Why Does America Provide More Space for Storing Cars Than Housing People?
commonedge.org
commonedge.org
They don’t make the connection between half of urban land (!) being allocated toward driving infrastructure and high housing costs. Landlords take the blame. Other problems caused by spatial displacement and only building infrastructure for cars include traffic congestion, oil dependency, climate change, and rising traffic deaths. Driving doesn’t scale well in cities. Besides insatiable demand for parking and congestion, people buy bigger cars to keep up with the crash safety arms race.
Even as someone living in a non-US city with supposedly good public transport, the cost of a cheap car + gas is ridiculous compared to the benefits.
Also, it would have created an environment that would have been totally unaffordable for families. Families don't work well in cities, because you need space. So that means a family of 4, with each kid a room, needs to pay 3-4 times the price a single person needs to pay, just for housing, while only making, at best, twice as much.
So families moved away. Families are also the ones that have the numbers, for voting, and the money ...
That, and stress in cities is 10x what it is in suburbs.
In a shocking and possibly illegal act of public absurdity, eight members of the Board of Supervisors voted to stall the construction of 495 new housing units on the site of a parking lot in the South of Market neighborhood.
It's a genuine question. Would love reasons instead of just downvotes.
It just said affordable housing, which I assume is for normal working folks even tech people?
The term 'affordable housing' often refers to housing units that are offered at below-market rates. It's part of a government racket:
The government creates regulations and takes other actions that hinder developers from easily building new housing, thereby limiting supply and increasing prices for the units that are available.
At the same time governments enact policies to prevent landlords from raising rents to market rates. While this protects current tenants, it limits the availability of units for new residents, effectively pricing them out and meaning only a subset of the total rental stock is affected by supply and demand.
After these regulations create a landscape of high housing costs, governments then introduce 'affordable housing' quotas for new development projects. These are often aimed at appeasing certain voter demographics to win votes.
The government forces developers to reserve some % of units for 'affordable housing' but this development wasn't being built to house people who are currently homeless.
This got me
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/06/07/build-buys-c...
More details here :
Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
If you want to know how good the QoL in a city can be, you need to visit a European city that is not car centric.
You can't effectively build human centric attractive spaces without being hampered by the fact we've given the majority of public space to cars
I think we should bring back housing projects though. I'd rather increase state budgets by the 2% it would take rather than deal with homeless all the time.
Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
Regardless of whether I get around during the week to a doctors appointment, my work, friends, etc I still will need a car.
Not being able to buy things in larger amounts means that you get taken advantage of, looking at price per X at your local grocer vs Costco.
Then during the weekend I want to go into nature. You cannot economically have public transportation to all those hiking trails.
Some of you might say: what about a rental for when I need a car? Lots of rental places just flat-out don't allow you to take the vehicle off of paved roads.
I have never seen a rental saying where you can or can’t go with a vehicle
So if you eat >15 chickens per year Costco is cheaper.
And even that is incorrect. Costco's chicken is 32oz, the Safeway one 28. Forgetting about taxes, Costco's is $0.15625 / oz, Safeway is $0.3210714285714286 / oz.
So now we have 2 equations, and we need to find the intersection:
* y = 60 + x * 0.15625
* y = 0.3210714285714286 * x
They cross at 11.37594799566631 chickens.
But larger chickens have larger bones, so let's keep it at 15. I definitely eat more than 15 chickens per year.
Then there's the issue of cost in general, while the house-brands of Safeway / Frys / Kroger / ... are cheaper, they are much more likely to have stuff added to it to make it 'bulkier'. A good example is Cottage Cheese from Walmart. They add a thickener to the liquid which allows them to sell you the same amount for less, but you actually get less cheese and more filler.
I don’t know if the cottage thing is true or not, but even if it is, it doesn’t make difference for the customer if their goal is to save money
https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/gold/displayTerm...
> 5. PROHIBITED USE OF THE CAR NEITHER YOU NOR ANY AUTHORIZED OPERATOR MAY:
...
d. ENGAGE IN ANY WILLFUL OR WANTON MISCONDUCT, WHICH, AMONG OTHER THINGS, MAY INCLUDE RECKLESS CONDUCT SUCH AS: ..., USE OFF PAVED ROADS OR ON ROADS WHICH ARE NOT REGULARLY MAINTAINED, ...
National:
https://www.nationalcar.com/content/dam/National/functional/...
> (10) Vehicle shall not be driven on an unpaved road or off-road.
