Cicero posted:

I feel like it's actually not very hard to generalize, even in major cities in the US it's common for the vast majority of residential land to be allocated just for single family homes. Obviously there's still variation there, but the broad strokes of what's causing the problem are generally pretty consistent across most of the country. It's similar to how car culture being dominant is true in almost every city.

KingFisher posted:

Or we could do towers in the park style high rise mixed use multifamily development and cast some long rear end shadows on NIMBY scum yards.

Cugel the Clever posted:

Urban cemeteries, too. Thousands of acres of prime land utterly wasted.

(for the record, whenever that time comes, I hope to have my loved ones spend as close to nothing as possible disposing of my corpse)

Squalid posted:

Yeah, I think problems like this could appear if a policy is implemented badly. I'm really just spit-balling ideas here. My main point though is that a lot of the time we refuse to talk and think about the systemic roots of these problems. People see a policy like rent control as means to reduce housing costs for free -- but it is not free. It's just that the cost of rent reductions today is reduced investment and development. It takes years for the results to manifest, but they inevitably will, in the form of shortages and lower quality housing stock. If you want to ameliorate these issues, you have to make up that reduction in private investment from somewhere else.

Instead we have people deny that there is even a problem in the first place. People that deny there is even a housing shortage in places like California in the first place, or who claim that supply doesn't matter. Or they have hair-brained schemes that have no hope of addressing the underlying issues, like redistributing vacant apartments. One off policies like that might add supply this year, but what are you going to do next year? There's a deep unwillingness even just to acknowledge the full scale of the problem.

I am not a free-market fundamentalist. I don't care at all if services are provisioned through the state or market. I am stunned though at the way so many people just refuse to acknowledge what seems like basic common sense. Just breaking the market isn't going to supply housing, you need to have an alternative.

ProperGanderPusher posted:

My relatives think raising kids in an apartment is child abuse because the kids can’t go outside unattended (assuming this is one of those gated condo communities in the suburbs or a building in an urban core) and all the neighbors will hear them screaming and carrying on all the time and will hate us.

I think it was this thread that pointed out that newer buildings tend to not have paper thin walls and this isn’t nearly as much of a problem.

Not having a backyard or a space outside to do whatever the hell I want in private is a big downside though, honestly.

Zapf Dingbat posted:

I grew up in the exurbs with something like a 1 acre lawn that we were forced to mow. It was hell, and I hate lawns now. All the time and energy spent on that useless space.

Trabisnikof posted:

You can be arrested for letting your kids play in the park unsupervised. Not so in your backyard.

Trabisnikof posted:

True, they apparently passed a 2016 law to try to legalize letting your kids walk to the park.

But there have been quite a number of times parents have either been arrested or had CPS force them to never ever let their kid go to the park alone again:





Since the laws are pretty vague on this its pretty much if someone calls CPS or if the cops want to hassle you.

Baronash posted:

Pretty much all of the interesting NotJustBikes videos are remakes of Strong Towns videos, in some cases down to copying sections word for word.

Cugel the Clever posted:

It baffles me that parts of the left have taken the "landlords are sitting indefinitely on vacant homes to jack up prices" thing as gospel. Even without all the data to back up the case, it's a fairly trivial thought exercise to explore the cost/benefit calculations to find that adding more homes to the market will force the landlord to respond to demand:

Landlord 1 owns a one-plex. They slap a price/rent on it at 125% of the average for neighborhood X, but there are no other vacancies because residential supply is capped by bad zoning laws and NIMBY opposition.
Homeseeker 1 wants to live in neighborhood X. With no other vacant options available to them, either they meet Landlord 1's exorbitant demands or are forced to find a home in cheaper neighborhood Y, which is less desirable for them due to their commute.

If Homeseeker 1 pays out, Landlord 1 wins! They get exactly what they asked for because Homeseeker 1 found the alternative more costly.
If Homeeker 1 instead chooses a home from Landlord 2 in neighborhood Y, Landlord 1 loses out on income and incurs recurring costs for maintenance and taxes. However, if vacancies are low across the neighborhoods, Landlord 1 knows they needn't wait long for Homeseeker 2 to come along and be the one to pay out. Meanwhile, Homeseeker 3 wanted to live in neighborhood Y, but Landlord 2 had similarly jacked up the prices expecting Homeseeker 1 would trickle down to them! Homeseeker 3 has to find another, even cheaper neighborhood, perpetuating a vicious cycle that ends in Homeseeker X living in their car or on the street. poo poo's hosed!

