7 ms·

I used to think like you but no longer do. A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Yes those people who live i

by bedobi 3y ago

I used to think like you but no longer do. A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Yes those people who live in that most central subsidized housing are in some ways winning a lottery ticket, and the real policy is to build a lot more housing as close to the city as possible. But Paris are doing that! AND adding new public transit etc etc. This multifaceted approach is better than just sterile economista policy. Vienna does it very successfully as well. Almost no one owns their home there, they're all renting very cheaply very high quality beautiful homes, including inside and very close to the city.

bko 3y ago
Ok,think of the politician you dislike the most. Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide. Would you still support the system? We should have a clear objective system of governance that allows even terrible people to oversee it
- digging 3y ago
  > Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide. How much room for discretion is there actually in promoting diversity? I suppose you could forcibly break up poorer immigrant communities which would be pretty harmful.
  - bko 3y ago
    It's simple, there are laws in the US that state that you cannot discriminate based on sex, religion, nationality, race, etc. if you would want to allow certain programs to help certain groups based on those characteristics you would have to lift those laws. Do you favor removing those laws?
    - digging 3y ago
      Oh this is one of those conversations; I'm leaving
bboygravity 3y ago
Why does everybody need to concentrate in huge cities? If Romans where able to relatively evenly spread their towns and population all over the place in the analogue age, then why aren't we able to do so in the digital age?
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Rome may not have invented the apartment block (insula) but they sure were fond of their high density residential/commercial space... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)
- penetrarthur 3y ago
  While being "huge", good European cities are quite homogenous throughout most of the area with 4-6 floor apartment buildings, small businesses in almost every building, parks, schools, good public transport system. They don't feel exactly "huge".
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Because ~90% of the population was farming
  - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
    [dead]
- ttymck 3y ago
  Did Romans enjoy walking to the coffee shop or the grocery store?
- digging 3y ago
  The principles would be the same even if we concentrated on small cities. A city must promote social diversity to grow the quality of social interaction (even indirect interactions, like walking through a neighborhood built by different ideas and in different styles).
rafaelero 3y ago
What do you mean cities need it not to die? Would you say Monaco is dead? What about Zurich? Oslo?
- foldr 3y ago
  Don't those all have a reputation of being rather dull and culturally insignificant in comparison to Paris?
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    Are you suggesting there's a strong correlation between the number of low-salary workers living in the city and the presence of the Louvre or the Centre Pompidou?
    - foldr 3y ago
      Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793? Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings? Also, mixed income housing in Paris has a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris#The_Haussmann_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
      - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        >Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793? No; I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. In fact, that seems like a fairly strange statement given that I mentioned the Centre Pompidou (opened in the 1970s) in practically the same breath. >Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings? No; again, not sure where that's coming from. My point, which you didn't address at all, was that you seemed to be implying that there was some kind of correlation between lower-income housing in cities and their cultural significance. Was that your goal? If so, can you explain further?
moconnor 3y ago
Interesting, so to put this in market terms, the city is allowing the value that such people add to it to be offset against the cost of their rent. This would mean that cities like Paris choosing to do this is entirely rational and GP's calculation fails to reach this conclusion because it ignores the actual trade that is being made in these cases? Or to make a clichéd example: being cool and arty isn't particularly rewarded by salaries because there are a limited number of opportunities for this to improve a company's profitability. But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society. Well, some people do. But everyone is paying for it, even if they'd rather save.
  - underlipton 3y ago
    If the value your espousing is, "No one should ever pay to have others live better than them off a livelihood that they don't support," a great portion of the remainder of America's middle class gets Thanos snapped. A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat. If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers, then that's fine. If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them, that's the issue I'm mentioning.
      - 3y ago
krona 3y ago
> A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Correct. Therefore, subsidized housing is good and more of it is better? No, it does not follow. What you say is correct, to a degree. Beyond that, it is incorrect. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
- TimPC 3y ago
  If you agree the city dies without people of all ages backgrounds and income levels what is your alternative proposal to subsidized housing. It's just a fact that some income levels are being priced out of the city and certain occupations may become entirely unavailable without some mechanism of solving that gap.
