As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study
georgeoliver 2021-08-18 00:40:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I don't disagree, but it seems a little strange that the article highlights this point rather than the endemic rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes?
Ensorceled 2021-08-18 00:50:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 02:12:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
Beware of the anti-profit bias:
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...
cloudfifty 2021-08-18 10:41:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
This would however go against a lot of interests, both institutional and citizens with a large mortgage, that depends on high housing prices. So it's rare. But one can see Vienna, Austria, as a good example of where the government takes an active role in building housing and can show a great result in low rents and high availability.
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 11:49:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
State-funded housing tends to be unimaginative/repetitive in design and lower quality though. The same outcome, of higher density housing, can be achieved by simply repealing zoning restrictions, and if that doesn't do enough, by replacing sales taxes with land taxes, which discourage sprawling land-inefficient housing.
There may be advantages, in political economy, that makes overcoming special interests opposed to densification easier, with the state-led approach though.
As for special interests in general, there are plenty in and close to the state itself that would massively profit from large public projects, so I don't see this as a question of whether or not we support special interests. It's simply a question of which special interests.
taurath 2021-08-18 02:53:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]
There are myriad reasons one area does great, and I don't think its entirely due to barriers in investing and building, else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them. Often times the desirability of living in a place is almost directly inversely related to how little regulation they have.
Ensorceled 2021-08-18 10:21:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/02/11/empty-homes-canada-...
https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 11:56:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But there is artificial scarcity in housing, and that's almost solely down to regulatory restrictions that suppress private property rights, whether that's rent control that make it less profitable than it should be to invest in housing, onerous permitting processes for building a new house, or zoning restrictions limiting the density of a new housing development. Economists have chronicled the problems created by these interventions, in detail.
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 03:25:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Obviously density can compromise something like having good views, or the benefit of a relaxed low-density neighbourhood, but almost any other kind of housing scarcity can be addressed through densification.
The study in the aeaweb link above estimates that increased housing restrictions in just three cities in the US; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, caused the US to have 36% less economic growth between 1964 and 2009 than it otherwise would have, by inhibiting population growth in these cities, which all provide settings for higher productivity due to agglomeration effects and being coastal cities with low logistical costs.
A report by the White House's Council of Economic Advisors in 2016 largely came to the same conclusion:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...
>>else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them
We see a massive movement of people from New York and California to Texas:
https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map
It's hard to isolate factors behind this move, but I don't think it's a leap to assume lower housing costs, largely due to fewer restrictions on housing investment and construction, is one of them. In contrast to San Francisco, which is notorious for zoning restrictions and rent control mandates instituted by extreme-left city governments, and unsurprisingly, has the highest rental rates in the world (while not having the highest average income rates), Houston is renowned for its pro-free-market housing policy, and communersately affordable housing:
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Ensorceled 2021-08-18 10:18:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 11:54:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]
sgregnt 2021-08-18 01:14:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lumost 2021-08-18 01:46:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The North American urban real estate market is increasingly dominated by a dwindling number of economic actors who collectively act to restrict housing supply. This is not a system where the free market is functional or would necessarily produce the best results.
sgregnt 2021-08-18 02:20:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> liquidity ... time horizon
Not sure how is this related? Liquidity in itself is an asset, if you have readily available money vs oney on paper that a big difference, always was and always will be. But how is this related?
> ...limited number of actors...
IMO, there are always so many alternatives, (e.g. moving to a different city, living in suburbs) it is hard to image uncompetitive real estate market, even if all the land in a city was in a private hands of a single "actor" it would still be very competitive market overall. But that's hardly a case, indeed even if the land is in hands of two actors it's enough for a competition here. Or do you suggest there is a cartel? In that case it's a legal issue of failed police force not a free market failure unless you privatize police as well.
lumost 2021-08-18 03:05:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The number of actors matter as moving to different cities typically means changing jobs which may or may not be viable, if alternative cities have the same pricing dynamics at play - then it may not be possible to find a better alternative in price.
As to the reason why this all matters and we aren't content with simply choosing to rent from REIT A or REIT B is that zoning boards have proven unable to cut through A & B's protests against new construction. While A&B may compete with each other they do not compete with any alternative, and all potential customers must acquire housing. As long as the total number of housing units remains below the demand for housing then A&B will benefit.
In practice there are still a number of players who interact with the zoning board - but the net result is still a frustratingly stagnant housing supply.
sgregnt 2021-08-18 03:31:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I'm not arguing that free market forces are better than the alternative (you need to define what you mean by better), just saying in terms of resources allocation, free market forces maximize utility in face of other alternatives.
You can argue that this is a prisoner dilemma situation etc... but that's a fallacy as well IMO (can discuss this if more details are desired)
pasquinelli 2021-08-18 01:36:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
throwawaylinux 2021-08-18 01:51:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]
BirdieNZ 2021-08-18 01:56:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]
throwawaylinux 2021-08-18 02:04:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Who has monopoly control of land? is there a cartel or corporation of all these shadowly urban upper-classes who own everything?
> which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class.
Owning land is not "rent-seeking". Owning highly desirable land is not. Owning a large amount of highly desirable land is not. Renting it out is also not. Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not.
BirdieNZ 2021-08-18 02:32:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Land is essentially monopolised through regulatory capture (council land use restrictions) and the lack of new production of land (ignoring for now the very minor exceptions of, say, Dubai, Singapore, the Netherlands). There is a lack of viable substitutes of land, and due the necessity of land for human life, the owners of land are able to extract rent far above their marginal cost.
It would be possible for landlords to not engage in rent-seeking, but in practice there are exceedingly few landlords who do not. See, for example, Ricardo's Law of Rent for an introduction as to why land-lording is the classic example of rent-seeking.
Note that by saying "Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not." I suspect that you see land as equivalent to other forms of capital, and thus a legitimate form of investment to be pursued without any ethical qualms. However, land is not capital, and is distinct from other forms of investment.
throwawaylinux 2021-08-18 03:03:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> Land is essentially monopolised through regulatory capture (council land use restrictions) and the lack of new production of land (ignoring for now the very minor exceptions of, say, Dubai, Singapore, the Netherlands). There is a lack of viable substitutes of land, and due the necessity of land for human life, the owners of land are able to extract rent far above their marginal cost.
This is just emotional handwaving. Water is vital for human life and you can't produce more of it ignoring very minor exceptions of chemical reactions. If I pour myself a glass of water I don't gain monopoly control of water.
And Ricardo's Law of Rent does not explain that land-lording is rent-seeking. Millions of people own a second house and rent it out, how are they rent-seeking?
> Note that by saying "Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not." I suspect that you see land as equivalent to other forms of capital,
From the point of view of an investor it's pretty equivalent to other assets. Everything is finite. Water, sand, apples, cell phones, gold.
