But young people aren't the only ones who need to be downtown, as I said, and families were driven out to the suburbs for suitable housing. They have to commute instead, which has caused all sorts of gridlock and the usual problems with urban sprawl.
If the right incentives existed for mixed housing, tax incentives included, then this wouldn't happen, and people of all ages could afford to live closer to where they work, thus alleviating many of those issues and creating more livable cities.
Here in Canada we already do this in one sense by mixing government housing among more affluent neighbourhoods. This has prevented the formation of ghettos, but this same approach hasn't been applied to create an appropriate mix of housing for all different living arrangements.
So given a land value tax incentivises certain kinds of land use, my question is whether it would incentivise using land to make urban centres more livable for all types of people, rather than only certain kinds of people or lifestyles.
When it comes to housing construction and tax incentives, what they need to do is (1) set tax incentives to discourage egregious misuse and encourage density, and (2) get out of the way.
As someone living in the middle of one of these debates right now, the idea that we need to carefully control the mix of 1bdr apartments vs 3bdr apartments is... risible? The frontline of this issue is SFZ, not what kind of apartments we build.
I disagree. No planning has lead to many ghettos. The planning we've done here has avoided ghettos. I think the data is very clear on that.
> When it comes to housing construction and tax incentives, what they need to do is (1) set tax incentives to discourage egregious misuse and encourage density, and (2) get out of the way.
Except as I've been saying, if you encourage too much density your cities become unlivable for families, and you encourage urban sprawl and all of it's subsequent problems.
> the idea that we need to carefully control the mix of 1bdr apartments vs 3bdr apartments is... risible?
Who said anything about "carefully controlling" anything? Certainly not me.
A lack of density closer to cities is a real problem: it makes living close to where you work prohibitively expensive, and promotes sprawl.
Of course, part of the subtext of these discussions is that proponents of SFZ and owner-occupancy tend also to believe that their favorite cities should have controlled population growth. It's just not a good look to say that out loud.
That's one cause. The other cause that you seem to refuse to understand is creating the wrong kind of density. An urban centre full of 1 bedroom apartments is still going to create urban sprawl because families just can't live there, thus driving them out of the city centre even though they still work there. I just don't get why you refuse to understand this very obvious point.
Citation? Where is that? Where I live the planning regime was famously ineffectual in the '50s and '60s, and as a result it's far more livable than big cities that had more planning: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/12/07/the-big-...
It seems to me to be the opposite. The mortgage interest tax deduction is a massive regressive government subsidy for homeowners, and penalizes younger people who rent or cannot afford to buy a home.
So I’m curious what suggests to you that renters have political power. To me it seems the opposite - tax policy massively prefers owners over renters.
The whole 1bdr vs. 3bdr thing is a total sideshow; the actual issue, again, is SFZ.
It's probably useful for you to understand my, uh, priors? about this, which include the fact that I live in an overwhelmingly SFZ community that actively works to prevent the construction of multi-family dwellings, often with appeals to the evil of "landlords".
How zoning should work is an orthogonal question in my view.
That's true for N=1 (SFR), N=2 (duplex, half-occupied by the owner), N=3 (triple-decker with owner living in one), or N=50.
If you just want single family homes with a big lawn you probably shouldn’t be living in Manhattan, which is the point of lvt.
Yes, exactly. And my point is that a city shouldn't optimize along one direction like this, because families work in urban centres too. There should be a mix of housing for single people and families in the same urban areas, or you drive the families out of the city and encourage commuting and urban sprawl.
Part of the point is to very deliberately say: we don't know, we'll let each neighbourhood build what works for that neighbourhood rather than trying to figure out ahead of time.
> As I've explained elsewhere, if that means packing as many tiny units together in an urban core rather than a mix of bachelor pads and family-suitable living spaces, than that drives families out of urban centers and encourages urban sprawl, which creates terrible commutes and traffic and all subsequent problems.
How do you figure that? For a fixed population, the larger the proportion of workers in the center, the shorter the average commute and the less bad the traffic. So 4 bachelors in the urban core and 1 family in the suburbs is much better than vice versa.
(Now of course what tends to happen is if you make the city better then you attract a bigger population. But that shouldn't be seen as a failure. Fixing traffic or commute times is essentially impossible, because as soon as you add capacity more people will move to the area or commute from further away. But what you can do is, for a given sane commute time, maximise the number of people and jobs within that range)