7 ms·

I don't care what the problems are: what we need is not people reporting other people to the kommandantuur. It simply isn't.

arcticbull 3y ago
The solution has always been to build more housing. Onerous zoning laws are preventing supply and demand from coming into balance. Single-family zoning needs to be banned. It's not actually that complicated, and to your point, it doesn't involve reporting your neighbors to the authorities.
- wtallis 3y ago
  How much single-family zoning is there in New York City?
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    A surprising amount, but of course that's not the only way of impeding construction. See San Francisco's shadow aversion. New York City is around 15%. Note that Manhattan has among the lowest prevalence of single-family zoning in the US, and a density of almost 70,000 people per square mile. 83% of the Bay Area is zoned single-family and has a density of just 400 people per square mile. [edit] If you look at NYC-adjacent counties, Bergen, Fairfield, Nassau, and Westchester the numbers get far worse. About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses. [1] [1] https://rpa.org/latest/lab/our-region-needs-more-housing-end-single-family-zoning https://rpa.org/latest/lab/our-region-needs-more-housing-end...
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      > About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses. That could be totally fine. Many people like living in detached housing and having that near rail service to a major city seems like a good thing. If the concern is zoning that precludes other uses, that’s a different thing, but a mere observation that X% of housing in some area is of a particular, often very desirable, type isn’t conclusive to me. If you want public transport to be seen as something everyone uses, it’s probably good that outlying counties like Westchester have detached SFRs in addition to the 44% higher density housing.
      - acdha 3y ago
        If detached single family homes are so popular, you wouldn’t need the government to prevent people from building what they want. Those rules were designed to ensure that certain neighborhoods were only for “the right kind of people”, not because Moses came down from the mountain with a single-family zoning plan.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        They are wildly popular. It's not the government preventing people from building what they want (though that's the proximate mechanism). It's people who live there and voted in the government and advocated for those policies. This is not a government problem, but a people's preferences problem.
        acdha 3y ago
        You have to consider selection bias here: people live where they can afford to, not necessarily where they’d like. You aren’t seeing what people who were excluded on price or racial lines would want, and you’re not seeing how many people truly want only that style versus not disliking it enough to organize a political movement, since depending on the area that can require things like supermajorities and even nullifying covenants in deeds. This also hits the tension cities have for balancing the interests of long-term residents against the future. Lots of places have this dynamic now where old retirees block any changes either because they’re opposed to change or fearful of losing the equity which is most of their retirement, but anyone looking at the city finances knows that they need more residents, especially of working age, and that includes lower income families if you want to be able to have service workers, city employees, etc. actually live there. This is especially true in places like California where old residents pay far less in taxes but have equally high, if not higher, expectations for city services.
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      > and has a density of just 400 people per square mile. Oh wow, that's low enough to count as rural in the UK.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > The solution has always been to build more housing The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places. However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral. You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive. Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms. One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston. One thing they have in common is no real constraints on zoning. > The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places. The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work. Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1] > However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral. Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way, it's environmentally friendly and gives us access to all sorts of services and social groups. Concentration of talent makes the Bay Area the Bay Area. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5-million-single-family-homes-due-to-a-decade-of-under-building-report-says-2fb86d08 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5...
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Yeah the existence of a cheap house doesn’t make housing cheap, or even scalable at that cheap price, since things are priced at the margins, if suddenly a few people flocked to cheap town it’s prices will go up fast.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        A $100000 house going up to $105000 is not the same as a $1000000 house going up to $1050000. Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed.
jdewerd 3y ago
I'm not keen to report my neighbor, but my landlord is not my neighbor. They could hardly be more not my neighbor if they tried. When my rent skyrockets amid lots of vacant new construction (I'm not in CA, we're actually building around here), "gee, I'd like to help these fine fellows cheat on their taxes" is not the first thought to cross my mind.
- wilg 3y ago
  Of course, some people's landlords actually are their neighbors.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    I wonder what the ratio of tenant landlords to corporate rentseekers is?
    - kevindamm 3y ago
      I don't have hard figures on this but I've been in the sphere long enough to gather some knowledge.. in NYC there are a few orders of magnitude more apartments owned by corporate rentseekers than there are tenant-landlords, but there are a few orders of magnitude again between the number of tenant-landlords greater than the number of corporate rentseekers.
  - jdewerd 3y ago
    One pays deadweight loss, the other receives deadweight loss. If they are literal neighbors, they are not metaphorical neighbors.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Our landlord lives downstairs from us, and we have two preschoolers. He is a saint.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Are they actually the landlord or just an onsite manager? I've seen both, but the onsite manager has been much more common in my experience
acdha 3y ago
This is a weird position: it sounds like you’re saying the problem is enforcing laws irrespective of the merits of those laws. I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule. Note the kind of conditions here: > Tenants living among empty apartments have described trash, mold, open windows, leaky gas pipes and rodents as scourges in their buildings. All this bill does is increase the odds of that neglect having consequences for the landlord, and it seems especially fair when there’s been a noted trend of units being left empty during a housing crisis hoping to jack the rent up in the future. This kind of thing has a real impacts on people because the rent controlled apartments they’re talking about are the only option for a lot of working poor.
- Spivak 3y ago
  It's really amazing that we've gone full 180 on "see something, say something" being good and not a horribly dystopian reaction to 9/11. These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. The intent might be noble and it might even be in response to a epidemic of break-ins but turning all eyes into a tool of the state is not a can of worms we should be opening. Even worse is this, making everyone not just the eyes but the prosecutors themselves. > The new bill also empowers tenants to sue landlords to force owners to open up vacant apartments for inspection. Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. It was bad when the abortion law did it and it's bad here. Throwing away our principles as long as the right people get hurt makes us no better than those far-right nutjobs.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. This is also the engine that powers every piece of the Civil Rights Act.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. Well, let’s step back and look at impact. If we used Ring cameras to have 100% enforcement of jaywalking laws, that’d be widely recognized as extreme because there’s no damage to everyone else. If we used the same cameras to have 100% enforcement of mugging, the reverse would be true because the only consequences are on people who everyone agrees deserve punishment. This seems to be in the latter camp: buildings whose owners have neglected them to the point that there are actual hazards to the residents. It isn’t some vague hypothetical future risk but a very clear question: the citizens of New York have decided that nobody should have to live in a building with rats or mold, should landlords be required to follow that law? The other concern with Ring cameras is that they could be misused for other purposes. That’s real there but not applicable here because this isn’t general data collection and everything funnels through a city office with a neutral third-party. The government can only get data when someone is bothered enough to report it, and if a report is specious the city inspector is going to quickly realize this.
yreg 3y ago
I don't care much about people investing in apartments, but citizen reporting is not flat out a wrong thing. E.g. reporting illegaly parked cars is highly positive. So is reporting domestic violence or animal cruelty.
imtringued 3y ago
You're not reporting other people, you're reporting the state of their property.