> and thus a legitimate form of investment to be pursued without any ethical qualms. However, land is not capital, and is distinct from other forms of investment.
Everyone wanting to live in the Upper East Side of New York City but not being able afford to rent or own a place there because everyone else wants to live there does not illustrate any ethical problems with land ownership at all. No more than me owning a box of corn flakes when some people starve to death because of poverty.
BirdieNZ 2021-08-18 03:50:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The land-owning class as a group have monopoly control of land. As far as I know, there isn't much un-owned land, so the land-owning class owns all the land.
> And whether or not new land is being produced or land is unique is pretty flimsy.
This is one of the definitional factors of a monopoly: "a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service", so I don't think it's flimsy at all. It's also a very commonly noted point by basically every economist that has looked at land, when distinguishing land from capital.
> if you want to abolish private ownership of land, just out and say it.
Not at all!
> This is just emotional handwaving. Water is vital for human life and you can't produce more of it ignoring very minor exceptions of chemical reactions. If I pour myself a glass of water I don't gain monopoly control of water.
As it turns out, if you and, say, 1 million others owned all the water in your country, you would in fact be part of the group that has monopolised control of water. You could then charge whatever you want to those who do not own the water, given they need it for life. This would be rent-seeking, as the amount you charge could far exceed your marginal costs of production. Water is actually a form of economic land, it just happens to be in great abundance and is slippery enough to be difficult to monopolise.
> And Ricardo's Law of Rent does not explain that land-lording is rent-seeking. Millions of people own a second house and rent it out, how are they rent-seeking?
Rent-seeking is the activity by which people try to gain more economic rent; that is, they are trying to gain something without doing anything in return. Those who own a second house and rent it out are actually doing two things: they are hiring out a house, which is not rent, properly speaking. And they are extracting rent for access to the land, which is economic rent. Building a house and maintaining it is a productive use of capital, and hiring it out is not rent-seeking. Owning land and renting out it is, definitionally, rent-seeking (unless one were to only charge as much rent for the land as the costs of keeping the land).
Ricardo's Law of Rent does explain this quite clearly. You can see an introduction here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent but this lecture may be more clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyv1xYDWAxk
throwawaylinux 2021-08-18 03:57:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> Rent-seeking is the activity by which people try to gain more economic rent; that is, they are trying to gain something without doing anything in return. Those who own a second house and rent it out are actually doing two things: they are hiring out a house, which is not rent, properly speaking. And they are extracting rent for access to the land, which is economic rent. Building a house and maintaining it is a productive use of capital, and hiring it out is not rent-seeking. Owning land and renting out it is, definitionally, rent-seeking (unless one were to only charge as much rent for the land as the costs of keeping the land).
No it isn't. You're doing lots of handwaving about semantics but you still haven't actually explained what rent-seeking activity these people engage in when they hire out their house-and-land to someone else.
>As it turns out, if you and, say, 1 million others owned all the water in your country, you would in fact be part of the group that has monopolised control of water.
Untrue.
> You could then charge whatever you want to those who do not own the water, given they need it for life.
Also false.
> This would be rent-seeking, as the amount you charge could far exceed your marginal costs of production. Water is actually a form of economic land, it just happens to be in great abundance and is slippery enough to be difficult to monopolise.
That is not what rent-seeking means, but at least we have gotten to the point where you agree that ownership of land is not fundamentally different from ownership of other assets in this regard.
> Ricardo's Law of Rent does explain this quite clearly. You can see an introduction here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
It actually doesn't at all.
teclordphrack2 2021-08-18 01:17:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
cubano 2021-08-18 01:18:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Why they don't kick me off is something I haven't been able to figure out, but I'm grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week.
Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing "when cities grow". What I've seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts.
To be honest, I've always been very much a loner so I don't really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff.
I really don't want to be poor like this, but I guess it's no one's fault but mine why I'm in this predicament.
What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree "Escape" charge that's always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don't "match" to the real charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges.
I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I'm sure think I'm a super junkie who has 50 felonies.
I don't really think it's fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that's happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don't you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways?
I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!
It's SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I've applied for I've gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.
Clewza313 2021-08-18 01:32:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Being upfront about your criminal record (including that it looks worse than it is) and/or explicitly targeting companies that have signed up to Ban the Box and/or the Fair Chance Pledge might help.
DoreenMichele 2021-08-18 01:33:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
B. I wonder if you can get some kind of gig work income that doesn't involve background checks.
C. I wonder if you might be able to develop some other source of income that doesn't involve background checks. (For example, I looked into panning for gold at one point.)
I'm sorry you are in such a pickle.
cubano 2021-08-18 23:37:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Yes I'm looking into perhaps putting together a classroom on one of those pretty killer live educational apps that are available these days. I used to teach guitar 30 years ago and I really enjoyed it, although I'm not sure I'm the best teacher ever.
DoreenMichele 2021-08-18 23:46:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I wrote the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide while homeless and I still work on developing free online resources, though I still struggle to make ends meet.
Let me know if you want links to some of those resources.
Best of luck.
metiscus 2021-08-18 01:27:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
cubano 2021-08-18 23:46:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The problem is the way the law is actually written...it 's written for a very specific use case (at least the one in Florida is) for people who committed ONE and ONLY ONE felony in their entire life (I think the Florida statue say that you can't even have another misdemeanor on your record, but perhaps I'm disremembering that).
It was never made to throw a big blanket over a lifetime of impulsive decisions like I have done. Plus, there is the problem of actually purging the perhaps 100s of private BG check database out there that various companies use that do not even advertise to the public.
Man I wish more than anything that I could just be given one chance to "start over"...you would see perhaps the most law abiding, risk adverse person you have ever seen.
I've been thru true hell with all this stuff, and people actually do change when the pain of staying the same crushes the pain of making changes.
In fact, that's the only time they do change if you ask me.
nostrebored 2021-08-18 01:43:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
nick__m 2021-08-18 01:43:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]
:(
cubano 2021-08-18 23:57:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I totally accept that many of not most people who read my BG think I'm getting exactly what I deserve...to never be given the chance to redeem myself or to pull myself out of my shit situation.
I think that's an extremely harsh way to judge someone, and that everyone should be given an opportunity to make a living if they show they have learned from the pain of the past.
Also, considering that hiring is such a crap shoot anyway, (I read somewhere that over half the people hired as programmers today won't be at that job in a year) what is the huge deal with giving someone like me who has been in recovery for 2.5 years a shot to contribute to the bottom line?
I really am a damn good programmer, and I still have an amazing passion for building new systems using modern stacks. I am fortunate as hell that I'm apparently a "natural learner" defined as someone who spends their entire life always chasing new knowledge.
meowkit 2021-08-18 01:50:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Its cheaper to lock you up, give you a record; its more lucrative to sell that data - then it is to rehabilitate, reintegrate, and forgive.
