5 ms·

I don't think those alternatives are comparable. People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible

I don't think those alternatives are comparable. People can't afford housing because it is scarce, and made artificially scarce on purpose. It is not possible for a million people to each own a home in an area where there are only 650,000 homes which is why the price increases until a third of them can't; there is no other solution than building more housing. The people opposed to this are opposed simply because they already own property and want housing prices to remain high and then come up with various excuses to rationalize their avarice. Congestion pricing is a trade off. The proponents will point out that it "works" in the sense that high taxes deter use, but that's ignoring the other side of the ledger. There are many other ways to reduce congestion than deterring use through taxation. One of them is to build more housing, for example, so that people can live closer to work and have shorter commutes. Another is to eliminate the fares for mass transit, so its relative cost advantage increases but the difference is created by using ordinary general purpose progressive taxes to fund the system instead of imposing a regressive tax on anyone with an unavoidable need to drive a vehicle. The latter also improves privacy for both drivers and riders by removing both mass surveillance systems that tie everyone's movements to them through the payments system, and increase government efficiency because revenue collection through general taxes has much lower overhead than transit collections infrastructure. There are actually reasons to oppose congestion pricing because there are alternatives to it that achieve the same goal more efficiently with fewer negative externalities.

jeffbee 2y ago
None of your supposed alternatives were actually on the table. Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. If your solutions are politically impossible or predicated on a revolution, they aren't legitimate alternatives. In this sense, the connection with housing/homelessness discourse is completed: many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there. Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston. > many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first. There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever. The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.
  - jakelazaroff 2y ago
    > Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike? Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.
7e 2y ago
There are better, valid reasons to oppose building more housing. Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't! Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly. After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example. The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions. The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't! It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite. > Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs. > The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco. > The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws. If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.

jeffbee 2y ago

None of your supposed alternatives were actually on the table. Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. If your solutions are politically impossible or predicated on a revolution, they aren't legitimate alternatives. In this sense, the connection with housing/homelessness discourse is completed: many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Traffic in Manhattan is largely caused by drivers from other states and the state of New York has exactly one means to tax that behavior. Both of the suggestions would actually address this. If you stop constraining housing construction in New York then more housing is created in New York and the people who work in New York could actually live there instead of commuting in from other states, which would consequently increase New York's tax base. If you eliminate fares for mass transit, they're equally removed for people commuting from out of state, who are meanwhile still doing business in New York as that's why they commute in, and are then subject to its other taxes the same as anyone else working there. Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Notice that it gets passed first in New York (a city directly adjacent to state borders) and not e.g. Los Angeles or Houston. > many non-solutions to housing costs are predicated on the workers' glorious revolution happening first. There is still only one solution to housing scarcity even in the presence of the workers' glorious revolution. Those solutions tend to be something like "have the government build a lot of new housing" which, although not necessary (the market would do it if you'd just stop restricting people from building in most places), is fundamentally just a different proposal for doing the same thing the opponents don't want to be done in any way whatsoever. The problem with the housing market is high housing prices, which is the thing the opponents of building want to preserve. The problem with transit is congestion, which nobody wants and then it's a debate over how to solve the problem rather than a fight against people whose actual goal is for it not to be solved.
- jakelazaroff 2y ago
  > Meanwhile disproportionately taxing people from outside of the jurisdiction is another disadvantage of congestion pricing, because it's taxation without representation and thereby creates a perverse incentive for the local government to use an inefficient system specifically because it taxes people without a voice in the relevant government. Is it also “taxation without representation” when NJ Transit charges me a fare to go to New Jersey or to drive on the Turnpike? Infrastructure costs money and the people who use it should help pay for its upkeep and externalities.

7e 2y ago

There are better, valid reasons to oppose building more housing. Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't! Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly. After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example. The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions. The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't! It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite. > Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs. > The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco. > The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws. If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.