8 ms·

To start, the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmen

To start, the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmental externalities, and are more productive. If our only hope is continued "suburbanization with li-ion characteristics", as so many people seem to believe, we're fucked as a country. So this preposterous fact those that all manner of incentives have gone wrong. For example, we now know rent control isn't bad, just like minimium wage: https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/ https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control.... To flip this around, that these neoclassical-economics-defying conclusions are true means the housing market and labor market are terrible markets. We do need to abolish bad zoning and things, but we also need more public housing. The simple fact is we need to build enough dense housing to "devalue" the existing events in terms of their rent revenue, and the private sector will be loath to do that. Another thing is public transportation. Public transit is extremely valuable, but the private sector is unable to provide because a) it's a natural monopoly we can't trust the private sector with (except for Japan, where a bunch of things relating to land use are really different). It works best when cars are beaten back (investments in one hampers the utility of the other), see https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-trains-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train.... The private sector is too impatient without the prospect of terrible rent seeking to wait out a transition from cars, and is also powerless to eradicate lanes and do other things that might driving rightfully harder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM). So people saying every government intervention has unwanted side effects are just shills for the continued retrenchment for the state. The fact is the market cannot coordinate on a scale needed to "turn the ship". At the same time, the emaciation of the administrative state decades across across the US means we have a weak and incompetent pubic sector that's currently incapable of administrating the necessarily infrastructure we need. Hard problems all around, but the former is a hard fact, while the latter is fixable.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources 50% of the world lives in cities yet they consume 70% of the worlds energy.
- aqme28 5y ago
  What are those numbers for American suburbs? We're not comparing to the third world here, we're comparing across models of living in the developed world.
- Swizec 5y ago
  Is that because the 50% who don’t live in cities spend half their typical day in the nearest city?
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I assume it's because people in cities are richer so they tend to consume more.
- othello 5y ago
  To enjoy modern standards of living, medium to high density urban arrangements are much less resource intensive than suburban sprawl, which the relevant comparison point. The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. By contrast, living in the countryside or in suburbia in rich nations is much more environmentally damaging than in dense urban areas, which is what gp was referring to.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    > The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. Literally pre-industrial [1]. Last numbers I saw from the UN estimated 2 billion subsistence farmers as of 2015, all living without the benefit of modern agriculture except the occasional bag of fertilizer or engineered seeds. The future is very unevenly distributed. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Also keep in mind that turning nature into agriculture also has huge environmental costs not captured in energy usage. If "developed cultured" is fixed by pricing the externalities, it would be absolutely better to pack people in cities, replace subsistence farming with sustainable industrial agriculture (no tilling, no aquifer depletion, etc.) and decrease the portion of land devoted to agriculture.
jimmaswell 5y ago
> it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmental externalities, and are more productive If people in the city earn more on average than people elsewhere, then everything will cost more, just supply and demand. Not sure what you can do about that besides put price controls on literally everything. That and the extra taxes and other business costs. When the hot dog vendor has to pay a million dollars a year for their spot at central park then they're going to have to charge more.
- saddlerustle 5y ago
  It's not "just supply and demand". Supply can increase to match demand! The production of almost everything in our lives has economies of scale, so it's surprising that this isn't the case for cost of living in cities. It also use to be true! The main thing that changed is government policies increasingly restricting supply.
  - nobodyandproud 5y ago
