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Why the High Cost of Big-City Living Is Bad for Everyone
- pgoggijr 10y agoArticle doesn't seem to assert that it's bad for everyone, just those who aren't already at the top of the ladder. The author even goes so far to say that city living is a "luxury good" for those who can afford it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 10y agoOne of the key point that the article makes is that change happens over decades. That's not to say that some change can't happen over shorter periods but anything fundamentally altering is something that may produce effects in thirty years--and probably in a way at least somewhat different from what was intended.
- choward 10y agoIt's 2016. Why is that picture blurry?
- unholythree 10y agoIf you're using NoScript the image is blurry until you allow newyorker.com
- dpark 10y agoI'm on my phone in Chrome (so no extensions) and it's super blurry.
- smb06 10y agoI'm on Chrome (iOS) as well. It remains blurry for ~5 seconds and then gets up to normal resolution.
- rtkwe 10y agoIt's blurry for me unless I disable uBlock (ad blocker) and I don't use NoScript. It does still pop up the full clear version if you click on it. That's a new 'reason to disable ad blocker on our site' though without something pointing it out not sure if it's doing any good.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoMaybe it's an artistic statement on how a beautiful city may exist before your eyes but if you can't afford it then it may as well be a mirage.
- andy_wrote 10y agoFrom the article: "One hardheaded answer is to build more housing. An increasing supply of housing would theoretically put downward pressure on prices. The reality, unfortunately, is that almost all urban construction happens too late." That last sentence does not sound like an argument against this approach, but an additional argument for it. If there is a secular trend of urban rents outpacing inflation, it sure seems like a "better late than never" situation.
- nibs 10y agoI live in Toronto. It is mind-blowing the number of condos being built. More are in progress now here than exist on Manhattan. But as far as world cities go, the condos and rent are both very affordable. So I think to a certain extent it does work to build more, but it is not 1:1, and lots of people come here because of the (relative) affordability.
- bufordsharkley 10y agoIt's a reminder that we have a prisoner's dilemma on our hands: if one city fixes things, they share an disproportionate burden of the load that will follow. Real success will only happen if everybody coordinates on better land-use policy. The likely outcome is that they won't, and here we are.
- Agustus 10y agoWhat kind of land-use policy are you proposing and how will it be kept out of the hands of politicians who abuse it for their own personal gain?
- bufordsharkley 10y agoMy ideal reform would be the Land Value Tax[0], which admittedly has run into problems in execution with poor implementations. It depends upon assessments on land value that reflect current market value of that land. In one notable case of the LVT in practice (Pittsburgh), assessors made a real hash of it, with assessments well out of proportion to market demand. I would like to see a proof of concept to fix this, mainly an automated algorithmic assessment map of land values, based off of public sales records. It's a fun project to attempt; I should start up a repo some time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
- pnathan 10y ago> It would mean, more or less, an urban Marshall Plan for housing. I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata. There's no reason Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc can't all be turned into high-density high-efficiency Manhattan-esque locations. With the increased density comes a more effective tax base and a better scale for urban services.
- wonkaWonka 10y agoOh, okay, yeah, we'll just MAKE people live however we want. We know best, so no one would ever resist.
- wtbob 10y agoOf course, the zoning, parking regulations, mortgage subsidies &c. which led to the present situation are all also instances of making folks live the way planners want.
- tzs 10y agoWeren't those mostly in place before most people who currently live in those places moved there, and don't people often chose where to live based on the rules and regulations of that place? I wouldn't call moving into a place being forced to live under the rules and regulations of that place. Changing the rules and regulations on people who already live there, though, I'd say is forcing because it can be a major effort to move somewhere else, especially if they are an owner rather than a renter.
- msandford 10y agoThey changed the rules and regulations that made housing prices go roughly 3x before I was old enough to buy a house. Why is locking me out of the housing market by preserving other people's paper wealth a moral imperative? Are they more deserving of the money because they're older? Because they already have it? I know the real answer is because they can vote for things that preserve it, and I can't vote for things that erode it. People complain that millenials aren't buying into the american way of life while simultaneously making it so unaffordable as to be roughly financial suicide to participate.
