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What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

by sjg007 5y ago

hedora 5y ago
Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
- Swizec 5y ago
  > My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down. The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled. To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically. Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office. I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal. The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
waheoo 5y ago
Properly implementing OKRs. Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure. You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year. Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it. What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives. Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
visualradio 5y ago
In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%. The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
paxys 5y ago
You don't even have to build housing specifically for the homeless. You don't have to build BMR or affordable housing. Just build more housing, period, and the problem will eventually solve itself.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The problem with saying this is that while it makes sense if you connect the dots, the path of those dots isn't direct so it's non-obvious to some. A government spending that money can't just build housing and have it solve the problem through market forces because the government won't be participating in the market that way. What a government has to do is incentivize the market, and through incentivizing the market (even if that's taking out many disincentives that have been put in place) cause market participants to build more housing. So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.

What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

by sjg007 5y ago

What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)

Swizec 5y ago
> My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down. The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled. To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically. Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office. I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal. The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.

waheoo 5y ago

Properly implementing OKRs. Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure. You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year. Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it. What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives. Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)

visualradio 5y ago

In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%. The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.

paxys 5y ago

You don't even have to build housing specifically for the homeless. You don't have to build BMR or affordable housing. Just build more housing, period, and the problem will eventually solve itself.

kbenson 5y ago
The problem with saying this is that while it makes sense if you connect the dots, the path of those dots isn't direct so it's non-obvious to some. A government spending that money can't just build housing and have it solve the problem through market forces because the government won't be participating in the market that way. What a government has to do is incentivize the market, and through incentivizing the market (even if that's taking out many disincentives that have been put in place) cause market participants to build more housing. So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.