    Real estate isn’t instantly scalable. It takes years of planning and decades of execution to create a truly scalable city. With stores, they’re squeezed on both ends: Pressure from online retailers and then exorbitant rents. It’s not unusual to have monthly rents that go into mid-five figures for a small store at ground level. Few small businesses can sustain that in the long term.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    The amount of land in a given area of a city in largely fixed. You can build upwards to create more usable space, but there are no economies of scale in doing this. The relationship is the opposite —- taller buildings are more expensive per unit of area as you go up. Space is a multi-floor building is not constructed marginally like a widget in a factory. Each floor must support the floor above it.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      While this is true, the expectations of the US have also overshot. The US is an outlier in terms of square footage in new homes, American homes are very large. And personally I don't want some 2000 sq ft McMansion because that means all the cooling, heating, cleaning, and maintenance of such a large space that I've only ever seen really used to accumulate lots of stuff. We don't need to go to extremes (a Parisian studio can go as low as 100 square feet!) but house size in the US has mostly crept up as a function of minimum lot sizes in US zoning.
varispeed 5y ago
> The simple fact is we need to build enough dense housing to "devalue" the existing events in terms of their rent revenue, and the private sector will be loath to do that. Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. The supply of residential housing should be at a level, where buying or renting from a private sector could be considered an option, not a necessity. Local governments should be allowed to rent houses from private investors, but pricing should be strictly regulated, so that residential property is not viewed as an investment, but rather as a way of getting maintenance money for idle properties. Residential property investment should be treated as carts and horses of economy and become the past.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  It's not families living in San Francisco. It's single, urban professionals and engineers. I don't like that people aren't really having families anymore, but just pretending that it's still the 70s doesn't exactly work either.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Actually, many of your points are good, just not your first one > The supply of residential housing should be at a level, where buying or renting from a private sector could be considered an option, not a necessity. That's actually good. > Local governments should be allowed to rent houses from private investors Nah, there's no value for the private sector to add, and huge risk of regulatory capture here. We avoid NYCHA failures be saying public housing != low income housing. Allow the average rent to meet costs so public housing is self sufficient. Having average rent not meet costs is moronic politics, basically committing seppuku for the right. > So that residential property is not viewed as an investment, but rather as a way of getting maintenance money for idle properties. Also true! ------- > Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. Saying density means less space for people is dead wrong! Less land space too, but taller buildings can mean bigger units. Back yards don't scale. Ensure people city and natural park access (which the Bay Area has lots of), and then build the buildings as big as possible to give people humane floor space. Ultimately it's single family homes that make people caged hens....in tents.
rcpt 5y ago
> we now know rent control isn't bad Huge ask that we all accept that conclusion from the speech you linked.
- opportune 5y ago
  Yeah. One has only to look at the housing market in Berlin to see that it can be bad. Of course that is one extreme and there are many different ways to implement rent control. Overall I think this is a whole other can of worms in itself though
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Ideally we should build enough public housing that rent control isn't needed, just as ideally we should have strong enough unions that minimum wages aren't needed. But we fail miserably on both those counts, and denying the next best thing does not strike me as useful accelerationism.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  What Prop 13 does for owners, rent control does for renters. Both gives huge advantages to current residents at the expense of future residents. It's obvious why current residents would vote for such a change. This allows current residents to ignore problems as they occur, so these problems grow out of control. We can't keep giving benefits to certain populations of people. You need to work out the negative externalities and tax it. You need to work out the positive externalities and subsidize it. Anything else leads to perverse incentives. If you happen to have a surplus as a result of taxing negative externalities, you should take the tax money and give it back to your residents as a dividend. If you want to have parking minimums, if you want to have certain setbacks and limited building height, if you want to disallow building train-tracks through your backyard, that's fine. But those are externalities on the community and they should ultimately show in the Land Value and that needs to be taxed. When it is not taxed it is incentivized, and those perverse incentives only lead to more bad policies. A Land Value Tax would instantly turn most NIMBY voters into YIMBY voters. Fixing all of these follow-on symptoms would go from an up-hill battle to a downhill breeze. Focus on the disease, tax negative externalities.