Budget:
https://www.budget.com/en/legal-documents/rental-terms
14. Prohibited Use of the Car. ...
... 4) to be operated in a test, race or contest or on unpaved roads
Avis:
https://www.avis.com/en/legal-documents/rental-terms
14. Prohibited Use of the Car. ...
... 4) to be operated in a test, race or contest or on unpaved roads
Same applies to all office jobs.
Even to physical labour, if we have robot telepresence[2].
[0] IDK, might be?
[1] Or at least +/- a time zone or three.
[2] AI-on-the-edge robotics probably ends those things as human work opportunities.
> Why is it surprising that there’s more cheap to build car parking
By that logic it would be cheaper not to build anything, so why is something built in the first place?
A hundred people in the space of 5 cars is unmeasurably better for the economy. Workforce, consumers, etc. If 2 of them open craft coffeeshops next door 98 of them won't need to go somewhere to get a nice drink, and so on. Once you don't need to cross 6 lanes on foot all sorts of possibilities open. Proximity is benefit multiplier at the same time reducing ecofootprint
Why is it surprising that there’s more cheap-to-build car parking than there is expensive-to-build housing?
" So not only is 32% of your apartment just for your car and otherwise useless, but its also by far the most expensive part of that apartment to build." in the example linked, for reference.
Specifically for housing in America, though, more houses don't lower the price. That's because the more housing is owned by an individual builder the more they control appraisal comps. Why do you think they have so much marketing to try to convince you that it's good for the environment? They are able to get zoning exceptions to build high density, high priced living. Pick any skyscraper residence in America. Nearly all, if not all, are far more expensive than surrounding suburbs.
Are you saying we should pour concrete over land as long as there's land remaining? Let's try to have a more nuanced discussion perhaps
> Or that we don't need money?
The opposite, dedicating space to park 5 cars some of the time instead of 100 people living is the waste of money here. This doesn't even take into account damage to the planet from spreading people all over it
> Fitting 100 people in the space of 5 cars sounds a lot worse, not better
Only if you make it bad, I've seen some comfy skyscrapers
Here's nuance. The entire population of the world could live in Texas with an American quality of life. A back yard and a lawn, a 2 car garage, etc. And that's just Texas. Where are you from?
>The opposite, dedicating space to park 5 cars some of the time instead of 100 people living is the waste of money here. This doesn't even take into account damage to the planet from spreading people all over it.
This doesn't damage the planet. Building skyscrapers to line pockets of bankers so they can build so close together that trees and crops can't grow in the surrounding area is damaging.
>Only if you make it bad, I've seen some comfy skyscrapers.
Really? Did they keep chickens and goats in their apartment? Did they plant forests in their balcony?
Yeah. Everyone would have sub 90 sq meters of space for everything, and there would be zero space for any sort of forest, park, a shopping mall or any roads for all those 8 billion cars. People would have to have drone deliveries for everything because roads would be gridlocked with all those cars and you won't get anywhere anyway. And better wear PPE mask outside at all times. Is that American lifestyle?
> Crops can't grow
If you spread 100 families on surface and give everyone 90 sq meters, that's all gone area for crops. Add infrastructure, electricity, piping, roads and junctions to handle private traffic. Add maintenance. But if you stack em vertically in the space of a medium sized parking lot the remaining space is all crops or trees or whatever.
> Did they keep chickens and goats in their apartment?
Sounds like animal cruelty to me
> Did they plant forests in their balcony?
No but a forest is available within walking distance. In your ideal world really no one leaves their designated box for a healthy daily walk? Ah right, I forgot about 6 lanes of traffic to cross.
It sounds like you might need some help with the math. Do you?
You just don't want to admit it. Dense areas are better in every way. Better for economy, more profitable, more efficient, sustainable. The only reason to be opposed is if you are afraid that real estate you own will start going down in price because everyone suddenly needs less land for everything.
When land is expensive enough efficiency finds a way.
If I fund a REIT and buy up half the housing in some bumbling town to extract rent, and let those who can't afford it go pound sand: it can be profitable for me, yet be a net cost to the wider economy.
In fact, it can cost significantly more than the profit I gain: A couple of cases homelessness can end up costing the state millions over the next few decades in knock on effects, the extra rent my REIT extracts in rent ends up in less economically stimulating places than the local economy, etc etc.
In the end I can end up contracting the economy by 100s of millions and still profit, as long as that contraction doesn't overlap with my personal interests too much. Increased homelessness might lower the value of my properties, but the majority of the economic loss doesn't fall on me so I might even expand on that loss in value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... shows the impact of parking minimums on housing costs.