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Land use policies make urban childcare expensive and rare
- brailsafe 3y agoI feel like land use policies make everything expensive and everything except parking lots and gas stations rare.
- HPsquared 3y agoIn my city at least, parking is in perpetual short supply.
- antognini 3y agoThat is because it is underpriced.
- magicalhippo 3y agoA city here in Norway had issues because rich people would just pay the $75 fine instead of following the parking regulations (ie time limits). Somehow repeat offenses did not escalate the punishment.
- kgermino 3y agoOr they have unstated standards. People will regularly complain that my city (Milwaukee) doesn’t have enough parking when they really mean parking that is some combination of free, on street and adjacent to their destination. Which… sure but there’s a $5 garage a block away with 300 empty spaces. There is an issue in some areas where most to all of the parking spaces are privately owned and not publicly offered at any price but in theory a culture of paying a fair price to store your large personal property would encourage those private holders to offer spaces up to the public and solve that issue too
- bombcar 3y agoSomething that can solve this issue is removing the free spaces entirely. If all parking is a minimum of $5, then the garage is fine. But if there are SOME free spaces, people will circle to blocks for hours trying to find one. People are weird.
- bombcar 3y agoHousing is in short supply, too, because it is underpriced. (There's something of a way that this may be true, but people won't like it.)
- brailsafe 3y agoInterestingly it's easier in most markets for people to buy more of a scarce supply of houses at any price than it is for the same person to occupy parking spaces. I know you're being a bit facetious, but housing is a fundamentally more complex component of the economy, as well as being the easiest plaything of people with money; the only way housing wouldn't be so expensive is if most places never put constraints in place in terms of building, while putting serious constraints on buying. Much like trying to out-exercise a diet of cookies and fudge won't work, out-building an endless source of capital that wants to bank on renters having no choice is a losing game. We need a lack of dampers on one side, and huge dampers on the other.
- smallmancontrov 3y agoThat's the idea. Gotta pump that land value!
- NewJazz 3y agoHow is a slab of asphalt or concrete, optionally with corrosive/toxic chemicals stored in underground containers, maximizing the value of the land? Something must be really fucked if that is what our society truly incentivizes.
- ipaddr 3y agoThat represents travel and allows the average person to visit places in the city. Like having a bike rack.
- NewJazz 3y agoBike rack, sidewalk, or parking lot... The value of that land is in people wanting to travel to and from it. Notice how all the national car parks are near forests and other nature-y places.
- drozycki 3y agoThe idea is that the politically active homeowners follow their self interest when they support policy which discourages new housing construction, driving scarcity in the housing market to raise prices.
- smallmancontrov 3y agoWhenever you see the word "value," the critical question is "who's value." In the case of capitalism, it is wealth-weighted-people. In order to understand how the world works, picture a random sample of 10 wealth-weighted-people and ask yourself whether or not (screwball action) benefits them.
- zbrozek 3y agoWe would do well as a nation to overturn Euclid v. Ambler. That Supreme Court decision was a mistake.
- r00fus 3y agoI mean, I think throwing out all zoning may be an over-step. I sure as hell don't want a chicken factory built next to my residence. However, a scale-back of zoning (like what CA state recently did - threatening the "builder's remedy" on cities/counties that didn't plan to expand housing appropriately) is probably a good idea. CA also recently made it easier to basically convert SFH to essentially 6-plexes (cost is an issue, so it's not an immediate fix). The major issue with most of America's woes has to do with us being an effective oligarchy and money having more say on what goes on than what most people want.
- zbrozek 3y agoThat's not what Euclid v. Ambler did, however. We had controls on legitimate health and safety concerns (e.g., pollution) prior to that ruling. The ruling dramatically increased the scope of police powers expressly and specifically against housing - things like floor area ratio, setbacks, number of habitable units, heights - that had not been within that scope before. It was unabashedly racist and classist, even in the text of the opinion.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alexb_ 3y ago> Family-friendly land use reforms make for more vibrant, joyous, and welcoming cities—they’re good for the entire city. Other cities hoping to stem the tide of families flowing to the suburbs should follow Austin’s lead. Every single time I read about land use, I feel like people are running head first into exactly the point and still completely missing it. People think others must have the same opinions and worldviews as they do, so they don't even consider the real reason land use policies are they way they are. They don't realize that people are just racist. Maybe you read this and think "that's crazy, I'm not racist and I am against upzoning!". Well, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the person who is so passionate about keeping the neighborhood's "character" that they will go to every single local planning meeting to keep black people out. I'm talking about the person who will talk about how they don't want "big city problems". I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring. The exclusion is the point. Over and over and over again I see well-meaning people think they can just convince people that it makes it cheaper, convince people about the economy, surely that will be the breakthrough! But it's racism. It has been racism ever since the first zoning laws that banned laundromats next to houses, knowing landromats were mostly owned by the Chinese. It's been racism ever since highways divided cities into the "good side" and "bad side". Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs.
- zajio1am 3y ago> Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs. Counterargument: The same/equivalent zoning, land use and NIMBY problems happen in countries that are racially homogeneous.
- bwestergard 3y agoCan you give a few examples?
- pydry 3y agoChildcare affordability is yet another reason why we need to kill land hoarding with a land value tax.
- voat 3y agoHow is that different than property taxes?
