Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I agree that is a net boon to society. I think the cross drift of ideas is a net positive, the human interaction can create more opportunities for those that have less, I don't think it reduces inequality meaningfully and I'm not suggesting that was a goal only that my prior statements might lead one to believe it does, but I've seen far more segregated cities be without many services during an infrastructure failure, because the people doing those services didn't live there.
Most new developments are in dead areas because nobody wants to spend time surrounded by ugly, bland and functional architecture.
The metro line was completed, inaugurated, but never opened to the public, and eventually mothballed. For quite a while, it was rumored that they operated trains once a month to keep the system working and maintained, not sure up until when.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxESIzJhCU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGIz_zwoALU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMHW9cEAO78
Its entirely possible to build a new city from the ground up. And starting with a clean slate allows planners to design with the next 10,20,30,50 years of growth in mind. It's very difficult to scale a city effectively without a long-term city plan.
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.
For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.
- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.
- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.
- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.
Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.
Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.
Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
Until their tires hit asphalt. Cars have to go very slowly for the engine to be louder than the tires, and that noise is a function of weight, and electric cars are heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
"Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 mile range and weighs the same as the average car.
What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
> "Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range.
Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant. You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example. The battery is the heavy part and while they may get more mass-efficient over time EVs are now and for the foreseeable future strictly heavier than same-size ICE cars.
EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is. EVs are better than ICE cars in most ways, but for noise all cars are a problem and EVs are worse.
Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.
> That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
> Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant.
People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.
The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.
Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.
> You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example.
If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.
> EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is.
Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.
All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.
That was an illustrative example. Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph. That's city street speeds. (In most car-dependent cities 40-50 is also typical city street speed.) Again, this is why tires are the majority of car noise. When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything. An off-road truck with knobby tires is going to have more tire noise than a sedan with snow tires which will have more than the same sedan with low rolling resistance tires. An 80s muscle car will have more engine noise than a modern 4-cylinder sedan which will have more than an electric vehicle. A gasoline vehicle under acceleration (as in stop-and-go city traffic) will have much more engine noise at a given speed. Tire noise is affected by the roadway material in addition to the vehicle. Tire noise in a 4000 pound electric car might overtake "engine noise" at a lower speed than it does for a 4000 pound V8, but that's because it's quieter, not louder.
> When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
> If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
I suspect the problem here is that the studies are so old. Here's the relevant sentence from the Wikipedia article called Road Noise:
> Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds.
For this sentence it has three citations. One discusses the effects of road material on tire noise and not tire noise relative to other noise, another lumps tire noise and aerodynamic noise into the same category. The third, which is presumably where it got the premise, is from 1973, when cars commonly used bias-ply tires, which are much louder.
But let's not lose track of the thread here. The premise is that electric cars would be louder. A Model 3 is ~4000 pounds, the same as a Ford Taurus, so that's not going to be louder. Some cars are lighter -- a Honda Accord is in the same class and is ~3200 pounds, only 80% as much. But then it has a gasoline engine, which is louder than an electric motor. Does the 20% weight difference cause more noise than the gasoline engine vs. the electric motor? Somebody would need a dB meter to even answer it, and that's rather the point. Either way the difference is going to be small and people are just looking for something to complain about.
No. It's very different. It's more like saying "a person is usually about 5'7"." It is obvious there are difference, but it's not something that varies minute by minute, and the range of differences is not stated. There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
You're right those aren't good citations, I looked at it earlier myself and didn't like them, but I didn't go through the work of finding better ones. But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise? Again, I've never heard anyone claim that.
> Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
Because, that's the sound it makes.
> But let's not lose track of the thread here.
This started because you claimed modern cars are not noisy except for those with modified exhaust pipes. I'm saying cars are fucking loud, all of them. Electric cars are also loud and do not solve for the problem of road noise at all. The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
Based on what? A car with low resistance tires on concrete isn't going to make a lot of tire noise even at fairly high speeds.
> But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise?
The one lumping tire noise and aerodynamic noise together is obviously contemplating that aerodynamic noise is a thing.
> Because, that's the sound it makes.
Tires make a rumbly sound, when you can hear them, as for example with the types of tires that make more tire noise.
> The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
There is a difference between something not being absolutely perfectly silent and something emitting a loud noise. Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud. Exhaust noise for cars with negligently or intentionally defective mufflers is loud.
If you can hear it and you're not next to the road, that's too loud. It's noise pollution. You can personally draw an arbitrary line anywhere you want to determine what counts as "loud", but the actual phenomenon is that cars make an amount of noise that is detrimental to our health, sanity, and wildlife.
Living in a 1900s building in Brooklyn is vastly different from living in a 2020 building in Manhattan.
I'm guessing mid-1900s to early 2000s buildings are the problematic ones.
Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic
Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.
There are so many of them. Every block seemed to have grocers and a small park.
Where I am it’s a massive supermarket every 5km, not a small one every 200m. You can shop different when it’s less hassle to go.
They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware stores.
Dense housing means there is more room for everything else, not less, so everything is less crowded. Birds singing outside of my windows is the main noise pollution where I live.
The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.
Density is the population of a metropolitan area divided by its total area. Not population divided by the footprint area of residential lots. Density advocacy is all about accommodating population influx; it is really burgeoning population advocacy.
I've never heard of a density advocacy group being opposed to population growth. Density advocacy is practically synonymous with at least acceptance (if not advocacy) of urban population growth. Population growth is in fact like a sacred cow. You must never blame any urban problems on population growth; the cause is always not enough vertical build.
Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
Have other metropolitan areas do the same so there is no net migration.
> Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
There is a difference between refusing new people and having population growth as a goal. People exist, they have to live somewhere, increasing density increases the housing stock and gives them somewhere to live.
If one city is hostile to giving them somewhere to live and another isn't, people might move from the hostile place to the amiable place. But the solution to this is obviously to make the other city less hostile, not to make sure that all cities are maximally hostile.
It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.
Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.
How is that good government?
And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...
You might be thinking of packed slums in a developing country.
> But it is easier to govern people.
Ah yes, like the French, a famously docile people who never, ever rise up against their government.
That depends on supply and demand, not simply demand. More people attract, open and staff more shops, etc. It's easier to find a restaurant in a major city than a quiet rural town.
Not that there's _no_ foot traffic congestion or lines, but it's the same thing that happens in a case where there's only one Starbucks in a sprawling suburb or business district at lunch time.
A high density area is likewise it's own complex economy and system that seeks balance, when there's too many people in one area, you just go somewhere else or enjoy or compete with it. That's partly why Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.
In my sparsely populated city that sprawls, it's extremely noisy, dusty, time consuming to get around, the infrastructure is failing, and I rarely bump into anyone I know, because people are only visible at the beginning and end of their journey. Meanwhile here in Vancouver I often run into people I know multiple times per day because we're in the same spaces, or I can go somewhere else and not see anyone just like any other place.
Sorry, no this is culture. The same virtues exist in Japanese suburbs, nothing to do with a city.
It seems to me that it's mainly cars and a scarcity of places to be that make cities horrible and congested. More pollution, more noise, less space.
Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.
Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.
In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).
Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.
If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)
I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
The easiest way to see that it is plausible is to note that only 400 years ago, something like 90% of all human labor went into growing food, which is the way agricultural societies had always been everywhere. The way society was able reduce that to the 5% or so it is today was to use fossil fuels. The first big reduction came with the mechanization of textile production, freeing the food-growers from the need to make their own yarn and weave it into fabric to make clothes with. The tractor was of course also responsible for a drastic reduction in human labor as input to food-growing. Also, the replacement of horses with trucks for transportation of food from the farm to the nearest rail head or port or river (and transportation of inputs like fertilizer to the farm) meant that the food-growers could concentrate on growing food for people now that horses were much less needed.
It's not just the extra calories needed to walk as opposed to rest or to watch television: it's the fact that a single person in a delivery truck can do the work of a dozen people who have to do the deliveries on foot, and keeping one person alive and productive costs only one twelfth as much as keeping a dozen alive and productive -- even if no one walks anywhere or does any exercise. Sometimes for example in order to remain alive and productive, one of the dozen will need to visit a doctor. The doctor requires food to stay alive and productive. Doctors don't live forever and so need to be replaced, and that is an expensive process in part because medical students need food and lots of other energy-requiring things to stay alive and able to learn (and to grow from babies to people mature enough to go to medical school).
My guess is that that analysis continues to hold even if the dozen delivery workers can take public transportation as well as walk although maybe we have to replace "dozen" with "six".
I'm not saying that restricting vehicles in Paris is a bad move: I'm just saying that the effects on, e.g., carbon emission is not obviously good and that the planners who chose (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...) to devote a large fraction of the area of cities to make it easy for vehicle traffic to flow were not just stupid benighted fools or evil people bent on making life worse for everyone.
[1] Excluding Uber style car-based food delivery services.
Oh, no, it's the other way round, mostly. It's easier to deliver a quantity and variety of goods to a dense area than the sticks. Which is why "go shopping" is a suggestion for people going to NYC, not Tucson.
Do you have a source for this? Sounds questionable.
100 miles? That seems very likely. That happens far quicker for the energy leaking heat machine sitting in the seat.
So, while maybe the theme of the statement is correct?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
A car flying down the freeway uses less emissions per mile, but if one is traveling 50 miles versus just walking to down the block the former is using a lot more emissions even if it is more efficient per mile.
https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html - a full car gets amazingly close to a average train (USA).
And this is seen in that trains are most common where they can be mostly full.
What's scary about that is how quickly busses just get outclassed - they have to be as big as their biggest loads, but they're usually empty.
You can use your eyes to instantly observe that car drivers are not reducing their caloric intake to compensate for the fact that they "save" that energy by not walking.
There are 340kcal in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour[2], so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat
Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg [3], so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e
Driving a vehicle powered by gasoline produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile [4]
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/calories-burned-walking#Wa... [2] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/health-promotion-knowl... [3] https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/9... [4] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Here's what I found: the formula given in the article is "calories burned = BMR x METs/24 x hour"
But the METs for lying quietly is 1. The author certainly forgot to subtract 1 from METs in that equation, and could easily have also forgotten to do so when calculating the given numbers.
100g of beef gives you 217 kcal [1], so you need 33g of beef for your walk
Carbon cost for beef is 99.48 kg CO₂e/kg [2]
So walking one mile fueled by beef creates ~3.3kg of carbon emissions, over 8 times what would be emitted if you drove
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/beef#nutrition [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-e...
[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/news/33676/uk-beef-carbon-footpr...
The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality.
So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.
They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances.
