5 ms·

That is an overly simplistic view of land ownership. In reality, nobody is an island. Much of the value of your land is provided by the presence of nearby peopl

by Decade 9y ago

That is an overly simplistic view of land ownership. In reality, nobody is an island. Much of the value of your land is provided by the presence of nearby people. The landlords in the city center get a lot of benefit from their investment in the area, but in a functional environment they are limited by competition and regulation, i.e., neighbors building more densely and taxes that rise with land values. In effect, you should pay rent to the city for the benefit that it provides to you. Silicon Valley suffers from the limited mobility and perverse incentives from a bad 1978 tax law. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_proposition_13_is_bad_policy_and_here_are_some_graphs_to_show.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_... Even outside California, American sprawl does not pay adequate rents. It was subsidized by tax benefits and federal matching funds for building to federal standards. In the long run, the suburbs need to either contract, going back to septic tanks and expensive bespoke utilities, or expand into full-fledged cities. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/6/22/greatest-hits-stroad-nation https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/6/22/greatest-hits-... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/16/reinventing-the-city-at-scale https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/16/reinventing-th...

rsj_hn 9y ago
I'm not sure what point you are responding to. I never said that man was an island. The idea that landlords "invest" in city centers by capturing rents is quite funny. They certainly aren't investing by earning income, nor is the quality of the housing stock very high. And of course Prop 13 ensures that landowners pay little in the way of taxes. So what exactly are these investments in exchange for people turning over 1/3 of their income to them? The truisms that Silicon Valley is limited by land aren't really relevant to any point being made by anyone in this discussion. The question is not whether land is a constraint, but what the best ways are of dealing with the constraint. So far, the consensus has been to recruit more land into use because improving transportation technologies gives us a more efficient way to recruit land rather than building taller buildings. This is true for a number of reasons -- e.g. look at the gains in efficiency in travel over the last 100 years versus the gains in efficiency in construction. Look at basic geography -- the ability to decrease transportation costs by 1/2 allows for a quadrupling of the available land that can be recruited. Or look at basic physics -- a 50% reduction in the cost of building an additional floor still requires tearing down the existing building before making it taller, as you can't just add another floor to an existing skyline like you can add another zone to an existing city. You need a stronger foundation before you can add a new floor. Anyways, you're not going to get anywhere with strawman arguments or by regurgitating talking points. Density has been declining all over the world in areas with or without zoning laws, because transportation has been advancing much faster than construction. This is a fundamental tradeoff that determines whether a region gets more or less dense.
- Decade 9y ago
  Landlords invest in city centers by buying land and then developing it. If they rent it out, then they need to spend money to maintain it. Or they can sell the land to new landlords. Whoever owns the land takes on the risk that it might decrease in value, such as during the time of Cold War subsidies of white flight,[0] or during the time of NAFTA destruction of inefficient manufacturing. Again, you are using island mentality, that it doesn’t matter where the land is as long as you can drive there. In reality, location matters tremendously because infrastructure doesn’t scale that much. The San Francisco Bay Area now has the most ridiculous commutes in the country,[1] yet a couple Bay Area suburbs have gone bankrupt recently (in accordance with the other links that I posted in this thread). Increasing density is not just about maintaining greenbelts,[2] but it is also about creating more financially sustainable patterns of living. Also, I find your idea of destroying everything to build more to be very odd. Surely, in physical terms, it should be quite possible to tear down a 2-story single-family home and replace it with a 4-unit, 3–5-story multi-family home. And in a functional market, you can clear out a 3-unit building to build a 5-unit building, because everybody would be able to find another place that they can afford. Developers don’t all have to be mega-developers with skyline-altering skyscrapers.[3] But Prop 13 has perverse incentives against that, too: Creating a taller building will trigger a tax reassessment and increase your property tax rate; not to mention all the stupid costs of zoning and the approval process. Currently, only the mega-developers have the resources to build successfully. Thus, the rules that were intended to improve social equity have instead increased inequality. [0] https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause... [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/job-boom-intensifies-traffic-and-housing-woes/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/job-boom-intensifies-t... [2] http://www.sfhac.org http://www.sfhac.org [3] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-growing-incrementally https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g...

by Decade 9y ago

rsj_hn 9y ago

I'm not sure what point you are responding to. I never said that man was an island. The idea that landlords "invest" in city centers by capturing rents is quite funny. They certainly aren't investing by earning income, nor is the quality of the housing stock very high. And of course Prop 13 ensures that landowners pay little in the way of taxes. So what exactly are these investments in exchange for people turning over 1/3 of their income to them? The truisms that Silicon Valley is limited by land aren't really relevant to any point being made by anyone in this discussion. The question is not whether land is a constraint, but what the best ways are of dealing with the constraint. So far, the consensus has been to recruit more land into use because improving transportation technologies gives us a more efficient way to recruit land rather than building taller buildings. This is true for a number of reasons -- e.g. look at the gains in efficiency in travel over the last 100 years versus the gains in efficiency in construction. Look at basic geography -- the ability to decrease transportation costs by 1/2 allows for a quadrupling of the available land that can be recruited. Or look at basic physics -- a 50% reduction in the cost of building an additional floor still requires tearing down the existing building before making it taller, as you can't just add another floor to an existing skyline like you can add another zone to an existing city. You need a stronger foundation before you can add a new floor. Anyways, you're not going to get anywhere with strawman arguments or by regurgitating talking points. Density has been declining all over the world in areas with or without zoning laws, because transportation has been advancing much faster than construction. This is a fundamental tradeoff that determines whether a region gets more or less dense.

Decade 9y ago
Landlords invest in city centers by buying land and then developing it. If they rent it out, then they need to spend money to maintain it. Or they can sell the land to new landlords. Whoever owns the land takes on the risk that it might decrease in value, such as during the time of Cold War subsidies of white flight,[0] or during the time of NAFTA destruction of inefficient manufacturing. Again, you are using island mentality, that it doesn’t matter where the land is as long as you can drive there. In reality, location matters tremendously because infrastructure doesn’t scale that much. The San Francisco Bay Area now has the most ridiculous commutes in the country,[1] yet a couple Bay Area suburbs have gone bankrupt recently (in accordance with the other links that I posted in this thread). Increasing density is not just about maintaining greenbelts,[2] but it is also about creating more financially sustainable patterns of living. Also, I find your idea of destroying everything to build more to be very odd. Surely, in physical terms, it should be quite possible to tear down a 2-story single-family home and replace it with a 4-unit, 3–5-story multi-family home. And in a functional market, you can clear out a 3-unit building to build a 5-unit building, because everybody would be able to find another place that they can afford. Developers don’t all have to be mega-developers with skyline-altering skyscrapers.[3] But Prop 13 has perverse incentives against that, too: Creating a taller building will trigger a tax reassessment and increase your property tax rate; not to mention all the stupid costs of zoning and the approval process. Currently, only the mega-developers have the resources to build successfully. Thus, the rules that were intended to improve social equity have instead increased inequality. [0] https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause... [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/job-boom-intensifies-traffic-and-housing-woes/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/job-boom-intensifies-t... [2] http://www.sfhac.org http://www.sfhac.org [3] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-growing-incrementally https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g...