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoI am concerned that we will kill the golden goose...neighborhoods will consist of only the elderly (who remain by virtue of prop 13), and the wealthy. Seems inevitable that neighborhoods of this composition can only support service industries (hair salons, restaurants etc) and will eventually become economic dead zones. In this model, the Bay Area becomes a glorified version of Sand Hill Road...cozy offices for a very few at the top...and every other facet of industry pushed out to affordable areas.
- 1_2__3 10y agoThis is exactly what is happening. The whole South Bay is slowly imploding.
- home_boi 10y agosouth bay isn't that expensive. It's just SF. South bay is cheap compared to the average income of the Bay area
- r00fus 10y agoAre you kidding me? Dunno, but $3k/mo for a 3bdrm apt is pretty unaffordable. Add $500 for duplex, and $1k for a single-family. That's literally double what it used to cost 10y ago.
- pound 10y agoSF would be $3k for 1bdrm
- cmurf 10y agoSan Francisco $84k median income vs $1.1 million median house cost. That is obscenely disproportionate. That's a $5k monthly payment for just P&I, which is 71% of income before taxes and savings. It's completely untenable. http://www.sfhip.org/index.php?module=DemographicData&type=user&func=ddview&varset=1&ve=tab&pct=2&levels=-1&varid=2419&vl=tb&sregcomp=1 http://www.sfhip.org/index.php?module=DemographicData&type=u... http://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/ http://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/
- cehrnrooth 10y agoSF specific anecdote - I had a radical idea while walking up Divisadero last week. What if we removed Divisadero and Geary St. and built apartments where the road is today. You'd have European style narrow streets for pedestrians and could increase the density massively. Imagine taking out the multiple lanes across Geary St and how much housing could be built. Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?
- dpark 10y ago> Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned? Yes. NIMBYism is entirely about public policy. The fact that the land in question might be publicly owned is irrelevant. If anything, publicly owned land should be more subject to NIMBYism. Public land does indeed belong to the citizens.
- pchristensen 10y agoYes, huge NIMBY problem - people drive/bike/ride busses on those streets, and business are on those streets. (not saying they wouldn't benefit from a change, particularly businesses, but many people object to huge changes) You don't need to own something to be a NIMBY. More practically, the width of even wide streets like Geary is narrower than the depth of a typical SF building - see https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62 https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62. Roads overall take up a huge amount of space in a city, but no single road is all that much area. For instance, it looks like the right of way on Geary is about 110'. If it went the full length of SF (~7 miles), then the whole road takes up less than 100 acres. For reference, Park Merced is 150 acres. It would be great if all the lightly trafficked side/residential streets could be squished from 60' to 40', you're talking about 50 blocks -> 1000' width, which is over 3 blocks wide and about a thousand acres, which is approaching the size of the Richmond district (and that's just if you squish in one direction). But you can't just pinch-to-zoom in real life :(
- aclimatt 10y agoI actually think about that all the time. But instead of doing it on Geary or Divis, I think the real win is in SoMa. Our city has six lane streets in some cases -- that's absurd. Build a strip of housing, retail, and parks down the middle of Brannan, and you've turned what I consider one of the least walkable and desirable neighborhoods in SF into somewhere potentially very nice to live.
- hkmurakami 10y agoThe best thing about a city is the forced contact with people who are radically different with each other. Only with time spent together can you begin to understand one another [1]. Given the vitrol and hatred being dished out between disparate groups around the country and the world, making city life affordable has an undeniable macro-level social good aspect to it. [1] one reason why many of us are hopefuly that the Internet will increase our contact with others around the world with radically different upbringings and world views from our own, helping us understand and empathize with one another better.
