own money
Unless you somehow have an income source that doesn't rely on any taxpayer funded infrastructure whatsoever, it's a bit disingenuous to call it 'your own money'. As an example, if your city pays for a big new park on your block and this increases the value of your property, is that increase really yours?
The whole issue of taxation is so much more complicated than '100% of my income is mine and any tax is essentially theft'. Much better to argue about taxation in terms of fairness in my opinion. In terms of fairness, property owners do much better out of the whole equation than it might first seem as every public improvement amounts to a tax refund in the form of increased property value. The poor might get obvious refunds or entitlements, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not equivalent.
In the above circumstance, the people with the most legitimate gripe are people paying a decent amount of income tax while owning no property and so missing out on both types of 'refund'.
I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly.
When you phrase it like that, it's not really an American-specific thing. I remember reading about ethological studies on very young children - not in US! - where they would be given a bunch of candy to distribute in various contrived situations. One of those was picking between something like "you get 1 candy and the other kid gets 1 candy" vs "you get 2 candies and the other kid gets 4 candies", and similar arrangements in larger groups. What they found is that there's a very strong bias towards fairness, meaning that kids were pretty consistently willing to end up with less candy themselves if that means that another kid would not get an unfair share. Which, if you think about it, is not an unreasonable trait to evolve in a social species.
And then once you have it, there's even less incentive to try to "move up" from there, because there's now a cliff in front of you. You have to make the whole jump in one go, because if you only take incremental steps, you lose eligibility for your subsidies.
I don't know about other places, but I think this is a major issue in France. Many things stop altogether if you get above a certain limit of income. So many people end up working for minimum wage, because if they got 1 € more, they start "qualifying" for more taxes, lose access to social programs, etc.
This is much easier to deal with in "money payments" (you just make sure that every dollar extra you earn doesn't "cost" you more than fifty cents by having graduated wind down of payments) but can be much harder with things like programs that give you actual things, like housing or food.
It can still be implemented (not by saying "if you make more money, you'll only get 29 days a month of this house" but making the cash subsidy for the housing explicit and able to be wound down) but it really has to be thought through.
You really want some way for lower income people to move to middle income without having to give up their neighborhood, friends, everything. But if the neighborhood is entirely "working poor" and "filthy rich" you can't.
I completely agree. But somehow, I can't shake off the feeling that the unbelievable complexity in all things tax-related (and I include social programs therein) is a feature and not a bug (as in, it's intentional).
I'm so glad I left the USA and moved to The Netherlands. Public housing in NL isn't perfect, but the one thing I really really do not miss is listening to my fellow Americans share their opinions on the subject.
And you still get to pay US taxes assuming you are a US citizen.
Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwelling if you can also wait 10 years, working but not pushing yourself, and someone else will pay for it for you?
Why would I have a problem with this if the "someone else" is a robot? Though I suppose, for the past 2-3 decades, it's been more like, "a worker whose productivity has been GREATLY increased by the advent if the Information Age." (I can see how the worker might be put off by that, but they also have the option of grabbing me and a few other people meeting witht he boss, and saying, "We're each going to do a small portion of my tasks, you're going to pay us the same as you used to, or nothing is going to get done at all.")
I'm not sure how you connect the first paragraph with the second.
American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck. [...] The idea of trying to make up for some of the luck factor by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant, even if it might lead to higher quality of life for everyone involved.
I don't find charitable giving repugnant. I donate myself, even when there is no tax benefit to be gained. I don't find conservative and prudently managed social safety nets repugnant either (by prudent, I have in mind social safety nets that are by design meant to help people get out of poverty, not become dependent on such a system by creating incentives to remain effectively poor). I also recognize that the common good does require more than just money (and I do recognize a common good, unlike weird, sociopathic hyperindividualists). And in times of crisis, I recognize that a rigid notion of private property is opposed to the common good; private property exists, after all, for the sake of the common good. If I had a warehouse of food during a famine, I would not view people taking amounts of food from that warehouse to allow them to survive as theft.
What I do find repugnant is what seems like the insinuation that my luck somehow means that others are entitled to what I have received through luck[0], and that my claim to such wealth is suspect. If I win the lottery, the notion that there is something unclean about receiving that wealth or bequeathing it to my children, because I was lucky, and others weren't, or else I'm a bad person, is preposterous. It reeks of envy. So, unless I've earned something, others can just take it? I have no right to it? But they have a right to it? Unless I've earned something, I must feel insecure about having it? No, actually. If I have received something through luck, through gift, through merit, and I have done so without criminality, it is mine.
Now, if I did win the lottery, I would certainly give to charity. And if a competent state taxed me in a reasonable way to fund programs that genuine help lift the poor out of poverty, I have no issue in principle. And I would claim, that those who have surplus wealth beyond what is needed to fully support themselves and their families do well to use that surplus to aid the poor (the poor, mind you, not those who can make it on their own). I simply reject the notion that others can or should force me to do so. And when I have the freedom to decide on my own, I have the freedom to allocate money prudently.
This is the main reason I'm drawn to Universal Basic Income (UBI). Give everybody a subsidy, regardless of their situation, and the cliff problem vanishes. If you never take away the subsidy, then there's always an incentive to improve.
We don't have to define basic necessities as "success". We can all have them.
My understanding is that excise taxation is generally agreed upon as the preferred method for governments to manipulate the market, both because it incurs fewer deadweight losses and because it tends to actually work better.
So, what if we get rid of all these complicated rent control and rent freezes and affordable housing schemes, and instead just implement a rent tax, to be paid by the landlord, and make it progressive? I don't know exactly how it should scale; you wouldn't want it to be just by rent because that would have a regressive impact on families who have kids, because they need more space and more space naturally costs more. Maybe price per square foot?
At least in my city this would probably also reduce real estate prices in general, because a huge source of demand for houses is actually real estate speculators who buy up houses and then put them on the market as rental units. I gather, based on one conversation with an acquaintance who had been a realtor but was looking to pivot into this line of business, is that a lot of what's fueling that is, in effect, not-exactly-loopholes in US and local housing, lending and tax laws - many of which are ostensibly aimed at making housing more affordable - that allow people with sufficient resources to financially engineer together a speculative source of income while externalizing all the risk onto everyone but themselves.
People who don't understand market pricing are against rent taxes because they think landlords can pass them through.
And people who don't understand supply and demand think rent taxes are a solution to a lack of housing stock.
Not everyone agrees there's a shortage: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...
A few choice paras (if people don't read the full article):
"The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum. The evidence, however, does not support this thinking. Quite the reverse. Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing while our living situations have been getting so much worse. In London, as the Conservative Home blog notes, there is a terrible housing crisis “even though its population is roughly the same as it was 70 years ago”, when the city was still extensively bomb-damaged by the second world war."
"The supply issue continues to dominate the discourse despite the US having more homes per capita than at any point in its history, and the UK’s homes-per-capita ratio actually exceeds the US’s."
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
That argument presumes that housing is consumed the same way it was 70 years ago, and that the location of the housing is irrelevant.
I know lots of places where there are empty, cheap houses. They're not close to any good jobs, the only Internet they have is 3G, and the schools suck because the county is poor (because no one wants to live there).
I also suspect housing consumption per-capita is up as people move out younger and marry later. Especially in population centers.
I'm not sure what they're pointing to as the reason for housing prices if it's not supply and demand.
as people move out younger and marry later
What data do you have of people moving out younger? Everything I've seen is that younger generations are stuck living at their parent's house.
I think the main argument they are making is that affordability is less a demand/supply issue and more a tax policy issue. Implication being: if you cap rental income, you'll see a fall in private landlords but not necessarily less housing stock than if there were no rent controls.
I'm not sure what they're pointing to as the reason for housing prices if it's not supply and demand.
They are saying the uncapped rental market makes housing as an asset class extremely profitable i.e. simple supply & demand argument is not strong enough alone to be the only driver.
And you either have to make the "cheap places" more desirable (which raises their prices, but lowers pressure elsewhere) or you have to build more housing in the desirable areas.
You also have the issue that if someone does have a house, no matter what kind of house, it's a hassle and a half to move, so you have to provide some pretty darn strong incentives to get people to move.
My house ain't great, but I'd need something like $10-20k to consider moving to a nearly identical or even somewhat better house, just because of the costs and hassle associated with moving.
Housing per capita may not be the best measurement, if households are changing. What may have been two parents and some kids in one house after the war may now be two separate households because of divorce, etc.
how could/would they not?
everything is paid by the renters, and if the price is not high enough (to turn a risk-weighted profit) it will be removed from the market.
(if there's a high enough vacancy tax and/or security costs against squatting, then eventually it will be sold. which is a one time boon for the market, but it ends up crowding out new developments for a while, and altogether this just leads to crazy waitlists and the usual discrimination.)
Rental supply is fixed in the short term. Therefore landlords have no pricing power unless they are colluding assuming theyre trying to maximize profit and not giving tenants a deal. Landlord goal is to rent every unit for maximum amount, that means renters set the price by competing with each other.
Kind of the same deal as rent control in a lot of ways, right? What you get is a short-term suppression of market rates that slowly get internalized by the supply-side until prices more/less return to the original equilibrium
I don't know anything about the French rental homes market but in the USA there's ample headroom in lessor profits to take a haircut without triggering the second-order effect that you hypothesized. Landlord income as a share of GDP (again, in the USA) stands at a post-War high, having increased 15x from its low around 1990.
Landlords have a huge and largely unearned cashflow and the thing about taxes is it's best to try to raise them where the money is.
People who don't understand market pricing are against rent taxes because they think landlords can pass them through.
If all rents are taxed, what is the market mechanism to avoid pass though?
It seems as if a more fair approach would be to increase tax rates on income from rents. That way a rentier would not defer maintenance, the costs of which would be deducted from income and not taxed, as opposed to front-loading the tax to the rent transaction and thus encouraging deferred maintenance to preserve income.
The problem — again, in America — is that residential rents are by far the largest component of unreported income. Exemptions mean nothing to petty criminals who are already not effectively taxed.
The market mechanism that precludes tax pass-through is the price is already set as high as the market will bear. If landlords could raise the rent to pass through a new tax then they would have done so already without the tax.
Where do you find that residential rent is highest unreported income? Last figure from IRS I see is 2014-2016 and rent was a quarter the size of non-farm proprietor: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1415.pdf#page23
What percentage of total rents are unreported? One would expect that the majority of rents are collected by professional management companies subject to reporting requirements that make underreporting unfeasible. Maybe that is an incorrect baseline?
What makes you think that rents are already as high as the market will bear? After all, rents keep rising, right?
Most demand for houses is from people. Most price increases are due to a lack of supply that exceeds population growth. Most lack of supply is caused by it being illegal to build higher / more dense, and a variety of other rules and regulations.
Landlords are for the most part capitalizing on these broader market / regulatory trends.
I don't understand the downvotes. I honestly think what that is saying is true in a black and white way.
Grandparent says: "get rid of all these complicated rent control and rent freezes and affordable housing scheme..."
I think this is fertile for discussion. Rent freezes didn't work in Argentina (extreme example), my opinion is they don't work anywhere. But oversupply does reduce prices, as happened with evergrande in China.
IMO interest in not having an oversupply bursting a bubble is precisely what parent is talking about.
Again, in a very absolute way of looking at life.
Compare and contrast with Paraguay where you can build whatever you want whenever and there is an ample supply of housing and very little in rental returns.
Argentina is a great example. That said rent is also cheap in Buenos Aires. But I think that is due to the economy rather than rent control.
You’re right in that affordable housing in any real sense would be MASSIVELY unpopular with voters. You’d be looking at cutting values in half to reach 2000s levels of affordability or 75% to get to 1970s levels.
The best that can be done is freezing house prices nominally (or close to it) and then let inflation take over as supply increases.
People are really bad at working out constant dollars and have loans, as long as the nominal value is steady or going up slightly, they don't really care if the absolute value has dropped because of inflation.
What mechanisms would be effective at controlling asset prices under inflationary monetary regimes?
No, price increase is mostly due to inflation trends. When there is an inflation trend the house market follows, for example in London, after the start of the war in Ukraine things like gas and gasoline price went up which created a legit price increase for products that depends on those. But we've also seen an increase in rent. And that's because estate agents knew that since there was an inflation trend people were expecting to pay more. So the whole market went up with no significant change in supply and demand.
You’re wrong and you don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t mean to be rude but it’s more than just inflation. There is a mismatch between number of people and number of housing starts, it’s been this way for 20 years. Estate agents charge more because people will pay it because anyone who can’t afford it goes homeless or moves somewhere else.
In London, where housing delivery has long trailed short of need, the population rose by 3.4 for every new home.