It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.
So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.
A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.
Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic!
Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
Erm aren't you forgetting something?
London just quadrupled its bicycle network. That seems like a massive improvement to me. When I lived there, biking was...let's be kind and say "less than ideal". Last time I visited I was amazed by the improvement, with protected two-way bike lanes right on the Thames and much more.
https://momentummag.com/london-just-quadrupled-its-bicycle-n...
Poster was presenting cars and public transport as the only two options, and complaining that one has been made worse without improving the other.
That completely misses the fact that there is in fact a third option that has been greatly improved, even if poster doesn’t like it.
Hence “Aren’t you forgetting something” rather than “you’re wrong”
If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to.
For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit
Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.
This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.
On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
As traffic and travel times lessen, people do travel further and more, but only to a point.
If your mailbox is attached to your house, you can lean out your front door to get your mail. If your mailbox is at the end of your 20 foot driveway, you take a few steps to get your mail. If you live on a farm, and your mailbox is down a several hundred yard driveway, you might hop in your side-by-side UTV. If your mail goes to a Post Office Box in town, you might hop in your truck and pick it up while running errands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If things that had been a 10 minute drive become a 5 minute drive, now they're worth it when before they weren't. You go to the shop instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon. You go to the shop you like more instead of the one you like less even though the lesser one is closer, because now the difference isn't as big.
If you make the drive shorter but make parking harder,
and you make the walk/bike shorter but walking/biking pleasant,
people will take their cars less.
Hmm...aren't you forgetting something?
Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris
Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more.
The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.
But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance.
Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute.
There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed).
So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc.
But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all.
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[0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
I've even read an article in Le Parisien (local-ish paper) about how some of those bike storage units were actually removed for some reason.
Edit: I'm actually saying this as someone who enjoys and actually does bike. When living in the city proper, I think there are very few routes for which the bike isn't the quickest method of transportation. For my commute, which is pretty much a best-case scenario (modern metro with few to no issues, goes in a fairly straight line, don't have to change lines, stations close to both home and the office) the bike is much faster: 20 instead of 30 minutes.
Wouldn't we all love to have such a big flat.
I was talking to a friend living in London, and it would indeed seem that flats tend to be bigger over there. We do have many 100+ m2 flats, don't get me wrong, it's just that most locals can't afford those and live in shoeboxes instead.
There's also the fact that the layout doesn't always lend itself to storing a bike, most flats being rather old. Even though I would technically have the surface area to store a bike, it'd have to be in an awkward place to avoid blocking the passages.
Some newer apartment buildings do have areas for storing bikes more or less securely. But I doubt that's the case for most people.
Instead, what I'm hopeful for, is that the local bike-sharing scheme will improve. And indeed, I've read a few weeks ago that they were rolling out some improved model, which they expect to be more robust.
Over a third of Dutch people cycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Over a quarter of all trips are on a bike. 49% of primary school students and 75% of secondary school students cycle to school.
Cycling has been a national priority for the Dutch, like the automobile has a been a priority for much of the rest of the developed world.
With e-bikes, fitness and terrain are less relevant than ever. Unsafe(car dominated) bike routes are the number one obstacle to increased cycling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
A quick search reveals that the average winter temperature in the Netherlands is above freezing, while average summer temperatures hover around 20C. Sounds positively delightful for biking. That’s not the case for much of North America.
Where I come from, generally in the Great Lakes region, the average temperatures range from -1C to 30C during the year. Not great for year-round commuting by bike. Some people do it, sure, but it is truly a commitment.
They don't have 40°C in Summer like in Southern Europe, or -20°C like in the Alps.
Riding worked for a particular phase of my life, now it doesn't, since I have a kid to take care of and the bike theft problem has gotten out of control in my locale.
My main gripe is actually availability of bikes in the bike-sharing scheme, since I can't bring up my own in the office, and since I work in a shady area, there's no way I'd leave it outside for the day. I also like the flexibility of not having to use my bike both ways. Think catching a movie or whatever after work and possibly getting a drink with friends. Although this is related to not wanting to leave the bike unattended for any period of time.
But nowadays, with electric bikes, unless you live on top of Montmartre hill (and even then), I think it's no longer an issue. I have a colleague who takes her two children to school on bike before riding into the office (she works in a different office, where they have an interior yard with bike racks). Her bike's got electric assistance and she doesn't seem to arrive out of breath or anything. She also doesn't seem exceptionally sporty.
You don’t need to be fit, just not entirely out of shape — or ride an ebike. You can easily do chores, get groceries, etc. on a bike. I take my kid to school in a cargo bike regularly. It’s faster than driving (at rush hour at least) because there’s no stoplights on the bike path. And rain gear is a thing.
It’s not for everyone but haters always claim it’s for no one. No, it’s just not for you, stop being a hater.
Hence, mostly flat.
If you want to bike fast you can do it when not on the way to the office.
(I once biked in Dallas at 95F. There not getting sweaty might be a challenge...)
People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).
To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.
Sirens, people yelling, loud music, construction, etc.
Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles
People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
Construction: valid
But the single most frequent / annoying loud sound: car horns. Constantly.
Most of what I remember of European cities, too, when anywhere near the denser parts.
Part of "city noise" is dependent where you're living, and how new it is. Close, cramped, older building with people arguing above and below and beside you? Not fun. Newer building with excellent soundproofing? Nowhere near as bad.
But they're attached to emergency vehicles. The fire department is not going to wait for the bus when responding to a fire, so you can't actually get rid of this by installing mass transit, and then its prevalence is proportional to density.
> People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
> Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
If people are usually in cars then the people making noise will usually be in cars. But it's not as if they're going to stop having business disputes or lovers' quarrels or whatever it is this time just because they're on foot.
And whether loud music is a problem depends primarily on who your neighbors are. In a city you'll have a lot of them and you don't get to choose who they are.
> car horns
Ironically this doesn't happen in the suburbs because there are more roads and parking per car, and thereby fewer traffic disputes and no need to summon someone from a building immediately instead of parking and going inside. So you're now equally making the case for cities to have wider roads and more parking.
However, in Manhattan the city is still very loud with 0 cars. Meaning in the middle of the night in midtown, not a single car, the city itself hums with a constant noise that is not healthy.
Witnessed this during covid when I didn't see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue, but the city is still very very loud compared to a suburban setting.
So, we get rid of all cars, then what? You still live in a noisy city. No thanks.
Credentials: 5 years in midtown, 15 years downtown Manhattan.
But I distinctly remember watching the odd car here and there and wondering where they were going.
And things were quieter! There was the background noise of machinery and buses and cars but it was a lot quieter than even holiday Sundays.
Credentials: 14 years in semi-rural Texas, 25 years in Manhattan
I agree the city was quieter during covid, and would be quieter without cars. It's ridiculous to debate otherwise.
But a major is vastly noisier without cars than any normal suburb with the rare car passing by a residential street.
NYC will always be loud, cars are not.
Sirens
Construction
Buses
Semintrucks / public machinery (trash, etc)
Subway
Belligerent people
Lunatics
Inconsiderate people on motorcycles
Cars
Buildings / HVAC
Cars are near the bottom of the list
More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.
They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit.
This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!
And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.
This will spell economic worries someway down the road as maintenance upkeep costs start to kick in.
In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).
And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.
Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.
Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.
Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.
30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.
Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.
Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.
The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.
Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)
This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.
All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.
It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.
Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.
I can just as easily accuse you of moral righteousness, it's not a cover for anything, it's what's happening and with neither you nor I citing sources, it's just your word against mine.
Even then, come up with whatever cutesy numbers you want regarding housing, there are concrete numbers to point to for the side effects. Depressed teacher salaries is a well known issue. Overcrowding in schools is a real issue. Congestion and lack of public transportation is a real issue.
You can argue causality all you want, but if you leave out suddenly overpopulating areas as part of your equation, it's already flawed.
Lastly, you didn't read what I said.
I said it's fine to build more housing provides it comes with equal investments in infrastructure. You conveniently glossed over this fact because your solution of building taller still doesn't address it. So no, build taller isn't the only solution.
Again, reread what I said. I'm not against building more housing. Do you understand that? Again, I am not against building more housing.
All for building out public transportation, all for doing that is required to build more housing.
So either you take a slow and moderate approach to building more housing, which is fine, and will allow other infrastructure more time to catch up, or you make these investments up front with your larger scale development, as long as it's addressed it's all I'm saying.
Not sure what you're so up in arms about.
Going from single family homes to quadplexes does not solve the problem, build taller!
> Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
Not building the houses doesn't make the people go away. What ends up happening is they have to commute in from somewhere else, and
> the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100
happens in a different road.
(sure, in the long run people learn not to have children in the West because living space is scarce, and your "doubled the amount of school children" problem goes away)
and most of those downtown high rises in most cities are office buildings. New York is really the exception.
Very large like Columbus Ohio?
https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/
Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be...
Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html
However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.
I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.
Source: Manhattan, NYC
There's a big difference between building a tall building with a large uniform floorplate that takes up much of a block and a tall building that is thin, only taking up a tiny slice of a block, and thus allowing sunlight to pass through.
For this reason gloomy Vancouver for a long time mandated point towers, for the purpose of maximizing light.
Paris' status quo of uniform 6 story streetwalls could arguably let in less light than a mixed amount of much taller thinner towers on 3 story podiums.
Here is a low rise area, H represent housing units, _ is the ground
H_H_H_H_H_H
H H H
H___H___H__
So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?
Maybe they should start charging for that ...
Let's call it "taxes".
So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.
It should work.
That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?
Wait, that's actually what we have now.
Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?
I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.
(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)
Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?
That’s certainly worth exploring too. But there’s a reason I no longer mow my own lawn nor do my own auto maintenance: I flatter myself that I’m now more productive for the larger community when I do work that uses the skills I’ve spent years developing.
The cost of the necessary subsidy is calibrated to fall on grubby new-money high earners, so it is effectively free for the long-established propertied class who don't need much taxable income & locked in their property taxes long ago.
Liberalizing the market doesn't always work, even in the most dense economic liberal cities, the best environment for sustainable affordable housing is depopulation or some sort of recession or economic stagnation.
Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.
It's much easier to make sure middle and upper middle class people interact with the poor and such, but once you're rich enough to hire an assistant, you're rich enough to avoid most anything you don't want to deal with.
Paris is already among the densest places on earth.
The problem comes from the excessive centralization of practically everything France has, in Paris, leading to an overpopulation of the entire Ile de France region, which drive prices in Paris itself to the roof.
Is that a bad thing?
