Land use policies make urban childcare expensive and rare
ryanpuzycki.com
ryanpuzycki.com
If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use and there's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
But as a result of land use regulations.
Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was?
Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply.
"Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case.
Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.
That's how they're used, but that doesn't mean that's optimal or that doing otherwise is "pointless". For example, a high school campus is typically suitable for any kind of school, and using the same building to hold college night classes would hardly be pointless.
> Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
Only if those costs are unrelated. You could lower staffing costs significantly by, for example, offering on-site living quarters for staff, but not if that's prohibited. Likewise, land use rules can constrain where you can put the facility, which in turn affects how much you have to pay staff, who may then have a longer commute and refuse the job unless you pay more.
> many jobs have been service oriented for a long time.
It's not obvious what that has to do with it. A nail salon, barber shop, veterinarian, etc. are all service jobs, but they're also all small business where the owner/family could benefit from living on the same property as the business.
I think the efforts to lower costs by being creative is worthwhile. I am personally skeptical of many initial ideas, but that is no reason not to explore them. And you are right that many of these things almost certainly interplay with each other. But, the more expensive the housing and general land use is in an area, the harder all of these tradeoffs will become.
Regarding the service jobs, many older service jobs were traveling services. You can't go to a roofer's to get your roof fixed. Nor did you historically go to the doctor's office. Since delivery vehicles were rather costly and large, it wasn't uncommon for most people to not go and buy things on the regular. Certainly you didn't load up the equivalent of a car's worth of groceries to bring home. Indeed, the milkman was a job. None of those services would have had you living where you work, as it were. And labor jobs, which were also very common, were definitely not performed at home. So, again, I'd be interested in the numbers.
If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school.
I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.
Busses.
The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common.
Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.
Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
Your children will get a better education, in far fewer hours, without the commute, without suffering under the prison bitch culture of the public school social heirarchy.
If your child is even just slightly neuroatypical, sending them to public school is child abuse, and you are a bad person, full stop.
You are no different from the guy who drinks a fifth of whiskey and beats the shit out of his kids - you're just keeping your hands clean by outsourcing the beatings to the kids on the playground.
In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours.
I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
I think few people would argue against allowing developers to build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than the cost of it.
if you stop right there, your statement is far more credible
Isn't the clear implication you shouldn't own a car?
Similar story with my home towns community college, where they had a habit of building new buildings on what used to be parking lots but refused for years to build new lots and when asked by the student counsel to build a parking structure the college president refused to consider it. I suspect if he hadn't had a had a reserved parking spot less the 30 yards from his office door his tune might have been different.
To answer my own question, I think the externalities of insufficient parking space is something government could address. Like by allowing much stricter enforcement of parking prohibitions. Or just outright not allowing street side parking. Like governments don’t typically provide free houses to people, why should they give free house to personal vehicles? Why should my take dollars go to pay for storage of other people’s personal al property?
There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to this point. We're still on the beneficial end of densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes on practically every metric.
Case in point: the densest parts of Manhattan don't smell. (Minus trash days.) Neither do Paris, Tokyo or Seoul.
Hint: It did smell. Every spring and a few other times each summer.
Zero evidence noise pollution is an unavoidable consequence of density. Plenty of New York apartments have better acoustic isolation than the average suburban dwelling. (If anything, as buildings get higher the problem gets simpler.)
I'd like you to meet my neighbors (both above and below) from the last time I was unfortunate enough to have to live in an apartment.
The teachers at his daycare were paid about 30% of the living wage required to live in our town. They were all driving from at least an hour away for the opportunity to earn a non living wage. There is no way I could reasonably expect any of them to be concerned with my child’s well being when they could even afford their own lives.
Absent subsidies (whether provided by a government, employer, religious order or other specific community), I’m honestly not sure how a safe, sensible, desirable product can be delivered at what anyone would consider a reasonable cost.
