5 ms·
Notably, most major cities have been building tons of housing (especially ‘affordable housing’) right next to highways, as it is the only areas that aren’t alre
by lazide 2mo ago
Notably, most major cities have been building tons of housing (especially ‘affordable housing’) right next to highways, as it is the only areas that aren’t already built out with tons of high value houses.
Surprise surprise.
- energy123 2mo agoIt's a dumping ground for poor people.
- tony69 2mo agoIt’s not like they do it on purpose rubbing hands
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoHousing development happens at random?
- masklinn 2mo agoPlus the US literally built highways in the middle of poor neighbourhoods.
- alex0015 2mo agoDevelopers build apartments where they can make money from them, in other words where they can rent them for enough that they'll make back their investment. It's very expensive to build housing, so the only way to make the investment back and have low rental prices is to try to make the building costs as low as possible. A big part of those costs is the price of land.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoWhat's even the point of this comment?
- alex0015 2mo agoThe parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.
- lazide 2mo agoOr, the only places to build houses with reasonable costs are in areas that weren’t already built out with very expensive houses. Which will tend to be less desirable areas, by definition. One approach, of course, would be to also make existing houses less expensive/desirable. Notably, wealthy people tend to have the resources to fight efforts to do that.
- ben_w 2mo agoThe other approach is to expand what land is available to build on. I understand that in the UK, farmers consider it a lottery win if they get planning permission for some of their farmland to become housing. Despite what many in the UK think about it "being full", this is mostly an illusion from how cramped are the parts in which the houses are allowed to go; the country as a whole is mostly undeveloped. (There are of course other considerations, with "why did you build on a flood plain?" being one of the failure modes in the UK).
- lazide 2mo agoWell, letting people build houses right next to freeways and/or on things like earthquake faults or flood plains is what is being done here. Which is, uh, also a problem. Since those people are now at much higher risk, eh? Building on farmland has national security concerns (as countries are slowly realizing), as the country ends up dependent on foreign food imports after awhile. Can't grow food effectively when there is a subdivision there instead eh? In most high demand areas (which are the ones everyone is complaining about, generally), all the decent land (or even just 'normal' land) is already developed. Bonus - next time around, even the flood plain land might be 'too expensive' to develop on, and folks will only be able to afford houses at the dump, or in a swamp, or the like. Yay.
- afiori 2mo agoWoke activists love the word "systemic" for a reason. If a bunch of good people acting in good faith produce a result an evil mastermind would want does it matter if they are good? On many levels obviously yes, on some practical levels the system and the incentives still need to change.