If you're upper middle class/rich, you can rent/buy. If you're poor, you get a chance to get public housing. If you're middle class, too bad for you.
Ultra rich easily bypass all those populist moves to 'tax rich', poor have sometimes unreasonable protections (ie you can just stop paying rent, give big FU to the owner, change locks and maybe, theoretically after 6 months of courts he can evict you on his costs, while you trash the place into nothing without any recourse - some real cases of friends living there).
Its outright the worst possible place in whole Europe to be rich (again, those ultra rich are off the quite corrupt system, just check all (super)yachts in whole Cote d'Azur), government goes after you like a rabid dog, inheritance tax is easily 40%. All the bankers I've talked to (not professionally, I am just a normal guy) advised against any investment in that country before you cross ultra high net worth line, then all this disappears.
Yet absolutely nobody strikes against this corruption and unfairness, middle class just buckles up and continues, at least whats left of it.
I guess it's a good thing Europe has free movement! They are free to be rich in Amsterdam, Berlin or Brussels. If the wealth is generated in France, then they should put up with the French inconveniences.
It goes the same for the social norms. If you are poor you can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like, if you are rich you also can have a trashy sex life and say whatever you like but if you are middle class you must have stable monogamous relationship with somebody of similar background and age(you can't just have sex with anyone between 18 and 80 and throw a scene, unlike the rich and the poor) and watch your mouth.
Hahaha, it's not one of my favourites these days but it was all over the place at that time :D.
edit: here's a more recent take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maObYlDIRcw
Their is give and take to everything in life. I don't think it's hard to live in Paris if you're in the middle class, but you certainly won't feel middle class doing it.
You'd be hard pressed to even find this outside of a few areas in NYC.
I know a lot of people who lived near the center when they were single so they were close to everything, and then moved 15 minutes out when they get kids. Selling those small central apartments give a big boost towards getting a nice home outside the center. Not Paris but the same European layout with dense suburbs, it really isn't that expensive since those dense suburbs are still very close to the city center relative to American sprawl like in silicon valley where you have to drive for an hour to reach a cheap place, in Europe if you drive for an hour you get to the next city so even the cheapest suburbs are much closer than that.
give us more data to understand if you define yourself as middle class. salary, rent, wealth beside salary. thanks.
It’s the same story all over Europe: the middle class sees close to 50% of their income taken away in taxes and contributions, and then is left paying for most of their expenses out of their own pocket.
Meanwhile rich people only pay a fraction of what they earn in taxes, and “poor” people get most stuff for “free”.
The saying is really correct: if you take half of someone’s wage to distribute for two people that didn’t do the same effort, you loose a vote, but you gain two.
I think this is the reason so many in the U.S. are skeptical of/resistant to such plans. Why work your butt off for 10 years to get to a place where you can afford a nice dwelling if you can also wait 10 years, working but not pushing yourself, and someone else will pay for it for you? And then once you have it, there's even less incentive to try to "move up" from there, because there's now a cliff in front of you. You have to make the whole jump in one go, because if you only take incremental steps, you lose eligibility for your subsidies.
American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck. As often as possible, we want to think it's earned. The idea of trying to make up for some of the luck factor by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant, even if it might lead to higher quality of life for everyone involved.
To some.
In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses. When you have 100 cousins and 10 brothers, this is a viable option.
They frequent each others businesses, work on interconnected industries, and in general help out however they can.
It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community. That seems a more fundamental problem with tax-rich/give-poor mentality. These folks make tons of charitable donations in money, in kind, and in time, but oppose wealth redistribution.
It was really easy to be charitable when I was young and working meaningless jobs for $15/hr and I had my whole life ahead, and it will probably be easy when I am retired and no longer feel the strain of 50/hr workweeks.
For now though it is brutal watching taxes eat huge chunks of your income so they can spend flagrantly.
What makes it so different for you where you have strictly more money than when you were young but have less money in excess? Folks in the comments saying being middle class is harder than being poor are insane to me, this is way better than when I was broke.
Well-known examples in the U.S. include the use of legal covenants, red lining, Jim Crow laws, and sometimes blatant intimidation to shape who can own which property where. Such changes persist for decades because of the illiquidity of property in general and the compounding effect of wealth discrepancies.
So “outside their communities” is not a neutral, or purely geographic concept. Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.
U.S. governments, in contrast, are ostensibly bound by the republican concept generally and the 14th Amendment specifically, to provide protection and service equally. Even if the citizens in question don’t fit the preferred local definition of “who we want to help.”
Edit add: I’m posting this because I think it helps clarify why some folks want government programs to exist to address social problems, as opposed to just counting on voluntary aid to solve it all.
I don’t want to leave the impression that I think government programs are perfect or without flaws. I actually agree with the comments above that point out how means-tested programs can create incentives to “stand pat” and not try for incremental improvements. It’s policy problem that is well known but hard to fix.
That is what the law says. It is not what they do.
I, personally, agree with your informative pseudo-rebuttal (it's polite and impartial so not really anti-them).
However, the philosophical difference is that
> they are intentionally constructed
is precisely the point, they might say.
I've come to realize, after spending time with them and reading "righteous mind", that the difference is so fundamental it requires a lot more power to cross divides than I have. I simply have to recognize the right and good intent in what they do, rather than denigrate it as "not enough" or "in the slightly wrong direction even if enough".
I imagine a world in which they decline to pay, and therefore to receive, benefits from wealth redistribution, and urbanites who are highly paid like ourselves subsidize other urbanites who are not. I also realize this world would have "rural" covens of uber rich, and so it will not be more just.
I think the first part of this statement is crucial to the full meaning. It is not about charity[0]. It is about redistribution of wealth by force is repugnant.
[0] This 2022 reports states US is #3 in charity (giving). https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-resea...
IE, giving Joel Olstein $10k to help him buy a new private jet is considered "charitable giving" and is also considered more charitable than if you just chat up the Asylum family that was just settled next door and help them get integrated into the local community to help them network and find work and friends, despite being way more impactful to human beings than that fucking grifter.
That "research" will also consider donating to, say, an anti-abortion group or an explicitly anti-gay group as "donations", as long as you, the questionee, consider them to be.
Also, being self reported with zero verification of any kind, Americans might just lie more about how much they "give".
The IRS publishes statistics about claimed charitable giving. 2020 tax filers claimed about $150 million in charitable giving if I am reading the report correctly, so less than two dollars per American. That is definitely an undercount since most people who make small contributions do not itemize their taxes and probably don't report their charitable giving, but even that number will be tainted by a person "donating" their money to a charitable organization that they 100% control.
For instance, the US government allocates $7 billion+ annually to the UN World Food Programme [1]. The next biggest donor? $1.7 billion. It's not even close.
And no, $150 million in claimed charitable giving in 2020 is provably false. One ultra-rich individual alone is enough to top that figure.
P.S: I'm not an American.
Rule no 1 - always blame others.
It's almost, per capita, exactly the same amount - The USA has a pop. of some 333+ million, Germany has a population of some 83 million.
Unless you are gay, trans, not the right kind of christian, have mental issues, are progressive in any way, are willing at all to contradict their absurd views of reality, want cheaper electricity through green energy, want any form of public transit, their family member has beef with you, you dared to question the authority of the local PD, you dare to question that drag queens are a threat, you think maybe gun control could have prevented the local school shooting or that the PD in that town could have done better and should be fired.
The belief that actually rural people are really nice and altruistic is just laughable. Having grown up with them, they will only help you if you are the "right kind" of person, IE, if you are useful or beneficial to them. My white, catholic, french mom in a city of 9000 was completely ostracized, despite knowing every single family, and being a very generous and nice person, because she didn't have the right last name.
Insular rural communities are all about local tyrannies, and local cliques, and if for ANY reason, no matter how tenuous or bullshit or even made up, you WILL be excluded if the local popular club doesn't like you. It's basically high school, which makes sense when you remember most rural communities are entirely made up of people who didn't do anything past high school and basically have not grown beyond that as people.
>It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community.
These are the same concepts. Being unwilling to help outside your community IS being unwilling to help.
This is a well-trod stereotype, probably for good reason, and it may also be your personal experience, so I'm not going to refute it generally. But this is not the case for the folks I was referring to.
> All else held constant, rural respondents were almost 5.2 percentage points less likely to be a charitable donor, and donated less, on average, than urban donors, after controlling for human and social capital variables, such as education level, income level, health status, religious affiliation, family composition, and others. Rural respondents were significantly less likely to be donors to secular charities, and gave less on average to secular causes overall. These differences do not exist when comparing the religious giving of rural and urban respondents.
> However, rural donors donated a statistically significantly higher percentage of their income to charity than did urban donors. Also, rural donors are more likely to donate to religious causes than secular causes. Frequent religious attendance is associated with a higher probability of giving for rural residents, as is itemization of deductions on income tax returns.
-- Comparing Donation Patterns of Rural and Urban Donors -- https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/00...
The US is in the ballpark of other OECD countries in terms of social expenditure: https://www.compareyourcountry.org/social-expenditure
And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the United States having a very unhealthy population and pays doctors the highest salaries in the world.
Why would I have a problem with this if the "someone else" is a robot? Though I suppose, for the past 2-3 decades, it's been more like, "a worker whose productivity has been GREATLY increased by the advent if the Information Age." (I can see how the worker might be put off by that, but they also have the option of grabbing me and a few other people meeting witht he boss, and saying, "We're each going to do a small portion of my tasks, you're going to pay us the same as you used to, or nothing is going to get done at all.")
Think it's more surprising how little of it is down to luck. Even working slightly harder reaps rewards quickly that outweigh the extra work.
It's most just most people are not even putting in the minimum.
Some people are just really bad at diligent hard work and lack the self control needed. The question is how to handle that without causing other issues.
A lot of the big cards are just dealt to you. Your parents, your skin, your religion, your school, your intelligence, your health, the neighborhood you grow up in--these things have a huge impact on what you do or don't have to overcome once you're old enough to take responsibility for your choices, and you don't get to pick them at the start. They have an outsized impact on what you even believe to be possible, never mind what you think is normal.
It's like how everyone says they would be anti-slavery if they grew up before the civil war despite the numbers just not supporting that. If I took away your advantages and made you do your life over you probably aren't going to break the mold and will end up roughly where everyone else of similar life circumstance ends up. What special spark could you even have? Because hard working and smart people are born in all walks of life but that only takes you to a local maximum.
You start having to consider that maybe white people are actually the superior race if you truly believe that it's not privileges because how else do you explain the vastly uneven distribution of success in the US?