arcticbull 3y ago

The solution has always been to build more housing. Onerous zoning laws are preventing supply and demand from coming into balance. Single-family zoning needs to be banned. It's not actually that complicated, and to your point, it doesn't involve reporting your neighbors to the authorities.

wtallis 3y ago
How much single-family zoning is there in New York City?
- arcticbull 3y ago
  A surprising amount, but of course that's not the only way of impeding construction. See San Francisco's shadow aversion. New York City is around 15%. Note that Manhattan has among the lowest prevalence of single-family zoning in the US, and a density of almost 70,000 people per square mile. 83% of the Bay Area is zoned single-family and has a density of just 400 people per square mile. [edit] If you look at NYC-adjacent counties, Bergen, Fairfield, Nassau, and Westchester the numbers get far worse. About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses. [1] [1] https://rpa.org/latest/lab/our-region-needs-more-housing-end-single-family-zoning https://rpa.org/latest/lab/our-region-needs-more-housing-end...
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses. That could be totally fine. Many people like living in detached housing and having that near rail service to a major city seems like a good thing. If the concern is zoning that precludes other uses, that’s a different thing, but a mere observation that X% of housing in some area is of a particular, often very desirable, type isn’t conclusive to me. If you want public transport to be seen as something everyone uses, it’s probably good that outlying counties like Westchester have detached SFRs in addition to the 44% higher density housing.
    - acdha 3y ago
      If detached single family homes are so popular, you wouldn’t need the government to prevent people from building what they want. Those rules were designed to ensure that certain neighborhoods were only for “the right kind of people”, not because Moses came down from the mountain with a single-family zoning plan.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        They are wildly popular. It's not the government preventing people from building what they want (though that's the proximate mechanism). It's people who live there and voted in the government and advocated for those policies. This is not a government problem, but a people's preferences problem.
        acdha 3y ago
        You have to consider selection bias here: people live where they can afford to, not necessarily where they’d like. You aren’t seeing what people who were excluded on price or racial lines would want, and you’re not seeing how many people truly want only that style versus not disliking it enough to organize a political movement, since depending on the area that can require things like supermajorities and even nullifying covenants in deeds. This also hits the tension cities have for balancing the interests of long-term residents against the future. Lots of places have this dynamic now where old retirees block any changes either because they’re opposed to change or fearful of losing the equity which is most of their retirement, but anyone looking at the city finances knows that they need more residents, especially of working age, and that includes lower income families if you want to be able to have service workers, city employees, etc. actually live there. This is especially true in places like California where old residents pay far less in taxes but have equally high, if not higher, expectations for city services.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    > and has a density of just 400 people per square mile. Oh wow, that's low enough to count as rural in the UK.
cyberax 3y ago
> The solution has always been to build more housing The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places. However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral. You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive. Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms. One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston. One thing they have in common is no real constraints on zoning. > The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places. The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work. Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1] > However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral. Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way, it's environmentally friendly and gives us access to all sorts of services and social groups. Concentration of talent makes the Bay Area the Bay Area. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5-million-single-family-homes-due-to-a-decade-of-under-building-report-says-2fb86d08 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-has-a-shortfall-of-6-5...
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Yeah the existence of a cheap house doesn’t make housing cheap, or even scalable at that cheap price, since things are priced at the margins, if suddenly a few people flocked to cheap town it’s prices will go up fast.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      A $100000 house going up to $105000 is not the same as a $1000000 house going up to $1050000. Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed.