I grant that there is probably some room in there for in-home child care that probably more closely resembles a hobby business than a true commercial endeavor - I can see zoning type issues being completely determinative on whether child care at this scale is feasible or not. But I also don’t think those are the types of arrangements that the author of TFA was really describing.
If labour were the principle cost component of childcare, yes. That does not appear to be the case. (EDIT: Never mind, labour is the principle cost [1].)
Consider, for example, how the problem would be solved if people could (legally) run childcare out of their apartments.
[1] https://raisingnewyork.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/1...
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly open to the argument that land use policies are a problem. And I am no fan of minimum parking rules. At the same time, I also know that parking doesn't cease to be a problem just because you don't want to build it. I've had the joy of going to a doctor's office where I couldn't figure out where to park within a 5 block radius of it. What was a convenient doctor when I lived within that 5 block radius turned into a miserable experience when I moved a bit further away. Same experience when dropping the kids off for a birthday party in some denser part of town. (At least there I can gripe to the kids saying they need to bike the 10 miles next time. Isn't that far, all told. :D)
Back to the question, labor strikes me as a thing that would be rather expensive for child care. Specifically, child care that isn't staffed by teenagers and has adequate staffing for the number of kids being cared for.
Edit: Realizing I may be reading the original comment wrong. I don't remember the apartment claim on my first read, so I thought you added it with your edit. I'm guessing it was there and I just didn't remember it?
Now how correct are you?
In-home childcare that resembles a hobby is called "parenting" and in the absence of a commercial option one half of a couple often ends up spending all of their time doing this until the child is of age to be placed in school. I think a lot of the problems our society has come from not valuing this or denigrating it as "hobby" work.
Some people enjoy that work, but a lot of people don't. The empirical result of forcing it is people have fewer children.
Obviously some people don't have the space - but many do. Surely it's lucrative enough that there shouldn't be a shortage of supply?
Doesn’t work in the suburbs where you won’t find a family 3 blocks from your house with a similar age child. You would think it would be more common though given how much useless sqft folks in the suburbs have.
But in the non-urban areas around here there are in-home childcare setups, that have to follow specific laws. I assume something could be done similar in urban areas, but the size of house that is amenable to it may be limited in number.
/s
This is like complaining that you won’t want to have $1M of income every year because you pay more tax. You pay more because you make more.
There is an issue in some areas where most to all of the parking spaces are privately owned and not publicly offered at any price but in theory a culture of paying a fair price to store your large personal property would encourage those private holders to offer spaces up to the public and solve that issue too
(There's something of a way that this may be true, but people won't like it.)
However, a scale-back of zoning (like what CA state recently did - threatening the "builder's remedy" on cities/counties that didn't plan to expand housing appropriately) is probably a good idea. CA also recently made it easier to basically convert SFH to essentially 6-plexes (cost is an issue, so it's not an immediate fix).
The major issue with most of America's woes has to do with us being an effective oligarchy and money having more say on what goes on than what most people want.
A more balanced viewpoint is that there are many advantages to living in a city, but cheap land and raising a family are not one of them. The suburbs of smaller towns have always been easier places to raise children. Rural areas, or smaller villages with schools, were better before the car was even invented.
One interesting aspect of childcares in this area: they buy out an entire house. I believe that a major part of making a childcare work financially is to use it to cover a mortgage/invest in real estate. Without that, there is very little profit to be made.
EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws might not be worded the way I described it, but the net effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?" question.
I think there's far too much wiggle room in the analysis of land-value vs improvement and would strongly prefer a solution that moves away from perpetual ownership and towards revolving leases instead. The way to do this non-coercively would be to gate the enormous tax benefits we bestow to real estate windfalls (1031 exchanges, the $500k exclusion, the 15% and 20% capital gains rates) behind conversion to a 99 year lease. We won't see the shade beneath those trees but our grandkids will.
This isn't really a problem in downtown Brooklyn or Austin, though.
I can't speak to Austin, but I would expect to see the same thing in the form of low-value land use. It happens whenever appreciation competes with or outstrips productive activity. Which is extremely common.