This mismatch of housing supply and need has had drastic consequences for affordability. Rents increased 2.0 per cent per year in England on average over the last decade, according to data from Hometrack. Growth ranged from 2.4 per cent per year in London, where housing delivery was lowest relative to population growth. In the North East, by contrast, housebuilding all but kept pace with population growth and rents grew just 0.7 per cent per year.
https://www.savills.co.uk/blog/article/309803/residential-pr...
The ratio of house prices to earnings, another basic measure of housing affordability, increased from 6.9 in 2010 to 7.8 in 2019 across England. In the North East, where we delivered almost as many homes as people, homes became more affordable. In London, where housing supply falls far short of need, the ratio of house prices to earnings has ballooned.
A large part of the price in indeed related to offer vs demand but that's the basics for any market. Now it's funny because you also say "Estate agents charge more because people will pay it because anyone who can’t afford it goes homeless [...]". So it isn't just offer and demand isn't it?
When you think about it, even in areas like London the housing market is not liquid nor uniform enough for the offer vs demand model to apply. You don't rent/buy home like you buy strawberries.
In about 1 year there was no significant increase in demand and the supply stayed the same but everybody saw its rent increase.
Edit: Also we should not mix-things up, the housing market is very different in outliers like London compared to the more global market. Here we're in the context of those outliers (Paris, London, etc.)
Most price increases are due to a lack of supply that exceeds population growth.
Citation definitely needed.
In my opinion, cheap credit (i.e. low interest rates) is the primary culprit. It has created an awful lot of 'artificial demand' for properties as investments as opposed to demand for properties to be used as homes. In most markets I look at, the proportion of underutilised properties has been rising (second homes, short term rentals, land banking, etc).
Here in NZ the sharp rise in interest rates caused a sudden and significant increase in homes available for sale and homes available to rent. Where did they come from?
The problem with taxing rent is you have to ask: do you also tax the "imputed rent" of owner-occupiers?
It's politically difficult to do so, but if you don't you end up with an even bigger barrier to mobility and entry to the property class as you have to pay more until you can save up for a deposit.
(I don't think you can make the tax incidence on renters zero)
There are failures of excise taxation to address the problem, in part due to political objections and blocks to taxation in the first place, while there are very long running examples of quality public housing making a competitive check on excess private rents in city markets.
You've re-invented Land Value Tax, which absolutely 100% should be everywhere.
Every Thursday, Jacques Baudrier, the Paris city councilor in charge of housing, scrolls through the list of properties being exchanged by sellers and buyers on the private market. With some exceptions, the city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, buy the property and convert it to public housing.
What are the mechanics of how this works? If I agree to buy a property for a million dollars, does the city get a chance to match that price?
Basically, if your property is eligible for preemption, you have to declare that you intend to sell (at the price you wish) to the city, which can then tell you that
- they don't intend to buy, in which case you can proceed with the sale
- they buy at the price you've set
- they make a counter-offer, which you have the right to refuse but then you also renounce to sell
If there's a dispute on the price (especially in the third case), a tribunal will decide the eventual price, "based on the recent sale prices of similar properties".
I tend to lean lefty, but this scheme makes me understand why libertarians want less government
How much my home is worth should not be capped by whatever government thinks. That's bs
If government is counter offering all of my neighbors and they are accepting it, then I am screwed. I either accept the government counter offer or I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbors to set the price at something very close to that anyways
And if I don't like it, I'm legally not allowed to sell?
Ridiculous
Even if you don't think houses should be infinitely appreciating assets, which I don't, your asset worth should still be as valuable as someone is willing to pay for them, not controlled by a cartel style government
How much my home is worth should not be capped by whatever government thinks
What's your take on anti-price-gauging laws? Should the government "cap" the price of food and bottled water after a natural disaster, or should the seller determine how much it's worth, as determined by supply & demand?
Now I'm curious about what's your take on them
I'm generally not against the existence/enforcement of price smoothing laws (over time - as the intention with anti-price-gauging laws, or across the market, with market comparisons). I think it strikes a good balance when bridging the macro to the micro.
You've misunderstood. You can choose what your sale price is. You may or may not clear the market (find a buyer) at that price. But, if you do, you may have to sell to the government. You choose the price but not the buyer.
Paris property remains extremely expensive.
Based on the parent comment, I don't think I've misunderstood
"if your property is eligible for preemption, you have to declare that you intend to sell (at the price you wish) to the city, which can then tell you that [list of options here]"
It seemed like the city has right of first refusal. If they make a counter offer you are then either obligated to accept their offer, or go to tribunal, or not sell
Should land -- a scare, limited resource -- be a private or public asset? I believe you're coming at this from the former perspective. But, it's worthwhile to ask this question so that we can understand why it could make sense to give the public a say in how land is allocated and used.
Also, I'd like to point out that when you say:
I tend to lean lefty, but this scheme makes me understand why libertarians want less government
It's quite easy to replace `government` with `a large private company` in your hypothetical:
If ~government~ a large private company is counter offering all of my neighbors and they are accepting it, then I am screwed. I either accept the ~government~ large private company's counter offer or ~I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbors to set the price at something very close to that anyways~
With, of course, the downside that there's no system-level recourse when the large private company uses its power to either: - undercut your "market value" of your home and force you to sell - or make living in your home terrible due to it successfully buying up and controlling all of the land _surrounding_ your home
Both lead to what you are saying you don't like -- some _external_ actor coming in and controlling "how much [your] home is worth."
It's quite easy to replace `government` with `a large private company` in your hypothetical:
Yeah that's kind of my point!
This would very obviously be predatory if it were a real estate conglomerate, which is something government should protect people from, not actually just become themselves!!
Should land -- a scare, limited resource -- be a private or public asset? I believe you're coming at this from the former perspective
This is completely irrelevant to the topic, because in this case we are talking about a situation where land is being treated as a private asset, and a government is acting like a private real estate conglomerate
You can challenge it on grounds of what "should" be, but that's an entirely different discussion
I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbors
That's an assumption on your part. Both the owner and the city can mount a legal case as to why their price is the correct one. In practice, this is often done by comparison with other properties in the same area and with the same characteristics. The judge also gets to visit the actual property to have its own perspective on it. Both the owner and the city have access to the same data when it comes to properties sold and bought, and must establish their cases based on concrete notarial deeds.
There are indeed cases where the city makes a counter-proposal with a price that is significantly lower than market rates, but you have court rulings that reject these and side with the owner. I don't think it's perfect, but it's not one-sided like you describe.
It can be frustrating, but eventually the city is not just a bunch of houses piled up in a completely decentralized way, and the preemption right, which has exceptions, for example properties recently built cannot be preempted, and which isn't automatic, i.e. there are multiple recourses for owners, is there so that the city has some leeway to conduct policy with regards to housing.
But the market is completely distorted because the government is close to a monopsony. Especially if they "preempt" an entire neighborhood. There's no private sales to point the tribunal to in that case so they have utter control over the price
That's what libertarians want until it's time to use eminent domain to build a freeway so they can exercise their freedoms. Then it's fine to cap your property value to something else because you can always prop the goal of progress as very important. But if you want to prop something else, dare I say something left leaning, something they're not interested in, then it's outrageous.
This isn't some government rug-pull on your idyllic picket-fenced suburban house. You might find housing to be different in other parts of the world.
Whether you like it or not the government does tell you how much your house is worth through monetary policy.
What are the mechanics of how this works? If I agree to buy a property for a million dollars, does the city get a chance to match that price?
there's a French wiki page on this: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_pr%C3%A9emption_urbai...
But basically, yes, the city has 2 months to match the price. The city can also offer a lower price, which can be refused (so no sale at all) or can be argued in front of a special judge, who'd rule if the price offered by the city is acceptable, depending on the local housing market.
It's not a rule that's specific to Paris, but which is applicable in most French cities.
So does this mean that every sale of any building can take at least two months?
2 months would be an ultra fast completion in the UK. I think when I bought my house it took 3 months, when I bought some land, cash purchase, it took more like 6 months.
Not any, only old buildings built after a certain date. And two month to sell a building in France? It's fast.
They always take two months at the very minimum as well because buyers as to go to many banks or a loan broker. You have notaries involved and right to step away from a sale, no question asked for 10 days iirc.
I've seen the process to purchase a place in both France and California. The former can take the significant part of a year, the later a matter of days.
From the experience of a few friends who've bought appartments these last years, two months would be the minimum here in France.
It's essentially the same as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_first_refusal
No, pre-empt here means you don't have a word, the town (commune) has priority and you can't make an offer
Yes, that's pretty much how it works. The city has the right to become the buyer for the specified price for any property sale.
the city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, buy the property and convert it to public housing
Sounds like every property sale is a political calculation ready for grease.
Why was this headline changed in such an editorializing way? “Mixed society” is a loaded term not present in the original headline.
Yup this makes no sense. Note that the original is also wrong: "How does Paris stays Paris...".
To me Paris is not Paris at all anymore.
The government is in damage control before the olympic games and shall try to hide that Paris is not Paris anymore but Paris honestly became a sad thing to see.
There are many tourists having an actual shock and it can be really bad: if I'm not mistaken japanese even have a hotline they can call if they're in shock when they discover the shithole that Paris as become as opposed to the rosy picture of Paris that is painted abroad.
But, I mean... Paris was _never_ that fantasy version of Paris, or anything like it? Though arguably it's a lot more like it today than it was, say, a century ago, or two centuries.
I'm going to guess Paris had more actual Frenchmen in it one or two centuries ago.
That would be a definitional matter. About 15% of Paris’s population are non-nationals. This isn’t unusual for a European capital; Dublin is 17% and Berlin is 22%, say. This would have been lower two centuries ago, though what it meant to be a national was arguably a bit different. However, what’s a ‘Frenchman’? Two centuries ago, most of France did not speak French fluently (and perhaps did not speak it at all). Even in World War I, 20% of the Metropolitan French army didn’t speak French functionally. Fluent French would certainly have been more common in Paris than elsewhere, but really you’re looking at a very weak national identity versus today.
About 15% of Paris’s population are non-nationals.
How would you possibly know this as France doesn't record ethnic data for births?
Non-nationals are, approximately, non-citizens. Outside of edge-cases, anyone born in a country may be presumed to be a national of that country.
Paris syndrome is fairly over-hyped. From wiki:
"Although the BBC reported in 2006 that the Japanese embassy in Paris had a "24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock",[4] the Japanese embassy states[clarification needed] no such hotline exists[clarification needed].[9][10] Also in 2006, Miyuki Kusama, of the Japanese embassy in Paris, told The Guardian "There are around 20 cases a year of the syndrome and it has been happening for several years", and that the embassy had repatriated at least four Japanese citizens that year.[11]"
Out of a million people who are Japanese that visit Paris every year, a dozen of them having shock at the reality of the city isn't that noteworthy honestly, and I imagine there are more Americans that do this than Japanese people.
Out of a million people who are Japanese that visit Paris every year
That's a staggering number of people! Almost 1% of all Japanese people visit Paris every year?
Looks about right, if you look at pre-covid numbers. Post covid Germany still had 60k visitors per month from Japan, and covid slashed tourism by around 80%.
A dozen of them having shock at the reality of the city and call the Japanese embassy. Don't know about you but it would take me way more than culture shock to call my embassy when I'm traveling.
I've been there every now and then over twenty years. None of this Paris isn't Paris any more. Pretty much normal changing of a city.
I went to Paris on vacation last year, and there was garbage piled head high on the sidewalks and multiple riots in the city protesting the pension changes while we were there.
We had a wonderful time.
The riots are scheduled ahead of time, so we knew where and when to avoid. The garbage was not pleasant. But did not stop us from enjoying awesome cultural and culinary and sight seeing experiences.
From what I can tell, this Paris has always been Paris. It's always been rich versus poor, often far more violently than what I describe.
What do you find 'loaded' about the phrase 'mixed society'? It is more descriptive than the meaningless phrase in the original headline: "How Does Paris Stay Paris?".
Can't help but be reminded of this classic:
THE VILLAS AT KENNYS HOUSE
The most sought after address in all of South park for only the very privileged few. You can take in the views from the deck spa and enjoy the mixed Sodosopa culture. Also, featuring a private fitness center, clubhouse and so much more. Welcome home.
https://southpark.cc.com/w/index.php/The_Villas_at_Kennys_Ho...
Possibly because it presumes Paris is 'mixed', but actually the city of Paris is notably better off than the surrounding suburbs, especially the ones on the north/east. This has some good maps: https://medium.com/perspective-critique/the-geography-of-ine...
Could be due to HN title's limit? For example, I tried to submit a story with this title - Google blocks man’s email account over nude childhood photo; Gujarat HC issues notice to firm - but it exceeds HN's title word limit. So I had to edit it to - Google blocks email account over nude toddler photo; Court issues notice to firm ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756841 ) to fit it within the word limit. Now, I get the use of "toddler" instead of "childhood" in the title does cause a slight loss of context, but it's the closest match I could think of to retain most of the headline as HN guidelines demand. So the "editorialising" could just be as simple as us trying to be "editors" on HN to meet its guidelines, rather than politics. (Also, I didn't find the term offensive and feel the submitted title is much better than the actual title on the article).