I don't know about other places, but I think this is a major issue in France. Many things stop altogether if you get above a certain limit of income. So many people end up working for minimum wage, because if they got 1 € more, they start "qualifying" for more taxes, lose access to social programs, etc.
It can still be implemented (not by saying "if you make more money, you'll only get 29 days a month of this house" but making the cash subsidy for the housing explicit and able to be wound down) but it really has to be thought through.
You really want some way for lower income people to move to middle income without having to give up their neighborhood, friends, everything. But if the neighborhood is entirely "working poor" and "filthy rich" you can't.
I.e. if the government buys up 10% of the posh neighborhood to add cheap housing, the number of posh units goes down 10% and you paid for the taxes to make that happen.
So you're paying taxes to give someone else the thing you want, and make it harder for you to get that thing in the future. Then you hear about some corruption scandal where the government was overpaying...
I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly. Admitting that success has a large luck component would mean admitting that the system isn't and cannot be made fair, and I just don't think that's an idea people can tolerate.
How does our justice system function if it admits that defendants in bad situations are there because they're unlucky instead of bad people? How do we justify income inequality if we admit those at the top were lucky and that it would be a different set of people in an alternate universe? Basically our whole society is built on the idea that the system is fair and everyone is where they deserve to be because of choices they've made.
Some children are going to grow up in abusive or neglectful homes, which isn't fair to them. Some portion of them are going to do poorly in school, which isn't really their fault, they're children. Those children then become adults who have to enter the workforce or try to get into college and be basically ranked in a lineup against everyone else, including people who had loving and supportive parents that bought them tutoring and what not. Where do we suddenly cross the line into being fair?
Repeat that situation across a variety of different attributes.
Sure everybody has to meet the same bar, but that doesn't imply the same odds of meeting it, or work to get there, or risk incurred to try. Is it fair to not build ramps on buildings because people in wheelchairs have equal access to the stairs? Is it fair to not give poor defendants attorneys because they have equal access to the market of lawyers?
I don't think equality of outcomes is desirable because of externalities, but I do think it's worth closing the gap between the haves and have nots out of deference to the inherent unfairness in the system. I don't care for the extremes of income inequality we've arrived at under the guise of the system being perfectly or mostly fair.
Unless you somehow have an income source that doesn't rely on any taxpayer funded infrastructure whatsoever, it's a bit disingenuous to call it 'your own money'. As an example, if your city pays for a big new park on your block and this increases the value of your property, is that increase really yours?
The whole issue of taxation is so much more complicated than '100% of my income is mine and any tax is essentially theft'. Much better to argue about taxation in terms of fairness in my opinion. In terms of fairness, property owners do much better out of the whole equation than it might first seem as every public improvement amounts to a tax refund in the form of increased property value. The poor might get obvious refunds or entitlements, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not equivalent.
In the above circumstance, the people with the most legitimate gripe are people paying a decent amount of income tax while owning no property and so missing out on both types of 'refund'.
When you phrase it like that, it's not really an American-specific thing. I remember reading about ethological studies on very young children - not in US! - where they would be given a bunch of candy to distribute in various contrived situations. One of those was picking between something like "you get 1 candy and the other kid gets 1 candy" vs "you get 2 candies and the other kid gets 4 candies", and similar arrangements in larger groups. What they found is that there's a very strong bias towards fairness, meaning that kids were pretty consistently willing to end up with less candy themselves if that means that another kid would not get an unfair share. Which, if you think about it, is not an unreasonable trait to evolve in a social species.
> American culture doesn't like to think about how much of "success" is down to luck. [...] The idea of trying to make up for some of the luck factor by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant, even if it might lead to higher quality of life for everyone involved.
I don't find charitable giving repugnant. I donate myself, even when there is no tax benefit to be gained. I don't find conservative and prudently managed social safety nets repugnant either (by prudent, I have in mind social safety nets that are by design meant to help people get out of poverty, not become dependent on such a system by creating incentives to remain effectively poor). I also recognize that the common good does require more than just money (and I do recognize a common good, unlike weird, sociopathic hyperindividualists). And in times of crisis, I recognize that a rigid notion of private property is opposed to the common good; private property exists, after all, for the sake of the common good. If I had a warehouse of food during a famine, I would not view people taking amounts of food from that warehouse to allow them to survive as theft.
What I do find repugnant is what seems like the insinuation that my luck somehow means that others are entitled to what I have received through luck[0], and that my claim to such wealth is suspect. If I win the lottery, the notion that there is something unclean about receiving that wealth or bequeathing it to my children, because I was lucky, and others weren't, or else I'm a bad person, is preposterous. It reeks of envy. So, unless I've earned something, others can just take it? I have no right to it? But they have a right to it? Unless I've earned something, I must feel insecure about having it? No, actually. If I have received something through luck, through gift, through merit, and I have done so without criminality, it is mine.
Now, if I did win the lottery, I would certainly give to charity. And if a competent state taxed me in a reasonable way to fund programs that genuine help lift the poor out of poverty, I have no issue in principle. And I would claim, that those who have surplus wealth beyond what is needed to fully support themselves and their families do well to use that surplus to aid the poor (the poor, mind you, not those who can make it on their own). I simply reject the notion that others can or should force me to do so. And when I have the freedom to decide on my own, I have the freedom to allocate money prudently.
So, what if we get rid of all these complicated rent control and rent freezes and affordable housing schemes, and instead just implement a rent tax, to be paid by the landlord, and make it progressive? I don't know exactly how it should scale; you wouldn't want it to be just by rent because that would have a regressive impact on families who have kids, because they need more space and more space naturally costs more. Maybe price per square foot?
At least in my city this would probably also reduce real estate prices in general, because a huge source of demand for houses is actually real estate speculators who buy up houses and then put them on the market as rental units. I gather, based on one conversation with an acquaintance who had been a realtor but was looking to pivot into this line of business, is that a lot of what's fueling that is, in effect, not-exactly-loopholes in US and local housing, lending and tax laws - many of which are ostensibly aimed at making housing more affordable - that allow people with sufficient resources to financially engineer together a speculative source of income while externalizing all the risk onto everyone but themselves.
Landlords are for the most part capitalizing on these broader market / regulatory trends.
Grandparent says: "get rid of all these complicated rent control and rent freezes and affordable housing scheme..."
I think this is fertile for discussion. Rent freezes didn't work in Argentina (extreme example), my opinion is they don't work anywhere. But oversupply does reduce prices, as happened with evergrande in China.
IMO interest in not having an oversupply bursting a bubble is precisely what parent is talking about.
Again, in a very absolute way of looking at life.
Argentina is a great example. That said rent is also cheap in Buenos Aires. But I think that is due to the economy rather than rent control.
You’re right in that affordable housing in any real sense would be MASSIVELY unpopular with voters. You’d be looking at cutting values in half to reach 2000s levels of affordability or 75% to get to 1970s levels.
People are really bad at working out constant dollars and have loans, as long as the nominal value is steady or going up slightly, they don't really care if the absolute value has dropped because of inflation.
In London, where housing delivery has long trailed short of need, the population rose by 3.4 for every new home.
This mismatch of housing supply and need has had drastic consequences for affordability. Rents increased 2.0 per cent per year in England on average over the last decade, according to data from Hometrack. Growth ranged from 2.4 per cent per year in London, where housing delivery was lowest relative to population growth. In the North East, by contrast, housebuilding all but kept pace with population growth and rents grew just 0.7 per cent per year.
https://www.savills.co.uk/blog/article/309803/residential-pr...
The ratio of house prices to earnings, another basic measure of housing affordability, increased from 6.9 in 2010 to 7.8 in 2019 across England. In the North East, where we delivered almost as many homes as people, homes became more affordable. In London, where housing supply falls far short of need, the ratio of house prices to earnings has ballooned.
When you think about it, even in areas like London the housing market is not liquid nor uniform enough for the offer vs demand model to apply. You don't rent/buy home like you buy strawberries.
In about 1 year there was no significant increase in demand and the supply stayed the same but everybody saw its rent increase.
Edit: Also we should not mix-things up, the housing market is very different in outliers like London compared to the more global market. Here we're in the context of those outliers (Paris, London, etc.)
Citation definitely needed.
In my opinion, cheap credit (i.e. low interest rates) is the primary culprit. It has created an awful lot of 'artificial demand' for properties as investments as opposed to demand for properties to be used as homes. In most markets I look at, the proportion of underutilised properties has been rising (second homes, short term rentals, land banking, etc).
Here in NZ the sharp rise in interest rates caused a sudden and significant increase in homes available for sale and homes available to rent. Where did they come from?
A few choice paras (if people don't read the full article):
"The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum. The evidence, however, does not support this thinking. Quite the reverse. Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing while our living situations have been getting so much worse. In London, as the Conservative Home blog notes, there is a terrible housing crisis “even though its population is roughly the same as it was 70 years ago”, when the city was still extensively bomb-damaged by the second world war."
"The supply issue continues to dominate the discourse despite the US having more homes per capita than at any point in its history, and the UK’s homes-per-capita ratio actually exceeds the US’s."
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
I know lots of places where there are empty, cheap houses. They're not close to any good jobs, the only Internet they have is 3G, and the schools suck because the county is poor (because no one wants to live there).
I also suspect housing consumption per-capita is up as people move out younger and marry later. Especially in population centers.
I'm not sure what they're pointing to as the reason for housing prices if it's not supply and demand.
You also have the issue that if someone does have a house, no matter what kind of house, it's a hassle and a half to move, so you have to provide some pretty darn strong incentives to get people to move.
My house ain't great, but I'd need something like $10-20k to consider moving to a nearly identical or even somewhat better house, just because of the costs and hassle associated with moving.
>I'm not sure what they're pointing to as the reason for housing prices if it's not supply and demand.
They are saying the uncapped rental market makes housing as an asset class extremely profitable i.e. simple supply & demand argument is not strong enough alone to be the only driver.
What data do you have of people moving out younger? Everything I've seen is that younger generations are stuck living at their parent's house.
everything is paid by the renters, and if the price is not high enough (to turn a risk-weighted profit) it will be removed from the market.
(if there's a high enough vacancy tax and/or security costs against squatting, then eventually it will be sold. which is a one time boon for the market, but it ends up crowding out new developments for a while, and altogether this just leads to crazy waitlists and the usual discrimination.)
Landlords have a huge and largely unearned cashflow and the thing about taxes is it's best to try to raise them where the money is.
If all rents are taxed, what is the market mechanism to avoid pass though?