I’m sorry you’re in this situation because it is bullshit. I’m not an expert on this, but I believe there are employers who will hire/help people with felony charges and hopefully you can find one near you.
jcims 2021-08-18 03:37:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
This might seem like a million miles away from where you are now, but if the skills you have or can develop are marketable it might be something to look into...if for no other reason than to give you some hope.
cubano 2021-08-19 00:06:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Loner-ism isn't exactly the best trait for landing contract jobs, or for sales in general...just in case you were perhaps wondering.
I had a fair amount of success on the Upwork platform until some real dickweek in New Jersey destoryed my JSS score because I wouldn't violate federal law and allow them to dictate the exact hours I was to work as a 1099 IC.
Worse, I feel, is that Upwork agreed with them (of course because they have the money) about this situation that could not be more plainly written on the IRS website.
I don't know exactly how you landed the contracts you did in order to pay the bills and such, but I don't seem to have any skill with that, so while I really appreciate the brainstorming everyone is doing, people should know that I'll never give up trying to better my life and make a living doing what I love.
pomian 2021-08-18 02:12:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]
cubano 2021-08-19 00:08:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Chris2048 2021-08-18 02:34:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I think this should be illegal - it's basically slander.
trhway 2021-08-18 01:42:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
reading stories like that i wonder whether in such situations it may be simpler to just start a new life by like moving to a 2nd-3rd rate country where society isn't that cruel/unforgiving wrt. priors (at least not badly violent ones) and where English (plus US passport which alone places one into higher caste out there) and technical skills take you at least into minimally comfortable existence or even much further. Countries like Ukraine and Russia naturally come into my mind, and anecdotally on a trip to Mexico i met a local consulting shop owner who was telling me how hard it is to hire there.
jandrewrogers 2021-08-18 03:12:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
meowster 2021-08-18 10:40:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Anecdotally, Hawaii is not. A lot of people think they can "start over" there, and it's next to impossible unless you already have a salaried job lined up before you move.
If anyone moves there, I highly recommend getting a local 808 number. People there are very nice, but they still discriminate against outsiders.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2021-08-18 01:55:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]
_carbyau_ 2021-08-18 02:34:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
...
weq 2021-08-18 02:04:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
burlesona 2021-08-18 00:55:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
pas 2021-08-18 02:22:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k
Not just scarcity, but the lack of mixed use development, the lack of high efficiency city logistics (moving people, people's belongings, food/freight/cargo to shops/restaurants and bigger stores) prevent most US cities from being adequately flexible enough to adapt to changing economic patterns. (And to allow innovating new patterns, etc.) Not to mention that most metro areas are a zigzag patchwork of planning jurisdictions, and all of these municipalities are incentivized to push certain stuff away from them.
ashtonkem 2021-08-18 01:12:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If that’s true (I’m not from Houston!), then it does seem like zoning reform is probably not enough to solve America’s housing issues.
stephenhuey 2021-08-18 01:34:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]
burlesona 2021-08-18 01:30:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
thebradbain 2021-08-18 02:30:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The problem is just that Texas, as a whole, has a planning philosophy of outwards, not upwards. Things are densifying in job rich areas now that they've just about expanded as far as they can (the city proper 669 square miles, or about twice the 5 boroughs of NYC, twice the geographic size of its sibling city Dallas, and 150+ square miles larger than Los Angeles; none of these sizes include surrounding suburbs, by the way).
All of this is long way to say that you're right – it's not just about zoning. It's equally about ending the grip of car-centric planning and not just allowing, but incentivizing densification and walkability. The fact 2/3rds of Houston is in (increasingly-frequent, due in part to the sprawl itself not allowing anywhere for water to runoff to) flood zones, too, is apparently not incentive enough.
[1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/06/32/10774164/4/1200x0.jpg [2] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/07/70/10780179/4/1200x0.jpg [3] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/07/64/10779939/4/rawImage.jpg
larsiusprime 2021-08-18 01:05:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
burlesona 2021-08-18 01:29:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
larsiusprime 2021-08-18 01:51:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
beebmam 2021-08-18 00:57:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
nitrogen 2021-08-18 01:05:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 01:34:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
rbranson 2021-08-18 01:40:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
bbreier 2021-08-18 01:17:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]
splitstud 2021-08-18 01:32:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
pas 2021-08-18 02:20:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The problem is that there's an enormous missing middle (and high) density development regime in the US that would allow cities to adequately track the changes in housing needs.
Ensorceled 2021-08-18 00:47:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It's not just the size of cities, as a culture we are deliberately exacerbating the impact of wealth disparity.
dghlsakjg 2021-08-18 01:12:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The upside is that after having lived in both places, I’d still rather hit a rough patch in Canada. The healthcare, policing, and social services are all way more friendly in Canada.
waterside81 2021-08-18 01:23:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]
No but seriously it’s nuts how expensive the island is and I’m from Toronto
dghlsakjg 2021-08-18 01:35:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The Canadian government’s, at all levels, unwillingness to do anything but talk about housing without action blows my mind. It’s like they never noticed what happened in the US.
271828182846 2021-08-18 07:40:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dghlsakjg 2021-08-18 18:29:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I called it a nothing town in reference to real estate. We are hours from major economic areas, have no industry to speak of, aren't constrained in land area, don't have anything unique, etc...
Nevertheless a "cheap" 3 bedroom house is $650k.
BurningFrog 2021-08-18 02:35:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
1. Poor people are living in crappy rooms and hotels.
2. We must do something, so we ban those forms of housing.
3. Now poor people are sleeping in the street. We solved the problem!
Extra credit question:
Which problem was actually solved?
bmmayer1 2021-08-18 01:00:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city.
This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city.
People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.
jollybean 2021-08-18 01:30:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]
That trope is a little bit of a trope.
It's one thing for young people from small towns to jump to a nice spot in the bigger city pyramid, but that doesn't speak to the fact that the poor, in cities, are still quite poor and have a low standard of living.
And frankly, nobody from a small town is impressed by someone 'making' it into a middle class lifestyle in the city anyhow.
Part of my family lived in a nice enough home in a small town, everyone knew each other, living was very cheap. Most people were actually technically poor, but how poor can you be if you own your own home, have access to basic resources, and material things, and very full social lives and hobbies, arguably more so than most city people?
The problem is that 'economic standing' is a crude assessment.
Toronto has these vast areas of older, ugly residential high rise buildings, you can hardly walk anywhere, there's maybe a crappy local strip mall nearby. No culture, no local institutions, no way to get away - you're just 'stuck at the bottom' in a pile of ugly concrete. Canadian winters are 'hard' but it's made 'ok' if there's space, places to play, trails and other activities which these areas tend not to have for both material and cultural reasons.
