> measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.
So, human engineering, with totally good intentions. Can you define 'right mix of people' in a non-totalitarian way?
So, human engineering, with totally good intentions. Can you define 'right mix of people' in a non-totalitarian way?
That’s why you have 6,580 people who are bidding on 95 affordably priced homes.
The fact that you have 70 people applying per home is what we’d call a signal that those homes are in demand, the problem preventing more supply coming on line to meet that demand is the zoning laws, again.
uh, well sure I mean there is probably a ton of demand for $100 4Runners too
Unless your idea is that companies shouldn’t take steps to meet demand and instead try to artificially restrict supply?
Of course pretending you're one of the restricting supply businesses while in fact increasing supply (ie. Apple) beats both business models by an incredible margin.
And then there is the business model of enforcing your own position by having government goons (rules or actual goons) drive out the competition, which certainly restricts supply (Verizon/AT&T, Suez, Electrabel, Atos Worldline, Total, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Glencore, Gazprom, ING, AXA, BNP Paribas, ... and then there's this tiny little thing called "China")
There's certainly a place for all of these.
This is all the extreme end of the situation, and we're not there yet, but it's the path we're on in many cities with San Francisco being at the forefront.
You can't have every worker specialize in to a narrow niche and then suddenly remove half of those niches from your society with no replacement and expect it to run smoothly
Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.
Forcing 'the right mix of people' _reeks_ of totalitarian state. Who gets to decide?
Are there going to be income/education quotas? Male vs female? Racial quotes?
Expecting market pressure to take care of everyone is condemning people to die. I agree that the market is more efficient, but that efficiency comes without any sort of humanity. There are people who have no talents that are worth enough in our current economic configuration to earn enough to live at market clearing wages. Should we just let them starve or go homeless because of it?
I also agree that planning a 'right mix' of people does reek of totalitarianism, but the other choice isn't any better.
I don't see how letting the rich choose who gets to live a decent life based on whose most useful to them is any less totalarian when our society is channeling more and more wealth everyday to a small group of people.
(2) Even if you have only market-rate housing, that doesn't mean the people who can't afford it end up homeless. You can just give them or their landlords money. In the USA, that's Section 8.
Economists generally like Section 8. It gets a bad reputation, because the apartments tend to be shabby; but that's a question of the amount of the subsidy, not the delivery mechanism. For a given total to spend, I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.
The real answer is that more housing needs to be built if demand is this high, but for various reasons that seems politically unfeasible for most US cities
Do you want to get USSR? Because one committee plays God and regulates who lives where. Then some other committee, no doubt well-intentioned, will apply the same logic to groceries. And cars. And salaries. And this is how you become USSR.
I don't want people dying on the street. I think more permissive zoning laws would solve a lot of our housing affordability crisis, but not all of it. For the rest, I think subsidies for market-rate housing (like Section 8) are the most efficient and transparent solution, and much less USSR-like than what the linked article describes. What do you think?
You pay teachers more, you pay policemen more, and your taxes go up. You start paying all the waitresses more, the supermarket workers more, the janitors more, your cost of living just goes up.
Wage isn't really an absolute, it's a ratio to the cost of living. So in response to all their food getting more expensive, their taxes going up, etc, you end up paying all your darling tech/finance workers more. Then you're right back where you started. You've solved absolutely nothing, you've just embiggened some numbers.