The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages...
I'm in between generations and watching the old vs young bickering / division is painful to see... but I've also got a low tolerance for a lot of the "OMG boomers" stuff out there from folks who as a whole have a really poor voting record. Get in the game people....
If you want to fix voting for the younger generation the barriers to actually vote need to be lessened if not removed.
Did I have "a lot going on"? Sure. Do I have utter faith in "The Government" and//or "The Voting Process"? Not really.
But I still vote. It's my right and also, as I've come to see it, my duty. Free speech or no, I believe that if I want to complain about an election and be taken seriously I should participate in it at at least the bare minimal active level.
I've always made time to vote, and at least read the voter's pamphlet if not also further sources to attempt to make that vote an informed one.
Asking for a thesaurus.
Since moving to California after that, I've voted by mail as much as possible, and I literally live right next door to my polling station; I see it and their parking spots right out my bedrooms' windows every day.
Seniors have time but have trouble getting to the pols.
Middle age - Are working/picking up kids but still find time.
I think younger people see through the effectiveness of voting. If I do vote my vote seems to really not matter. If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
It seems crazy that you are given two choices that basically blame each for everything gone wrong or take credit for everything positive but do the same thing when given the chance.
Liking a photo is so much more rewarding and feels like more of a direct impact.
As long as young people keep thinking like that, and old people don't, old people will keep winning elections.
> If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
State and local elections matter too.
Voting is not economically rational if it takes more than zero time, given those odds.
When so many people beat the drum of economic rationality, is it a surprise people don't vote? At most one of "economic rationality is valid" or "you should vote" is a true statement. When we're told that the former is true, we're being told not to vote.
There are modifications of "rationality" that actually provide a justification for voting. But you'll never see an economist acknowledge that superrationality is a thing, for instance.
So if you aren't the one, single deciding vote it's not worthwhile? That's an immature approach. All the more immature because you go on to couch it in rhetoric about economics and "rationality" that amounts to nothing more than third rate sophistry.
You're not a taxi cab that has to be in service 24 hours a day to maximize utilization. You're a person with responsibilities. Your "economic rationality" is just a lazy justification for only doing what you feel like doing ("provides marginal value!") and never doing anything you don't.
If you're going to be a bum, be honest with yourself and those around you.
Is a thing only worth doing if you can cast yourself as the lone hero who turned the tide?
This seems like the Tragedy of the Commons. You fish in a stream, because why not? One person can never eat enough fish to make a dent in the population. Then a thousand of your neighbors fish the same stream. Soon it's completely depopulated, and there are no more fish for anyone, and everyone involved can still say "it wasn't my fault, my impact was barely noticeable."
Either it's nobody's fault, just a totally unavoidable act of God, or it's everybody's fault, and you all should have worked together to address it. Only one of those ways of thinking will get anything done.
In one of those elections, my preferred candidate won by a mere 129 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...
If you don't vote, you won't be able to tell if your vote "really mattered" in an election until it's too late to do anything.
Traditionally older people tend to have (or have had) more set schedules/defined work hours, more benefits (paid time off), and better job security in general. I'm not saying it's impossible for kids today to vote, but there are some disturbing trends in employment and the way workers are treated that I can see making it harder than it's been for previous generations.
Previous generations were able to support themselves at least enough to move out of their parent's homes. Young adults today are clearly struggling in ways that past generations haven't had to and that's going to strain how much time and effort they can spend on local and state politics.
Of course none of that addresses the larger issues like voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering which limit the impact of voters making the effort seem less worthwhile.
I still think young people should do everything the can to get involved and vote, but I'm not going to pretend that any mention of their struggles can be dismissed by calling them "whiny entitled people"
Every year more than 1M people default on their student loans, ruining their credit and essentially their lives.
Currently this is a voting block of 8M people and it will continue to grow by 1M every year. There is one candidate who has promised to forgive all student loans, and yet the person won't garner anywhere close to 8M votes.
There is a coordinated effort to indebt young people with loans they will spend the next 40-50 years of their life paying. Their degrees won't even pay for themselves as evidence by the fact these young people who historically could at least move out and begin their lives are no longer able to afford to do so...and when these issues are mentioned people are silenced (or downvoted into the grey so their comments can't be read).
There is more to this than young people don't vote, especially where they have every reason.
However, 8 Million is the potential voting block of people who have already defaulted on their student loans...there are a total of 44.7 Million people with student loans who all would be interested and benefit from loan forgiveness/abatement. To put those numbers in perspective it it just exceeds the number of elderly voters on Medicare (44 Million).
Also, if you live on a red state vote for a moderate. Try to influence the primaries.
I find this a very questionable statement. Most middle age people are working 40+ hours, on top of devoting hours to kids, maintenance etc. They are every bit as busy as young people, if not more so.