At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors.
All the 'working class' I know in small towns have either boats, RVs/Campers, often cottages while their peers in the city live in concrete jungles.
I feel that cities are far more likely to have fragmented communities, people are more individualist, which also means more opportunity in the technical sense for prosperity, but on the other end of the Bell Curve ... it's also bad.
The cities with less transient populations are probably a little better.
Cost of housing is probably a very fundamental factor.
taurath 2021-08-18 02:59:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Other than access to the outdoors I would say the rest of that doesn't apply to almost any small town in the USA - may just be a canadian thing. In the USA we have meth, heroin, and a 2/1 church to local business ratio.
jollybean 2021-08-18 05:28:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
New England seems to me to have more civil and quaint small towns.
41209 2021-08-18 01:50:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It wasn't perfect( mine didn't have a kitchen, I learned how to cook pasta via a rice cooker), but considering it gave me a much needed escape from the insanity of my family, might as well of been a mansion.
I was making 10$ an hour back then, at 40 hours a week I'd take home maybe 1300 a month.
Rent was very doable. Now the same apartment is 1100$, minimum wage is 15$ but it's harder to get a 40 hour work week. I strongly believe you should be able to at least move out at 18, 19, etc. The best way to deal with a toxic family is dealing with them less.
But that's largely impossible now.
eric4smith 2021-08-18 01:05:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Both very large cities with about 8 million people each.
New York City (5 boroughs) has become almost unaffordable for someone on the mean wage and salary USA personal income, which is $66K USD in 2019. You more or less have to share your apartment.
If I'm renting an apartment in any of the 5 boroughs that is anywhere near decent, I'm probably going to pay over $2,000 p/m.
Even in Bangkok, although rents are lower, salaries are also lower for the people at the bottom, so in the end, it comes down to the same problem. Most office workers making under USD$1,000 per month will be living in substandard accommodation or with family.
I would say, that in cities, food and transportation are still relatively cheap. But rents are driving out a lot of people now. We will see the soft white underbelly of all of this when the rent moratoriums finally end. (Winter is coming!)
dragonwriter 2021-08-18 02:22:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
No, the mean wage and salary personal income in 2019 was $51,916.27 (the median was $34,248.45.) [0] Both of those are across the employed population, whole population figures will be lower.
66K is roughly (but not exactly, but maybe a ”real” figure using earlier base year constant dollars) 2019 median household income.
fy20 2021-08-18 03:25:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The problem I see with this In my city today is almost all new developments are smaller, being studios or 1 or 2 bedrooms. As the older housing stock is replaced, it means at sometime in the future it's not going to be possible to share as I did. Most people who have families move to the suburbs when they outgrow their apartment, so there isn't much demand for larger properties amongst people who can afford to buy them.
oh_sigh 2021-08-18 01:21:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]
NineStarPoint 2021-08-18 01:52:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dragonwriter 2021-08-18 02:10:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Median household income and median wage (or, alternatively, the former and median personal income, which isn't quite the same thing as median wage, but closely related) are not the same things. Of course, this thread has gone from one person mentioning mean wage and salary income to the response discussing median wage as if it were the same to the response to that discussing median household income as if it was the same.
mjmahone17 2021-08-18 01:43:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]
That makes the argument that NYC is unaffordable even stronger.
oh_sigh 2021-08-18 02:58:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
yarky 2021-08-18 01:56:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dragonwriter 2021-08-18 02:14:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]
That seems to be what the Census Bureau has for median household income for New York State for that period; I can't find any Census Bureau report for median wage for NYC, and that number doesn't match any Census Bureau reported income & poverty measure for New York City.
tbihl 2021-08-18 00:57:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
In essence, the study rediscovered that division of labor proliferates as economies grow.
NineStarPoint 2021-08-18 02:02:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
tbihl 2021-08-18 02:08:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]
arc-in-space 2021-08-18 02:02:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]
>We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent.
Perhaps suboptimal if you believe income inequality is a massive problem, but scaling linearly with population? That's actually better than what I'd expect, and certainly not as tragic as the cherrypicked wording of the headline/news publication seems to imply.
It's another episode of an editor using a result to say literally anything they already wanted to.
Meta point: Nothing against the study itself here, but growing increasingly tired of this sort of truth-twisting nonsense. It seems like it will never end. How can we fix anything if we can't at least agree to not outright lie to each other?
refurb 2021-08-18 01:35:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]
There was another study that determined that gentrification actually benefited low income, in particular those who owned property (which is not a small number).
werber 2021-08-18 00:47:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
semperdark 2021-08-18 01:12:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Leaving aside race, Detroit needs to densify or die - nothing sustainable about supporting services in neighborhoods with one occupied house per block. Duggan has no choice but to chase downtown growth for tax revenue. It's a city with infrastructure built for millions and a population of half a mil.
werber 2021-08-18 02:28:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]
semperdark 2021-08-18 14:23:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]
MattGaiser 2021-08-18 00:40:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
A soup kitchen wouldn’t show on an income statement and nor would a food bank or a free clinic, but I imagine that there are more support services in cities.
As poor people seem to flock to cities.
DoreenMichele 2021-08-18 00:46:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
And they aren't wrong to do that. Plenty of people were willing to take advantage of me and get free benefits from my knowledge, expertise etc when I was literally homeless and going hungry regularly while they did nothing for me. I still go hungry regularly and still add value and still can't figure out how to get my fair share.
I don't know what the solution is for me and I don't know what the truth is about cities, but I'm wholly unimpressed with this piece.
burlesona 2021-08-18 01:04:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
At a certain point in my life I was strapped, and I really related to your statement: I was trying hard to make a living freelancing / gigging etc and had accumulated a lot of skill and knowledge that I was offering far and wide. I found lots of takers for free or super cheap labor, but I was having a hard time paying my bills and really needed to get paid.
Somewhere along the line I realized I had to just stop doing anything for free. I started telling people up front something like “I could definitely solve X for you. I bill $50/hour.” Some things that I had previously worked on went away, but others surprisingly started paying. Over time I was able to raise my rate.
I eventually realized that, before, I hasn’t valued my own time enough, and I had been much too generous in doing things pro-bono just because they interested me, or I hoped that they would open doors down the line. And I realized that other people would never value my time for a penny more than I valued it. And again, part of it was that I was chasing some work I really wanted but was _never_ going to pay, and when I started having pay as a requirement, it stripped some of that stuff out of my life but ultimately replaced it with more productive and satisfying work.
I know that’s easier said than done, but it was a true ephiphany and major life breakthrough for me. So, again just in case that’s helpful or encouraging to you or anyone else reading, thought I’d share.
DoreenMichele 2021-08-18 15:32:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Rest assured, I wish it were a case of "Doreen is just being stupid about something and if she would just learn this one neat trick, everything would fall into place." But it's really not.