Landlord 1 can sit pretty for a little while knowing they'll inevitably catch a mark who can pay out for lack of alternatives, so the easiest option available to us is to introduce alternatives into the market through a mixture of public housing and upzoning. The city changes the maximum occupancy and height limit, as well as shuts down the mechanisms landlord-friendly exclusionary groups used to throw a wrench in the works, to enable denser construction at a cheaper price point.

Suddenly, Landlord 1's aging and minimally maintained one-plex doesn't enjoy the exclusivity—the city has constructed a six-story, mixed-use building with a mixture of market-rate and affordable units! Landlord 1 wails and gnashes their teeth as they realize the next few dozen homeseekers are likely to jump on the new building rather than pay bank for their rat trap. The likelihood of a homeseeker coming to them within the time horizon for which they can tolerate losing money becomes vanishingly small, so Landlord 1 is forced to lower their rates and even gasp maintain and improve their property to outcompete the alternatives. Homeseeker 1, 2, 3, and many others can now find homes in the neighborhoods they wanted and at better price points than they might have otherwise.

While I'd prefer the city, state, or even the feds to be the purveyor of these now homes, enabling construction by private developers achieves the same effect, just with the consequence of the new private owner of the homes, Landlord 3, immediately turning around to pull up the ladder behind them so they can achieve the same position as Landlords 1 and 2 were in at the outset. The key is to never let them do that.

That all said, this needn't preclude a vacancy tax, but there's little reason it would do a drat thing to address the root causes of the affordability crisis. Worse, it's typically bandied about as a better alternative to, rather than minor complement of, increasing home supply in place people want to live. A vacancy tax might at best reduce the time horizons landlords before they hit their limit, but would have knockon effects in landlords cheaping out elsewhere to make up the difference. Ultimately, if prices are high because 3 different homeseekers are all chomping at the bit for the same property, then the only durable solution is to construct more homes.

tl;dr: build more homes. Public homes; private homes; gnome homes; more homes.

Cicero posted:

5% isn't a very high vacancy rate, a typical historical level is like 7% IIRC. And you WANT a fair amount of vacancy, both to reduce landlord leverage over renters, and also because of certain amount of market liquidity is necessary for anyone to, y'know, rent or buy a home. A market with all occupied homes is one where you can't move there. Because the homes are occupied.

Cicero posted:

It's just weird to me that people are (higher) framing vacancy rates as bad, when they're actually good, at least to a point.

For longer periods of time, I agree. But some amount of time unoccupied after a current tenant leaves is of course normal and expected.

Cicero posted:

A very large percentage of homeless people have serious mental illness or substance abuse issues, such that putting them in random homes will likely end poorly. So many are not in a good place mentally to take care of a regular home, either as a cause or effect of homelessness, this is something that shelters are equipped to deal with that standard apartments or houses are not. We need to build a lot more emergency/temporary housing that's explicitly designed to help people who are currently homeless and may need heavy support.

Badger of Basra posted:

It seems relevant to me considering the historically low vacancy rate is a big part of why housing costs and homelessness are so high

Greg12 posted:

pointing to a vacancies while saying "the housing supply isn't the problem, see?" in a vacuum is what dogshit nimbys in powerful positions have done for a decade because they actually believe that, if you don't build a new building, new people won't move to the city, and nothing will ever change, and they can be 24 years old forever.

Baronash posted:

"If you strip a situation of context to the point of meaninglessness, then I'm totally right" is not the slam dunk argument you seem to think it is. Somehow, despite correctly identifying housing costs as a major driver of homelessness, you've repeatedly ignored anyone pointing out that low vacancy rates are a major cause of rising housing costs. That's why shelters and other supportive housing projects generally aim to increase the supply of available housing, rather than worsen housing markets already in crisis.

OddObserver posted:

Requiring EV charging stations as an overall rule is probably a win overall. Going through a 12-month process of arguing over it for every single place, however ...

Ham Equity posted:

EVs are going to loving murder us. It's just more car infrastructure: more parking that won't be used exclusively by EVs, more roads, stroads, and freeways that won't be used exclusively by EVs, more tires that require more oil that spew out more rubber and microplastics, more brake pads doing the same, more minerals needing to be mined out of the earth that requires yet more fossil fuels, and more chemicals being used in the manufacturing that get dumped back into the ecosystem.