  - krona 3y ago
    Either you willingly misunderstood my comment, or you are so absolutist in your thinking that you're incapable of understanding the concept of a limiting principle in social policy.
    - eszed 3y ago
      Whoa whoa, dude. You're being unnecessarily hostile. GP's question was a fair one, and not (by my reading) unkindly phrased. Even if I'm wrong about that, personal attacks aren't welcome contributions: flag and move on.
      - krona 3y ago
        Being strawmanned in the most mundane and cliched of ways is deserving of opprobrium. HN is better than that. It's tiresome.
  - dantheman 3y ago
    Building more types of housing. It's simple - allow people to build, allow denser construction, allow smaller apartments, etc. Hell most of NYC would not be allowed to be built today because the apartments are too small -- yet these are the most desirable areas...
rmbyrro 3y ago
In general, I'm against govt interventions like this, but in the case of housing, I agree with you. For a society to function in a healthy way, it can't be divided in social class "gettos". It is the responsibility of the State to spend public funds to avoid that. This is not about fairness and equality. It's about the long term survival of a society.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Even further: extremely affordable technology now exists such that the leaders of our "democracies" could ask the public's opinions on such matters in a wide variety of fine-grained ways, or even better: facilitate a high quality moderated public conversation that actually involves the public on these and other matters. This may even be a requirement for a healthy society. Unfortunately, current styles of "democracy" not only do not do this, they instead engage in deceptive propaganda to make it appear like they do this and more (how you can tell: observe how people praise "democracy", based on clearly silly memes). I often wonder if the quality of these institutions in an absolute sense (as opposed to a relative comparison to literal fascist dictatorships, the only other option dontchaknow) may have something to do with some people thinking they should be eliminated and replaced, a sentiment which is always and without exception represented as being dumb/etc. Note also that these institutions also control school curriculum, which "denies" the public the skills needed to realize any of this is going on, how utterly riddled with error and deceit/delusion the public conversation is, etc.
  - bedobi 3y ago
    > ask the public's opinions on such matters this would be a disaster take how Hidalgo is deprioritizing private automobiles on the streets of Paris most of the public was passionately and intensely opposed to that, but she did it anyway now, people can't imagine ever going back to how it was before - families being able to walk and ride bikes along the Seine and Rue de Rivoli is too nice = asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to result in locking in status quo because people don't really know what they want, but they're usually pro status quo and opposed to change
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Subsidies always have a cost on public finances. In Paris' case, the financial situation is bad and getting worse with a debt on track to reach EUR10 billion. So it seems to me that Paris is borrowing like there is no tomorrow. This usually does not end well.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  It entirely depends on how the money is spent. If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base, it's a good prudent strategy, certainly better than the supposedly more fiscally responsible do-nothing strategy that can just as easily lead to financial ruin as irresponsible drunken-sailor spending.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    > If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base Obviously, this is not what they are doing, debts growing with quite high tax rises at the same time ("taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year). Paris is often depiected as a great model, especially by liberal foreign media, but the reality is rather different, and I believe that the Mayor's approval rating is currently abyssmal...
    - kspacewalk2 3y ago
      Not at all obvious. What is obvious is that returns on many investments, such as vastly improving housing and transportation for city residents, have multi-year lags. Like, obviously when you just spent billions on improving your RER, properly redesigning your streets to not be deadly by design anymore, and buying up housing, you'll be in the read that fiscal year. >"taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year My French is rusty, but it was a 50% increase, it was previously the lowest of all cities in France, and it was not raised since 2011[0]. It is also peanuts compared to property taxes in Canada where I live, and especially compared to many parts of the US. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because property taxes pay for different things in different countries (i.e. in Canada provincial taxes pay for schools, in the US it comes out of your municipal property taxes). But still, we're not talking about one of the main taxes for an average French citizen, clearly. [0] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-paris-anne-hidalgo-annonce-une-augmentation-de-10_55025669.html https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-pa...
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
closeparen 3y ago
Suppose you get a job offer, or your adult child has a newborn, or your aging parent's health takes a turn for the worse. Instead of being able to simply move, this instead starts a decade-scale process that has a 1% of chance of allocating you a public housing unit in the end. What does that do for dynamism? People's intentions about when and where to move are important. A housing system that removes all individual agency from this question, abdicating everything to a government lottery/waiting list system, can meet other desiderata but is clearly losing something important.

