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Comment by ceeplusplus | Hacker News Reader

Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars.

Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.

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The main way to make affordable housing is to make more housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want to dwell.

But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed.

Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota [1] which approached rent control in very different ways. Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it needed to apply rent control to all units including new construction.

> housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed

Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions.

> Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed.

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

> Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density".

High density is a terrible way to live. I thought we learned from the pandemic that high density living is unsanitary and promotes the proliferation of disease, and that a 600 square foot box is a really depressing place to be when you're stuck inside working from home.

The solution that the current generation loves to hate is to go back to a more suburban lifestyle. But it's possible to do suburbia without making it completely car-dependent. Look at planned cities like Portland, OR, where they have a lot of mixed use development paired with good public transportation and bicycle infrastructure well into the more suburban parts of the city. In a country like the United States where we have vast expanses of land, it makes a lot more sense to spread out than develop vertically.

Single-family homes can get surprisingly dense, depending on how you move the numbers and sizes around.

But more importantly, all towns and most cities were at "suburban" densities years ago (check the "old towns" of most towns, etc) - the key was "travel to services" was limited by walking or sometimes subways, etc.

If instead of one Walmart every 30 miles you have smaller stores every 2-5 miles, suddenly density isn't as mandatory for livable cities.

Mixed usage and transit backbones are the key - you could design "pods" that are about two miles in diameter centered on train stations that would be entirely walkable/bikable - then you can even have the massive city centers.

People having cars isn't a problem if they don't use them for commuting, and some small changes in city design can lead to that.

The reason that the current generation hates suburbia to me seems like a result of a cultural process that can be considered borderline indoctrination and the fact that for whatever reason suburbia doesn't move on with the times. I can understand those who are dissatisfied with the current state of suburbia (e.g. lack of entertainment options, lack of public spaces that don't look like a repurposed commercial property), though many of those issues may be attributed to the scale of the land as a whole, but you'd be surprised that the idea of moving to an apartment block from say a generic suburban home is not viewed as a downgrade by some. Another thing is that classic suburbia often has a uniform look, which might negatively contribute to the entire perception of suburban housing, but then again, same people who complain about it have no problem with same-looking generic apartment blocks.

The reason why apartment minded folks say little about generic 5-over-1 units and a lot about suburban housing is because most folks live in dense areas for access to their services. Due to SFH zoning there's little to do in most of suburbia outside of your home, so a lot more focus needs to be on the home to be attractive and entertaining.

As for cultural reasons behind preferring apartments, everyone has various reasons. I doubt you'll find consensus among those that dislike SFH development over what it is they dislike, but they're unified as a bloc in their desire for density.

Public housing can be made properly like in Vienna. You have to build a lot, build nice, and worry about having many different socio-economical tenants in the apartments, though.

And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in many places they just want to set up some buildings and forget about it, and that way it will never work.

It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of getting problematic people out of the streets, but that shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so they can save more money and use their increased disposable income locally.

If you build enough and make private developments easy enough everyone benefits.

In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their conservative government (I think they have a coalition now) doesn't want to spend money on the program and private developments have a set of restrictions that allow price gauging.

> And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person actually living in a city knows this, which is why many people protest having public housing built anywhere near them.

Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but they they don’t seem to be aware as to what it takes to get there. One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin: you’ll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist, jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is happening in many UD cities, which claim that their policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the underclass lifestyle, is “harm reduction”, and continue to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.

  > One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy)

interesting, because thats the opposite of what i thought...

any good charts/data for that?

See eg. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincomedistributio... which states that the United States has the most progressive tax system among developed countries. It has not fundamentally changed since 2008.

Well, then you guys have to do something because, honestly, some famous cities in the US are in a deplorable state.

You know what your problems are and you don't even have to come up with anything new or revolutionary, as solutions are already invented and tested.

The US can build public housing and can manage it properly. The money is there, and it has already been done (built, not managed properly). Mix public housing with transit oriented development, mix-use zones, more lax private development and you'll get nice neighborhoods for modal income people which is what's really important.

As for cars, you can build multi-story car parks with commercial and/or residential development on top too. Not cheap but necessary given your constraints.

The US has IMO very strong civil society organizations. Take advantage of that and go advocate for this.

CA is working on mixed income public housing. I think it will avoid the faults of the previous projects we built. See AB 2053.

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