It seems as if a more fair approach would be to increase tax rates on income from rents. That way a rentier would not defer maintenance, the costs of which would be deducted from income and not taxed, as opposed to front-loading the tax to the rent transaction and thus encouraging deferred maintenance to preserve income.
The market mechanism that precludes tax pass-through is the price is already set as high as the market will bear. If landlords could raise the rent to pass through a new tax then they would have done so already without the tax.
What percentage of total rents are unreported? One would expect that the majority of rents are collected by professional management companies subject to reporting requirements that make underreporting unfeasible. Maybe that is an incorrect baseline?
What makes you think that rents are already as high as the market will bear? After all, rents keep rising, right?
It's politically difficult to do so, but if you don't you end up with an even bigger barrier to mobility and entry to the property class as you have to pay more until you can save up for a deposit.
(I don't think you can make the tax incidence on renters zero)
Oh come on, the NYPD swallowed 5 billion in public funds, the most of any city on earth. Crime is near an all-time low. Hell, they could probably slash half that budget without causing the crime sprees the NY post implies could happen at any time. This is the worst excuse to avoid funding subsidized housing when the latter would probably have a greater impact on whether people were desperate enough to turn to crime. Saying NY needs to be more secure is just fear mongering at this point.
> they could probably slash half that budget without causing the crime sprees
You're living in a world painted by your politics and oblivious to reality. I plan to return to the city someday if things improve, but things are horrible now and not moving in the right direction.
Nobody ever backs shit like this up. You've been had and in the most obvious and shallow manner.
What are the mechanics of how this works? If I agree to buy a property for a million dollars, does the city get a chance to match that price?
there's a French wiki page on this: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_pr%C3%A9emption_urbai...
But basically, yes, the city has 2 months to match the price. The city can also offer a lower price, which can be refused (so no sale at all) or can be argued in front of a special judge, who'd rule if the price offered by the city is acceptable, depending on the local housing market.
It's not a rule that's specific to Paris, but which is applicable in most French cities.
- they don't intend to buy, in which case you can proceed with the sale
- they buy at the price you've set
- they make a counter-offer, which you have the right to refuse but then you also renounce to sell
If there's a dispute on the price (especially in the third case), a tribunal will decide the eventual price, "based on the recent sale prices of similar properties".
How much my home is worth should not be capped by whatever government thinks. That's bs
If government is counter offering all of my neighbors and they are accepting it, then I am screwed. I either accept the government counter offer or I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbors to set the price at something very close to that anyways
And if I don't like it, I'm legally not allowed to sell?
Ridiculous
Even if you don't think houses should be infinitely appreciating assets, which I don't, your asset worth should still be as valuable as someone is willing to pay for them, not controlled by a cartel style government
That's an assumption on your part. Both the owner and the city can mount a legal case as to why their price is the correct one. In practice, this is often done by comparison with other properties in the same area and with the same characteristics. The judge also gets to visit the actual property to have its own perspective on it. Both the owner and the city have access to the same data when it comes to properties sold and bought, and must establish their cases based on concrete notarial deeds.
There are indeed cases where the city makes a counter-proposal with a price that is significantly lower than market rates, but you have court rulings that reject these and side with the owner. I don't think it's perfect, but it's not one-sided like you describe.
It can be frustrating, but eventually the city is not just a bunch of houses piled up in a completely decentralized way, and the preemption right, which has exceptions, for example properties recently built cannot be preempted, and which isn't automatic, i.e. there are multiple recourses for owners, is there so that the city has some leeway to conduct policy with regards to housing.
Also, I'd like to point out that when you say:
> I tend to lean lefty, but this scheme makes me understand why libertarians want less government
It's quite easy to replace `government` with `a large private company` in your hypothetical:
> If ~government~ a large private company is counter offering all of my neighbors and they are accepting it, then I am screwed. I either accept the ~government~ large private company's counter offer or ~I go to tribunal who will cite all of the government's recent purchases from my neighbors to set the price at something very close to that anyways~
With, of course, the downside that there's no system-level recourse when the large private company uses its power to either: - undercut your "market value" of your home and force you to sell - or make living in your home terrible due to it successfully buying up and controlling all of the land _surrounding_ your home
Both lead to what you are saying you don't like -- some _external_ actor coming in and controlling "how much [your] home is worth."
Yeah that's kind of my point!
This would very obviously be predatory if it were a real estate conglomerate, which is something government should protect people from, not actually just become themselves!!
> Should land -- a scare, limited resource -- be a private or public asset? I believe you're coming at this from the former perspective
This is completely irrelevant to the topic, because in this case we are talking about a situation where land is being treated as a private asset, and a government is acting like a private real estate conglomerate
You can challenge it on grounds of what "should" be, but that's an entirely different discussion
What's your take on anti-price-gauging laws? Should the government "cap" the price of food and bottled water after a natural disaster, or should the seller determine how much it's worth, as determined by supply & demand?
Paris property remains extremely expensive.
"if your property is eligible for preemption, you have to declare that you intend to sell (at the price you wish) to the city, which can then tell you that [list of options here]"
It seemed like the city has right of first refusal. If they make a counter offer you are then either obligated to accept their offer, or go to tribunal, or not sell
Sounds like every property sale is a political calculation ready for grease.
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To me Paris is not Paris at all anymore.
The government is in damage control before the olympic games and shall try to hide that Paris is not Paris anymore but Paris honestly became a sad thing to see.
There are many tourists having an actual shock and it can be really bad: if I'm not mistaken japanese even have a hotline they can call if they're in shock when they discover the shithole that Paris as become as opposed to the rosy picture of Paris that is painted abroad.
How would you possibly know this as France doesn't record ethnic data for births?
"Although the BBC reported in 2006 that the Japanese embassy in Paris had a "24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock",[4] the Japanese embassy states[clarification needed] no such hotline exists[clarification needed].[9][10] Also in 2006, Miyuki Kusama, of the Japanese embassy in Paris, told The Guardian "There are around 20 cases a year of the syndrome and it has been happening for several years", and that the embassy had repatriated at least four Japanese citizens that year.[11]"
Out of a million people who are Japanese that visit Paris every year, a dozen of them having shock at the reality of the city isn't that noteworthy honestly, and I imagine there are more Americans that do this than Japanese people.
That's a staggering number of people! Almost 1% of all Japanese people visit Paris every year?
We had a wonderful time.
The riots are scheduled ahead of time, so we knew where and when to avoid. The garbage was not pleasant. But did not stop us from enjoying awesome cultural and culinary and sight seeing experiences.
From what I can tell, this Paris has always been Paris. It's always been rich versus poor, often far more violently than what I describe.
One way is to have hidden costs. This could range from straight up bribes, to paid consultants to fill out a lot of forms or talk to the right people, to just knowing someone
Another way is a lottery which benefits a tiny percentage of people. Sure it's "fair" but the incentive to rig it is huge
But even with a lottery it's still inefficient. If you give someone an apartment with a market rent of 4k for only 1k you're effectively giving them a 3k apartment subsidy. But if you handed them 3k, maybe they would spend 1k dollars on extra apartment and 2k for something else.
There are other distortions. Overall these are the worst kinds of policies because it's all hidden costs. If we realized that with a system like this we're giving 1 out of 1k eligible people the equivalent of a 30k a year transfer, we'd likely realize it's a ridiculous policy. But instead we just say how nice it is so and so is paying only 600 Euros to live in the center of Paris
We should have a clear objective system of governance that allows even terrible people to oversee it
How much room for discretion is there actually in promoting diversity? I suppose you could forcibly break up poorer immigrant communities which would be pretty harmful.
Do you favor removing those laws?
If Romans where able to relatively evenly spread their towns and population all over the place in the analogue age, then why aren't we able to do so in the digital age?
Also, mixed income housing in Paris has a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
No; I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. In fact, that seems like a fairly strange statement given that I mentioned the Centre Pompidou (opened in the 1970s) in practically the same breath.
>Or that Paris's culture can be reduced to a set of buildings?
No; again, not sure where that's coming from.
My point, which you didn't address at all, was that you seemed to be implying that there was some kind of correlation between lower-income housing in cities and their cultural significance. Was that your goal? If so, can you explain further?
Zurich and Oslo, I don't see the connection, they both have workers of all kinds, old and young people. They're organic and alive cities.
The point in Monaco farthest from France is like a 10 minute drive away.
And I don't know about Zurich, but Monaco is clearly dying. Luckily they can build on the sea (and do so), but it suffered greatly from covid and Russia invasion of Ukraine, as without the Russian mob, a lot of 'amenities' aren't as available, which slow the 35yo+ fratboy life.
As the poor constituency builds greater numbers they attract politicians that promise them things by stealing from those with money. This in turn chases those people away and the city is left poorer and poorer and becomes worse and worse. Once nice areas become undesirable and decay sets in.
Or to make a clichéd example: being cool and arty isn't particularly rewarded by salaries because there are a limited number of opportunities for this to improve a company's profitability. But it can be rewarded by subsidised rents because people prefer to live in cities with a population of cool and arty people for the non-monetary benefits they bring to that society.
Well, some people do. But everyone is paying for it, even if they'd rather save.
If those jobs are paid for by voluntary customers, then that's fine. If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them, that's the issue I'm mentioning.
>If they're subsidised through taxes of people who don't want them
Yes.
how do people show up to work at Google, Apple etc?
through everything from "not dying from preventably disease in adolescence" to "being educated in public schools" to "being carried to work on roads and transit paid for by the public"
As in if I am a private plumber who does jobs for people, my job is subsidised by taxes?
That's not considering your customers, who are likely also subsidized by the government in some fashion - if their jobs do not involve federal or state government contracts or supplying or servicing companies holding such contracts, they're almost certainly taking advantage of advantageous tax rebates or deductions.
Well, not necessarily. People stay for jobs, family and friends. They will just pay for something they're not bothered about if it's not so expensive they're forced to move. That doesn't mean them staying is anything to do with the thing some people want.
I'm passionately opposed to private automobiles and the fact that my tax money goes to subsidizing them (including stupid road upkeep etc)
unfortunately I don't get to choose not to pay for that (but I can choose to live in a place like Paris where the Mayor is taking active steps to support not only private automobiles but give equal importance to other modes of transport)
I don't have a problem with roads, I have a problem with roads being gridlocked and destroyed by single occupancy private automobiles and the resulting unnecessary deaths and road upkeep.
You need to be able to speak without classifying people into groups. I'm not an ardent motorist. I don't think it's good to allow myself to be indoctrinated into any of the (frankly bizarre) transportation-obsessed groups that exist.
Correct. Therefore, subsidized housing is good and more of it is better? No, it does not follow.