Mc91 5y ago
> public transportation I have spent some time in the San Francisco bay area and a lot of time in New York City. Looking at BART and Caltrain schedules - the last Caltrain train leaving San Francisco is three minutes after midnight. The last BART train leaving San Francisco leaves at 1041PM! The BART website says they will add slightly later trains next month, but still - it was like this before Covid too. In New York City, PATH and subway trains run all night. Metro-North, LIRR and New Jersey transit trains run fairly late as well. It's a larger city, but many people commute 40 miles or more every day, and it's no big thing - get on a train in Bay Shore, Suffolk, New York in the morning, and in a little less than an hour you walk out of Penn Station, over 40 miles away. If you want a faster commute, then live 35, or 30, or 25 miles away - still plenty of room for one family homes and lawns if that is your thing. I have taken the BART from SFO into the city during the day, and that worked well enough when I did it, but expanding BART, Caltrain etc. could solve a lot of the Bay's problems of insane rent for a small place in a neighborhood that is not that great.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  NYC is better, but there is still to much sprawl there too. The A train is < 40 miles, and Manhanttan is roughly in the middle, so subways commutes are less long. There is nothing wrong with long regional rail commutes per-se, but the the problem is US "commuter rail" is set up so the richest surburbanites in the biggest homes drive for the rest of their lives (and are the worse green house gas emitters in the country), and just take transit to get to their 9-5 midtown office jobs. This is bad for the environment, and regressive. Transit should serve all classes, and be paired with dense development around stations (think more flushings) so people living far out might have more room for kids, but need not rely on cars to any greater extent. See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/09/the-hempstead-line/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/09/the-hempstead-... and linked posts for plans about this sort of thing.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    NYC metropolitan region was what I was calling sprawl, to be clear. But yes, NYC proper isn't dense enough in parts either.
sgregnt 5y ago
> In a setting where the supply of new housing is already limited by other factors – whether land-use policy or the capacity of existing infrastructure or sheer physical limits on construction – rent regulation will have little or no additional effect on housing supply. I find this sentence to be crucial. So 3/4 of the way into his speech it seems like he mentions perhaps the most important assumption he is making: he is assuming a situation where the supply and demand of housing is already largely fixed regardless of whether there is or there is no rent control. That's a bit funny, if that the case then it's almost by definition, the rent control is not going to have much effect in this case... Even if he is right about what he is pitching for under these assumptions, the discussion seems incomplete unless he also treats the situation where the supply of housing is flexible enough. What happens then? Does rent control has effect on supply in this case? Maybe the problem is actually too much regulation to begin with. Which then leads to very reduced flexibility in the market response. So he is not arguing about policies to reach global optimum, just policies to adjust for a local optimum under heavily regulated market assumption.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Keep in reading, including the comments such as the author's in https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/#comment-13301 https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... : > I’m not entirely unsympathatic to your point of view. If we could do more to boost the supply of affordable housing, there would be less need for rent control, that is true. > But, first, less need is not no need. I don’t think it’s even physically possible to get a perfectly elastic housing supply at the local level, so when local demand rises some people are still going to face displacement from rising rents. And I think they deserve protection from that. Second, and more important, I am not at all sympathetic to the idea that we should remove protections that people very much need today, because they would need them less in a quite different world that we may reach someday. I'd say what you are talked about is exactly addressed. Sure, it would have been good to include in the article this audience, but that wasn't the audience of the original speech.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources 50% of the world lives in cities yet they consume 70% of the worlds energy.

