4 ms·

I'm pretty right wing. The way I see it, most left wing "solutions" to poverty seem to be sticking plasters rather than actual fixes. We should build enough no

by throwaway22032 4y ago

I'm pretty right wing. The way I see it, most left wing "solutions" to poverty seem to be sticking plasters rather than actual fixes. We should build enough normal houses in areas people want to live such that 90%+ can afford them, make owning and operating a car affordable, and make raising a family affordable. I don't think any of this is about spending money. It's more about defining the problem. As I see it the problem is that a ton of people are in a super precarious position, renting their lives with no real stability.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> We should build enough normal houses in areas people want to live such that 90%+ can afford them, make owning and operating a car affordable, and make raising a family affordable. That hasn’t really worked anywhere: popular places attract so many people that you literally can’t put supply into synch with demand. San Francisco is already a dense city, would it be as cheap as Manhattan if it had Manhattan like density? Maybe, but Manhattan isn’t cheap. It might be better to focus more on better intercity and intracity transport like they do in Japan, or allow for smaller cheaper places to live like they do in Tokyo (incidentally, aggressively deprecating the value of structures like they do in Japan might help as well).
- Redoubts 4y ago
  > San Francisco is already a dense city The vast majority of residential there is single family homes. Why do you think this? https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-map-single-family-homes-17699820.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-map-single-family-... > 38% of the city’s land is zoned for single-family homes, which is almost two-thirds of all the land zoned for residential purposes. You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    By American city standards, San Francisco is dense. Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other. > You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years. What do you mean? I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense, and plenty expensive to rent for locals.
    - Redoubts 4y ago
      > Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other Is that supposed to mean something? Most housing there doesn’t look like a The Painted Ladies anyways, and being denser amongst the most middling cohort possible isn’t an accomplishment. > I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense What’s plenty? Why do you think it’s enough? And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        > Is that supposed to mean something? Row house are dense housing. No yards, they don’t take up much space on the ground. If you are comparing it to people who live in apartments sure, not as dense, but the SFHs you think exist in SF don’t really, the neighborhoods are all fairly dense given the land costs involved. > And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising. How is that different from “The popular place everyone wants to live should build enough housing to support that affordably”? Consider: IDK if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people want to live in Seattle in the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in Seattle isn’t surprising. Are you just using another standard for China, or do you mean the situation is truly different?
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  An apartment is not a normal house, density is not what I'm advocating here. The vast majority of people don't want that. It's a sticking plaster. People want normal lives. Not pokey flats with no car and eating vegetables. That's a 1, maybe 5% bizarro world coastal thing.
lliamander 4y ago
Indeed. The only levers government has is to subsidize demand and restrict supply, both of which have the effect of increasing prices and making life less affordable.
jackson1442 4y ago
I think one of the problems is we keep searching for a "miracle cure" rather than getting our hands dirty and putting in the work to fix these problems. Rather than thinking of each as a distinct issue, we should think about these as a complicated web of problems: fixing one may make another worse temporarily, but if we work on several at once, we can make a meaningful difference for a lot of people. Let's take home values, for example. Homeowners are typically against changes that can decrease their property value because of how important home ownership is for generational wealth here. We've made the assumption that house prices will increase YoY forever, which just isn't feasible - especially considering homes will age and encounter more and more issues as they age. Naturally, you have NIMBYs who don't want their home values to decrease – honestly, I can't blame them. I think making housing affordable for everyone (or at least _most_ of everyone) will require a significant shift about how we think about home ownership. There's also the hidden cost of suburban developments to cities[0] which results in chronic underfunding of city services, not to mention the added cost of car ownership typically required to live in a single-family home. I drive rather little, but typically spend ~$150/mo on insurance and gas alone in a given month. It's a hard problem that will require many people smarter than me to figure out how to get us out of this web. But I think that it can happen if we acknowledge that our cities have problems and actually invest time and money into fixing it. [0]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-build-the-poorer-we-get https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-bui...

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

> We should build enough normal houses in areas people want to live such that 90%+ can afford them, make owning and operating a car affordable, and make raising a family affordable. That hasn’t really worked anywhere: popular places attract so many people that you literally can’t put supply into synch with demand. San Francisco is already a dense city, would it be as cheap as Manhattan if it had Manhattan like density? Maybe, but Manhattan isn’t cheap. It might be better to focus more on better intercity and intracity transport like they do in Japan, or allow for smaller cheaper places to live like they do in Tokyo (incidentally, aggressively deprecating the value of structures like they do in Japan might help as well).

Redoubts 4y ago
> San Francisco is already a dense city The vast majority of residential there is single family homes. Why do you think this? https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-map-single-family-homes-17699820.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-map-single-family-... > 38% of the city’s land is zoned for single-family homes, which is almost two-thirds of all the land zoned for residential purposes. You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  By American city standards, San Francisco is dense. Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other. > You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years. What do you mean? I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense, and plenty expensive to rent for locals.
  - Redoubts 4y ago
    > Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other Is that supposed to mean something? Most housing there doesn’t look like a The Painted Ladies anyways, and being denser amongst the most middling cohort possible isn’t an accomplishment. > I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense What’s plenty? Why do you think it’s enough? And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      > Is that supposed to mean something? Row house are dense housing. No yards, they don’t take up much space on the ground. If you are comparing it to people who live in apartments sure, not as dense, but the SFHs you think exist in SF don’t really, the neighborhoods are all fairly dense given the land costs involved. > And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising. How is that different from “The popular place everyone wants to live should build enough housing to support that affordably”? Consider: IDK if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people want to live in Seattle in the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in Seattle isn’t surprising. Are you just using another standard for China, or do you mean the situation is truly different?
throwaway22032 4y ago
An apartment is not a normal house, density is not what I'm advocating here. The vast majority of people don't want that. It's a sticking plaster. People want normal lives. Not pokey flats with no car and eating vegetables. That's a 1, maybe 5% bizarro world coastal thing.

lliamander 4y ago

Indeed. The only levers government has is to subsidize demand and restrict supply, both of which have the effect of increasing prices and making life less affordable.

jackson1442 4y ago

I think one of the problems is we keep searching for a "miracle cure" rather than getting our hands dirty and putting in the work to fix these problems. Rather than thinking of each as a distinct issue, we should think about these as a complicated web of problems: fixing one may make another worse temporarily, but if we work on several at once, we can make a meaningful difference for a lot of people. Let's take home values, for example. Homeowners are typically against changes that can decrease their property value because of how important home ownership is for generational wealth here. We've made the assumption that house prices will increase YoY forever, which just isn't feasible - especially considering homes will age and encounter more and more issues as they age. Naturally, you have NIMBYs who don't want their home values to decrease – honestly, I can't blame them. I think making housing affordable for everyone (or at least _most_ of everyone) will require a significant shift about how we think about home ownership. There's also the hidden cost of suburban developments to cities[0] which results in chronic underfunding of city services, not to mention the added cost of car ownership typically required to live in a single-family home. I drive rather little, but typically spend ~$150/mo on insurance and gas alone in a given month. It's a hard problem that will require many people smarter than me to figure out how to get us out of this web. But I think that it can happen if we acknowledge that our cities have problems and actually invest time and money into fixing it. [0]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-build-the-poorer-we-get https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-bui...