It's not laziness. It's not me being neurotic. It's partly sexism and misogyny out in the world but that doesn't explain the whole thing.
I'm a writer. I need more Patreon supporters and more resume work and more tips on my blogs. Someday maybe I will have "a real business" of some sort. Until then, I need to somehow make writing cover my bills because that's what I am capable of doing given a long list of constraints on my life, including poverty making it hard to move on to other things.
Thank you for your concern. I hope your comment helps someone else.
teorema 2021-08-18 00:47:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Probably too more opportunities, which means more opportunities to go sour.
mc32 2021-08-18 01:02:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Even centralized government systems cannot provide an idealistic solution to the pressures growing populations put on cities; however, given that people never the less pursue those opportunities even at a local disadvantage will take it because it’s better than their home opportunities.
brozaman 2021-08-18 08:43:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Most of this jobs will pay close to the minimum wage anyway but the living expenses are significantly lower in the smaller towns. I don't know how much of this can be exported to other countries such as the US though.
I live in Spain in a small town (<100k citizens) and a single person with a modal wage can easily afford to own both a house and a car. And a family with two parents with minimum wages and two kids can live without luxuries but without missing any of the essential stuff. However, in Madrid you would need over half of a modal salary and well over 70% of a minimum wage just to rent a single bedroom apartment in a location that isn't in the middle of nowhere.
One of my friends here is a delivery man and his wife is a cashier, they have two daughters, own two good cars which weren't pre-owned, have a detached house less than 10km away from the city center (10 minute drive) and they live well, go on vacation every now and then, etc.
ineedasername 2021-08-18 01:33:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I don't think astronomical income differences are a great thing, but if the COL-adjusted income is higher among, say, the bottom 25% in a city than in a suburban or rural area, that would be an important factor to take into account. Even more so if COL-adjusted income is lower since that would mean the poor are getting less than nothing.
Just looking at the income gap doesn't really tell the story though.
criticaltinker 2021-08-18 00:50:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent
> For the poorest income deciles, cities have no positive effect over the null expectation of a linear increase
> we find that mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of income distributions all increase with city size.
> the Kullback–Leibler divergence between a city’s income distribution and that of the largest city decreases with city population, suggesting the overall shape of income distribution shifts with city population
> Our results show that the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.
> our analysis including housing cost demonstrates that despite agglomeration effects on income, bigger cities are less affordable for people of all deciles in the sense that they spend proportionally more of their income on housing; this is especially true for lower income people
IMO this presents evidence that dense and well developed cities attract wealthy individuals and businesses. Perhaps this attraction can be attributed to the diversity in food, entertainment, transportation, and labor force. The paper does not attempt to explain why the poorest income deciles do not scale with city population - but take a look at the other comments here for plenty of speculation on the dynamics of income inequality.
[1] Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf
taurath 2021-08-18 03:07:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Condo buildings in asia often can have a 10x-100x difference in price between units. The maid for the person in the penthouse might live downstairs, or a few buildings away. They planned for their cities a lot better to actually have a lot of people in them. New condo projects go up constantly, all the time. Seattle for a while in the past few years had the most cranes in use in the US, at something like 18. That number seems pitifully low.
coder-3 2021-08-18 02:46:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I'd love for West to provide some corroborating evidence for that claim...
stjohnswarts 2021-08-18 04:14:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
S_A_P 2021-08-18 02:31:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]
colechristensen 2021-08-18 02:36:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Clewza313 2021-08-18 01:23:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]
hhs 2021-08-18 01:03:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]
tootie 2021-08-18 01:11:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
observer23 2021-08-18 12:12:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
CryptoPunk 2021-08-18 02:09:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
aaron695 2021-08-18 01:32:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
This is wrong
As cities get bigger everyone benefits as expected confirmed by the study -
"We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent."
"We repeat our analysis after adjusting income by housing cost, and find similar results"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_o...
Clewza313 2021-08-18 01:39:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
arc-in-space 2021-08-18 02:25:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
There is a very good reason the title used quotation marks, and it's not because it's a quote.
aaron695 2021-08-18 06:29:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]
"The poorest two deciles in bigger cities make about the same income as their counterparts in smaller cities"
Which does match the title.
I think there are a few obvious problems with this. But as a paper it's a good start. I object to the strongly worded title, but it's not wrong from the paper.
PhileinSophia 2021-08-18 00:38:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]
And yes, as the area becomes more desirable, the cost of living will increase, and the people who don't earn enough to live there will increasingly struggle.
This is basic economics, no need for a study nor an article.
micromacrofoot 2021-08-18 01:02:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I didn't understand it at first, but I've lived here long enough now to see it first hand. The rich move in, their dogs shit all over the sidewalk, they complain about everything, they are not social, they call the police for every little thing, their kids go to private schools... and everyone else's rent and property taxes go up. These poor neighborhoods have been under-served by the city for decades, and suddenly when the land is valuable the city wants to "have a dialog with the neighborhood about development."
boplicity 2021-08-18 01:26:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work.
In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work.
Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.
gravypod 2021-08-18 02:08:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
My mom had recently begun using again and I said "enough" and moved in with a relative. ~3 months in I had gotten a job in Hoboken, NJ (https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA) and would have to drive from my relative's house to my college/job every day and drive back. I couldn't afford the boarding costs for on campus residency especially with the added pain of having to move in/out every semester.
Each day I drove ~80 miles and had to fill up my tank. It was still some how barely cheaper than renting in the area and all I could afford.
This kind of thing really kills you inside. It's truly painful. For me, I would wake up at 5AM each day to drive west to east with the sun in my eyes. Then I would stay at school and work until around midnight where I'd drive back east to west with the sun in my eyes. I was surviving with ~4hr/night of sleep. I wish we lived in a world where no one else had to go through that torture (for lack of a better word).
rexreed 2021-08-18 02:27:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I get your point though, driving bleary eyed is not only soul sucking, but very dangerous for yourself and others on the road. Not to mention the ecological and time waste issues. Although I would note a 40 mile each way commute is sadly not out of the ordinary for America. Turns out the average commute distance for NJ is 40.9 miles. See stats here: https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...
clifdweller 2021-08-18 14:04:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
gravypod 2021-08-18 02:31:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]
heavyset_go 2021-08-18 02:48:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.
They're using full days in that calculation. The average commute there results in ~40 8-hour work days of driving a year.
[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator
abc_lisper 2021-08-18 02:59:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
fy20 2021-08-18 03:01:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
vladvasiliu 2021-08-18 05:33:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]
In Paris, there are more and more "anti-car" measures which are currently in effect, but no alternatives. Yes, they're building and extending a bunch of metro lines, which I think is great, but almost none of those are currently operational.
