Why can't you move? If real estate is twice as expensive, just pick a place half the size?
Don't you value your own time---wasted in commuting---at any positive dollar figure at all? If you spend an hour commuting each way for 21 days a month, that's 52 hours a month extra that you spend on `work', even if your employer doesn't gain anything from it.
Which is doublespeak for him feeling entitled to live in a huge and inefficient property for no reason other than him liking it.
If you were really eco-conscious you could probably get more gains out of owning your own house. Especially since most houses have already been built, whereas most of the new construction I see in my city (Baltimore) is going towards mixed-use condos/apartment towers for all the trendy folks wanting to live downtown. If they really cared about the environment and efficiency they'd be fixing-up the thousands of run-down homes.
That's pretty small relative to the extra energy consumption from having to commute farther, and the land that you might live on could be used for solar power regardless of whether you live there.
It's definitely not typical since I'm in the minority of solar panel and electric car owners who are within commute range on a single charge. But there you have it. It's at least possible.
For purposes of that calculation, it's double-counting to include the solar panel energy, because we can already put a solar panel at that location regardless of whether you live and commute from there; your choice to live there did not expand our solar energy capability, and you're still avoidably drawing down the supply of clean energy.
Just to clarify: I'm not criticizing your decision, only justifying why it's not an argument against this being a systemic inefficiency.
But I guess I'm really getting into the definition of efficiency. I suppose in my mind I'm considering clean energy as more efficient even though from an economic POV fossil fuels are still more efficient based on price (though probably not for long).
So in conclusion, you're right. I'd just add the caveat that faced with the reality of a mostly uncoordinated system run by large groups of people with competing interests, you can possibly find higher efficiency (depending on how you look at it) from making your own intelligent individual decisions while living in a large home away from the city center.
Perhaps repairing the houses would be less efficient than building new apartment blocks, I'm really getting well beyond my knowledge or expertise. But I'd somewhat presume that instead of building new high rise apartments downtown it would be more efficient overall if we refurbished some of the crumbling residential areas.
Course that only applies to older cities mostly on the East Coast.
The cost of the housing stock is of minor importance in these arguments, and nobody suggest tearing down existing houses just for the sake of efficiency. That wouldn't make any sense.
(A house build and paid for once can stand for hundred years or more, but only with a constant expense on maintenance in either money or sweat.)
What we want is denser urban cores. That way there will be less sprawl, and even the country pumpkins would have shorter commutes, because the countryside could start so much closer to the city centres: given the same or even larger number of people in them cities, they would take up less space.
Fully charging the Leaf should be about the same as my Fiat 500e, and that's roughly equivalent to running a space heater for 18 hours. I'd conservatively estimate your commute takes 1/8th to 1/4th that power. (There are lots of details I don't know that could affect that.) It is roughly the same going by that.
Perhaps there are families out there that need more space, would like to be self-sufficient especially in emergency situations and feel happier outside of an urban center.
I think if we build these types of communities/houses, we should have a way of sustaining them. This man wants to work and is not asking for a handout. This should be celebrated and the person should be given work to do to earn his keep.
In essence, the paper argues that highly-leveraged homeownership causes NIMBYs.
Also, in most localities in the US, good luck getting custody of any kids if they don't have a separate bedroom.
On a policy level, we can make almost arbitrary amounts of rooms in cities: just build up.
Being able to get rental real estate for your business. In the suburbs you now need a loan, credit, collateral, 30% down, etc to build your own building as there generally isn't a rash of empty floors on skyscrapers like cities do.
Being able to have face to face meetings frequently with your investors, board members, and bankers and other people who hold your pursestrings.
Being able to find investors in the first place. Picture two similar business plans. One by a group in the far out suburbs and one nearby. As an investor, which one would you lean towards, especially if you expect yourself to do any hands on work or attend board meetings?
Being able to get to the airport and mass transportation hubs quickly.
Being able to wine and dine investors and customers in places that will impress them.
Being able to court youngsters and urban professionals who want a city life and won't even interview in the suburbs. (Hi! This is me and almost everyone I know.)
Being near urban universities for the above reasons and job fairs.
Being near your competitors to help you poach their staff.
Being able to work with a local government that understands business needs and not being subjected to a 'board of elders' of out of touch 70 year old suburban retirees who will bikeshed the shit out of any proposal of yours and NIMBY you to death.
Being able to quickly expand by taking more office space instead of, you guessed it, building another fucking building.
Being able to order 1gb fiber and have in here in 30 days as opposed to 360 days in the suburbs and that's on top of paying tens of thousands of dollars for that last mile to your office, which they will need to dig up just for you.
...and yes, maybe some perks of city life as you mention. Work life should have pleasant parts and it helps attract talent.
discretionary income: income minus taxes and base housing costs
hour lost to work: time at work plus time commuting or otherwise stuff you wouldn't otherwise have to do
That metric captures dynamics like "yeah there are jobs, but with much higher cost of living, so it cancels out the DIPHLoW" and "yeah you can live where it's cheaper but you have to commute an extra 90 minutes, which eliminates the impact on DIPHLow".
(Or am I not getting a pun here?)
Edit: Also thought of "discretionary income per UnFree hour" (DIPUPH) ... not sexy either though.
This is to capture that increasing working hours from 8h to 24h a day even when pay would be more than tripled, would leave you with a very sad life.
(Shadow) price of time would be a good one, too? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price) In some sense, that's the same as marginal cost of your time, expressed in dollars or some `utils' or `hedons'.
Then you can say, eg taking a longer commute for a cheaper house would value my time at 30 hedons per hour---but spending time with my daughter is worth at least 50 hedons per hour. So it would be bad trade-off.