Investors should pay the collective for exclusive use of a scarce resource, they should not get paid for holding exclusive access to a scarce resource. That's bad and backwards. Unless you're an investor, of course ;)
Yes, but that's due to financing restrictions. Unless one is planning on putting a tax burden on every piece of real estate analogous to full leverage, the cost of financing an empty unit providing unsufficient motivation to fill it seems to imply a similarly-scaled LVT wouldn't either.
Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic. If you ask me to defend it, I simply won't. Rolling leases are the way.
It isn't possible to calculate the tax with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't mean it is problematic to calculate with a close enough approximation. The process of multivariate analysis is relatively simple, relies upon public data, can be open sourced and is self correcting over time (with the addition of new data via sales).
It's also absolutely impossible to avoid. $0 needs to be spent on enforcement. You can't cart land off to a tax haven. If you don't pay you forfeit the land and property - simple. You don't need legions of forensic tax accountants to uncover a trail of transactions like you would for income taxes. You don't need arbitrary rules about where somebody's main residence is. You don't need elaborate machine learning models to detect VAT carousel fraud.
You need a bunch of publicly available data and a very simple model.
Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
> By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and expensive to open new childcare centers.
Again, Austin, TX is not NYC.
What makes it onerous? Why does Brooklyn not have that luxury?
Wow, that's very forward thinking. I'm curious what country this is. In my country, you can find child care literally in your own home!
We have this crazy system where instead of blowing all your money on status-seeking expenses like residing in the "right" neighborhood, monthly vacations, eating out all the time, luxury vehicles, golf outings, designer clothes, a closet with $35k of footwear that is valued only because of the name on the label rather than the build quality, daily microbrews and lattes, you and your partner make the decision in which the higher-earning partner works and the lower-earning partner stays home, and you budget accordingly.
I know this sounds like a very radical idea, that the long-term future of the children could be prioritized over what Frank would think about you not renewing the country club membership, but in my country, the law actually permits it!
Just be aware that there can be an evil microagression lurking in the details. If you are the sole source of income for the family, and you are male, you will be committing a Misogyny with a Capital M, because it's EMPOWERING to take orders from, and earn money from, a man in a necktie with whom one is not personally affiliated with, but earning money from a man IN PAJAMAS, from whom taking orders is optional, is PATRIARCHY. So, be aware of the pitfalls of taking this option.
I recommend looking into your country's laws to see if it is permissible to have a single-earner household.
In my country, there is also this brand-new legal structure called "marriage", in which the non-earning party is compensated by law in the event of dissolution. Judges will consider the financial impact of the dissolution on the non-earning party and issue a transfer payments order to the earning party.
But again, be aware of subtle patriarchy in this arrangement. When an employee is fired without cause by a man in a necktie after walking into their cubicle, is is extremely EMPOWERING, and the man in the necktie has no legal financial obligations to the employee beyond accrued paid time off. But if a man in PAJAMAS fires a non-earning partner because the non-earning partner was impregnated by an attractive man at a nightclub, and a judge requires the PAJAMA MAN to pay the non-earning partner half of their assets in addition to 30% of their salary in perpetuity, that is PATRIARCHY.
Please consider the options available to you in your country. I understand that not all countries have these novel legal structures, and I myself have only recently been informed of their recent development in my own country.
I have heard, however, that the wild notions of "not living an extravagant lifestyle to impress others", and "raising your own children might provide more life satisfaction than writing spyware for adtech companies", and "marriage" are catching on in other regions, so I'm optimistic these may be options for you soon!
That said, I fully understand if you still opt to outsource childcare. Sure, the risk of physical and sexual abuse is significantly more likely at the hands of a random daycare facility employee than by the child's own biological parent, but I empathize that this is a small price to pay for exercising your God-given right to take orders from a man in a NECKTIE, who has no personal allegiance to you, who can fire you for no reason, with no further compensation than a corporate severance check in the amount of $1372.16. That ought to buy at least a few sessions of therapy to deal with your toddler's abuse at the daycare facility and the fact they barely even saw, let alone knew, either of their parents, so that's good!