aqme28 5y ago
What are those numbers for American suburbs? We're not comparing to the third world here, we're comparing across models of living in the developed world.
Swizec 5y ago
Is that because the 50% who don’t live in cities spend half their typical day in the nearest city?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I assume it's because people in cities are richer so they tend to consume more.
othello 5y ago
To enjoy modern standards of living, medium to high density urban arrangements are much less resource intensive than suburban sprawl, which the relevant comparison point. The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. By contrast, living in the countryside or in suburbia in rich nations is much more environmentally damaging than in dense urban areas, which is what gp was referring to.
- akiselev 5y ago
  > The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. Literally pre-industrial [1]. Last numbers I saw from the UN estimated 2 billion subsistence farmers as of 2015, all living without the benefit of modern agriculture except the occasional bag of fertilizer or engineered seeds. The future is very unevenly distributed. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Also keep in mind that turning nature into agriculture also has huge environmental costs not captured in energy usage. If "developed cultured" is fixed by pricing the externalities, it would be absolutely better to pack people in cities, replace subsistence farming with sustainable industrial agriculture (no tilling, no aquifer depletion, etc.) and decrease the portion of land devoted to agriculture.

jimmaswell 5y ago

> it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmental externalities, and are more productive If people in the city earn more on average than people elsewhere, then everything will cost more, just supply and demand. Not sure what you can do about that besides put price controls on literally everything. That and the extra taxes and other business costs. When the hot dog vendor has to pay a million dollars a year for their spot at central park then they're going to have to charge more.

saddlerustle 5y ago
It's not "just supply and demand". Supply can increase to match demand! The production of almost everything in our lives has economies of scale, so it's surprising that this isn't the case for cost of living in cities. It also use to be true! The main thing that changed is government policies increasingly restricting supply.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  Real estate isn’t instantly scalable. It takes years of planning and decades of execution to create a truly scalable city. With stores, they’re squeezed on both ends: Pressure from online retailers and then exorbitant rents. It’s not unusual to have monthly rents that go into mid-five figures for a small store at ground level. Few small businesses can sustain that in the long term.
- kube-system 5y ago
  The amount of land in a given area of a city in largely fixed. You can build upwards to create more usable space, but there are no economies of scale in doing this. The relationship is the opposite —- taller buildings are more expensive per unit of area as you go up. Space is a multi-floor building is not constructed marginally like a widget in a factory. Each floor must support the floor above it.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    While this is true, the expectations of the US have also overshot. The US is an outlier in terms of square footage in new homes, American homes are very large. And personally I don't want some 2000 sq ft McMansion because that means all the cooling, heating, cleaning, and maintenance of such a large space that I've only ever seen really used to accumulate lots of stuff. We don't need to go to extremes (a Parisian studio can go as low as 100 square feet!) but house size in the US has mostly crept up as a function of minimum lot sizes in US zoning.

varispeed 5y ago

> The simple fact is we need to build enough dense housing to "devalue" the existing events in terms of their rent revenue, and the private sector will be loath to do that. Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. The supply of residential housing should be at a level, where buying or renting from a private sector could be considered an option, not a necessity. Local governments should be allowed to rent houses from private investors, but pricing should be strictly regulated, so that residential property is not viewed as an investment, but rather as a way of getting maintenance money for idle properties. Residential property investment should be treated as carts and horses of economy and become the past.

iamstupidsimple 5y ago
It's not families living in San Francisco. It's single, urban professionals and engineers. I don't like that people aren't really having families anymore, but just pretending that it's still the 70s doesn't exactly work either.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Actually, many of your points are good, just not your first one > The supply of residential housing should be at a level, where buying or renting from a private sector could be considered an option, not a necessity. That's actually good. > Local governments should be allowed to rent houses from private investors Nah, there's no value for the private sector to add, and huge risk of regulatory capture here. We avoid NYCHA failures be saying public housing != low income housing. Allow the average rent to meet costs so public housing is self sufficient. Having average rent not meet costs is moronic politics, basically committing seppuku for the right. > So that residential property is not viewed as an investment, but rather as a way of getting maintenance money for idle properties. Also true! ------- > Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. Saying density means less space for people is dead wrong! Less land space too, but taller buildings can mean bigger units. Back yards don't scale. Ensure people city and natural park access (which the Bay Area has lots of), and then build the buildings as big as possible to give people humane floor space. Ultimately it's single family homes that make people caged hens....in tents.

rcpt 5y ago

> we now know rent control isn't bad Huge ask that we all accept that conclusion from the speech you linked.

opportune 5y ago
Yeah. One has only to look at the housing market in Berlin to see that it can be bad. Of course that is one extreme and there are many different ways to implement rent control. Overall I think this is a whole other can of worms in itself though
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Ideally we should build enough public housing that rent control isn't needed, just as ideally we should have strong enough unions that minimum wages aren't needed. But we fail miserably on both those counts, and denying the next best thing does not strike me as useful accelerationism.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
What Prop 13 does for owners, rent control does for renters. Both gives huge advantages to current residents at the expense of future residents. It's obvious why current residents would vote for such a change. This allows current residents to ignore problems as they occur, so these problems grow out of control. We can't keep giving benefits to certain populations of people. You need to work out the negative externalities and tax it. You need to work out the positive externalities and subsidize it. Anything else leads to perverse incentives. If you happen to have a surplus as a result of taxing negative externalities, you should take the tax money and give it back to your residents as a dividend. If you want to have parking minimums, if you want to have certain setbacks and limited building height, if you want to disallow building train-tracks through your backyard, that's fine. But those are externalities on the community and they should ultimately show in the Land Value and that needs to be taxed. When it is not taxed it is incentivized, and those perverse incentives only lead to more bad policies. A Land Value Tax would instantly turn most NIMBY voters into YIMBY voters. Fixing all of these follow-on symptoms would go from an up-hill battle to a downhill breeze. Focus on the disease, tax negative externalities.