It looks like the New York Times changed it. The title in the <title> tag is the same as this post, in the article header they changed it.
The title of this post is taken from the linked page's title element. It's likely that the NYT changed the headline on the page after publication but did not update the title element to match. Happens all the time
I think it's a direct translation of the French phrase "mixité sociale" mentioned in the article, I bet the connotations are slightly different in English than in French.
Is Paris considered a great place to live? I've been there a couple times in the last few years, and it just seemed like every other big western city. (except for the police walking around with assault weapons.)
except for the police walking around with assault weapons
So you've never been to North America. Where is it you're comparing Paris to, such that it seems like every other big western city?
I've been to most major American cities, and Toronto, and D.F., as well as Paris and Brussels.
What Paris and Brussels have in common with D.F., which they do not share with either the major American cities or Toronto, is police open-carrying machine guns.
I assume by "machine guns" you mean rifles, and by "open carrying" you mean "carrying." (there's no way to carry a rifle concealed) I have no idea what "D.F." is.
Another response above mentioned that American cops generally keep the long gun in the car. Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf, but it's fair enough to point out that French law enforcement do like their rifles. I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street. I don't remember ever seeing police walking in Paris, although I admit that I was a pretty sheltered tourist there.
(I bet there's a more nuanced conversation to be had here about the difference between police and gendarmerie and I just don't know enough about it, except I sort of wonder what the OP was doing that caused him to cross paths with heavily armed law enforcement outside of the airport or government buildings. Maybe Paris really has changed.)
DF is an abbreviation of Distrito Federal, a name for Mexico City. It was changed officially in 2016 to just Ciudad de Mexico/CDMX.
Thanks!
I assume by "machine guns" you mean rifles
I mean both fully-automatic rifles and submachine guns, but sure, I never saw someone lugging around an M2 like a 1980s action character.
and by "open carrying" you mean "carrying."
I mainly meant to contrast it with having one easily accessible in their squad car, actually. American police do have long rifles, although these are mostly semiauto.
Since there is no way to carry a rifle concealed, all carry is in fact open carry... or is it? Is a rifle in a case open carry? It is not. The term means something in the U.S., and I was using it correctly. In places where citizens have the right to open carry, this applies to a slung rifle as well, in places where they do not, it's legal to carry a rifle, but it must be in a case.
I have no idea what "D.F." is.
Distrito Federal, Ciudad de México. Had you been a bit more curious, the answer is very easy to determine: https://www.google.com/search?q=D.F+city
This is no stranger than referring to New York City as NYC, it is an utterly commonplace term for the city, the one which Mexicans normally use in referring to it.
Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf
That may be the case, I've been to New York many times but not for many years now. If I had seen this, I would have mentioned it.
I don't see what about this conversation is tone deaf, other than perhaps your refusal to read what I said with reasonable generosity, or look up a common term for the largest city in North America when you didn't recognize it.
I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street.
They do tend to cluster around airports and train stations in both Paris and Brussels, although not exclusively. In D.F. you'll see machine guns open carried pretty much anywhere, true throughout Mexico in fact.
Having lived in america my whole life and been to many different major cities I can say that the police keep their long guns in the car generally.
In the United States the AR or shotgun will generally be kept in the car. It's fairly common to see automatic weapons in Mexico, depending on where you are.
(I don't remember how the Canadian police typically do things. I think I was dazzled by how attractive the police officers in Canada are compared to the United States, particularly in Montreal, but they definitely carry pistols and wear kevlar...)
I havent really spent much time in mexico but in my experience cops in canada also generally keep long guns in the car.
Thanks. It's not too surprising that Canada would do things similarly to the US, perhaps sans some of the over-the-top use of surplus military equipment and with fewer donuts.
By all accounts, heavily armed security (and I'm sure it's not just sworn law enforcement officers, but also private security) in tourist areas are a bigger thing in Mexico than elsewhere in North America.
This is hard for me to imagine. Where in Paris were you? Which big western cities specifically do you feel like it resembled?
Sorry my communication skills aren’t great. It was a genuine question. I spent a total of 14 days there, but I’m an adventurous walker and covered much of the city. My expectations were too high, probably. (Too high expectations lead to disappointment)
There's even a name for this specific case of disappointment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
"the disorder is caused by positive representations of the city in popular culture, which leads to immense disappointment as the reality of experiencing the city is very different from expectations: tourists are confronted with an overcrowded and littered city ... and a less than welcoming attitude by French hospitality workers like shopkeepers, restaurant and hotel personnel without considering the higher safety risks to which tourists used to safer cities are suddenly exposed."
I'm surprised, to me it always looks & feels very different than most other Western cities, in part due to low-rise buildings and almost exclusively independently operated restaurants and shops.
Most other large European cities allowed for high rises and chain coffee shops & restaurants, to the point where they've started to become indistinguishable from one another.
Paris has the CBD called La Défense which looked like most cities to me. Apparently tourists and residents alike hate it.
The rest of Paris is pretty "European city" and maybe I'm not tuned into the differences, but it seemed quite like Munich, Rome, or Barcelona except for the language, etc.
For me the size of the core of Paris what make it different. It's still comparatively small, but you can walk for hours through streets with shops and restaurants. In other European cities I feel like I hit much faster the suburbs.
I think like every city it has good parts and bad parts. Food is great, lots of stuff to do, employment is ok, the city is generally superb. But the population is irascible, the metro is a dark, overcrowded, grafiti covered, piss-stinking place, and the city is one gigantic traffic jam. Health and education is cheap, though state-run schools are in free fall and parents rush to put their kids in private schools. And the city is surrounded with poor neighbourhoods that are a ticking timebomb (with regular riots that are now spreading inside Paris).
Unfortunately it means it's extremely hard to live in Paris if you're middle class.
If you're upper middle class/rich, you can rent/buy. If you're poor, you get a chance to get public housing. If you're middle class, too bad for you.
You can put this on whole France, this is general approach at least for past few decades.
Ultra rich easily bypass all those populist moves to 'tax rich', poor have sometimes unreasonable protections (ie you can just stop paying rent, give big FU to the owner, change locks and maybe, theoretically after 6 months of courts he can evict you on his costs, while you trash the place into nothing without any recourse - some real cases of friends living there).
Its outright the worst possible place in whole Europe to be rich (again, those ultra rich are off the quite corrupt system, just check all (super)yachts in whole Cote d'Azur), government goes after you like a rabid dog, inheritance tax is easily 40%. All the bankers I've talked to (not professionally, I am just a normal guy) advised against any investment in that country before you cross ultra high net worth line, then all this disappears.
Yet absolutely nobody strikes against this corruption and unfairness, middle class just buckles up and continues, at least whats left of it.
Its outright the worst possible place in whole Europe to be rich
I guess it's a good thing Europe has free movement! They are free to be rich in Amsterdam, Berlin or Brussels. If the wealth is generated in France, then they should put up with the French inconveniences.
Don’t worry I’m upper middle class and roughly 75% of my salary goes straight to taxes while everything that’s state provided (schools, hospitals, security, infrastructure) just collapses.
In France? How when the top tax rate is 45%?
That's only income tax. There's also social contributions including pension, health insurance, and unemployment insurance. This adds up to around an extra 20% tax (although pension contributions are capped so could be less for very high salaries).
Also, VAT
Income tax isn't the only tax people pay
I'm middle class and lived in Paris. I had rich friends and poor friends. My rich friends owned flats that occupied entire floors of a building. My poor friends got whatever social housing was available. And my middle class friends rented or bought a place in the suburbs with more space. We owned, a relatively small by American standards 55sqm, 3F, flat in the city center. My middle class friends could also rent the same size flat on their salaries but none of them wanted to. They liked their space and garden.
Their is give and take to everything in life. I don't think it's hard to live in Paris if you're in the middle class, but you certainly won't feel middle class doing it.
No middle class family in America has a family in 600 sq feet.
You'd be hard pressed to even find this outside of a few areas in NYC.
People typically move further out so they can afford something larger when they get kids. Since the city is dense you don't have to move very far for prices to drop steeply, unlike sparser cities, so you can still keep your job with a reasonable commute.
I know a lot of people who lived near the center when they were single so they were close to everything, and then moved 15 minutes out when they get kids. Selling those small central apartments give a big boost towards getting a nice home outside the center. Not Paris but the same European layout with dense suburbs, it really isn't that expensive since those dense suburbs are still very close to the city center relative to American sprawl like in silicon valley where you have to drive for an hour to reach a cheap place, in Europe if you drive for an hour you get to the next city so even the cheapest suburbs are much closer than that.
highly doubt the last decade has been a nice time to be middle class in paros. salaries unlike us major cities never rose and real instate kept increasing. average is 10k sqm which requires you to at minimum make over 100k/year to have a 40sqm flat not in top paris estate
give us more data to understand if you define yourself as middle class. salary, rent, wealth beside salary. thanks.
With 2 children you'll need about 65sqm. Hopefully the nursery is cheap compared to other cities -cough London- but it adds up. Basically you need to be in the upper middle class for a decent life with children in Paris.
Wowow, the rich have had it tough since the 90s (only the French born before 1988 or so will understand the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1N3WXZ_1LM
Wowow, the rich have had it tough since the 90s (only the French born before 1988 or so will understand the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1N3WXZ_1LM
Hahaha, it's not one of my favourites these days but it was all over the place at that time :D.
edit: here's a more recent take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maObYlDIRcw
That's the same everywhere in the developed world. If you are too poor you are taken care of through social programs(even in the USA), if you are rich you take care of yourself but if you are middle class you will have to fight for this privilege everyday.
It goes the same for the social norms. If you are poor you can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like, if you are rich you also can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like but if you are middle class you must have stable monogamous relationship with somebody of similar background and age(you can't just have sex with anyone between 18 and 80 and throw a scene, unlike the rich and the poor) and watch your mouth.
Is it that much different from anywhere else in that regard? The fact the poorer people get something, doesn't mean they lose something. I'd guess on average despite higher cost of living, they wouldn't trade places.
The poor get a chance but not a very good one.
One quarter of residents in the French capital now live in government-owned housing, part of an aggressive effort to keep lower-income Parisians — and their businesses — in the city.
I think they meant "...and their votes"
People always say this like a gotcha, but aren’t politicians supposed to do stuff that they think people will vote for?
No, I want my politicians to declare what they want to do, and then I choose which one I agree with. I do not want them to get elected, then try to do what people want. That's backwards.
Haven't they advocated for public housing and people voted them because of it?
Only if it is good for the country, otherwise it is at best demagogy, at worst corruption. And in this case borderline with gerrymandering (not by pushing constituency limits but by engineering a change in demographics).
Since when is encouraging people to be priced out “good for the country”?
aren’t politicians supposed to do stuff that they think people will vote for?
This is generally true, but there is a line beyond which this becomes problematic.
Surely you wouldn't support explicit vote buying, where a politician promised to repay voters with public cash after the election! If such a scheme were permitted, democracy would quickly cease to become a marketplace for ideas. It would devolve into a patronage system. Most of us would immediately recognize such a scheme as dangerous and question the legitimacy of any so-called democratic government whose majority was bought in such a manner. Do you agree that this would be a problem?
Why would this cease to be a problem if the kickbacks were paid in-kind, and only made available to the poor?
Politicians aren't supposed to manipulate the voters set by moving people around by decree.
That said, city planning is a complex thing so there's no easy answer to whether they are doing this.
there are laws against giving financial incentives to voters... but they have been long forgotten
expand?
The socialists who control the city have a majority but not a structural one (Paris was voting conservative for a long time). The gentrification of Paris would normally deplete their electorate, so you can see their efforts to buy prime real estate at high price to convert it to social housing as a very expensive vote-buying exercise.
Or perhaps they try to do what socialists are supposed to be doing, namely giving the people a place where they can live.
Not the same guy, but if a class of people have to move out of the city because they are being priced-out, they will not vote in this city anymore (but in their new city in the suburb), shifting the current political balance. The current Paris mayor is from the Parti Socialiste (left-wing / moderate left-wing - for France), and may get a lot of their vote from the working class people living in Parisian social housing. Therefor, they have an active interest in keeping them within the city.
The political theory is true but I have no idea if the people living in social housing do vote more for the current mayor though. So it is just theory.
The article mentions a woman who wept with joy when she received a "steal" of a lease for a new government owned building, and the article mentions that certain political parties have made this program a priority. Perhaps this woman will support such political parties with her vote in future elections.