- loeg 3y agoProperty taxes are assessed on land value + "improvements" (i.e., structures) value. A land value tax doesn't tax the imps. This generally encourages doing more productive things with the same parcel of land.
- Detrytus 3y agoI think it's a bit different: property tax taxes the actual property that is located on the piece of land, i.e. single family home, for its current value. Land value tax works differently: tax authorities ask themselves a question: "what is the most profitable thing one could possibly build on that land?", and they tax you based on that. Which means that if you build a single family home in the neighborhood of 7-stories apartment buildings you will be taxed as if you owned an apartment building. And the only way for you to be able to afford those taxes is to actually build 7-stories apartment building there. EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws might not be worded the way I described it, but the net effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?" question.
- loeg 3y agoNo, you've completely invented a system that is not how land value taxes work.
- firejake308 3y ago
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoI get it, but this person is comparing apples-to-oranges. Austin, TX is not Brooklyn, NYC. Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury. > By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and expensive to open new childcare centers. Again, Austin, TX is not NYC.
- alexb_ 3y ago> Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable, and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury. What makes it onerous? Why does Brooklyn not have that luxury?
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoBecause Austin, TX has a very small and quaint downtown district with big, wide sidewalks and lots of extra concrete space in the roadways and ample gaps between storefronts and pedestrian walkways. Downtown BK has none of that.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoYou do realise that for most of New York's history, when its construction was most productive, we had no real urban planning? If anything, the abundance and diversity of spaces in Brooklyn should make it easier to deregulate where childcare can be provided.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago[flagged]
- Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago"Ample gaps" means walking and cycling FURTHER (often across paved, dangerous, parking lots) to get to your destination. American cities are built for cars, not for people.
- mwkaufma 3y agoArticle's recommendation is just another meaningless tug in the tug-of-war over parking. Conspicuously unmentioned is the public pressure to deal with "you have to drive everywhere and there's no parking when you get there." If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use and there's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
- guestbest 3y agoJust put the children in a pod and send them home through a pneumatic tube
- smeej 3y agoIt looks like you're getting downvotes, but most kids would think this was an awesome way to get to school!
- mwkaufma 3y agoFWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."
- awkward 3y agoHow would parking requirements solve that? Would parents drive to the school and then leave the car with their preschoolers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nocoiner 3y agoIsn’t it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare is much more a function of Baumol’s cost disease than parking minimums or land use requirements? It’s hard to bring any kind of desirable productivity revolution to childcare - it’s inherently a pretty one-to-few proposition at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how you get away from the labor intensivity of it all. Absent subsidies (whether provided by a government, employer, religious order or other specific community), I’m honestly not sure how a safe, sensible, desirable product can be delivered at what anyone would consider a reasonable cost. I grant that there is probably some room in there for in-home child care that probably more closely resembles a hobby business than a true commercial endeavor - I can see zoning type issues being completely determinative on whether child care at this scale is feasible or not. But I also don’t think those are the types of arrangements that the author of TFA was really describing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Isn’t it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare is much more a function of Baumol’s cost disease than parking minimums or land use requirements? If labour were the principle cost component of childcare, yes. That does not appear to be the case. (EDIT: Never mind, labour is the principle cost [1].) Consider, for example, how the problem would be solved if people could (legally) run childcare out of their apartments. [1] https://raisingnewyork.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/12/NY-Cost-of-Quality-Report-Raising-NY.pdf https://raisingnewyork.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/1...
- taeric 3y agoThis intrigues me, what is the principal cost? Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly open to the argument that land use policies are a problem. And I am no fan of minimum parking rules. At the same time, I also know that parking doesn't cease to be a problem just because you don't want to build it. I've had the joy of going to a doctor's office where I couldn't figure out where to park within a 5 block radius of it. What was a convenient doctor when I lived within that 5 block radius turned into a miserable experience when I moved a bit further away. Same experience when dropping the kids off for a birthday party in some denser part of town. (At least there I can gripe to the kids saying they need to bike the 10 miles next time. Isn't that far, all told. :D) Back to the question, labor strikes me as a thing that would be rather expensive for child care. Specifically, child care that isn't staffed by teenagers and has adequate staffing for the number of kids being cared for.
- cafard 3y agoExpensive, maybe, but I see child-care groups in downtown Washington, DC, fairly regularly--three-year-olds with a hand on a rope, grownups in front and back. I could walk in fifteen minutes past two day-care centers.
- throwaway22032 3y agoUrbanists strike me as being cult-like at this point. It's like absolutely everything is a pain in the arse in a city, and it's all because of some sort of conspiracy by Big Car. A more balanced viewpoint is that there are many advantages to living in a city, but cheap land and raising a family are not one of them. The suburbs of smaller towns have always been easier places to raise children. Rural areas, or smaller villages with schools, were better before the car was even invented.
- tpdly 3y ago[dead]
- jfil 3y agoA non-urbanist counterpoint: here in Canada, the federal government has been making big strides towards $10/day daycares. No anti-car. Just extra payments to daycares. We live in an urban area (middle of Toronto), succedsfully raising children, lots of childcares around, and daycare costs have gone down by 50%. No need to move to the suburbs. One interesting aspect of childcares in this area: they buy out an entire house. I believe that a major part of making a childcare work financially is to use it to cover a mortgage/invest in real estate. Without that, there is very little profit to be made.