Mc91 5y ago

> public transportation I have spent some time in the San Francisco bay area and a lot of time in New York City. Looking at BART and Caltrain schedules - the last Caltrain train leaving San Francisco is three minutes after midnight. The last BART train leaving San Francisco leaves at 1041PM! The BART website says they will add slightly later trains next month, but still - it was like this before Covid too. In New York City, PATH and subway trains run all night. Metro-North, LIRR and New Jersey transit trains run fairly late as well. It's a larger city, but many people commute 40 miles or more every day, and it's no big thing - get on a train in Bay Shore, Suffolk, New York in the morning, and in a little less than an hour you walk out of Penn Station, over 40 miles away. If you want a faster commute, then live 35, or 30, or 25 miles away - still plenty of room for one family homes and lawns if that is your thing. I have taken the BART from SFO into the city during the day, and that worked well enough when I did it, but expanding BART, Caltrain etc. could solve a lot of the Bay's problems of insane rent for a small place in a neighborhood that is not that great.

Ericson2314 5y ago
NYC is better, but there is still to much sprawl there too. The A train is < 40 miles, and Manhanttan is roughly in the middle, so subways commutes are less long. There is nothing wrong with long regional rail commutes per-se, but the the problem is US "commuter rail" is set up so the richest surburbanites in the biggest homes drive for the rest of their lives (and are the worse green house gas emitters in the country), and just take transit to get to their 9-5 midtown office jobs. This is bad for the environment, and regressive. Transit should serve all classes, and be paired with dense development around stations (think more flushings) so people living far out might have more room for kids, but need not rely on cars to any greater extent. See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/09/the-hempstead-line/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/09/the-hempstead-... and linked posts for plans about this sort of thing.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  NYC metropolitan region was what I was calling sprawl, to be clear. But yes, NYC proper isn't dense enough in parts either.

sgregnt 5y ago

> In a setting where the supply of new housing is already limited by other factors – whether land-use policy or the capacity of existing infrastructure or sheer physical limits on construction – rent regulation will have little or no additional effect on housing supply. I find this sentence to be crucial. So 3/4 of the way into his speech it seems like he mentions perhaps the most important assumption he is making: he is assuming a situation where the supply and demand of housing is already largely fixed regardless of whether there is or there is no rent control. That's a bit funny, if that the case then it's almost by definition, the rent control is not going to have much effect in this case... Even if he is right about what he is pitching for under these assumptions, the discussion seems incomplete unless he also treats the situation where the supply of housing is flexible enough. What happens then? Does rent control has effect on supply in this case? Maybe the problem is actually too much regulation to begin with. Which then leads to very reduced flexibility in the market response. So he is not arguing about policies to reach global optimum, just policies to adjust for a local optimum under heavily regulated market assumption.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ericson2314 5y ago
Keep in reading, including the comments such as the author's in https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/#comment-13301 https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... : > I’m not entirely unsympathatic to your point of view. If we could do more to boost the supply of affordable housing, there would be less need for rent control, that is true. > But, first, less need is not no need. I don’t think it’s even physically possible to get a perfectly elastic housing supply at the local level, so when local demand rises some people are still going to face displacement from rising rents. And I think they deserve protection from that. Second, and more important, I am not at all sympathetic to the idea that we should remove protections that people very much need today, because they would need them less in a quite different world that we may reach someday. I'd say what you are talked about is exactly addressed. Sure, it would have been good to include in the article this audience, but that wasn't the audience of the original speech.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]