They're saying it's done as an electoral bribe so that the people who benefit from this policy will vote for the party who did it
This article reminded me of a thought I’ve often had: that the USA is a great place to live for the upper middle class and above, but it’s one of the worst wealthy countries to live in when you’re poor.
From the context of the USA it seems downright amazing to see a society where public housing isn’t automatically assumed to be a number of bad things: taxpayer waste, crime haven, and antiquated disrepair.
The benefits of the tenant management system also seems like it’s good for everyone in society. Our daily surroundings really shouldn’t be a race to the highest bidder for high-rent tenants like McDonald’s to come in, underpay employees, and poison local residents with junk food. The approach to the city as a public landlord being selective and building a neighborhood through balancing available goods and services seems incredibly desirable.
In the US this is all inverted the wrong way: the wealthy neighborhoods are the only ones that can keep chains like McDonald’s and Walmart out, walkability and positive urban fabric is a luxury amenity for the few (e.g., NYC, Miami, and Chicago’s best neighborhoods), and the wealthy are the ones that are subsidized instead of those who are low income or middle class.
Boutique shops and artisinal fares aren’t what poor immigrants to the USA are looking for. Being poor in the USA already means you’re better off than you’d be in most of those “wealthy countries’” in income. The bottom 10% in the US have a life index on par with or better than the top 10% in most European countries. The lowest 20% in America consume like an average person in a wealthy European country. Meanwhile my cousin is a third generation German and still gets called Ausländer by her teachers (who get to decide for her which academic future she’s allowed to have).
Every poor immigrant family I know from around the early 2000s, ourselves included, now _owns_ at least one house. Their kids went to college, people started businesses.
Also if you haven’t seen chains in <wealthy European city> pay less attention to McDonald’s and more attention to luxury clothing brands. Trust me, unlike Subways, you won’t be seeing Europe’s poor in any of these places. And for what it’s worth, Paris is swarming with homelessness, including that of small children. The fact you see the opposite written in the New York Times should be a clue that they’ve got a reason to skew that reality otherwise.
The bottom 10% in the US have a life index on par with or better than the top 10% in most European countries.
Not convinced.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish...
Also: Reported by Le Monde covering a study of GDP per Capita:
Italy is just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France is between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively 48th and 49th. Germany doesn't save face: It lies between Oklahoma and Maine (38th and 39th). This topic is muted in France – immediately met with counter-arguments about life expectancy, junk food, inequality, etc.
Love that last bit predicting OP’s stereotype.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...
I think the big issue is it's a lot harder to start social housing in 2024 when you have extremely limited historical action on it. But in general a city buying real estate is a hedge on real estate prices increasing in that city, which can be extremely useful for city budgets if you have any costs associate with housing some portion of the population. Most cities of a certain size find they can't function without some amount of social housing: the free market prices out entire occupations that cities need. Even someone as non-essential as a Barista is actually quite important in that many of the people in NYC want to be able to buy coffee. But you aren't going to get Starbucks to pay the $20+ /hour needed for them to rent within a reasonable commute of where they live.
There are also questions about how much of out of control rents employers are responsible for and should bear the cost of, and how much it is the cities fault. To the degree to which rental prices are high because of politician supported NIMBYism it seems fairer for city budgets to bear those costs than third parties.
The other option is to greatly improve transportation where you can live 50 miles outside the city and still get to work in under 30 minutes.
This is very hard to do as you need exceptionally fast trains and well developed feeder lines.
Our daily surroundings really shouldn’t be a race to the highest bidder for high-rent tenants like McDonald’s to come in, underpay employees, and poison local residents with junk food.
A good term I heard for this was "strip mine society".
Poison? More like extremely nutritious and very cheap. Maybe too nutritious. Thanks to modern technology, even the poorest among us can afford to look like King Henry VIII. Would you take that privilege away from them?
In the USA the government does things like this by subsidies to private people and businesses (section 8 housing is somewhat similar and is paid to landlords).
If the government wants to do this, they really should cut out the middle man and do it directly - purchase the building at something akin to fair market value and manage it themselves going forward.
I've often suspected third world countries stay "third world" because being rich in a poor country makes it a great place to live?
(just as the second world countries which bordered the first seem to have done better than their ideological cores, it seems to me that first world countries which bordered the second have also done better)
The reality of this housing policies is that it is currently bankrupting the city of Paris with a skyrocketing debt and growing local taxes. They spent enormous sum of money to buy old buildings at the historical peak of their price, buildings ill-fitted to house poor wide families and sometimes in very expansive neighborhood where they have to travel far to get access to cheaper groceries. Also the delta between the low rent and the theoretical market rate for the housing is insane, this is equivalent to several thousand euros in untaxed shadow income, all from randomness or special favor. All with the goal to transform 40% of the housing in socialised ones, this is a power grab of the mayor to assure them votes for the future and has always been the strategy of the communist towns surrounding Paris.
I love how "giving poor people comfort" is always actually a "power grab."
I'm sure it does have political benefits for the mayor, but that's also a natural outcome of good policy. (Not the only one; often good policy actually has horrible backlash.)
This comment could be expressing some true ideas but I don't find it trustworthy.
There's a line somewhere where "giving poor people comfort" goes from providing good and useful social services to essentially a bribe. Where that line is varies based on who you ask - for some it's student debt cancellation (a US thing), for others it's $1000+ subsidies for housing, other people may not see any service the government provides as a "bribe" of any sort.
Caring about these bribes/"power grabs" is important (even if this guys comment strikes you as trollish). Just because you agree with a social service to benefit some group doesn't mean that the people in power won't abuse their power in the future. They might abuse their support by holding these social services (or "comforts") hostage. Once you have people who have adapted to living in their subsidized housing (which can/will happen quickly) you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away".
Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service, it's something that needs to be considered. To circle back, if you do something that is considered beyond the line of "comfort for poor people" and is seen as a "power grab" by enough people - you're more likely to have the opposition emboldened to eventually remove that service.
There's a line somewhere where "giving poor people comfort" goes from providing good and useful social services to essentially a bribe.
I'm not sure I agree. Like giving out literal tons of candy and soda would be a political bribe but I wouldn't count it as "comfort"; it's poison. If you do think it's in the same category, I guess that would be my line - the aid should not be obviously harmful.
you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away" ... Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service
But that's true of literally everything a government does, isn't it? It's the nature of power being centralized that if one person can force a change, their replacement can undo it. Even if the 1st person is completely earnest and never makes such a statement it is implicitly part of the process and people will make their votes with that expectation.
You are free to not agree that giving housing subsidies is not crossing the line into bribe territory. I would say it's important for you to understand that for many people, there is a line. Your example of unlimited candy and soda as being a bribe is a bit odd, but also seems demonstrative to me that your thinking on this is further to an extreme than you might realize.
And yes - this is true of everything the government does. That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.
That's why I'm saying it's really important to consider that for some people, certain policies can cross a line for what feels fair or what feels like a political bribe. Like I said, you're free to disagree with where that line is, but pretending it doesn't exist (or just writing off anyone on the other side of it) is a sure fire way to bring about consequences that just might be worse than what was originally happening.
I'm not pretending people don't have their own lines, but I think they're fundamentally wrong to say the line exists within the space of "doing unequivocally good things for poor people [which admittedly may have negative downstream effects, as do all actions]"
That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.
Sure, it's something to think about, but it's not a realistic impediment to enacting a good policy. If the worst thing you can say about a policy is that "it might end, and that would be bad" you should do that policy. Besides, government programs tend to get institutionalized and are often much harder to undo than to do.
Can you provide some sources on the Paris city’s budget and debt? I couldn’t find anything on it. France’s debt looks roughly linear, which I imagine would support Paris a lot
This is maybe interesting or useful: https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/debt.php
It's a comparison of the debt per capita of France compared to the rest of the EU (in USD). It looks to me like France started to take on more debt per person around 2007/08 and as recently as 2022 had $13k more debt/capita than the EU, or +40% more debt per citizen.
Before the invention of the elevator, buildings were more naturally mixed-use: shops (and stables?) on the ground floor, posh tenants on the first, all the way up to artists and baristas in their garrets under the roof.
By democratising travel within a building, ironically the elevator made it possible to have neighbourhoods for which service workers had to commute primarily from the outside along the x and y axes, not merely within the neighbourhood along the z.
all the way up to artists and baristas in their garrets under the roof.
I don't think there was any significant crossover between lifts not existing and _baristas_ existing. For a start, lifts predate proper espresso machines.
Good point; please substitute the appropriate word for the service worker who doles out glasses of wine from behind a zinc counter. (or did zinc also postdate lifts?)
Zinc counters feel very much an early 20th century thing to me. Like, I'm sure they had zinc in the 19th century, but it's hard to imagine that bars were made out of it.
Apparently the bars (les zincs) did exist in the XIX, but were mostly shiny and not necessarily zinc-plated. (more that zinc, like AI now, was the cool thing then)
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Histoire
L'utilisation du zinc pour le zincage du fer ... a permis l'essor de l'architecture de fer, ainsi les halles centrales de Paris, le palais de l'industrie, les nombreux théâtres et gares monumentales de chemin de fer entre 1860 et 1880.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Lexicographie
Dans les années 1873 à 1876, les écrivains français consignant l'expression populaire, aussi bien Zola que Huysmans, nomment zinc la surface propre des bars anglais ou le revêtement brillant des comptoirs souvent étamés ou cuivrés, plus rarement zingués.
... which puts them, if preceding, nearly contemporaneous with elevators. (but copper bartops must have been a thing earlier?)
this makes zero sense, plenty of cities with housing built mostly after the invention of the elevator that have mixed use neighborhoods with tall, low and medium height buildings alike
Yes, and those cities also presumably don't have the problem of segregated neighbourhoods. (also those cities don't tend to occur in my Old Country, but perhaps they've made progress there since I've been gone? Protip: never attempt to live in a "city" which is younger than you are. Survivre plutôt que vivre)
All I was claiming is that the elevator is necessary but not sufficient: monocultural neighbourhoods were much less likely to arise back when number of flights of stairs put a significant natural gradient on the price point of each buildable unit.
Public housing is terrible - why should the government steal my money (income tax) to pay to house criminals and drug dealers nearby which devalues my property and endangers my life and family?
We just need a true Free Market - let people build and invest how they want, where they want. And ensure that everyone has a stake in the property they own and the area they live in.
Because as a society we progress at the pace our weakest progress.
We don't say China moved ahead because the rich got richer, but because it lifted hundred of millions from poverty.
And if anything, a poor social net tends to create more dangers, not less.
When people have no roof, no jobs, no help, they will turn into criminals. Hell if I need to eat, or worse, I need to feed my family, I could not care less about becoming a criminal too. Zero.
I've seen the dystopia of private neighborhoods with gates and security, the ghettos, the crumbling neighborhoods, endless tents anywhere you look in many major US cities.
We don't want this in Europe.
I'd rather pay more taxes that help the weakest, not just taxes to punish them and send them to jail. A society with more desperate people makes my life worse, not better just because I can find a more isolated/secure prison where I can avoid looking at them.
We don't say China moved ahead because the rich got richer, but because it lifted hundred of millions from poverty.
I was under the impression the poor in China moved ahead due to working, not because the Chinese government subsidized their housing or other basics. Although, the Chinese government did subsidize their ability to find and get to work via huge infrastructure projects.
China has always had planned housing welfare, it was the only way of building houses for decades.
Liberalized housing started in the 90s along the rest, but planned housing projects have kept existing and had huge budgets till the late 2010s. Even today around one in twenty development housing projects is still state funded.
Anyway, I was mostly talking about them as a society lifting more and more of the weakest. And yes, building houses has been a major contributor of this obviously as well as a stimulus for the economy.
why should the government steal my money (income tax) to pay to subsidize you driving around in and parking your private automobile, for every trip, everywhere, including in dense urban environments?
NY is a mess of policy failure and rampant corruption in the implementation of these policies, policies which have for decades been championed by the NY Times, frequently by naive portrayals of policies in Western European countries like this one. Once imported at 5 times the cost and half the quality these become irrevocable subsidies for well connected landlords and administrators. The city needs to get basic things like sewage, security, and transit working before plowing any more money into subsidized housing.
security
Oh come on, the NYPD swallowed 5 billion in public funds, the most of any city on earth. Crime is near an all-time low. Hell, they could probably slash half that budget without causing the crime sprees the NY post implies could happen at any time. This is the worst excuse to avoid funding subsidized housing when the latter would probably have a greater impact on whether people were desperate enough to turn to crime. Saying NY needs to be more secure is just fear mongering at this point.
This is simply not true.
they could probably slash half that budget without causing the crime sprees
You're living in a world painted by your politics and oblivious to reality. I plan to return to the city someday if things improve, but things are horrible now and not moving in the right direction.
but things are horrible now and not moving in the right direction.