It's not an improvement, it's just a thing that extends the lifetime of the habits we can't afford to have, and lets lovely people greenwash building more parking.

Mustang posted:

I'm a regular user of the light rail here in Seattle, but what about the majority of the US with no good public transportation options? If I leave the city I'll need a car to do it any kind of reasonable time frame. Not to mention the western parts of Seattle like Ballard and West Seattle aren't even supposed to have light rail stations until like 2039 at the earliest.

Unless we invest an insane amount of money to build out the country's public transportation network, I'd rather people be using EVs than gas powered cars.

mobby_6kl posted:

Are people going to give up their lawns and McMansiosn to live closer to civilization though? These are mutually incompatible and while everyone hates driving (for commuting), I kind of doubt many would make that trade voluntarily.

Greg12 posted:

We would make a huger dent in the carbon we put in the atmosphere if we just

stop spending money on cars

not one more new lane-mile

Count Roland posted:

Setting unreasonable goals is not the way to take something seriously.

Society is based on cars and roads. Much of the world is less developed, and building more roads would significantly help the people living there.

If you're proposing to halt road and car production, then you need to offer an alternative to be taken seriously.

Nitrousoxide posted:

People complain about the wires for trolley buses and the noise and emissions of diesel buses.

Bongo Bill posted:

poo poo's complicated. Any solution to any of these problems is going to require multiple components, each of which individually might accomplish nothing or even make things worse without the other components. Also the solution as a whole will have to be resilient to compromises necessitated by accommodating people trying to live through it while in progress. "X won't save us" is kind of a facile objection.

Count Roland posted:

I don't think this is really fair either.

Biden's infrastructure bill puts truly vast amounts of money towards things like offshore wind. I think it includes money for upgrading electrical power infrastructure to handle the increased use of electricity.

I don't know if that bill will come out as planned, nor am I saying this bill will defeat climate change or anything.

But there is quite a lot being done, not just talked about, but legislated and funded.

Minenfeld! posted:

"Realistic" in this context inherently means patting yourself on the back for being smarter than everyone else who demands better things. You don't demand better things. You demand change in snall increments because it's what serious people do.

Fill Baptismal posted:

The biggest benefit of EVs isn’t actual their emissions imo: it’s that widespread EV adoption gives politicians and political parties less need to keep the car sauce flowing cheaply. Even if they didn’t have any benefits in other aspects and that was all they did, people not getting pissed when number go up at the pump is pretty massive in terms of the possibility space it opens up.

mobby_6kl posted:

From the energy thread:

so hopefully within a few years

Quorum posted:

I work in environmental compliance (archaeology/NHPA Section 106 specifically). One of the most common misconceptions is that the law prevents environmental (or, in my specific case, historical property) damage, but in fact the law generally only requires that the government consider the effects of its actions on the environment. Ultimately, the NHPA, NEPA, and their state equivalents don't typically care if you actually harm the human environment at the end of the process as long as you've put the work in to figure out what impact you're going to have. The problem arises because often project proponents try to avoid considering particular impacts using things like creative crafting of project alternatives or insufficient scoping. A well-planned, properly-executed process is mostly immune to NEPA/NHPA legislation, but ironically the more a project proponents tries to avoid environmental review, the more vulnerable they become to costly litigation.

There may well be process reforms that could improve the system -- you won't find many environmental compliance specialists who think the process is perfect -- but many of the horror stories are because project proponents tried to circumvent the process, rather than because of the process itself.

Quorum posted:

There are more factors at play as well (developer-funded suburban subdivision projects often don't trigger environmental review because they don't involve federal or state money, for example, unlike something along the lines of installing a high speed rail system), but I think you're right to identify one of the core flaws of American environmental review laws: they ultimately rely on expensive private legal action to enforce them, which disproportionately tilts the manner of their enforcement towards entities with the resources to bring them. That's why some procedurally-rotten projects might sail through with nary a peep while others (and maybe ones with fewer flaws) might get bogged down. That's also, I'd argue, why agencies and proponents persist in trying to cut corners and avoid doing higher level reviews in the first place: there's a good chance they won't get called out on it, and the projected cost savings up front is a very compelling political incentive.

Ham Equity posted:

I dunno, this really seems like a case of "what a system does is what it's designed to do." And this system really seems designed to shut down any sort of positive movement in favor of freeways, parking lots, and single-family bullshit.

BougieBitch posted:

VictualSquid posted:

No, I think he is saying that urban areas can't have food without privately owned muscle cars somehow.