Tax on land value only, excluding improvements. This encourages landowners to build to the limit of marginal construction costs, which benefits both the local economy and tenants.
The more important question is: can we have growth in economic output (which is what we actually want) without growth in economic input (which is purely instrumental)?
In order to crack water, you need water, which is in short supply in the desert. Desalination + massive pumps and pipelines from the ocean would soak up any increase you get in price efficiency compared to batteries or even compressed air.
I wonder what the breakeven cost would be of a monthly subscription to ad-free journalism on the quality level of the New York Times (or your preferred equivalent). Something like $200-300 maybe? If it were actually ad-free and zero-clickbait, 100% high quality journalism, I'd be willing to pay about that much.
NIMBYism is pretty much a de facto campaign against internal migration. It's not much of an issue in the fastest growing states, but certain states with hot economies but stagnant or declining populations, like Massachusetts or California, are affected by it.
That's the difficult part--the insulin spikes from ultraprocessed food will make you hungrier and eat more as well as lower your basal metabolism. "Calorie range" is a moving target.
Aesthetic objections to new construction are 99.9% bullshit. Otherwise things like vomit- and baby-poop-green vinyl siding, uniformly white windows with fake grills and little to no trim, McMansion-style hip-roof horrorshows and gables on top of gables wouldn't exist.
Your house is worth what people are willing to pay for it. Developers are willing to pay a lot for it since a multifamily building can yield a lot more rent revenue than a single family house. The house is probably worth more in this scenario.
> The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing.
Not if you own the underlying land, or at least a portion thereof, and willing to build higher and denser and rent it out. For example, if I own a 1 story house, NIMBYism prevents me from building another story and renting it out as a separate unit for extra income. NIMBYism raises the value of my current property but lowers its potential value.
High quality speech recognition is ubiquitous in phone services these days so that isn't a good reason. Besides, if I want to set a 16 char password and am willing to enter that on a keypad, what's the problem?
If you're poor, how did you come to own the assets in the first place?
If you became poor, then maybe you should sell the property to gain more liquidity, balance your portfolio, and transfer the property to someone with enough income to fully maintain it.
Except what the SF Bay Area is facing isn't the Tragedy of the Commons--it's the Tragedy of the Anticommons, where the owners of resources underutilize them.
On average, moving one person from a small town in the midwest to SF reduces resource consumption, so from that point of view construction in SF should be encouraged. Tearing down abandoned houses in small midwestern towns and converting them to wildland should also be encouraged.
If SF Bay Area cities can't be bothered to build enough housing, they should at least have the decency to tax the fuck out of business until they start moving out and housing prices regress to 3x the median rent.
If you want the companies, you must take their employees. If you don't want their employees, you shouldn't have the companies.
> But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome.
If they didn't consider that a good outcome, they would stop paying money to move there, or move out, and cause housing prices to drop, thus solving the problem.
NIMBYism is fine, as long as it is applied to businesses as well as housing. Way too many towns and cities want to maintain their low density small town & suburban characters while attracting employers.
Using single digit numbers by themselves to denote highways is awkward and confusing, but it's much less of a problem with double and triple digit numbers--"I took 95 from Boston to Washington" sounds prettier than "I took 5 from Seattle to Portland". Since the IHS numbering system starts from the southwest and increments up as you go northeast, southwestern Interstate highway numbers are disproportionately single-digit, which is probably why "the" is commonly prepended in SoCal.
That works because Chicago is in the north central part of the country, where highway numbers are firmly in the double digits. In the southwest the numbers are often single digit, so it's awkward and confusing to use without a preprended "I-" or "the".