Nobody ever backs shit like this up. You've been had and in the most obvious and shallow manner.
The Mayor of Paris has bigger balls any other Mayor except maybe Barcelona
...and they're both women! The confidence to make radical, meaningful changes for the better of the people and tell the opposition to get stuffed... I wish all politicians had that.
I wish all politicians had that.
Even the politicians you disagree with? So for example, AfD in Germany making the radical, meaningful change for the better of the German people by removing non-Germans from Germany ... and telling you to get stuffed ... you'd love that presumably?
What you love is this policy. Don't confuse that with the method, which you clearly wouldn't like if the shoe was on the other foot.
Either I missed the part where the article mentioned the policy in paris being unconstitutional or that equivalence is overly-exaggerated at best
it's mostly continuing the policies from the previous mayor... (who was male, but I don't see the relation).
"A city, if it’s only made up of poor people, is a disaster," said Mr. Apparu, who now works for a property developer. "And if it’s only made up of rich people, it’s not much better."
From a human+social position, I strongly agree with this. The value of social benevolence isn't limited to the direct beneficiaries and has positive impacts beyond the economics.
But that literally never happens, each city contains both rich and poor people.
Strictly sure but the quote more addresses the experience that visitors, residents and prospective residents have.
it's not benevolence, it also makes economic sense. who does the menial job anyway? you should keep them close. if they will go to live far, their cost will increase, or their cost in time of traffic and pollution.
If the USA didn't endlessly fund war then maybe they could invest in their cities & infrastructure more. Probably not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of things.
What is interesting is that after WW2 Europe had to rebuild and the USA was left with a great industrial machine that had a capacity that outstripped demand.
The Empire needs to wage war in order to expand its reach and thus sell its goods there/exploit the local labour, otherwise it falls.
I would absolutely love for European countries to pay the true cost of their defense so I can drive on nice roads and children could be taught by people who make a decent wage.
Probably not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of things.
I wonder how many of those poor immigrants who live in this public housing to serve wealthy Parisians would prefer to live in something like an American suburb if they could get jobs there.
all of them
Probably none. I'd much prefer to be poor in Paris than America.
https://homelessdeathscount.org/ (arrogent domain given it's a USA count) https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/dying-on-the-streets-franc...
Even adjusted for population size, we're still talking 2-3x the death rate if homeless.
Acolin notes that France has roughly as many social housing dwellings as the United States, despite having less than one-fifth the population.
https://www.sightline.org/2021/07/26/yes-other-places-do-hou...
Social spending in France is the highest in the world, which has a dramatically larger effect on poor immigrants.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/social-spending-highe...
In France, these immigrants woild also have access to public healthcare, meaning they'd get 70-100% back on most medical appointments and reimbursement for prescription medications. There are many other social benefits too. It's also much more likely to be closer to their country of origin than the US, in the event they want and are able to return at some point.
I'm not trying to be rude, but why do you think a poor immigrant would have it better in the US than France? I can't think of a single reason.
The article is quite... disappointing for a french Parisian.
Let's make things clear: so called "mixed society" is actually a mix of "friends of the Mayor and allies" and poor-enough people that will vote for the so-called socialist Mayor. It's not about having a philosophical or idealogical view of society, only a practical view of election (a kind of "gerrymanding" if this concept is more understandable for US).
There has been frequent scandals with ministers still using "low income" housing for themselves or families. The article starts with the interview of some Ms Vallery-Radot, and that uncommon name prompted me to look on internet and wonder if she is related to the https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallery-Radot which was until the 2000 ... State Advisor.
So please... do not think that Paris is some kind of wonderful place where intelligent and humanistic leaders are working for the good of the french society as an example to the world. It's just usual political shady business, nepotism (and you'll see by yourself that the results will be bad during the Olympics for example)
By American standards, these would be eminently “intelligent and humanistic leaders.” NYC is ran by a crooked cop, who is under investigation for taking bribes from Turkey, while slashing the budget for schools and libraries so he can give more money to his “constantly defrauding the government” police gang. LA is such a wildly corrupt city, it’s hard to pick where to start, but several city council members were just caught on tape trying to explicitly screw over renters, rig an election against one of their left wing opponents, all while making racist comments to boot. The city also takes in billions in tax revenue for “affordable housing” schemes that go almost entirely to lining the pockets of cronies and party insiders through various fronts and nonprofits.
This measure, as most welfare measures, punishes the middle class - the ones that pay, out of their own pocket the taxes that fund the welfare state.
It’s the same story all over Europe: the middle class sees close to 50% of their income taken away in taxes and contributions, and then is left paying for most of their expenses out of their own pocket.
Meanwhile rich people only pay a fraction of what they earn in taxes, and “poor” people get most stuff for “free”.
The saying is really correct: if you take half of someone’s wage to distribute for two people that didn’t do the same effort, you loose a vote, but you gain two.
Singapore? 80% of public housing? true?
being a broke outsider in the city, it has been very difficult to exercise my rights especially in terms of housing.
from my limited experience it seems that while in richer neighbourhoods there might be some diversity, it is not the case everywhere. there has been a move to grow the city outwards and move newer social housing further out. but the historically poorer neighbourhoods more or less seem to remain in their older state.
however you rationalize it, one ends up questioning whether it is worth living in the city given the challenges in finding a place.
I can't pass the paywall but does it mention Paris is losing people? I was living in the 15th arrondissement and this family area turned into a violent zone in a couple of years as they put public housing everywhere. Drug dealers, violence at my kid school, theft... My street became a spot for druggies and I had to pass them with my kids. 15 minutes from the Eiffel tower...
I left this city 3 years ago and found safer land. All my friends did the same. There is no sane reason to stay in an area with so much violence. Parisians will deny this but will just say "you have to avoid this and that, have a pepper spray, do not wear a skirt, do not go there at night..."
Diversity needs the precondition of liberal democratic welfare support? Therefore, eliminate public goods like public housing to destroy diversity. Since diversity positively correlates to large populations and the tragedy of the commons.
Hong Kong has some is highest skyscrapers next to housing that rents cages for people to sleep in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedspace_apartment People live in the same neighborhood and there is a cruelty factor of understanding and accepting that in your city poor people live in cages. And people in the US live in tents. At least nobody profits from that.
Who is paying for all this?
But it hasn't stayed Paris, it's overrun with North African "migrants". Why put a bald faced lie on it?
Editorialized title. Just seems like virtue signaling to me. Unless anyone has a reason that it isn’t?
I was recently in Paris, the comments here are a touch different in tone than the Parisians I talked to.
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.
It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?
The higher the density, the more vehicles get in each others way.
If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)
A 155lb human burns 177kcal when walking at 2.5mph[1], so that's 71kcal per mile
There are 340kcal in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour[2], so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat
Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg [3], so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e
Driving a vehicle powered by gasoline produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile [4]
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/calories-burned-walking#Wa... [2] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/health-promotion-knowl... [3] https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/9... [4] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Don't forget that the person would be burning calories even if they weren't walking.
The figure for calories consumed when walking is excess calories consumed (compared to sitting still)
Are you sure? It doesn't say that.
I am sure. Think about it for a minute and you'll see why
I don't. Could you explain what you mean?
Here's what I found: the formula given in the article is "calories burned = BMR x METs/24 x hour"
But the METs for lying quietly is 1. The author certainly forgot to subtract 1 from METs in that equation, and could easily have also forgotten to do so when calculating the given numbers.
https://pacompendium.com/inactivity/
It just wouldn't make any sense to tell people "you burn X calories when walking/running/whatever for an hour" if they had to subtract their base metabolic rate from the number.
I agree it should state the excess calories burned. I think the author probably misunderstood the formula.
However if the calories from your walk come from beef ...
100g of beef gives you 217 kcal [1], so you need 33g of beef for your walk
Carbon cost for beef is 99.48 kg CO₂e/kg [2]
So walking one mile fueled by beef creates ~3.3kg of carbon emissions, over 8 times what would be emitted if you drove
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/beef#nutrition [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-e...
Except the only people who eat that much beef are certainly not walking anywhere so it’s a fun “statistic” that has no basis in reality.
Oh and it turns out the carbon footprint for beef varies significantly by where the beef is raised. Average carbon footprint per 1kg of beef in the EU is 22.1 kg CO₂e [1], so if you're in the EU your beef-fueled 1 mile walk emits ~730g of CO₂e, a little under twice what you'd have emitted if you drove
[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/news/33676/uk-beef-carbon-footpr...
If I'm reading this right it's not quite apples for apples, as it's comparing the cost to create and move the beef, but doesn't consider the cost to create the car, only the movement of the car.
A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.
"it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile"
I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?
I don't remember where I heard it, only that it was an expert on agriculture saying it.
The easiest way to see that it is plausible is to note that only 400 years ago, something like 90% of all human labor went into growing food, which is the way agricultural societies had always been everywhere. The way society was able reduce that to the 5% or so it is today was to use fossil fuels. The first big reduction came with the mechanization of textile production, freeing the food-growers from the need to make their own yarn and weave it into fabric to make clothes with. The tractor was of course also responsible for a drastic reduction in human labor as input to food-growing. Also, the replacement of horses with trucks for transportation of food from the farm to the nearest rail head or port or river (and transportation of inputs like fertilizer to the farm) meant that the food-growers could concentrate on growing food for people now that horses were much less needed.
It's not just the extra calories needed to walk as opposed to rest or to watch television: it's the fact that a single person in a delivery truck can do the work of a dozen people who have to do the deliveries on foot, and keeping one person alive and productive costs only one twelfth as much as keeping a dozen alive and productive -- even if no one walks anywhere or does any exercise. Sometimes for example in order to remain alive and productive, one of the dozen will need to visit a doctor. The doctor requires food to stay alive and productive. Doctors don't live forever and so need to be replaced, and that is an expensive process in part because medical students need food and lots of other energy-requiring things to stay alive and able to learn (and to grow from babies to people mature enough to go to medical school).
My guess is that that analysis continues to hold even if the dozen delivery workers can take public transportation as well as walk although maybe we have to replace "dozen" with "six".
I'm not saying that restricting vehicles in Paris is a bad move: I'm just saying that the effects on, e.g., carbon emission is not obviously good and that the planners who chose (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...) to devote a large fraction of the area of cities to make it easy for vehicle traffic to flow were not just stupid benighted fools or evil people bent on making life worse for everyone.
When people suggest that we reduce the number of cars driven, they are generally not talking about reducing commercial delivery vehicles [1]. Obviously our civilization depends on moving essential stuff around, and we need to do continue doing that, albeit with a electrified fleet of trucks/vans. The problem is with private cars, electric or internal combustion.
[1] Excluding Uber style car-based food delivery services.
OK, but some people here are asserting that the more urban density, the better, and neglecting to consider that if the density gets high enough, the commercial delivery vehicles are stuck in traffic most of the time or the residents of the city refrain from buying things that would enhance their lives if it weren't so expensive or tedious to move things around the city.
Which is why if you've ever lived far outside the city, you're tired of people from the city coming out to visit you to buy all the stuff they can't get in the city.
Oh, no, it's the other way round, mostly. It's easier to deliver a quantity and variety of goods to a dense area than the sticks. Which is why "go shopping" is a suggestion for people going to NYC, not Tucson.
In deciding between a city where personal vehicles are banned or discouraged and a city where they are allowed, noting the virtues of cities over rural areas is relevant how?
I wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol.
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
A human walking is absurdly efficient, as anyone who's ever tried to outrun a bad diet can tell you. Running or walking a mile burns ~100 extra calories relative to sitting on your couch. Unless you're putting active effort into not doing so, most diets fluctuate by far more than that.
Sure, but it is also true that food that is healthy for people is an absurdly expensive form of energy compared to gasoline.
If we make free the largest costs of gas, greenhouse gas emissions.
Do you have a source for this? Sounds questionable.
It's false. People will not go into suspend mode when not walking; they still burn calories. A very large person would burn about 130 calories walking a mile. i.e. one large latte. And most people who are this large are not at risk of a caloric deficit by burning an extra 130 calories.
Humans are INSANELY efficient at walking. That's why walking and running are terrible ways to lose weight.
About 2x as efficient as a Model 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
Yeah well I'm not exactly 4000 pounds or going 60mph hah
I agree that OP's assertion sounds dubious (especially considering the entire supply chain) but calories are a measure of energy, not CO2. You need to know the rate of CO2 emitted per kcal.
I'm not claiming that the CO2 exhaled by people is relevant. I'm claiming that growing food requires significant energy inputs unless you want to go back to the world where most human labor went into growing food.
A single mile, no.
100 miles? That seems very likely. That happens far quicker for the energy leaking heat machine sitting in the seat.
So, while maybe the theme of the statement is correct?
It's simply not.
The problem that this is the wrong measure to use emissions per mile, when it's really about emissions per trip.