I think that there may be people who will absolutely choose to drive if at all possible, but I believe they are a minority, so maybe let's not concern ourselves with them at first.
But I also believe that most people will take the sensible option, and if transit is cheaper and faster (or at least not terribly slower and inconvenient) they will choose this option.
My point is that all these policies amount to a lot of sticks and no carrots.
If I lived where my parents live, my commute would be close to two hours each way, if (and that's a big if) none of the several trains I'd have to take had any issue. Commuting by car would be around one hour each way. It would cost more because of the taxes on gas, but would allow me both some flexibility on coming and going AND let me get back two hours per day.
And they live in a town with a direct to Paris suburban train stop. Many, many towns in the suburbs don't even have a train stop at all, so you'd have to catch a bus first to then catch a slower train.
Now here's the kicker: most people I know, working in IT, are barely able to afford a livable apartment to raise a one-kid family. Hell, most end up living outside of Paris. So I'm not sure how much you can reasonably expect the wages for low-earners to rise so that they could afford to live in Paris instead of driving there.
My point is that rising gas taxes and, generally, acting directly on the driving itself won't solve the issue, because people driving is itself a consequence of the underlying issue.
I don't know what the solution is, but personally I'd rather look at improving the transit network and incentivizing companies to open offices elsewhere, to ease the density-related problems, such as overcrowded metros. Maybe then people would stop driving around in Paris, because they would have no reason to.
sofixa 2021-08-18 13:48:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I really don't see this as a problem. Paris proper has boundaries and is space constrained, making it extremely expensive. Living in the suburbs in the same metropolitan area is perfectly fine. And there are plenty of cities there with good transport links to Paris itself.
> And they live in a town with a direct to Paris suburban train stop. Many, many towns in the suburbs don't even have a train stop at all, so you'd have to catch a bus first to then catch a slower train.
"Many, many" is an exaggeration. Most cities in Ile de France have a train station, and a lot of those that don't and are dense are getting trams, metros lines. Those that do remain affordable, as long as you aren't immediately outside of Paris or westwards.
Driving in Paris is unsustainable. Driving daily 2h because you live in a house in a village of 1k people is unsustainable.
I have colleagues living in small villages that take their car to a train station, and take the train to Paris. It's a decent tradeoff for the people who live in the middle of nowhere.
Discouraging it to the maximum possible
2021-08-18 05:35:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
gravypod 2021-08-18 10:58:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]
1. dropped out and not gotten a job
2. Stayed in an abusive and unsafe environment and ended up on the streets in a few months when my mom was evicted
My first "apartment" was 600/month (1 room in someone else's apartment) and if took me months to save up for to be able to do it with a buffer if I lost my job mainly because how much I was spending on college and gas and misc life stuff.
I have photos because I was so excited to get my "own" place I showed my boss. I should dig them up sometime.
JohnJamesRambo 2021-08-18 01:33:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Infuriating.
epistasis 2021-08-18 01:56:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed.
The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).
unixbeard1337 2021-08-18 02:32:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If we can't figure out a way to get people to live in Cleveland and St. Louis again, we're spitting into the wind.
derefr 2021-08-18 02:47:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Of course, top-down planning a city (as would be needed to "stamp" one out whole) has never worked; but how about we copy-and-paste the zoning plans from cities we already know are functional, and then incentivize all the same major companies that have headquarters in City The First to build secondary HQs in City The Second?
(I'm not sure if I'm joking.)
prawn 2021-08-18 04:17:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Even a coordinated national program like this: https://renewadelaide.com.au/grow/
vladvasiliu 2021-08-18 05:40:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I think there may be something to this.
The other day I was riding around the French Pyrenees, and some (bigger) villages had signs along the lines of "fibered village", as in "with optic fiber". Along those were other signs about selling lots, mostly by the town hall.
I was thinking that maybe this could attract remote workers. The environment is beautiful (if you're into mountains), they have clean air, etc. It could be great for a remote worker.
But then it hit me. Say you'd go to one of those villages, with a girlfriend / wife, or you found one there, and wanted to have kids. They'd be able to go to elementary school. But probably starting in junior high, and certainly in high school, they'd have to take the school bus to the "local big town". Which is, basically, a commute.
So I got a feeling of "unfairness": people moving there to escape commutes, but then subjecting their young kinds to the same...
epistasis 2021-08-18 02:53:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]
We need to tax land hoarders and use the proceeds to build public housing.
This will be sooooo much easier than trying to do business development in smaller cities. Those cities have already been doing their best to expand the job situation, but top down planning of jobs rarely works. Our top down planning to induce housing shortages is far easier to fix.
heavyset_go 2021-08-18 03:04:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
nazgulnarsil 2021-08-18 04:21:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]
fshbbdssbbgdd 2021-08-18 01:49:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Usually I found Craigslist had a lot more inventory when I was looking for a house to rent.
judge2020 2021-08-18 02:38:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
tablespoon 2021-08-18 04:10:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Can they even do that? My understanding is the local MLS databases are the closely guarded pet of "Realtors™". I was told that Realtors will always list on the MLS, and may or may not list on Zillow as a separate process, depending on if they think it's necessary.
judge2020 2021-08-18 13:29:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
zdragnar 2021-08-18 01:59:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Short term rentals may end up being more profitable, but are also seriously more work, and a lot of the smaller landlords don't want that.
Then again, with the eviction moratorium and other regulations that make dealing with problem tenants becoming heavy handed, I dont think I would ever want to have long term renters either, so... good, long term renters get the worst end of the deal, I guess.
borski 2021-08-18 02:30:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
hattmall 2021-08-18 02:00:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]
xyzelement 2021-08-18 02:00:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It depends on where you live of course but my wife and I recently house shopped and inventory was super-tight because (a) fewer people were willing to have people in to see the place due to COVID (b) fewer people were moving out of houses and into apartments due to WFH and (c) many people were looking to move from apartments into houses.
There was also a big move out of cities - you could easily rent/buy in NYC but good luck finding something in the suburbs.
All of these factors would affect rental tightness/availability where you are. I'd look into that more, rather than accepting a vague "yes, probably" as an explanation.
dragonwriter 2021-08-18 03:52:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
No, they are saying they don't rent them out in the long-term residential rental market because renting them out in the short-term vacation/travel rental market yields more income.
Spooky23 2021-08-18 16:42:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Short term rental was way more profitable than leasing the whole house. Rents are capped by low interest rates and the type of people who want to rent a four bedroom house are people more likely to be a problem in some way.
I did it for 4 years, from July to September. I would rent the furniture for a few months, have a cleaning service paid for the tenants and essentially rent the house for a week for the equivalent of 2-6 months rent.
thatfunkymunki 2021-08-19 01:06:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Can you elaborate what you mean here? I am hoping to rent a larger home soon and am curious.