jdewerd 3y ago

I'm not keen to report my neighbor, but my landlord is not my neighbor. They could hardly be more not my neighbor if they tried. When my rent skyrockets amid lots of vacant new construction (I'm not in CA, we're actually building around here), "gee, I'd like to help these fine fellows cheat on their taxes" is not the first thought to cross my mind.

wilg 3y ago
Of course, some people's landlords actually are their neighbors.
- cdchn 3y ago
  I wonder what the ratio of tenant landlords to corporate rentseekers is?
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    I don't have hard figures on this but I've been in the sphere long enough to gather some knowledge.. in NYC there are a few orders of magnitude more apartments owned by corporate rentseekers than there are tenant-landlords, but there are a few orders of magnitude again between the number of tenant-landlords greater than the number of corporate rentseekers.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  One pays deadweight loss, the other receives deadweight loss. If they are literal neighbors, they are not metaphorical neighbors.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Our landlord lives downstairs from us, and we have two preschoolers. He is a saint.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Are they actually the landlord or just an onsite manager? I've seen both, but the onsite manager has been much more common in my experience

acdha 3y ago

This is a weird position: it sounds like you’re saying the problem is enforcing laws irrespective of the merits of those laws. I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule. Note the kind of conditions here: > Tenants living among empty apartments have described trash, mold, open windows, leaky gas pipes and rodents as scourges in their buildings. All this bill does is increase the odds of that neglect having consequences for the landlord, and it seems especially fair when there’s been a noted trend of units being left empty during a housing crisis hoping to jack the rent up in the future. This kind of thing has a real impacts on people because the rent controlled apartments they’re talking about are the only option for a lot of working poor.

Spivak 3y ago
It's really amazing that we've gone full 180 on "see something, say something" being good and not a horribly dystopian reaction to 9/11. These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. The intent might be noble and it might even be in response to a epidemic of break-ins but turning all eyes into a tool of the state is not a can of worms we should be opening. Even worse is this, making everyone not just the eyes but the prosecutors themselves. > The new bill also empowers tenants to sue landlords to force owners to open up vacant apartments for inspection. Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. It was bad when the abortion law did it and it's bad here. Throwing away our principles as long as the right people get hurt makes us no better than those far-right nutjobs.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. This is also the engine that powers every piece of the Civil Rights Act.
- acdha 3y ago
  > These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. Well, let’s step back and look at impact. If we used Ring cameras to have 100% enforcement of jaywalking laws, that’d be widely recognized as extreme because there’s no damage to everyone else. If we used the same cameras to have 100% enforcement of mugging, the reverse would be true because the only consequences are on people who everyone agrees deserve punishment. This seems to be in the latter camp: buildings whose owners have neglected them to the point that there are actual hazards to the residents. It isn’t some vague hypothetical future risk but a very clear question: the citizens of New York have decided that nobody should have to live in a building with rats or mold, should landlords be required to follow that law? The other concern with Ring cameras is that they could be misused for other purposes. That’s real there but not applicable here because this isn’t general data collection and everything funnels through a city office with a neutral third-party. The government can only get data when someone is bothered enough to report it, and if a report is specious the city inspector is going to quickly realize this.

yreg 3y ago

I don't care much about people investing in apartments, but citizen reporting is not flat out a wrong thing. E.g. reporting illegaly parked cars is highly positive. So is reporting domestic violence or animal cruelty.

imtringued 3y ago

You're not reporting other people, you're reporting the state of their property.