A car flying down the freeway uses less emissions per mile, but if one is traveling 50 miles versus just walking to down the block the former is using a lot more emissions even if it is more efficient per mile.
High density is what enables mass rail transportation, which is much more efficient than personal vehicles.
Mass rail is most efficient when it's full.
https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html - a full car gets amazingly close to a average train (USA).
And this is seen in that trains are most common where they can be mostly full.
What's scary about that is how quickly busses just get outclassed - they have to be as big as their biggest loads, but they're usually empty.
How often do you see a full car? Average vehicle occupancy is 1.67, and has been for years.
Quite often! But usually in the mirror/kid cam, because I'm driving the family somewhere.
This is simply abject nonsense. I know the research you obliquely referenced and it assumes you specifically fuel that movement by eating beef burgers. And even that's on shaky ground.
You can use your eyes to instantly observe that car drivers are not reducing their caloric intake to compensate for the fact that they "save" that energy by not walking.
More people in a smaller area?
Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic
Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.
...This is the state of people living under car-dependency, not dense urbanism supported by public transit and walkable areas. Car noises stress people out, make them irritable, impact their health. Driving in traffic makes people angry/furious/insane (literally - it is not sane to pull a gun on someone driving past you but it happens). Prioritizing parking and roads is a colossal misuse of land which causes crowded public spaces; imagine if every parking lot was an additional market or park.
But, they are closing roads making them one way etc, that creates the traffic problem. It's bad governance - creating pain to allow government to administer the preordained 'solution' - no cars!
Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.
How is that good government?
And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...
This has nothing to do with my comment or what I was replying to, which was a comment about crowded public spaces.
You might be thinking of packed slums in a developing country.
Ah yes, like the French, a famously docile people who never, ever rise up against their government.
We just like to be vocal and share our disagreements publicly. It used to force a bit of honesty (it's not working much right now)
I really think people underestimate how much of this is down to _taste_. Personally I've lived in pretty sparse suburbs of Dublin (by European standards, anyway; think semi-detached houses, as far as the eye can see), in the city centre, and in dense inner suburbs (walking distance to the centre, generally terraced houses and apartment buildings). I wouldn't consider going back to an outer suburb, never mind a rural area. But I know some people who live in the middle of nowhere and love it! Couldn't do it, myself.
They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware stores.
Dense housing means there is more room for everything else, not less, so everything is less crowded. Birds singing outside of my windows is the main noise pollution where I live.
That's only true if we hold the population constant, and get everyone to scrunch together onto smaller lots built taller.
The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.
No, the aim is to have that one million people occupy a smaller area, so that there's more space for parks, open space, farms, etc.
Sorry, which density advocacy groups have this nice idea as their literal goal?
Density is the population of a metropolitan area divided by its total area. Not population divided by the footprint area of residential lots. Density advocacy is all about accommodating population influx; it is really burgeoning population advocacy.
Every group I know of that actually advocates for density does have this as their goal. It is a bit odd that the external reputation is that they do not, to the point that parallel orgs sometimes appear advocating for pretty much the same things but "with more emphasis on livability" or similar.
Really? Is this documented somewhere? What is the typical proposal for how they plan to keep the population constant, after creating all that space? I've not heard of this. It's always about how many more millions of people could live here if we rearranged things.
I've never heard of a density advocacy group being opposed to population growth. Density advocacy is practically synonymous with at least acceptance (if not advocacy) of urban population growth. Population growth is in fact like a sacred cow. You must never blame any urban problems on population growth; the cause is always not enough vertical build.
Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
Have other metropolitan areas do the same so there is no net migration.
There is a difference between refusing new people and having population growth as a goal. People exist, they have to live somewhere, increasing density increases the housing stock and gives them somewhere to live.
If one city is hostile to giving them somewhere to live and another isn't, people might move from the hostile place to the amiable place. But the solution to this is obviously to make the other city less hostile, not to make sure that all cities are maximally hostile.
paris proper is already one of the densest areas in the world (and definitely in europe). when i lived there i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces compared to the comparatively low-density city i currently live in.
there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.
There are so many of them. Every block seemed to have grocers and a small park.
Where I am it’s a massive supermarket every 5km, not a small one every 200m. You can shop different when it’s less hassle to go.
Delivery also lets you have more smaller stores carrying the 80% you need regularly, and the 20% that is less common can come via delivery in a day or two.
This seems like a fundamentally suburban perspective, and I don't mean that to be an insult, it's just what all of my small home town family members and friends think, and it overwhelmingly and ironically relates to the real traffic congestion they actually experience coupled with the hypothetical imagined congestion they pre-emptively avoid exposure to by driving instead of getting on the train.
Not that there's _no_ foot traffic congestion or lines, but it's the same thing that happens in a case where there's only one Starbucks in a sprawling suburb or business district at lunch time.
A high density area is likewise it's own complex economy and system that seeks balance, when there's too many people in one area, you just go somewhere else or enjoy or compete with it. That's partly why Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.
In my sparsely populated city that sprawls, it's extremely noisy, dusty, time consuming to get around, the infrastructure is failing, and I rarely bump into anyone I know, because people are only visible at the beginning and end of their journey. Meanwhile here in Vancouver I often run into people I know multiple times per day because we're in the same spaces, or I can go somewhere else and not see anyone just like any other place.
Sorry, no this is culture. The same virtues exist in Japanese suburbs, nothing to do with a city.
"Partly why". It's just an example, I'm sure other cities are more hectic. I didn't get the impression that Japanese suburbs were particularly different than North American ones in terms of volume levels or how uninteresting they are.
It seems to me that it's mainly cars and a scarcity of places to be that make cities horrible and congested. More pollution, more noise, less space.
That depends on supply and demand, not simply demand. More people attract, open and staff more shops, etc. It's easier to find a restaurant in a major city than a quiet rural town.
I would imagine that the answer would be to open more shops. Obviously, to avoid a NYC-like situation, you would have to bust the CRE cartels that keep retail square-footage absurdly expensive. Parks and libraries are harder... though building taller does tend to allow for more open land space.
Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.
Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.
In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).
Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.
Mixed use zoning solves that as businesses (grocery stores, cafes, pharmacies, etc.) are able to locate closer to people.
I guess one person's congestion is another person's lively and bustling city?
Ultimately you have more people coming and going from each building, which means more people on the streets, and more demand for all utilities and public services. Building up doesn't build out those other things. That's why you have things like Air Rights in NYC to limit building.
People aren't very noisy. Cars are
I don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had:
- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.
- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.
- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.
Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.
Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
Theoretically all those interactions breach the social contract and could be acted upon by making complaints. However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".
Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.
Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
Until their tires hit asphalt. Cars have to go very slowly for the engine to be louder than the tires, and that noise is a function of weight, and electric cars are heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise. You can barely hear the tires unless you're standing right next to it.
"Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 mile range and weighs the same as the average car.
What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant. You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example. The battery is the heavy part and while they may get more mass-efficient over time EVs are now and for the foreseeable future strictly heavier than same-size ICE cars.
EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is. EVs are better than ICE cars in most ways, but for noise all cars are a problem and EVs are worse.
Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.
Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.
The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.
Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.
If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.
Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.
All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.
That was an illustrative example. Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph. That's city street speeds. (In most car-dependent cities 40-50 is also typical city street speed.) Again, this is why tires are the majority of car noise. When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything. An off-road truck with knobby tires is going to have more tire noise than a sedan with snow tires which will have more than the same sedan with low rolling resistance tires. An 80s muscle car will have more engine noise than a modern 4-cylinder sedan which will have more than an electric vehicle. A gasoline vehicle under acceleration (as in stop-and-go city traffic) will have much more engine noise at a given speed. Tire noise is affected by the roadway material in addition to the vehicle. Tire noise in a 4000 pound electric car might overtake "engine noise" at a lower speed than it does for a 4000 pound V8, but that's because it's quieter, not louder.
Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
I suspect the problem here is that the studies are so old. Here's the relevant sentence from the Wikipedia article called Road Noise:
For this sentence it has three citations. One discusses the effects of road material on tire noise and not tire noise relative to other noise, another lumps tire noise and aerodynamic noise into the same category. The third, which is presumably where it got the premise, is from 1973, when cars commonly used bias-ply tires, which are much louder.
But let's not lose track of the thread here. The premise is that electric cars would be louder. A Model 3 is ~4000 pounds, the same as a Ford Taurus, so that's not going to be louder. Some cars are lighter -- a Honda Accord is in the same class and is ~3200 pounds, only 80% as much. But then it has a gasoline engine, which is louder than an electric motor. Does the 20% weight difference cause more noise than the gasoline engine vs. the electric motor? Somebody would need a dB meter to even answer it, and that's rather the point. Either way the difference is going to be small and people are just looking for something to complain about.
No. It's very different. It's more like saying "a person is usually about 5'7"." It is obvious there are difference, but it's not something that varies minute by minute, and the range of differences is not stated. There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
You're right those aren't good citations, I looked at it earlier myself and didn't like them, but I didn't go through the work of finding better ones. But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise? Again, I've never heard anyone claim that.
Because, that's the sound it makes.
This started because you claimed modern cars are not noisy except for those with modified exhaust pipes. I'm saying cars are fucking loud, all of them. Electric cars are also loud and do not solve for the problem of road noise at all. The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
Based on what? A car with low resistance tires on concrete isn't going to make a lot of tire noise even at fairly high speeds.
The one lumping tire noise and aerodynamic noise together is obviously contemplating that aerodynamic noise is a thing.
Tires make a rumbly sound, when you can hear them, as for example with the types of tires that make more tire noise.
There is a difference between something not being absolutely perfectly silent and something emitting a loud noise. Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud. Exhaust noise for cars with negligently or intentionally defective mufflers is loud.
If you can hear it and you're not next to the road, that's too loud. It's noise pollution. You can personally draw an arbitrary line anywhere you want to determine what counts as "loud", but the actual phenomenon is that cars make an amount of noise that is detrimental to our health, sanity, and wildlife.
As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.
recently moved half a mile further out from city center and can attest to all of this. Hookah bar in my case was blaring music at 1AM. People in various states of inebriation shouting to each other outside my bedroom window.
There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
I have never met a car that had a fight with her spouse that woke up the whole block at 3AM
You need better walls, aren't there standards that apartment walls need to be sound proof?
Remember that in the US at least, many dense buildings are incredibly old, from before soundproofing and such was really common.
Living in a 1900s building in Brooklyn is vastly different from living in a 2020 building in Manhattan.
My early 1910s Manhattan building was fantastically quiet, with very thick walls. The only noise I ever heard was floor noise directly above me, never to the sides.
I'm guessing mid-1900s to early 2000s buildings are the problematic ones.
Cars get into wrecks all the time :) Seriously though we just normalise it. If there is a car accident on your street everyone is awake. How about cop cars and ambulances racing by sirens blaring at all hours. People blast horns way louder than anyone will shout.
NYC started making certain streets pedestrian-only during COVID. The silence was astonishing.
Same thing on snow days in Manhattan. It's eerily quiet
It causes congestion if the city refuses to invest in public transportation - which is more a problem in US cities - though some European cities could be behind on keeping up with changes to different degrees
Oh, right, I see, yeah. Would not generally be an issue in Paris, I would've thought, at least not towards the centre.
You'd be mistaken. Public transit is extremely crowded in the centre during rush hour.
For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.
Congestion is a problem even in cities with excellent public transportation. Have you ever been on the Tokyo subway at 8:30 am?
Yes, it always a balance of factors in the system, but what you're talking about is a higher threshold of capacity already. They've built up to higher rise density in Tokyo and are already managing much higher people movement in core higher density areas than the edges of Paris.
Light pollution is relatively easily solved, there's just not much will to do so. Noise pollution is best solved by reducing car-dependency which is a non-starter in most North American cities; I can't speak for Europe but I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.
The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality.
So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.
Hmm...aren't you forgetting something?
Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris
Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more.
The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.
How do people deal with being sweaty at work? Do offices generally have showers?
they don't; it's just not practical. You have to be relatively fit and energetic to do it every day, have no chores like kids pickup, have extra time on your hands, the weather has to be perfect - no rain or god forbid snow. This only works for a particular segment of working people out there.
The Dutch beg to differ[0].
Over a third of Dutch people cycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Over a quarter of all trips are on a bike. 49% of primary school students and 75% of secondary school students cycle to school.
Cycling has been a national priority for the Dutch, like the automobile has a been a priority for much of the rest of the developed world.
With e-bikes, fitness and terrain are less relevant than ever. Unsafe(car dominated) bike routes are the number one obstacle to increased cycling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
according to your own numbers, 64% of the Dutch don't use bicycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Meaning that bicycling doesn't work for the majority of population even when it is made a national priority. I'm all for it, but the numbers you've listed prove that it's simply not practical for most people in the best of times.