2021-08-18 12:58:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]
smabie 2021-08-18 01:56:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Or maybe Zillow just doesn't anything listed.
jazzyjackson 2021-08-18 02:03:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
unreal37 2021-08-18 02:39:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]
AirBnb charges fees of 14% to guests. Those fees are added to the rent.
That is indeed "AirBnb's fault" that they have their own 14% fees on your rent if you're planning to stay there long term.
jazzyjackson 2021-08-18 13:59:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Maybe the fact that a landlord that would usually have to find a new tenant though word of mouth or classified ads can now advertise to a much wider audience has the result of making the landlord more money and making housing more expensive.
sershe 2021-08-18 09:15:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If inequality had anything to do with it, you would expect more unequal (or more expensive) cities to be more sprawling - as people are "pushed out" further by higher prices; but that is not the case. Why? Probably because people actually want to live far away, or don't care either way if they can trade off for e.g. more space, so they do (disclaimer: not me until 2020).
Similarly, you would expect more unequal cities around the world to be sprawling, with more driving. Yet, many cities where the central area is unaffordable to locals do quite well with transit. Related to the above, many do have a ton of people who drive, and they may make up in low speed/inefficiency what harm they fail to produce because they don't drive as far. Again, because people, apparently, want to drive as soon as they can afford it (disclaimer: not me).
makeitdouble 2021-08-18 01:41:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society
IMHO they should heavily focus on the most impacting forces to climate change, which are industrial emissions. Or really, we could try to think of any huge impact environmental crisis, and come to the conclusion we should do something about industrial accountability as they represent more than 90% of the volume in most cases.
boplicity 2021-08-18 01:45:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Transportation, in 2019, was the leading source of emissions, with industry ranked third, behind electricity.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
makeitdouble 2021-08-18 03:36:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Agriculture and Industry represent 33%, more than the 29% of the total for transportation.
Even drilling down transportation, personal vehicles are a small portion (about a fifth ?) of the total compared to trucking and other business vehicles https://depts.washington.edu/trac/bulkdisk/pdf/VVD_CLASS.pdf
And I'd expect their emissions to be way lower than trucks and heavy duty vehicles.
We could drill down the other categories (electricity, commercial and residential -- btw it's so absurd to merge these two in one block), what we individually consume/burn as private citizen is usually the tip of the iceberg.
Consuming less or different can have an impact, but only if the industries behind also follow through (image for instance you stop eating meat to reduce the agricultural impact, only for the soybean producer to go on a production rampage and destroy soils and areas in ways we wouldn't have predicted). Or from another perspective, we could have significant impact from the producers improving their practices, with little to no consumer behavior change.
Basically nothing will happen without the production side making a significant effort. If what we're looking for is "doing something", pushing harder on producers should be the way to go.
simongr3dal 2021-08-18 02:06:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Example: a car is produced, does the responsibility for the emissions go to the manufacturer or the consumer who buys the vehicle? Now do this for every single part and bucketful of metal ore down the chain of suppliers, manufacturers, shippers etc.
Drawing a line seems difficult and how do you even know whether you double counted at any point.
retrac 2021-08-18 02:41:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]
We either get more efficient at making it or consume less.
diordiderot 2021-08-18 06:39:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Manufacturer emissions from production. (Costs just passed on to consumer but that means lower sales and smaller tam until they make lower emission vehicles)
Consumer emissions from use
spullara 2021-08-18 01:47:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]
boplicity 2021-08-18 01:50:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
heavyset_go 2021-08-18 02:57:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
quickthrower2 2021-08-18 01:45:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
jader201 2021-08-18 03:38:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But in fact, only a portion (of the US, at least — 31% [1]) live in urban areas that would allow them to go car-less, even if you take the housing issues out of the equation.
If the rest (69%) even lived right next to work (which many couldn’t, since in many areas, there isn’t housing close to their workplace), they’d still have to commute everywhere else.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
amanaplanacanal 2021-08-18 03:53:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]
throw0101a 2021-08-18 11:14:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Maybe in the US where driving is prevalent, but in many other places your "commute" is simply your trip to work. In Toronto, Canada, many people commute via transit (TTC). We have a commuter rail system for the region (GO).
amanaplanacanal 2021-08-18 15:09:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]
jader201 2021-08-18 04:22:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
My point is that I’ve seen many highly upvoted comments on HN lately (this one included) that seem to think living near work would put a dent in the climate change problem, when the data suggests this isn’t the case.
Many people on HN either live — or if they could afford it, would live — near work allowing them to go car-less, and therefore assume most of the world is like that, when, in fact, most of the world could not go car-less in their current job/residence.
Phrodo_00 2021-08-18 19:53:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]
This is not an immediate conclusion. There exist multiple alternatives to driving, but it's also up to cities to provide them.
raxxorrax 2021-08-18 10:34:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The solution has to be to make individual traffic CO2 neutral.
lkbm 2021-08-18 14:37:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I don't think we'll get rid of all personal transportation, or even all car usage, but it's highly variable from city to city, and I suspect we could convert some of the "worst" cities to be more like the "best".
We should also decarbonize private cars, but we should be pursuing battery of solutions.
RickJWagner 2021-08-18 11:57:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]
xwdv 2021-08-18 01:43:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.
Valgrim 2021-08-18 02:37:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.
ewindal 2021-08-18 06:55:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:11:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]
How? What other environmental crisis do you see happening if we embrace nuclear?
> We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.
It seems short-sighted to focus _all_ of our efforts on holding quality of life the same as reduce consumption. I certainly agree that this will be a part of the solution, but by constraining the problem thusly we make it much harder to solve. A robust mix of nuclear, renewables, and efficient consumption is much more likely to work than any of these three options alone.
Valgrim 2021-08-18 03:57:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I don't see into the future better than anyone else, but my guess? The sheer amount of resources we need and the waste we create is drastically reducing biodiversity around the globe, and keystone plant and animal species are on the verge of becoming extinct. This will cause a cascading ecological collapse, including our own food chain.
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 04:58:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But why? I'm not arguing that our current lifestyle in heavily developed countries is sustainable, but what makes you certain that we can't form sustainable habits? As long as humans have existed on the planet, we've become better at using available resources (though many of us have certainly died trying, as evidenced by the decline/collapse of many pre-Industrial civilizations through environmental damage). What about this moment in time marks the end of our ability to become more efficient?
2021-08-18 01:56:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]
boplicity 2021-08-18 01:51:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
epistasis 2021-08-18 01:58:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.
AngryData 2021-08-18 02:13:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car.
I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.
epistasis 2021-08-18 02:51:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life.
What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. This is the crucial road block to nuclear. There are lots of places begging for nuclear to be built, but it never works out, and causes tremendous disaster for all involved in construction. The two "success" stories are China and Russia's Rosatom, but it's unlikely that we could have them construct reactors in the US and succeed. For a while it was hoped that South Korea could build for the rest of the world, but it has become clear in recent years that there was corruption at the root of their inspection process.