Politicians respond to only 2 things, votes and lobbyist dollars. If people want to make a change and have politicians stop ignoring them then they need to establish themselves as a reliable voting block. Until they do this they are just shouting into the wind / twitter / reddit / facebook.
Voting by absentee ballot takes minutes, everyone who want to has time for that.
That's the bug right there. Rental housing is a popular investment vehicle, at a ROI of 9.5 % it slightly outperforms the stock market. Any regulation and anything that would decrease profit will be stridently opposed by the wealthy classes. They go and vote and sit on the city council.
Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.
That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.
There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.
I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).
Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.
I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.
Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house/neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) and high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth many more times than that solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.
We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.
Look at Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palo_Alto,_California
So... yeah, build a ton of housing, but start doing it a lot more in the rich areas that have been exempt from it for far too long.
It sure worked for Harlem.
Also, nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want at whatever price they want. It's this attitude that drives so many "affordable" housing programs that are complete failures (and a tax on the middle class).
In my area, new construction has raised the rent of “nice” apartments and shifted aging properties to Section 8, which is a defacto price floor.
So it's generally hard - for good reason - to persuade young people that any of the political candidates on the slate care about them. This has only barely begun to change recently.
So I would guess most 3 car garages are built in the countryside, where there is lots of space for building.
The two numbers point to completely separate issues.
If singles would be willing to move to the countryside, perhaps they wouldn't have a problem to find accommodation. (A job could be a different matter).
They also use shitty materials. Compare a modern house with century-or-more home which are often timeless art pieces.
North American cities are sparse and are nowhere near our tech limits. Housing shortages in North America are due to nothing more than bad regulation.
Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business. The other two, could potentially be an issue, however, but in my experience, most apartments like that are not filled with retirees, but working class individuals and to an extent working class families.
The real problem with gentrification is the unearned increase in property values that accrue to owners and not renters. This could be solved with Georgist land value taxes [1].
>>Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business.
Don't come to Japan then. [1][2] Like it or not, some cultures (including the older generation of Americans) hold certain social mores that include expectations of public appearance and decorum.
[1]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/19/national/stigma...
[2]https://observers.france24.com/en/20170504-japanese-authorit...
Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
To Downvoters: I feel I've done a decent job outlining the futility of more and more compact housing. I'd like to know what your logic if you disagree.
2. If the economy need's growth but is going to level out at 11 billion, we should think about that now.
3. Enforcement is heavy handed, but at least admitting it would be a step in the right direction.
You should get out of the city more often.
I think overpopulation isn't our most pressing issue right now, but generally there are a lot of advantages to having fewer people.
Okay, here's the thesis. Sounds like neo-Malthusianism.
> Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
Yep, that's the Malthusian endgame. Unpacking this claim, it seems to be claiming that the Earth is a closed-system that we can't escape. Now I'm looking for evidence or supporting arguments that prove that.
> The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
What exactly does the phrase "how much nature will be left" mean to you? This is too hand-wavy, especially for such a heavy-handed conclusion.
> I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
Is a golf course a nature preserve? No. Of course not. It's an extremely controlled environment. Any wildlife foolish enough to try to inhabit it that doesn't fit in a coffee cup will almost certainly be chased off, trapped or killed.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
The constraint isn't necessarily that people have to leave the planet so much as we need to ensure access to minerals and high industrial capacity.
When we exhaust "nearby" minerals and space transit has advanced enough, colonization will look more attractive.
Will we hit a bottleneck along the way? I don't know. But it would be an awful shame if it were political.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
Japan's total fertility rate has been consistently below-replacement since 1975:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINJPN
Nonetheless, it took until 2010 for Japan's total population to peak and begin to decline. It's estimated to take until 2042 for Japan's population to fall lower than it was in 1975:
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/japan-population/
That's a 67 year lag between a country reducing birth rates below replacement and the country actually having more space available per capita.
So I downvoted you on two counts:
1) You seemed to be unaware that the US is already reproducing less, to the extent that its population will eventually decline without immigration.
2) "Reproduce less" takes a very long time to reduce total population. It takes many decades even if there is no immigration. Its influence is far too slow to help today's young adults afford their own living spaces.
> "Reproduce less" takes a very long time Pretty much every real solution to any problem I have ever seen takes generations. If the point of more housing is to mitigate suffering while these changes take root, that sounds realistic and responsible. As it is, it sounds like nobody has any thoughts at all about when we should realistically cap ourselves and I don't think that's responsible.
It appears your argument is that reproducing less is good, but we're already doing it (though not on purpose), so therefore me saying we should do it on purpose is wrong?
Most developed nations are below replacement rate, and you don't have to look far in places like the northeast or midwest of the US to see places that are going to seed and reverting back into wilderness.
There's not even a shadow of Constitutional argument that that's a federal power.