What you say is correct, to a degree. Beyond that, it is incorrect. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Unfortunately, current styles of "democracy" not only do not do this, they instead engage in deceptive propaganda to make it appear like they do this and more (how you can tell: observe how people praise "democracy", based on clearly silly memes). I often wonder if the quality of these institutions in an absolute sense (as opposed to a relative comparison to literal fascist dictatorships, the only other option dontchaknow) may have something to do with some people thinking they should be eliminated and replaced, a sentiment which is always and without exception represented as being dumb/etc.
Note also that these institutions also control school curriculum, which "denies" the public the skills needed to realize any of this is going on, how utterly riddled with error and deceit/delusion the public conversation is, etc.
this would be a disaster
take how Hidalgo is deprioritizing private automobiles on the streets of Paris
most of the public was passionately and intensely opposed to that, but she did it anyway
now, people can't imagine ever going back to how it was before - families being able to walk and ride bikes along the Seine and Rue de Rivoli is too nice
= asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to result in locking in status quo because people don't really know what they want, but they're usually pro status quo and opposed to change
It depends how you do it. For example, if you ask their opinion and then carry out that opinion without thinking about it, it would probably not yield optimum results, because humans almost always hallucinate (our culture teaches them this behavior). But with patient guidance I believe it is possible for people to improve over time.
As it is, we are at the mercy of bureaucrats with questionable ethics and goals, who also also always hallucinate (again, because of culture), so this is not a fantastic position to insist on maintaining either.
It has been well demonstrated that under very specific conditions, humans can achieve a state of high coherence. We've only managed this in a few select domains so far, because of hard work and counter-cultural attention to detail, and mainly: because a few individuals thought it seemed like a good idea, and made it happen against the odds. I personally think we can make it happen again, but not if no one tries.
> now, people can't imagine
Not quite. In fact, people cannot stop imagining, the problem is that they do not have control over it, or realize they are doing it. But we are in luck: we have children and teenagers, who have yet to fall victim to the hypnosis/Maya that has spread throughout the adult world. They could teach adults how to do it in a controlled manner, as we could in the past, or ideally even better (children and teenagers have never had enough say in decisions if you ask me, they are waaaaaaaay better than adults at specific forms and domains of thinking).
> asking for peoples opinion on stuff in lots of cases is just going to...
Do you still believe this?
if people are given the choice of anything, the answer most of the time will be "no"
Prime example: do you remember that big pandemic a few years ago? Do you remember how passionate most people were that everyone should go get their vaccinations, to protect each other? I sincerely think that these people genuinely believed that the feelings they were experiencing were sincere, and human belief even if non-genuine is an incredibly powerful force, maybe even the most powerful of all forces.
It’s not in human nature to give charity that would elevate others to the same or, God forbid, higher status as compared to the benefactor.
Wherever a young person, newcomer, or upstart has a reasonable chance of attaining what the incumbents enjoy, you’re probably going to find them taking it through market competition, not having it allocated to them by a vote of the incumbents.
a) we had a political system that was capable of enacting the will of the people
b) we had an education system that improved people so they were capable of making more optimal decisions
Alternatively, we could [1] consider waking up for even a short period of time and put some mental effort into considering whether our most sacred operating system may not actually be what it is advertised (and thus: believed) to be.
Is it not rather funny that thousands of incredibly smart programmers, systems analysts, etc are not able to even consider whether the system that controls our lives and well being, not to mention the literal continued existence of many thousands of innocent people throughout the world could maybe be substantially improved?
Day after day we engage in the pointing of fingers, funny how the fingers never get pointed at ourselves.
[1] Well, I am speaking a bit loosely: the laws of physics in this environment support it, but that does not guarantee that it is completely supported.
In Paris' case, the financial situation is bad and getting worse with a debt on track to reach EUR10 billion.
So it seems to me that Paris is borrowing like there is no tomorrow. This usually does not end well.
Obviously, this is not what they are doing, debts growing with quite high tax rises at the same time ("taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year).
Paris is often depiected as a great model, especially by liberal foreign media, but the reality is rather different, and I believe that the Mayor's approval rating is currently abyssmal...
>"taxe fonciere" [property tax] doubled last year
My French is rusty, but it was a 50% increase, it was previously the lowest of all cities in France, and it was not raised since 2011[0]. It is also peanuts compared to property taxes in Canada where I live, and especially compared to many parts of the US. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because property taxes pay for different things in different countries (i.e. in Canada provincial taxes pay for schools, in the US it comes out of your municipal property taxes). But still, we're not talking about one of the main taxes for an average French citizen, clearly.
[0] https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/taxe-fonciere-a-pa...
And I won't even get into how ghastly areas around the Eiffel Tower (for instance) have become with crime, beggars, etc everywhere.
As I mentioned, rose-tinted glasses can be very strong, especially in people who have no insight but are looking for ideological reinforcement because, frankly, articles about how great Paris is in the NYT only serve that purpose, the readers will not know a thing about the actual situation.
Big number scary, but looking at it on a per citizen basis is it really that big, or unreasonable a number? Assuming that this debt has been spent rationally on say infrastructure, social housing policies, QoL upgrades for xyz?
Yes, good fiscal policy to keep debt stable or reduce in the long term is necessary, but it sure doesn't seem as doom and gloom as people make it out to be.
You should see how much debt some countries are in... It's an order of magnitude more in the extreme cases.
People's intentions about when and where to move are important. A housing system that removes all individual agency from this question, abdicating everything to a government lottery/waiting list system, can meet other desiderata but is clearly losing something important.
I am not saying Paris' approach is transplantable directly to NYC, but rather that first principle analyses (such as gp's commentary) that say that the Paris approach doesn't work are flawed. I know these analyses are flawed because one can look at Paris and see that they have achieved their policy objective of Paris being affordable for a wide swath of incomes.
Policies should be pursued, adopted, changed etc based on their outcomes above their adherence to abstract models. Models are great but once you have data that a policy has failed you should change that policy and try something else.
For health care, there are many publicly owned hospital systems in Mississippi, and of course Medicare is available for everyone 65+. Mississippi is not a Medicaid expansion state, so while Medicaid (free health care) is available for children, pregnant women, and the disabled, there is a coverage gap between that and qualifying for the ACA subsidies for health insurance (aka "Obamacare") which is sort of similar to the German system if you wave your hands; I think Austria has something similar, but I'm not familiar, but obviously the coverage is broader.
Additionally, quality of life amounts to more than measures for disposable income etc. If you consider access to education and healthcare the picture might take on greater depth.
If you used housing prices an an indication of desirability (and an attempt to stay on topic) people much prefer to live there than the smallish mid-western town that I bought a house in.
I mean, trees and mountains instead of miles and miles of corn...
If you compare the Quality of Life Index, Austria is 9th, USA is 15th. Freedom Index - Austria is 93, USA is 83. HDI USA is 20th with 0.927, Austria is 22nd with 0.926. Another fun one is Cost of Living index which shows that Austria is significantly cheaper to live in compared to the US (66.8 vs 72.9 out of NYC).
I can go on, but it's frankly ridiculous that you think GDP per capita is relevant, or somehow directly impacts the lives of Austrians and invalidates the good choices Austria and Vienna have made.
You're quite correct he should have used GDP w/ PPP, but I don't think the fact that Austria would rank merely below-average rather than second-worst is a very powerful argument. And there is some truth to this: visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European. I remember being particularly shocked by the state Germans live in and find acceptable.
It is, because they were implying that Austria having the social housing policies that it does, it severely impacts GDP; but it doesn't. A tiny mountainous country that was twice in the middle of disastrous wars in the last century, has practically no raw materials... and would be in the middle of the US GDP PPP-wise, which has a much bigger market, a lot more workers, a lot of raw materials, etc etc etc etc. And again, this is assuming GDP matters for the average person's life... and it doesn't.
> visit the average American household and they have a lot of material wealth compared to the average European
At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
Austria got screwed by WWII for sure, but it still had a literate, educated, relatively wealthy population and was once the center of a great empire that amassed great wealth. And, I mean, Vienna was practically the cultural center of Europe for a brief period.
> At the expense of crippling debt :) https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm (don't forget the fact that American savings have to account for losing your job or getting sick, as well as retirement, while in Austria they don't).
I'll be the first to argue that the American safety net needs improvements, but Social Security, (retirement and disability benefits), Medicare (65+ government health insurance), Medicaid (poor, unemployed, and disabled health insurance), and unemployment insurance all exist in the US, and together with other benefit programs constitute the majority of US spending. Indeed, US government spending per capita on health care is higher than many European countries. It'd be a good example of where having a higher nominal dollar value doesn't buy as much even adjusted for PPP, since obviously despite this the US doesn't have universal public health care.
This is considered uncouth to say, but household debt is sometimes due to horrible exigencies, but it's much more often the result of easy access to debt and material consumption. It's really shocking to see the people you know cannot be making more than 40-60k driving around 50-70k vehicle, and who also have a nice boat and a huge house. But even people not doing these things tend to live more materially comfortable lives than most Europeans I know.
While the latter have indeed revenues that seem much higher, I would say that there is no doubt that the quality of life of my former Austrian colleagues was higher, based on purchasing power, balance between job and personal life and quality of food and environment.
Who cares about some silly numbers on a bank account? We live good lives.
Your description of the situation sounds more like America where a tiny inventory of antiquated public housing units built ~40 years ago (the last time any American politicians cared to lift a finger to address poverty and inequality) are made available by a bleak lottery.
Just because the public housing system doesn’t work in America where it’s basically an afterthought doesn’t mean that it isn’t working in other places.
> For many New Yorkers, the most desirable jackpot is not the New York Lotto, but to be selected in the city’s extraordinarily competitive affordable-housing lottery. Tens of thousands of people, and sometimes many more, vie for the handful of units available at a time. Since 2013, there have been more than 25 million applications submitted for roughly 40,000 units.
Central planning has been tried over and over and has failed and led to more scarcity. It's like fitting climate change by regulating thermometers. Maybe this time is different?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nyc-affordable-h...
Central planning works very well: that's how every corporation, city, and state works. It works well as long as you apply it to a small enough market and e.g. don't try to plan the whole economy.
The problem in NYC is that there is not enough affordable housing. 40k units is nothing in the housing supply, and the rent inflation has been way too high lately.
Centrally planned universal healthcare is generally effective and much cheaper than other systems. The US has out of control healthcare costs with its free market system. The next most expensive country to the US has less than 50% of the administration costs so the free market has actually come up with a bureaucracy that is more expensive to administer than what the government creates.