by bedobi 3y ago

bko 3y ago

Ok,think of the politician you dislike the most. Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide. Would you still support the system? We should have a clear objective system of governance that allows even terrible people to oversee it

digging 3y ago
> Now imagine the discretion of "people of all ages backgrounds income levels etc" would fall to his or her purview to decide. How much room for discretion is there actually in promoting diversity? I suppose you could forcibly break up poorer immigrant communities which would be pretty harmful.
- bko 3y ago
  It's simple, there are laws in the US that state that you cannot discriminate based on sex, religion, nationality, race, etc. if you would want to allow certain programs to help certain groups based on those characteristics you would have to lift those laws. Do you favor removing those laws?
  - digging 3y ago
    Oh this is one of those conversations; I'm leaving

bboygravity 3y ago

Why does everybody need to concentrate in huge cities? If Romans where able to relatively evenly spread their towns and population all over the place in the analogue age, then why aren't we able to do so in the digital age?

082349872349872 3y ago
Rome may not have invented the apartment block (insula) but they sure were fond of their high density residential/commercial space... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)
penetrarthur 3y ago
While being "huge", good European cities are quite homogenous throughout most of the area with 4-6 floor apartment buildings, small businesses in almost every building, parks, schools, good public transport system. They don't feel exactly "huge".
spywaregorilla 3y ago
Because ~90% of the population was farming
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
ttymck 3y ago
Did Romans enjoy walking to the coffee shop or the grocery store?
digging 3y ago
The principles would be the same even if we concentrated on small cities. A city must promote social diversity to grow the quality of social interaction (even indirect interactions, like walking through a neighborhood built by different ideas and in different styles).

rafaelero 3y ago

What do you mean cities need it not to die? Would you say Monaco is dead? What about Zurich? Oslo?

foldr 3y ago
Don't those all have a reputation of being rather dull and culturally insignificant in comparison to Paris?
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  Are you suggesting there's a strong correlation between the number of low-salary workers living in the city and the presence of the Louvre or the Centre Pompidou?
  - foldr 3y ago
    Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793? Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings? Also, mixed income housing in Paris has a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris#The_Haussmann_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
    - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      >Are you suggesting that nothing of cultural significance has happened in Paris since the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793? No; I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. In fact, that seems like a fairly strange statement given that I mentioned the Centre Pompidou (opened in the 1970s) in practically the same breath. >Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings? No; again, not sure where that's coming from. My point, which you didn't address at all, was that you seemed to be implying that there was some kind of correlation between lower-income housing in cities and their cultural significance. Was that your goal? If so, can you explain further?

moconnor 3y ago

Interesting, so to put this in market terms, the city is allowing the value that such people add to it to be offset against the cost of their rent. This would mean that cities like Paris choosing to do this is entirely rational and GP's calculation fails to reach this conclusion because it ignores the actual trade that is being made in these cases? Or to make a clichéd example: being cool and arty isn't particularly rewarded by salaries because there are a limited number of opportunities for this to improve a company's profitability. But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society. Well, some people do. But everyone is paying for it, even if they'd rather save.
- underlipton 3y ago
  If the value your espousing is, "No one should ever pay to have others live better than them off a livelihood that they don't support," a great portion of the remainder of America's middle class gets Thanos snapped. A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > A lot of the decently-paying jobs in services, tech, etc. that these communities rely on essentially make the world a worse place, but they're profitable, and people gotta eat. If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers, then that's fine. If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them, that's the issue I'm mentioning.
    - 3y ago

krona 3y ago

> A city NEEDS to have people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels etc in it to not die. Correct. Therefore, subsidized housing is good and more of it is better? No, it does not follow. What you say is correct, to a degree. Beyond that, it is incorrect. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