- ihsw 10y agoSorry but this feelgood empathy-saves-us-all stuff really irks me, frankly I'm not convinced the world will suddenly get better if we all learn to communicate our feelings more effectively. There are plenty I wouldn't bother saving in a life-threatening scenario, and they're perfectly normal people that I just happen to have fundamental disagreements with. That said, I think we are witnessing the effects of your ethno-emotional proposal -- we are all forced to confront each-other's differences as we all come online and the world is convulsing. The internet is amplifying hatred and fear rather than dispelling it.
- muninn_ 10y agoThat's because the Internet does not require human contact. We all act differently in person than from behind a keyboard and a Wi-Fi connection.
- douche 10y agoMaybe we could actually let people work remotely, and not waste billions of hours commuting. Then we could leave these fucking urban and suburban hellscapes, and go live somewhere with green grass, and trees, and mountains, and human-scale communities. Maybe people wouldn't be so neurotic.
- flukus 10y agoBecause there are too many people that think good communication is important and that good communication is comprised solely of face to face meetings. IME these people are universally poor communicators in the much more important text medium.
- ctvo 10y agoI wouldn't go that far. There's a host of conscious and subconscious things we can only get when we're in the same room as someone. It's not surprising people rarely get funding, make hiring decisions, etc. solely from text communication. It's unfair to characterize people / companies who value the additional information as being backwards or old fashion (you didn't do this -- just a general statement).
- stephengillie 10y agoMany jobs, like cutting hair, waiting tables, and changing car oil, are hard to do remotely. If your industry has options for remote work, pursue those instead of bemoaning your current situation.
- makomk 10y agoThose jobs are hard to do remotely because they involve providing services to other people who live in the area - in the case of San Francisco, that's mostly tech industry workers who could work remotely but don't for reasons of industry politics. The hairdressers and mechanics and waiters required to service them act as a multiplier on the resulting population growth, but the cause is all the jobs that could be done remotely but aren't. Every tech firm that insists on operating from SF leads to a penumbra of non-tech workers around it being stuck in SF in jobs that cannot be done remotely.
- bhewes 10y agoCities are inherently places where wealth begets wealth. I can say after living in LA I see the process of its Mahattanization. My guess is my kids won't even understand a suburban LA other then as a historical artifact mostly represented in old films and TV shows.
- bufordsharkley 10y agoAffordable suburbs are, I've come to believe, a transient phenomenon. They exist for a brief and beautiful moment when there's cheap land outside a city center. Then their demand exceeds their supply... and you know the rest.
- jackcosgrove 10y agoThere are some inherent problems with making cities affordable. Dense construction is more expensive per unit area. So even if you could spread out the cost of expensive land among many units, a high density building will cost more per unit to build. Shrinking living spaces can only be taken so far before they hurt quality of life. So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs. Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment. Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. This has already happened with industry, which requires more space than services to be profitable. We are now seeing the service economy priced out of the Bay Area, leaving only the rentier economy. Density is not a panacea.
- bufordsharkley 10y ago> So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs. And yet many will pay, because the benefits of cities are desirable. > Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment. There may be an absolute limit, but with well-executed transit, the density of cities can offer mobility options that less dense communities could not begin to consider. > Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. I agree, but in my take, that's largely because cities are artificially expensive owing to the speculative value of land-- you simply can't build better transit because the cost of land rights would be gigantic. You can't afford to build denser apartment buildings because homeowners enforce restrictive zoning to protect their land values... It's exactly correct that this all benefits rentiers. But I think the right solution is better land-use policy which directly targets rent.
- skewart 10y agoMaybe, as an academic exercise you could find an upper limit on the benefits of density. In practice, however, we are so far from anything remotely resembling a natural limit on the benefits to density that we will see a lot of improvements by freeing cities to become more dense. Removing the artificial constraints on growth imposed by anti-growth nativists will do a lot to improve affordability.
- ThomPete 10y agoBecause of urbanization which will continue to go on for a long time it's going to be next to impossible to drive prices down around the big cities. People will simply just move as close to opportunties as possible and that will drive prices further up. This is why cost of living is going up not down. For all the great things technology does it doesn't solve one of the most fundamental needs of humans.