In general, central planning fails when market mechanisms are replaced by using force to allocate something. That doesn't mean opt-in programs with voluntary registration are going to experience the same type of failure. We know replacing salaries with a gun and telling people what they have to work on is a bad idea. That doesn't mean all central planning ever is a bad idea. I don't think anyone seriously argues we should abolish federal, state, city governments and let my local neighborhood manage it's own policy but that's the logical extreme of all central planning failing.
I can honestly not come up with another industry that is subject to higher regulatory burdens. Maybe nuclear power?
I'm actually quite happy with my socialized health care aside from the last time I went to the emergency room they sent me home to die and when I came back a day later they were rapidly pulling out faulty body parts before I did indeed die. Well, then there's the Phoenix VA death list scandal.
I know I shouldn't complain as it not like I risked life and limb in service of my country and earned it as a direct result of military service or anything.
What I believe is more likely is people looking at the kind of regulations being used and concluding that the correlation between good and bad regulations can be directly tied to the profit motives behind said regulations. A purely state run health care system has zero incentive to impose regulations that seek to raise costs and hurt competitors because, by definition, there is no completion. A purely private health care system has a lot of incentive to regulate the amount of doctors (to keep wages high) or make reporting costs extremely high to push out the smaller hospitals and increase their market share &etc.
I suspect that reality falls somewhere in the middle no matter what system you look at and everyone wants to argue from the extremes (or accuse someone else as being an extremist as you so helpfully demonstrated) so there is no real dialog for trying to fix anything.
This claim is almost always because american lifetime expectancies are bad. But thats because Americans are unhealthy, not because our healthcare is bad. Do you have a different reason to make this claim?
If we do not try to not fail, then we should not be surprised when we always fail.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-...
To adress this specific question for Paris, they put an upper limit on your income to rent specific housing with lower rent.
I'll scale down your caricature of an example though, the offers you can see are usually 15% to 20% under market price, not 75% like you seem to imply.
Not exactly sure what is your point otherwise, the difference in terms of giving someone an apartment with a lower market rent vs. giving that money outright will eventually lead to the same thing, except that the former is also a way to curb the very high rent inflation (among other things), and results in both cases in a significant increase in purchasing power, at a given income.
> If we realized that with a system like this we're giving 1 out of 1k eligible people the equivalent of a 30k a year transfer
This is not equivalent because giving someone that money doesn't mean they'll chose to live inside Paris, and this is a measure that goes beyond financial support. It's also a city policy aimed at achieving a specific population distribution.
I don't know, I would prefer the autonomy to choose where I live and how I spend my money. Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off? Why do we want to essentially force them to live somewhere expensive when they would prefer to use that money elsewhere? They're not some pawn you can use to feel good about yourself. "Oh look at all these people from different cultures that live here". They're human beings
On the other hand, if they want to, they have an avenue to do this (and it's still going to be difficult, supply isn't nearly as plenty as the private market), even if they don't have the income needed to find housing in the same area otherwise.
> They're not some pawn you can use to feel good about yourself
That's not the reason Paris is doing this. There are benefits to encouraging diversity, among which fighting against getthoisation/communitarianism and prejudices, things that France has quite a poor records with in the last 50 years, and that had direct consequences on society cohesion.
Secondly, Paris' policies are decided by the mayor of Paris and the city council, and they're elected (mayor directly, city council semi-directly). Not by "unelected bureaucrats".
Then your comment makes no sense. Policies favoring social diversity are the exact same policies that led to getthoisation? Do we agree on what getthoisation means? Because those two things are exclusive.
You say you don't want bureaucrats to put their finger on the scale of who can live in an area, that's your opinion. But if you're saying this should be purely left to supply and demand, then somewhat it is still a (non-)decision to put the finger on the scale, at one extremity, and it will have a certain outcome. Whether this outcome is good or bad will be a matter of opinion in certain cases, but not in others, e.g. what impact this has on the local economy for example, whether this leads to a more or less appeased society, and so on.
This has to be facetious. They're perfectly free to go live in the country or move to Italy. I've never seen a desirable apartment I couldn't afford and then thought to myself how much I'm being respected by not being able to live there.
And with regard to the last point, no one is suggesting this as a means to have some peasant zoo in the city, a city needs a labor force. If you price out everyone who isn't a dev or a financier then you're not going to have a lot of the things that make a city nice. To some degree this is a subsidy for employers, because otherwise they'd need to pay more for their employees to afford living nearby.
Why would you ever want to incentive people to not earn more money? Stay poor and we'll give you a house - sounds like a bribe.
Case in point - congestion pricing
I prefer excess housing / school / living infra which is subsidized by the society
In the end, this would solve the allocation problem while maximizing the available public housing. It would take a couple of years or decades to reach an equilibrium state I guess.
I'm probably missing something obvious here. Can somebody point out my mistake?
A developer charges as much as they can for their rental units. If profitable they take that surplus and build new units up until the point that the marginal cost of providing an apartment is equal to the marginal revenue for renting such a unit. This isn't due to benevolence but how you maximize profit. The developer also pays taxes which pays for public services
So yes, I am in favor of this system.
If the French wanted citizens to have the freedom of (dis)association they would have written it into their constitution.
The “they haven’t thought this through all the way” mantra you’ve espoused might be true. Also maybe you’ve not thought it all the way through. Maybe that has been tried and doesn’t work well for reasons. For example if you increase the flow of money into a market without increasing supply, prices tend to rise and the wealthier will absorb the rise better than the poorer. As you’ve helpfully pointed out, there are knock-on effects, however those effects don’t just apply to one side.
So that’s why I advocate for aligning and judging success on the goal and comparing like to like.
The rent can be levied by the owner however the owner actually did not provide any of the investment or labor required to give the apartment the value it has. The apartment has value not because of anything inside the apartment or the building. It has value due to its location, something that the owner has no control over and did not spend a single penny to make more attractive.
This is obviously a huge inefficiency in the economy. Why should someone profit from the attractiveness of a location they haven't actually built? This is a positive externality.
Part of the solution of our huge housing crisis across most developed cities is obviously that there should just be more housing. This would bring prices down overall. However, new construction is extremely difficult, and that is due the in part to lobbies of wealthy owners which seek to keep prices high by maintaining scarcity.
Turning private rent housing into public housing is a good way to eliminate the economic inefficiency of rent in that one case and it also drives the price of nearby housing down too, as the private market has to compete with the public offering.
To be fair, the owner is paying property taxes - which do go towards improving the location.
> The apartment has value not because of anything inside the apartment or the building.
I think you'll find, in basically any city, that the quality of a building does correlate to it's rent price or value. You'll also find that owners do invest in increasing the quality of their buildings, which does improve the value or "niceness" of the location. If this wasn't true, gentrification couldn't exist.
> Why should someone profit from the attractiveness of a location they haven't actually built?
If you're claiming that since no real identifiable person or group "built" the attractiveness of a location, and that therefore no one should get to profit from it, you'd be seriously tampering with the signal that the natural markets supply/demand provides in the form of rental prices. That's going to lead to some significant "economic inefficiencies" for the area in the medium to long term.
- mortgage costs
- property taxes
- insurance
- utilities
- repairs
- maintenance
- savings for large future capital outlays (new roof, furnace, etc)
- renters not paying
- empty rental units
- loss of investment opportunities of the capital locked up in the building
- possible loss of all income due to fire, etc
- 34 other things I'll leave out
You can test this anywhere the rental prices are below about 1% of the purchase price.
I left this city 3 years ago and found safer land. All my friends did the same. There is no sane reason to stay in an area with so much violence. Parisians will deny this but will just say "you have to avoid this and that, have a pepper spray, do not wear a skirt, do not go there at night..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
"the disorder is caused by positive representations of the city in popular culture, which leads to immense disappointment as the reality of experiencing the city is very different from expectations: tourists are confronted with an overcrowded and littered city ... and a less than welcoming attitude by French hospitality workers like shopkeepers, restaurant and hotel personnel without considering the higher safety risks to which tourists used to safer cities are suddenly exposed."
Most other large European cities allowed for high rises and chain coffee shops & restaurants, to the point where they've started to become indistinguishable from one another.
The rest of Paris is pretty "European city" and maybe I'm not tuned into the differences, but it seemed quite like Munich, Rome, or Barcelona except for the language, etc.
So you've never been to North America. Where is it you're comparing Paris to, such that it seems like every other big western city?
What Paris and Brussels have in common with D.F., which they do not share with either the major American cities or Toronto, is police open-carrying machine guns.
Another response above mentioned that American cops generally keep the long gun in the car. Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf, but it's fair enough to point out that French law enforcement do like their rifles. I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street. I don't remember ever seeing police walking in Paris, although I admit that I was a pretty sheltered tourist there.
(I bet there's a more nuanced conversation to be had here about the difference between police and gendarmerie and I just don't know enough about it, except I sort of wonder what the OP was doing that caused him to cross paths with heavily armed law enforcement outside of the airport or government buildings. Maybe Paris really has changed.)
I mean both fully-automatic rifles and submachine guns, but sure, I never saw someone lugging around an M2 like a 1980s action character.
> and by "open carrying" you mean "carrying."
I mainly meant to contrast it with having one easily accessible in their squad car, actually. American police do have long rifles, although these are mostly semiauto.
Since there is no way to carry a rifle concealed, all carry is in fact open carry... or is it? Is a rifle in a case open carry? It is not. The term means something in the U.S., and I was using it correctly. In places where citizens have the right to open carry, this applies to a slung rifle as well, in places where they do not, it's legal to carry a rifle, but it must be in a case.
> I have no idea what "D.F." is.
Distrito Federal, Ciudad de México. Had you been a bit more curious, the answer is very easy to determine: https://www.google.com/search?q=D.F+city
This is no stranger than referring to New York City as NYC, it is an utterly commonplace term for the city, the one which Mexicans normally use in referring to it.
> Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf
That may be the case, I've been to New York many times but not for many years now. If I had seen this, I would have mentioned it.
I don't see what about this conversation is tone deaf, other than perhaps your refusal to read what I said with reasonable generosity, or look up a common term for the largest city in North America when you didn't recognize it.
> I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street.
They do tend to cluster around airports and train stations in both Paris and Brussels, although not exclusively. In D.F. you'll see machine guns open carried pretty much anywhere, true throughout Mexico in fact.
(I don't remember how the Canadian police typically do things. I think I was dazzled by how attractive the police officers in Canada are compared to the United States, particularly in Montreal, but they definitely carry pistols and wear kevlar...)