TimPC 3y ago
If you agree the city dies without people of all ages backgrounds and income levels what is your alternative proposal to subsidized housing. It's just a fact that some income levels are being priced out of the city and certain occupations may become entirely unavailable without some mechanism of solving that gap.
- krona 3y ago
  Either you willingly misunderstood my comment, or you are so absolutist in your thinking that you're incapable of understanding the concept of a limiting principle in social policy.
  - eszed 3y ago
    Whoa whoa, dude. You're being unnecessarily hostile. GP's question was a fair one, and not (by my reading) unkindly phrased. Even if I'm wrong about that, personal attacks aren't welcome contributions: flag and move on.
    - krona 3y ago
      Being strawmanned in the most mundane and cliched of ways is deserving of opprobrium. HN is better than that. It's tiresome.
- dantheman 3y ago
  Building more types of housing. It's simple - allow people to build, allow denser construction, allow smaller apartments, etc. Hell most of NYC would not be allowed to be built today because the apartments are too small -- yet these are the most desirable areas...

rmbyrro 3y ago

In general, I'm against govt interventions like this, but in the case of housing, I agree with you. For a society to function in a healthy way, it can't be divided in social class "gettos". It is the responsibility of the State to spend public funds to avoid that. This is not about fairness and equality. It's about the long term survival of a society.

mistermann 3y ago
Even further: extremely affordable technology now exists such that the leaders of our "democracies" could ask the public's opinions on such matters in a wide variety of fine-grained ways, or even better: facilitate a high quality moderated public conversation that actually involves the public on these and other matters. This may even be a requirement for a healthy society. Unfortunately, current styles of "democracy" not only do not do this, they instead engage in deceptive propaganda to make it appear like they do this and more (how you can tell: observe how people praise "democracy", based on clearly silly memes). I often wonder if the quality of these institutions in an absolute sense (as opposed to a relative comparison to literal fascist dictatorships, the only other option dontchaknow) may have something to do with some people thinking they should be eliminated and replaced, a sentiment which is always and without exception represented as being dumb/etc. Note also that these institutions also control school curriculum, which "denies" the public the skills needed to realize any of this is going on, how utterly riddled with error and deceit/delusion the public conversation is, etc.
- bedobi 3y ago
  > ask the public's opinions on such matters this would be a disaster take how Hidalgo is deprioritizing private automobiles on the streets of Paris most of the public was passionately and intensely opposed to that, but she did it anyway now, people can't imagine ever going back to how it was before - families being able to walk and ride bikes along the Seine and Rue de Rivoli is too nice = asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to result in locking in status quo because people don't really know what they want, but they're usually pro status quo and opposed to change

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Subsidies always have a cost on public finances. In Paris' case, the financial situation is bad and getting worse with a debt on track to reach EUR10 billion. So it seems to me that Paris is borrowing like there is no tomorrow. This usually does not end well.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
It entirely depends on how the money is spent. If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base, it's a good prudent strategy, certainly better than the supposedly more fiscally responsible do-nothing strategy that can just as easily lead to financial ruin as irresponsible drunken-sailor spending.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  > If Paris is making investments that will enable it to substantially grow its tax base Obviously, this is not what they are doing, debts growing with quite high tax rises at the same time ("taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year). Paris is often depiected as a great model, especially by liberal foreign media, but the reality is rather different, and I believe that the Mayor's approval rating is currently abyssmal...
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    Not at all obvious. What is obvious is that returns on many investments, such as vastly improving housing and transportation for city residents, have multi-year lags. Like, obviously when you just spent billions on improving your RER, properly redesigning your streets to not be deadly by design anymore, and buying up housing, you'll be in the read that fiscal year. >"taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year My French is rusty, but it was a 50% increase, it was previously the lowest of all cities in France, and it was not raised since 2011[0]. It is also peanuts compared to property taxes in Canada where I live, and especially compared to many parts of the US. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because property taxes pay for different things in different countries (i.e. in Canada provincial taxes pay for schools, in the US it comes out of your municipal property taxes). But still, we're not talking about one of the main taxes for an average French citizen, clearly. [0] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-paris-anne-hidalgo-annonce-une-augmentation-de-10_55025669.html https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-pa...

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

closeparen 3y ago

Suppose you get a job offer, or your adult child has a newborn, or your aging parent's health takes a turn for the worse. Instead of being able to simply move, this instead starts a decade-scale process that has a 1% of chance of allocating you a public housing unit in the end. What does that do for dynamism? People's intentions about when and where to move are important. A housing system that removes all individual agency from this question, abdicating everything to a government lottery/waiting list system, can meet other desiderata but is clearly losing something important.