---
When you're retired, remember that your teenager dying of a fentanyl overdose in a random alleyway because it was the only way to escape his pain of knowing that making a Powerpoint slide deck to pitch a way to force MORE ads down the throats of your fellow humans was more important to you than making him a PB&J sandwich and playing Uno with him - that was just a blip in the statistical noise of humanity. And you can die happy knowing that at one point in your long and storied career, before your necktie-wearing boss was caught in that whole embezzlement scandal, the market capitalization of Panopticon Corp ticked $1B, for just a few trades, but it happened. You won the Super Bowl of careerdom, for just one glorious moment. Sure, your options expired deep under strike a few years later, and you got laid off in 2029, and the GFC of 2037 wiped out all your savings, but god damn it, you did it, once.
The robot nurse is scheduled to bring you Standard USDA Meal #46 in 6 minutes, to Retirement Pod 842H, and you're hoping it's at least warm this time.
You sacrificed everything for that man in a necktie, god his hair was perfect.
It was all worth it.
Fuck them kids, amirite?
Correct. Parking mandates are even less sensible as a policy in NYC than in Austin, TX.
Every single time I read about land use, I feel like people are running head first into exactly the point and still completely missing it. People think others must have the same opinions and worldviews as they do, so they don't even consider the real reason land use policies are they way they are. They don't realize that people are just racist.
Maybe you read this and think "that's crazy, I'm not racist and I am against upzoning!". Well, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the person who is so passionate about keeping the neighborhood's "character" that they will go to every single local planning meeting to keep black people out. I'm talking about the person who will talk about how they don't want "big city problems". I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The exclusion is the point. Over and over and over again I see well-meaning people think they can just convince people that it makes it cheaper, convince people about the economy, surely that will be the breakthrough! But it's racism. It has been racism ever since the first zoning laws that banned laundromats next to houses, knowing landromats were mostly owned by the Chinese. It's been racism ever since highways divided cities into the "good side" and "bad side".
Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs.
Counterargument: The same/equivalent zoning, land use and NIMBY problems happen in countries that are racially homogeneous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/prague-is-the-third...
The core underlying thing that is driving exclusionary zoning is not racism, but classism. But racial exclusion is the bonus on top because race and class are often related.
When zoning was beginning to be broadly implemented in the 1930s the core goal was to limit apartments. Apartments were filled of relatively low income, working class renters. They were often also racial minorities too. Two core reasons why wealthy single family home owners wanted to push them far away.
> I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The fact that you are making the huge logical jump from "I don't want crime in my neighborhood" to "You must hate black people!" says more about your assumptions and biases than it does people who simply don't want crime - regardless of the type of person who is committing it.
Then you forget you just said that and say the real reason is that everybody that doesn’t agree, for the most part, is racist. This is an insane and hateful point.
The sort of belief that if held sincerely can hurt people. Where do you get the confidence or the merge to claim something like this? You’re the one that seems to be comfortable ascribing beliefs to people you don’t even know.
Another choice is to look at outcomes. Racial exclusion is a predictable result of these policies. It does not need to be the intent. People who consistently support policies with racist outcomes can be called racist. It's a useful shorthand, not a conviction of their soul.
Racism doesn't need to be a matter of personal malevolence. Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient.
Which is why loosening the definition has backfired so spectacularly. Some ascribe racism statistically, to the point that in some circles it's done a full circle to all white people being inherently racist. Most, however, perceive it as a moral judgement. If you loosen the definition to remove intent, it's no longer a moral judgement.
> Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient
But it's not racism by most peoples' definition. It is by the neo-academic revisionist one. But that loosening gave cover for the actual racists to come out and become accepted again. (If everyone who wants a parking lot is called a racist, it takes the bite out of the guy waving a Confederate flag. And if you're called a racist despite knowing you had no racist intent, it makes the other people being called racist more sympathetic.)