By all accounts, heavily armed security (and I'm sure it's not just sworn law enforcement officers, but also private security) in tourist areas are a bigger thing in Mexico than elsewhere in North America.
https://homelessdeathscount.org/ (arrogent domain given it's a USA count) https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/dying-on-the-streets-franc...
Even adjusted for population size, we're still talking 2-3x the death rate if homeless.
> Acolin notes that France has roughly as many social housing dwellings as the United States, despite having less than one-fifth the population.
https://www.sightline.org/2021/07/26/yes-other-places-do-hou...
Social spending in France is the highest in the world, which has a dramatically larger effect on poor immigrants.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/social-spending-highe...
In France, these immigrants woild also have access to public healthcare, meaning they'd get 70-100% back on most medical appointments and reimbursement for prescription medications. There are many other social benefits too. It's also much more likely to be closer to their country of origin than the US, in the event they want and are able to return at some point.
I'm not trying to be rude, but why do you think a poor immigrant would have it better in the US than France? I can't think of a single reason.
Sorry I couldn't help it. Comparing an EU member state to the US is akin to comparing a US state to the EU. These are big places and Paris and even France are a very, very small part. Europe has some real, real crappy places that really, really mess up Europe's statistics. Once places like Bosnia and Ukraine get in, the stats will get even worse. I doubt Romanian and Ukrainian social spending is very high. Compare to US states and cities in you're comparing EU states and cities, and comparable ones.
I'm sure it does have political benefits for the mayor, but that's also a natural outcome of good policy. (Not the only one; often good policy actually has horrible backlash.)
This comment could be expressing some true ideas but I don't find it trustworthy.
Caring about these bribes/"power grabs" is important (even if this guys comment strikes you as trollish). Just because you agree with a social service to benefit some group doesn't mean that the people in power won't abuse their power in the future. They might abuse their support by holding these social services (or "comforts") hostage. Once you have people who have adapted to living in their subsidized housing (which can/will happen quickly) you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away".
Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service, it's something that needs to be considered. To circle back, if you do something that is considered beyond the line of "comfort for poor people" and is seen as a "power grab" by enough people - you're more likely to have the opposition emboldened to eventually remove that service.
I'm not sure I agree. Like giving out literal tons of candy and soda would be a political bribe but I wouldn't count it as "comfort"; it's poison. If you do think it's in the same category, I guess that would be my line - the aid should not be obviously harmful.
> you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away" ... Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service
But that's true of literally everything a government does, isn't it? It's the nature of power being centralized that if one person can force a change, their replacement can undo it. Even if the 1st person is completely earnest and never makes such a statement it is implicitly part of the process and people will make their votes with that expectation.
And yes - this is true of everything the government does. That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.
That's why I'm saying it's really important to consider that for some people, certain policies can cross a line for what feels fair or what feels like a political bribe. Like I said, you're free to disagree with where that line is, but pretending it doesn't exist (or just writing off anyone on the other side of it) is a sure fire way to bring about consequences that just might be worse than what was originally happening.
> That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.
Sure, it's something to think about, but it's not a realistic impediment to enacting a good policy. If the worst thing you can say about a policy is that "it might end, and that would be bad" you should do that policy. Besides, government programs tend to get institutionalized and are often much harder to undo than to do.
It's a comparison of the debt per capita of France compared to the rest of the EU (in USD). It looks to me like France started to take on more debt per person around 2007/08 and as recently as 2022 had $13k more debt/capita than the EU, or +40% more debt per citizen.
From the context of the USA it seems downright amazing to see a society where public housing isn’t automatically assumed to be a number of bad things: taxpayer waste, crime haven, and antiquated disrepair.
The benefits of the tenant management system also seems like it’s good for everyone in society. Our daily surroundings really shouldn’t be a race to the highest bidder for high-rent tenants like McDonald’s to come in, underpay employees, and poison local residents with junk food. The approach to the city as a public landlord being selective and building a neighborhood through balancing available goods and services seems incredibly desirable.
In the US this is all inverted the wrong way: the wealthy neighborhoods are the only ones that can keep chains like McDonald’s and Walmart out, walkability and positive urban fabric is a luxury amenity for the few (e.g., NYC, Miami, and Chicago’s best neighborhoods), and the wealthy are the ones that are subsidized instead of those who are low income or middle class.
A good term I heard for this was "strip mine society".
There are also questions about how much of out of control rents employers are responsible for and should bear the cost of, and how much it is the cities fault. To the degree to which rental prices are high because of politician supported NIMBYism it seems fairer for city budgets to bear those costs than third parties.
This is very hard to do as you need exceptionally fast trains and well developed feeder lines.
(just as the second world countries which bordered the first seem to have done better than their ideological cores, it seems to me that first world countries which bordered the second have also done better)
Every poor immigrant family I know from around the early 2000s, ourselves included, now _owns_ at least one house. Their kids went to college, people started businesses.
Also if you haven’t seen chains in <wealthy European city> pay less attention to McDonald’s and more attention to luxury clothing brands. Trust me, unlike Subways, you won’t be seeing Europe’s poor in any of these places. And for what it’s worth, Paris is swarming with homelessness, including that of small children. The fact you see the opposite written in the New York Times should be a clue that they’ve got a reason to skew that reality otherwise.
Not convinced.
Also: Reported by Le Monde covering a study of GDP per Capita:
> Italy is just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France is between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively 48th and 49th. Germany doesn't save face: It lies between Oklahoma and Maine (38th and 39th). This topic is muted in France – immediately met with counter-arguments about life expectancy, junk food, inequality, etc.
Love that last bit predicting OP’s stereotype.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...
If the government wants to do this, they really should cut out the middle man and do it directly - purchase the building at something akin to fair market value and manage it themselves going forward.
from my limited experience it seems that while in richer neighbourhoods there might be some diversity, it is not the case everywhere. there has been a move to grow the city outwards and move newer social housing further out. but the historically poorer neighbourhoods more or less seem to remain in their older state.
however you rationalize it, one ends up questioning whether it is worth living in the city given the challenges in finding a place.
Let's make things clear: so called "mixed society" is actually a mix of "friends of the Mayor and allies" and poor-enough people that will vote for the so-called socialist Mayor. It's not about having a philosophical or idealogical view of society, only a practical view of election (a kind of "gerrymanding" if this concept is more understandable for US).
There has been frequent scandals with ministers still using "low income" housing for themselves or families. The article starts with the interview of some Ms Vallery-Radot, and that uncommon name prompted me to look on internet and wonder if she is related to the https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallery-Radot which was until the 2000 ... State Advisor.
So please... do not think that Paris is some kind of wonderful place where intelligent and humanistic leaders are working for the good of the french society as an example to the world. It's just usual political shady business, nepotism (and you'll see by yourself that the results will be bad during the Olympics for example)
From a human+social position, I strongly agree with this. The value of social benevolence isn't limited to the direct beneficiaries and has positive impacts beyond the economics.
Probably not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of things.
I think they meant "...and their votes"
The political theory is true but I have no idea if the people living in social housing do vote more for the current mayor though. So it is just theory.
That said, city planning is a complex thing so there's no easy answer to whether they are doing this.
This is generally true, but there is a line beyond which this becomes problematic.
Surely you wouldn't support explicit vote buying, where a politician promised to repay voters with public cash after the election! If such a scheme were permitted, democracy would quickly cease to become a marketplace for ideas. It would devolve into a patronage system. Most of us would immediately recognize such a scheme as dangerous and question the legitimacy of any so-called democratic government whose majority was bought in such a manner. Do you agree that this would be a problem?
Why would this cease to be a problem if the kickbacks were paid in-kind, and only made available to the poor?
...and they're both women! The confidence to make radical, meaningful changes for the better of the people and tell the opposition to get stuffed... I wish all politicians had that.
Even the politicians you disagree with? So for example, AfD in Germany making the radical, meaningful change for the better of the German people by removing non-Germans from Germany ... and telling you to get stuffed ... you'd love that presumably?
What you love is this policy. Don't confuse that with the method, which you clearly wouldn't like if the shoe was on the other foot.
I was recently in Paris, the comments here are a touch different in tone than the Parisians I talked to.
We just need a true Free Market - let people build and invest how they want, where they want. And ensure that everyone has a stake in the property they own and the area they live in.
We don't say China moved ahead because the rich got richer, but because it lifted hundred of millions from poverty.
And if anything, a poor social net tends to create more dangers, not less.
When people have no roof, no jobs, no help, they will turn into criminals. Hell if I need to eat, or worse, I need to feed my family, I could not care less about becoming a criminal too. Zero.
I've seen the dystopia of private neighborhoods with gates and security, the ghettos, the crumbling neighborhoods, endless tents anywhere you look in many major US cities.
We don't want this in Europe.
I'd rather pay more taxes that help the weakest, not just taxes to punish them and send them to jail. A society with more desperate people makes my life worse, not better just because I can find a more isolated/secure prison where I can avoid looking at them.
I was under the impression the poor in China moved ahead due to working, not because the Chinese government subsidized their housing or other basics. Although, the Chinese government did subsidize their ability to find and get to work via huge infrastructure projects.
Liberalized housing started in the 90s along the rest, but planned housing projects have kept existing and had huge budgets till the late 2010s. Even today around one in twenty development housing projects is still state funded.
Anyway, I was mostly talking about them as a society lifting more and more of the weakest. And yes, building houses has been a major contributor of this obviously as well as a stimulus for the economy.
By democratising travel within a building, ironically the elevator made it possible to have neighbourhoods for which service workers had to commute primarily from the outside along the x and y axes, not merely within the neighbourhood along the z.
All I was claiming is that the elevator is necessary but not sufficient: monocultural neighbourhoods were much less likely to arise back when number of flights of stairs put a significant natural gradient on the price point of each buildable unit.
I don't think there was any significant crossover between lifts not existing and _baristas_ existing. For a start, lifts predate proper espresso machines.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Histoire
> L'utilisation du zinc pour le zincage du fer ... a permis l'essor de l'architecture de fer, ainsi les halles centrales de Paris, le palais de l'industrie, les nombreux théâtres et gares monumentales de chemin de fer entre 1860 et 1880.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Lexicographie
> Dans les années 1873 à 1876, les écrivains français consignant l'expression populaire, aussi bien Zola que Huysmans, nomment zinc la surface propre des bars anglais ou le revêtement brillant des comptoirs souvent étamés ou cuivrés, plus rarement zingués.
... which puts them, if preceding, nearly contemporaneous with elevators. (but copper bartops must have been a thing earlier?)