It helps that the Netherlands is mostly flat and has pretty good weather for it (I guess rain is kind of an issue). They also have awesome infrastructure and don't just expect cars to do the right thing (they actually design and redesign roads to make biking safe).
Netherlands is on a sweet spot for cycling.
They don't have 40°C in Summer like in Southern Europe, or -20°C like in the Alps.
I’m not biking to work in -17C. I have walked to the bus (including through 50cm of snow in a raging blizzard) and driven in such temperature many times.
A quick search reveals that the average winter temperature in the Netherlands is above freezing, while average summer temperatures hover around 20C. Sounds positively delightful for biking. That’s not the case for much of North America.
Where I come from, generally in the Great Lakes region, the average temperatures range from -1C to 30C during the year. Not great for year-round commuting by bike. Some people do it, sure, but it is truly a commitment.
I'm not so sure that's an issue for the general population.
My main gripe is actually availability of bikes in the bike-sharing scheme, since I can't bring up my own in the office, and since I work in a shady area, there's no way I'd leave it outside for the day. I also like the flexibility of not having to use my bike both ways. Think catching a movie or whatever after work and possibly getting a drink with friends. Although this is related to not wanting to leave the bike unattended for any period of time.
But nowadays, with electric bikes, unless you live on top of Montmartre hill (and even then), I think it's no longer an issue. I have a colleague who takes her two children to school on bike before riding into the office (she works in a different office, where they have an interior yard with bike racks). Her bike's got electric assistance and she doesn't seem to arrive out of breath or anything. She also doesn't seem exceptionally sporty.
It depends on the climate. If you live in California or west coast outside of rainy seasons, there really isn't much of a problem unless you have a huge hill to climb on the way to work. Actually, that was my problem in Lausanne (3D town, I road up the hill every morning, and would be a bit sweaty, but I had my own office so I didn't care).
Riding worked for a particular phase of my life, now it doesn't, since I have a kid to take care of and the bike theft problem has gotten out of control in my locale.
I call it natural selection of the gene pool. Of course they dont call it like that in their pink city world.
Everything only works for a particular segment of people, but you exaggerate how small this particular segment is.
You don’t need to be fit, just not entirely out of shape — or ride an ebike. You can easily do chores, get groceries, etc. on a bike. I take my kid to school in a cargo bike regularly. It’s faster than driving (at rush hour at least) because there’s no stoplights on the bike path. And rain gear is a thing.
It’s not for everyone but haters always claim it’s for no one. No, it’s just not for you, stop being a hater.
I live in Paris, I have 2 small kids, and I don't have much time on my hands (founder). I go to work (5km) by bike every day, whether it rains, snows, or worse ;)
Paris is mostly flat. As long as you aren't racing to work, sweat shouldn't be an issue.
it is not flat at all
"Other than the hill of Montmartre and the Belleville area, the terrain of Paris changes less than the height of a ten story building."
Hence, mostly flat.
Isn't La Defense on a hill? I remember the escalators going up to it and down from it, anyways.
Offices generally don't have showers.
People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).
To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.
Also: don't wear a backpack if it's not one of those "air-something" that allow airflow on your back.
I have biked to work over 30 years in various places. Some with uphill in the morning. The point is just that you bike comfortably. When I was younger that probably meant something like 18 km/h in sligthly hilly places. Nowadays it's less. You can actually debug your code while biking (mentally, no screen involved). I have solved many problems after 15 minutes on the bike better than in 3 hours in front of the screen. Yes, I avoid heavy traffic, even if it means a detour.
If you want to bike fast you can do it when not on the way to the office.
(I once biked in Dallas at 95F. There not getting sweaty might be a challenge...)
ebike
You wear wicking clothing, don't ride too hard and change into work clothes in the office bathroom.
Sure, if you live in the city proper.
But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance.
Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute.
There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed).
So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc.
But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all.
---
[0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
The original post was complaining about increasing density and how investment in public transport hasn't kept up. The previous poster said what about bikes, and you are now saying that bikes are not a solution to people coming from the greater Paris region. But that was not what we are talking about, we were talking about higher density (=more people) in Paris proper. Bikes are certainly a solution to transport in the high density city.
Only part of my answer was about people coming in from afar. The other, about there being nowhere to store bikes, as well as questionable quality of the biking infrastructure is about the city itself.
Edit: I'm actually saying this as someone who enjoys and actually does bike. When living in the city proper, I think there are very few routes for which the bike isn't the quickest method of transportation. For my commute, which is pretty much a best-case scenario (modern metro with few to no issues, goes in a fairly straight line, don't have to change lines, stations close to both home and the office) the bike is much faster: 20 instead of 30 minutes.
Bike storage was never a problem for me living in London, even when I lived on a tiny canal boat. I can’t imagine Parisian’s bicycles are that different nor their homes much smaller than a boat or my 75m2 flat. Yes, I also have a cargo bike for transporting kids. The only thing stopping anyone from cycling is their anxiety and sense of car-owing identity
Wouldn't we all love to have such a big flat.
I was talking to a friend living in London, and it would indeed seem that flats tend to be bigger over there. We do have many 100+ m2 flats, don't get me wrong, it's just that most locals can't afford those and live in shoeboxes instead.
There's also the fact that the layout doesn't always lend itself to storing a bike, most flats being rather old. Even though I would technically have the surface area to store a bike, it'd have to be in an awkward place to avoid blocking the passages.
Some newer apartment buildings do have areas for storing bikes more or less securely. But I doubt that's the case for most people.
Instead, what I'm hopeful for, is that the local bike-sharing scheme will improve. And indeed, I've read a few weeks ago that they were rolling out some improved model, which they expect to be more robust.
Safe (locked) bike parks are popping up everywhere in Paris
Where everywhere? I haven't seen any recently. Are those being up in underground parking lots? (I don't have a car, so I never go there)
I've even read an article in Le Parisien (local-ish paper) about how some of those bike storage units were actually removed for some reason.
Like in German cities? For the lucky 30 or something that managed to arrive earlier to the spot, and only on the main station.
One reason I don't get a bike here in Seattle is because bike theft is just way too common, and I have no way to secure it in my house (not enclosed garage, no space inside to keep it). It is funny, because they have better infrastructure now, but the theft problem (and lack of police/government care for the problem) means less people are actually riding bikes here.
For what it's worth, I got a folding bike (a Brompton) to address the storage issues you cite.
The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution.
They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances.
It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.
Erm aren't you forgetting something?
London just quadrupled its bicycle network. That seems like a massive improvement to me. When I lived there, biking was...let's be kind and say "less than ideal". Last time I visited I was amazed by the improvement, with protected two-way bike lanes right on the Thames and much more.
https://momentummag.com/london-just-quadrupled-its-bicycle-n...
Since when have bicycles been public transport?
Exactly.
Poster was presenting cars and public transport as the only two options, and complaining that one has been made worse without improving the other.
That completely misses the fact that there is in fact a third option that has been greatly improved, even if poster doesn’t like it.
Hence “Aren’t you forgetting something” rather than “you’re wrong”
The comment specifically excludes London, as it works differently from the rest of the UK.
I feel like the best way to make getting from A to B quicker is for A and B to be closer together. Which makes walking or biking more practical and you don’t have to spend as much money on public transit.
A and B being closer works for cars, too.
A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.
Only to a point, because car trips have more “friction” especially in a city.
For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic!
Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
‘ making public transport any better (outside of London)’ is not really under the government’s control until after the local electorate agrees to it.
So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.
This doesn't sound right?
If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to.
For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit
Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles.
Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.
This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.
On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.
But as point A and point B become closer together, it takes less time to get there by car and then people do it more often. Unless traffic congestion eats the time savings, implying that there is high traffic congestion.
Cities are populated by people, not cars. As point A and point B become closer, people are less likely to drive.
If your mailbox is attached to your house, you can lean out your front door to get your mail. If your mailbox is at the end of your 20 foot driveway, you take a few steps to get your mail. If you live on a farm, and your mailbox is down a several hundred yard driveway, you might hop in your side-by-side UTV. If your mail goes to a Post Office Box in town, you might hop in your truck and pick it up while running errands.
If you make something more efficient, people often use more of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If things that had been a 10 minute drive become a 5 minute drive, now they're worth it when before they weren't. You go to the shop instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon. You go to the shop you like more instead of the one you like less even though the lesser one is closer, because now the difference isn't as big.
It's not only a function of trip length.
If you make the drive shorter but make parking harder,
and you make the walk/bike shorter but walking/biking pleasant,
people will take their cars less.
There's a finite number of trips people can practically do - just because they live next door to work doesn't mean they'll commute more than twice each day (close enough people will return for home for lunch perhaps).
As traffic and travel times lessen, people do travel further and more, but only to a point.
But who was contending otherwise? You don't need it to be infinite, to be a problem all it has to do is not allow the reduction in driving because now distances are shorter and sometimes people can walk to not exceed the increase in density because now four times as many people are in the same area. Which it might not have done even without this, depending on how much more often shorter distances cause people to walk.
That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)
Paris is building a lot of transit enhancements right now.
Hear hear! Anytime someone argues something like "I could never give up my car and live in a city! They're so noisy!" I feel like a version of that Goose meme. "NOISY FROM WHAT?"
Sirens, people yelling, loud music, construction, etc.
Credentials: Lived in NYC for 10+ years
Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles
People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
Construction: valid
But the single most frequent / annoying loud sound: car horns. Constantly.
I'm not going to argue the point that cars aren't loud they are!
However, in Manhattan the city is still very loud with 0 cars. Meaning in the middle of the night in midtown, not a single car, the city itself hums with a constant noise that is not healthy.
Witnessed this during covid when I didn't see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue, but the city is still very very loud compared to a suburban setting.
So, we get rid of all cars, then what? You still live in a noisy city. No thanks.
Credentials: 5 years in midtown, 15 years downtown Manhattan.
With all respect, “didn’t see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue”, even during peak covid, is bananas if for no other reason than the ambulances were going almost constantly (ymmv based on where you live).
But I distinctly remember watching the odd car here and there and wondering where they were going.
And things were quieter! There was the background noise of machinery and buses and cars but it was a lot quieter than even holiday Sundays.
Credentials: 14 years in semi-rural Texas, 25 years in Manhattan
Living in Texas and Manhattan you should aware that we very good at adapting to our surroundings. The relative noise is not comparable between rural Texas and Manhattan.
I agree the city was quieter during covid, and would be quieter without cars. It's ridiculous to debate otherwise.
But a major is vastly noisier without cars than any normal suburb with the rare car passing by a residential street.
NYC will always be loud, cars are not.
Noise pollution in big cities, particularly nyc, ranked starting from the worst factoring frequency:
Sirens
Construction
Buses
Semintrucks / public machinery (trash, etc)
Subway
Belligerent people
Lunatics
Inconsiderate people on motorcycles
Cars
Buildings / HVAC
Cars are near the bottom of the list
It varies by area; I remember staying in Brooklyn with a friend and being a few floors up the traffic noise was minimal (constant), few horns, but it seemed an emergency vehicle went by every few minutes.
Most of what I remember of European cities, too, when anywhere near the denser parts.
Part of "city noise" is dependent where you're living, and how new it is. Close, cramped, older building with people arguing above and below and beside you? Not fun. Newer building with excellent soundproofing? Nowhere near as bad.
But they're attached to emergency vehicles. The fire department is not going to wait for the bus when responding to a fire, so you can't actually get rid of this by installing mass transit, and then its prevalence is proportional to density.
If people are usually in cars then the people making noise will usually be in cars. But it's not as if they're going to stop having business disputes or lovers' quarrels or whatever it is this time just because they're on foot.
And whether loud music is a problem depends primarily on who your neighbors are. In a city you'll have a lot of them and you don't get to choose who they are.
Ironically this doesn't happen in the suburbs because there are more roads and parking per car, and thereby fewer traffic disputes and no need to summon someone from a building immediately instead of parking and going inside. So you're now equally making the case for cities to have wider roads and more parking.
More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.
The purging has really picked up pace in the last couple of years, and I think a major highlight will be the upcoming cleansing of Place de la Concorde.
Both the fight against car dependency and the housing policy in TFA have been spearheaded by the current mayor, Anne Hidalgo
France already has some of the most densely populated cities in the world, Paris is #32. French cities feel less congested than the likes of US cities because it has better cycling infrastructure and public transport options. High population density is not a cure for the bias car infrastructure imposes on a city. So your recipe will need to take more in to account than just density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
How does that linked Wikipedia page not contain any cities in China, which in my experience are more dense than just about anywhere else in the world?
What is your experience ? China cities are noticeably less dense than other cities in Asia (Manilla, Delhi..) or even Paris
Most of Manila is an endless sprawl low-rise housing and single-story slums, with a few areas of high-rise buildings (Makati, BGC, etc). In the average large Chinese city, more or less all the housing is high-rise.
how much of that housing is occupied vs investment, and how large are the apartments? slums get quite packed.