A strict constructionist reading of the constitution would suggest that Gonzales v. Raich is judicial activism, and indeed, all the judges signatory to the majority opinion tend to be the "big government" types. Note that O'Connor and Rehnquist, two famous justices who often sided with strict constructionism, dissented. O'Connor wrote that though she did not support California's actions, she respected its right to do so:
"Relying on Congress’ abstract assertions, the Court has endorsed making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use. This overreaching stifles an express choice by some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently. If I were a California citizen, I would not have voted for the medical marijuana ballot initiative; if I were a California legislator I would not have supported the Compassionate Use Act. But whatever the wisdom of California’s experiment with medical marijuana, the federalism principles that have driven our Commerce Clause cases require that room for experiment be protected in this case. "
Thomas also dissented, for somewhat similar principles though with different wording. Source for this is your link.
We don't implement things like this federally because needs differ. Bozeman, Montana can probably zone and sprawl as needed; it's small and there's lots of land. San Francisco can't. Why would any one feel the need to apply the same rules to both, unless it was an attempt to force a particular ideology on another? If there is sufficient support for something, it ought to pass just as well at the state or local level.
[0]: https://www.history.com/news/franklin-roosevelt-tried-packin...
If Bozeman, Montana can sprawl without worry, why does it even need restrictive zoning laws mandating SFH’s? That’s what doesn’t make sense. People who move to Bozeman clearly want to live in SFH’s. Outlawing restrictive zoning laws doesn’t affect them in the least.
In practice, considering home construction and home buying are often transacted in interstate commerce (e.g. a company buying parts or supplies from out of state to build), it’s likely a Supreme Court case against a law relating to zoning could be upheld. The federal government already claims the ability to regulate other things such as guns constructed within the borders of a state and never moved outside them, all based on the arguments upheld in cases like Wickard that they possibly could affect interstate commerce.
A similar clause could be attached to the mentioned zoning law. (E.g. a person from one state buys land in another state? No zoning allowed - and because buying land within a state affects the prices for interstate purchases, suddenly there’s a nexus for regulation of purely intrastate purchases too!)
Not saying it’s a great idea, but it’s hardly clearly unconstitutional under modern precedent and interpretation.
> Force cities to build duplexes/triplexes/four-plexes everywhere.
Declining tax bases in rural areas will be death by a thousand cuts. It takes serious cash for a municipality to "keep the lights on".
This may sound slightly contrary to my prior opinion, but there ought be a middle ground between the free choice of wanting a SFH, but also having some level of community planning that ensures the community remains viable.
You would have each unit certified as either A, B or C. C being nearly no noise insulation, A being very quiet.
Let the market decide what they want to pay for.
And for some people, it beats a 3 hour commute. People should be free to choose what they prefer as long as it's safe.
And since housing is a zero sum game the market is already rigged in favor of landlords. People generally don't have as much choice where to live when you start considering school access, public transit, commute and so forth. Relying on the market to solve housing will simply result in miniature SFs popping up over the US, just like what's happening to Austin.
As if construction costs were the primary factor in determining the cost of real estate in places with housing crisis problems (like the Bay Area).
Of course, then you’d ask, well why are construction costs so high in the Bay Area? And you might hear something about earthquakes, insulation, whatever. But the real reason is that contractors and construction workers need to live here too, and living here is damn expensive!
You're making an assumption that noise insulation is particularly subject to the market. Unfortunately noise 'insulation' like other insulation is extremely sensitive to competence in instiallation and maintenance.
Because it isn't particularly easy to gauge when shopping I don't believe that it is... and in markets where there are more prospective renters than units, it especially isn't.
There are also plenty of multiplex designs that have good noise insulation.
In reality people do want to live in them which is why zoning laws are used to prevent them from being built. If people refused to live there, there would be no need for zoning as developers wouldn’t build homes people don’t live in.
I distinctly recall it calling for a ban on single family housing. Considering that there are many replies calling it an overreaction and replying as thought it called for a ban on single family housing in general I would be willing to bet money it did not originally say what it says now.
> Force cities to build duplexes/triplexes/four-plexes everywhere.
which makes the intention ambiguous and slanted towards banning single family homes.
Banning single family zoning does not equate to banning single family homes!
It's more like: re-legalizing a lot of different housing options.
Where people want to build, the power-hungry folks in charge put restrictions in place and demand a troll toll to let a few projects through. And the folks in charge where nobody wants to build see the opportunity and seize it. It's just human nature, and it's the reason local government shouldn't be put in charge of density regulation.
If someone is happy in their SFH, why would it disappear?
If someone has the money, they'll be able to build new ones too.
Yeah, maybe central San Francisco won't have many, as people cash out, but that seems pretty reasonable. You can go live in Lakeview Oregon and have a huge house on a huge lot if that's what you want.
Besides - SFH's predate most restrictive zoning laws (which really caught on in the 70's). SFH's, at the edges of the city, aren't going anywhere.
[1] https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2018/12/15/brookhaven-pio...