China is deurbanizing and dedensifying. It's a popular myth that Chinese cities are dense. Density peaked a decade ago.
This will spell economic worries someway down the road as maintenance upkeep costs start to kick in.
PRC cities are not particularly dense. Population densities in cities within a country tend to follow zipfs law, which would predict BJ and SH to be 3-4x larger than it currently is. Many economists and urban planners was suggesting PRC should densify tier1 about 10 years ago. But hukou anbd industrial policy seems to be designed to limit megacity sizes to redirect popuation towards growing 3rd, 4th+ tier cities into their own economic hubs. IMO trying to avoid SKR/JP where everyone rushes to a few economically viable regions.
one is that Chinese "city" boundaries also generally include a lot of rural land, mountains, etc. Chongqing is the size of Austria.
The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.
But why are French cities so densely populated? The country is twice the size of the UK with roughly the same population.
There was a semi-arbitrary building height adopted during the Haussmannian reorganization in Paris. My feeling is people noticed it led to perfectly liveable blocks. (Most places go a bit higher than this by now but Paris is strongly attached to the "roofs of Paris" and actively protects them. So Paris is a mix of Haussmannian building heights and higher.)
In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).
And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.
Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that I love it and I wish there were more American cities that were an option for my lifestyle.
America is filled with high rises. Where are you from?
What do you mean? In my experience outside of the few major cities (New York, LA, etc.) there are only high rises in the very downtown of large cities.
Highrises are just apartments.
Very large like Columbus Ohio?
https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/
Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be...
Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html
I guess I tend to think of "high-rise" as a synonym for skyscraper. Something in the neighborhood of 10+ stories. I'm fairly certain that Columbus at least doesn't have many residential buildings that high outside of its downtown.
However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.
i don't remember any high rises outside of downtown in LA either.
and most of those downtown high rises in most cities are office buildings. New York is really the exception.
This is a huge problem with housing in general that is mostly ignored.
Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.
Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.
30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.
Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.
Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.
The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.
Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)
This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.
All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.
It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.
Maybe the reason people accuse you of being "racist/classist/luddite" is because you're fearmongering, and they suspect these talking points are just a cover for looking out for your financial interest (keep increasing property prices), or keeping your community free from "others" or something.
Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.
How is this fearmongering?
I can just as easily accuse you of moral righteousness, it's not a cover for anything, it's what's happening and with neither you nor I citing sources, it's just your word against mine.
Even then, come up with whatever cutesy numbers you want regarding housing, there are concrete numbers to point to for the side effects. Depressed teacher salaries is a well known issue. Overcrowding in schools is a real issue. Congestion and lack of public transportation is a real issue.
You can argue causality all you want, but if you leave out suddenly overpopulating areas as part of your equation, it's already flawed.
Lastly, you didn't read what I said.
I said it's fine to build more housing provides it comes with equal investments in infrastructure. You conveniently glossed over this fact because your solution of building taller still doesn't address it. So no, build taller isn't the only solution.
Again, reread what I said. I'm not against building more housing. Do you understand that? Again, I am not against building more housing.
All for building out public transportation, all for doing that is required to build more housing.
So either you take a slow and moderate approach to building more housing, which is fine, and will allow other infrastructure more time to catch up, or you make these investments up front with your larger scale development, as long as it's addressed it's all I'm saying.
Not sure what you're so up in arms about.
Not building the houses doesn't make the people go away. What ends up happening is they have to commute in from somewhere else, and
happens in a different road.
(sure, in the long run people learn not to have children in the West because living space is scarce, and your "doubled the amount of school children" problem goes away)
It is not a hard problem to solve and was/is being solved all around the world. If a developer is building not 60 homes but 6000 homes then they can be tasked to build a school, a few kindergartens, a fire station, cafes, grocery shop, a few bus stops and plenty of individual and communal parking spaces.
Going from single family homes to quadplexes does not solve the problem, build taller!
Cities aren’t loud. Cars are.
Cars are very loud, Cities are still loud with 0 cars.
Source: Manhattan, NYC
Part of the draw of a city is bustling night life. You don't move to Manhattan for dark skies.
Can we at least acknowledge that it is not universally a draw, and many people actually hate it?
I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.
It's literally been dubbed the City of Light and the highest density cities in France already. It's not even close.
Cool cool, except the situation is dire and people need a roof over their head. Other priorities can wait.
Thankfully Paris was also super super super smart & has rapidly developed dedicated bike infrastructure that is incredibly popular & nice to use. It rapidly reduces the need for cars for many many people.
They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit.
This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!
And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.
What is making the noise?
So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?
Maybe they should start charging for that ...
It's effectively doing just that - tax the entire city (which taxes are usually mainly paid by the richer people) and use the taxes to subsidize poor people.
So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.
It should work.
That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?
Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?
I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.
(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)
Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?
If we are going to develop the state capacity to override inexorable forces of nature, like the productivity and desirability of the metropole over the hinterlands, might I suggest we first give the people a good show by turning off gravity? Bring the Mediterranean climate to Chicago? Maybe do something about climate change?
I don’t know if I’d call it “inexorable forces of nature” as much as economic financialization and industry consolidation run amok.
The arc of urbanization is thousands of years old! Once we figured out how to produce food at scale without much labor, it was pretty much over for decentralization.
Urbanization doesn’t require entire industries to be concentrated in a handful of cities. Wall Street and uncontrolled consolidation do that. The question is, can you achieve through public policy an economy where a large segment of jobs doesn’t involve delivering food to knowledge workers? I think you can, even today. Germany, for example, is quite urbanized, but far more decentralized (in terms of having many important large urban centers, plus many small urban centers) compared to say France or the UK.
That’s certainly worth exploring too. But there’s a reason I no longer mow my own lawn nor do my own auto maintenance: I flatter myself that I’m now more productive for the larger community when I do work that uses the skills I’ve spent years developing.
Everyone needs service workers. Even service workers need service workers.
My service workers have service workers who go to the market FOR them!
Wait, that's actually what we have now.
California perspective: rich people could meet their needs for workers/artists/etc by liberalizing the market, but this would cost them property value and eat into the market rents they're collecting. Favoring income-restricted housing allows them to address the same objectives without this blowback.
The cost of the necessary subsidy is calibrated to fall on grubby new-money high earners, so it is effectively free for the long-established propertied class who don't need much taxable income & locked in their property taxes long ago.
Income-restricted housing isn't sustainable, nor is it very accessible (you either win the lottery and have it, or you are stuck in a very long line).
Liberalizing the market doesn't always work, even in the most dense economic liberal cities, the best environment for sustainable affordable housing is depopulation or some sort of recession or economic stagnation.
Rich people need to keep encountering not-rich people, rather than just live in a rich-person bubble. They need that, whether or not they want that.
Of course, because what does it mean to be rich if you can't show it off to poorer people.
Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.
Not at all. The rich need it to maintain some humanity and empathy, not to boost their ego.
I wouldn't be so sure it does that. Slave owners interacted with (some of) their slaves daily, and yet...
Depending on what you mean by "rich" they're already insulated entirely, no matter where they live.
It's much easier to make sure middle and upper middle class people interact with the poor and such, but once you're rich enough to hire an assistant, you're rich enough to avoid most anything you don't want to deal with.
Let's call it "taxes".
Paris needs a new center. Like many other cities, build more places where people want to flock so you get pressure off the center.
Most new developments are in dead areas because nobody wants to spend time surrounded by ugly, bland and functional architecture.
The problem is, when you are competing with the center of Paris, it is pretty hard to build a compelling alternative. Say what you will about the streets being loud, chaotic and dirty, the area between the II, III, V and VI arrondissements (Latin quarter, Pantheon, Beaubourg, Jardin du Luxembourg, Tuilleries, Notre Dame, Place des Vosges) is still just swell.
Yeah, and also you have the problem of job location. The regional government says they want to make the Paris area more "polycentric", but there’s a limit to that if jobs are heavily concentrated in one area. We are racing to open more subway lines, and that will surely help, but at some point, raw distance will remain a bottleneck.
This reminds of the project that aimed at creating a new business/commercial complex south-east of Paris in Noisy-Le-Grand. A real estate promoter had a big project, and a metro line was designed, then built, but the real estate project went into bankruptcy and never got out of the ground.[0]
The metro line was completed, inaugurated, but never opened to the public, and eventually mothballed. For quite a while, it was rumored that they operated trains once a month to keep the system working and maintained, not sure up until when.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-le-Grand_Metro
The Tim Traveller channel on YouTube did a couple videos about this [1] and [2]. The station was open for a brief time for some public tours before being redeveloped. He also links to some archival footage from 1997 showing it in motion [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxESIzJhCU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGIz_zwoALU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMHW9cEAO78
It's not a problem in the sense that nowadays we know how to make it. It's a question of money and political build. More housing, more offices, make it pleasent, connect it, etc.
Seems like governments could lead the charge by building new government facilities in an alternate location, which is created with a solid plan for incorporating public transport, housing, event spaces, and retail.
Its entirely possible to build a new city from the ground up. And starting with a clean slate allows planners to design with the next 10,20,30,50 years of growth in mind. It's very difficult to scale a city effectively without a long-term city plan.
You seem to neglect the cost of it. The city is nearly bankrupt, parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time.
Is that a bad thing?
I guess not for the people who think they are entitled to the rest of the population subsidising their lifestyle.
So, everybody? It's a city. Last I checked Paris was not full of homesteads and organic farms.
Building taller means people see the sky less. In my home city that is the case and you definitely dont want that. Where ive been living the last few years, no building is above 3 stories and its wonderful.
Not necessarily.
There's a big difference between building a tall building with a large uniform floorplate that takes up much of a block and a tall building that is thin, only taking up a tiny slice of a block, and thus allowing sunlight to pass through.
For this reason gloomy Vancouver for a long time mandated point towers, for the purpose of maximizing light.
Paris' status quo of uniform 6 story streetwalls could arguably let in less light than a mixed amount of much taller thinner towers on 3 story podiums.
Most of New York has 10-15 floors buildings with wide streets. Light and fresh air isn't a problem. But you can't really widen Paris street and the uniformity of the architecture is what makes it a beautiful city. Tourists aren't flocking to Paris to take pictures of some boring glass and concrete buildings.
For the same density, geometrically, you should see the same amount of sky it you are at the ground floor (or outside), and more if you are on the upper floors.
Here is a low rise area, H represent housing units, _ is the ground
Now for the same density with high rise buildings For someone on the ground, between buildings, the field of view occupied by the sky is the same, that's because buildings are twice taller and the distance between buildings is twice longer, which cancel out. Or equivalently, the average apparent size of buildings (how much of your field of view they take) is also the same. Obviously, people higher up have a better view of the sky.Don’t necessarily need to build taller, if transit (not bad in Paris already) is brought up to Tokyo levels (meaning an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else) then you just build densely outwards. Tokyo has far higher population but is mostly low-rise. A city like Paris has the bones for this.
impossible to brong it to tokyo level. our people are not educated like japanese people. add the strikes, the frequent infrastructure issues and we will never reach tokyo levels. also since covid transportation is worse since they figured out they could make more money cramping up less trains
lol then I guess Paris is doomed
We are already the densest OECD city by quite a margin! (22,000 per sqkm in the inner 20 district, twice that of Manhanttan and 3 times that of Tokyo - and still 8,600 in the Petite Couronne, which includes 8 million people)
Manhattan has a population density of 28,154 per sqkm according to Wikipedia?
Yeah; they're probably thinking of New York City. If taken on its own, Manhattan is one of the densest cities in the world; the rest of NYC brings it down a lot.
I agree that is a net boon to society. I think the cross drift of ideas is a net positive, the human interaction can create more opportunities for those that have less, I don't think it reduces inequality meaningfully and I'm not suggesting that was a goal only that my prior statements might lead one to believe it does, but I've seen far more segregated cities be without many services during an infrastructure failure, because the people doing those services didn't live there.
it is already one of the densest cities on earth.. dont build within paris but modernize its suburbs and create more centers there. the public housing is actually adding social segregation as it is edging out middle class and now paris is segregated between ultra rich and poor people working to serve the rich ones
Paris is already among the densest places on earth.
The problem comes from the excessive centralization of practically everything France has, in Paris, leading to an overpopulation of the entire Ile de France region, which drive prices in Paris itself to the roof.
I've made a 3D map of social housings in Paris/France: https://charnould.github.io/rpls-3d/ Territorial segregation is a thing.
Building taller is the equivalent of building more lanes. The main problem with housing shortage and infrastructure congestion in Paris is that everything is centralized and concentrated on Paris, and thus everyone want to be there
Do you live in one of these places?