As for storage, it is getting deployed all the time, mostly in conjunction with new wind and solar installs (called "hybrid" in the field). It is unlikely that we could scale any sort of nuclear construction to catch the coattails of storage now, we are rolling out dozens of GW per year currently, and that will go up by a factor of 10 by 2026, and another factor of 10 by 2031, with an expected 10-30TWh of storage production annually. Nuclear can't scale like that.
goatlover 2021-08-18 02:57:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
And how much less CO2 would have been put into the atmosphere over that time period? Also, if we had scaled up to produce that many nuclear reactors, don't you think we'd be invested in new and better ones coming online? Or at least until solar and wind can solve their storage and transmission issues.
epistasis 2021-08-18 03:15:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:15:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It's definitely feasible to construct and run, it's just that folks are scared to run nuclear power. France has a _lot_ of nuclear power but only started dialing back after Fukushima scared them.
epistasis 2021-08-18 04:15:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I'm begging that anybody who believes that nuclear is possible to construct today, to look at any of the many places where it has been attempted: any of the French EPR or the AP1000s in the US. It has been abandoned by all, except for a few startups working on small modular reactors. These had been avoided in the past because it was thought they could never be as economical as the large reactors that we can't construct today.
And even before that, nuclear was abandoned in the US not because of TMI or Chernobyl, but because it had been a financial and managerial disaster:
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?
CapricornNoble 2021-08-18 11:04:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I'm not sure why we don't fork the reactor designs with some minor changes for powering urban grid infrastructure....Hmmm, maybe a sneaky rollout would be to establish a bunch of "test reactors" physically on naval bases, but with grid connections to the local cities.....essentially subsidizing the national power grid with US Navy nuclear assets.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine
epistasis 2021-08-18 14:07:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 04:47:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The link you post talks about the project mismanagement and bad incentives that tanked nuclear prices. This isn't anything new. The US has been failing to build new infrastructure on time and under budget for decades now and it's a much larger problem than just nuclear plants.
> Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?
I mean, I don't think there's definitive proof that cost is the reason here. Whataboutism isn't enough to sow doubt, we need a more clear line of reasoning.
epistasis 2021-08-18 05:14:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But it's a bit unfair to call my questions about the supposed success of France when you are the one who brought up the topic. I have searched for cost numbers on the Mesmer plan a few times and came up dry. Yet I still hear it as evidence that nuclear was cost effective and a good idea, without any numbers or data attached to it. So if it was cost effective, where are the numbers? And why did they stop at a fraction of what they had planned? These are earnest questions, directly on topic, directly about the feasibility of constructing nuclear. But I'm not surprised that nobody has the details, as I've never met a nuclear advocate that has investigated it as much as I have and could provide me with a single new fact. I am very interested in all potential solutions to climate change, but I don't see how nuclear could be one after three history I have learned and the recent track record with construction. Nuclear as climate solution does not have enough basis in fact for me to be able to support it.
2021-08-18 04:18:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Chris2048 2021-08-18 02:27:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]
epistasis 2021-08-18 02:55:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Japan may have a difficult time, which is why they have been so fond of hydrogen, but I have a feeling that they may find some other solutions. Deep-sea floating turbines are falling in price all the time.
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:19:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I think we need a bit more than feelings and faith to solve climate change. Nuclear buys us time to work out the issues with renewable energy, as long as it takes. And in certain cases, it just might not. That's the nature of renewable energy, much like oil deposits or rare-earth deposits aren't available everywhere in the world.
epistasis 2021-08-18 04:20:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
"Feelings" are the only reason people think nuclear is possible. Those that have been trying it in the past decade have shown it to not be competitive.
Usually HN is good at thinking like engineers, but for some reason nuclear seems to get very little critical thought, and renewables get very little consideration for their actual reality.
There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear except as a tiny tiny fraction of grid power. Literally none!! Yet somehow comments about needing to build lots of nuclear get treated as serious statements that could hold some water. Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years, and most likely never again in human history.
Chris2048 2021-08-19 03:03:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]
> There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear
and in what timescale can these carbon-free models be developed? We probably need a carbon-negative model to reverse existing CO2 damage.
> Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years
France has declared it will wants to cut nuclear to 50% of the grid by 2035, it's current share is 70%. So what does this statement mean?
> Floating wind is falling cost all the time. Nuclear's cost is going up all the time.
The cost of energy production, or the total cost of infra?
Part of the reason nuclear is growing is lack of funding. Turns out, you need to keep building nuclear power stations for people to think a degree in nuclear engineering is a good idea. And you need to keep building them to keep power-plant-building corps in business and innovating/improving efficiency.
imjustsaying 2021-08-18 01:54:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dang 2021-08-18 06:25:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tomrod 2021-08-18 01:56:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]
garmaine 2021-08-18 01:38:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The emissions of all consumer cars together is a drop in the bucket compared to other CO2 sources.
boplicity 2021-08-18 01:42:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
"Light Duty Vehicles", which are presumably cars, make up over half the "transportation" emissions in the US, and transportation is the leading source of emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
garmaine 2021-08-18 01:56:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Also if you track down the original report that pie chart is drawn from, you’ll find that is only considering direct fossil fuel combustion. Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%.
ALL consumer cars everywhere, for every purpose, amounts to 12% of emissions. Commuting is a smaller fraction of that. I stand by my claim.
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:00:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
What does this mean? All sources?
How is 17% emissions a small amount? It's as much as our agricultural and commercial emissions combined and 1% more than our residential and commercial emissions combined. It's more than the the emissions of all airline travel. Only industrial and electricity related emissions are more. What other category would you pick to lean up on?
garmaine 2021-08-18 03:08:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:42:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/us..., Section 2-3 Trends, Pg 94.
garmaine 2021-08-18 04:56:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I’m on mobile now I’m not interested in delving further because 12% vs 16% doesn’t matter. The vast majority of emissions are not from cars.
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 05:01:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]
garmaine 2021-08-18 06:38:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]
mogadsheu 2021-08-18 01:33:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
All other factors being equal, high city populations relative to the countryside should be more resource efficient.
jacobolus 2021-08-18 01:37:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Better is to build a serious transit network with regular fast access to the city center, with dense neighborhoods near transit stations (3–6 story apartment buildings for at least a couple blocks surrounding each station). Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.
alasdair_ 2021-08-18 02:09:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Doesn’t Japan have basically everyone live in Tokyo and ignore everywhere else?
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:18:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dzhiurgis 2021-08-18 02:45:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Maybe compare life satisfaction and some other outcomes when looking at places like Japan. I'd never want to live in 10 sq meter apartment and be jammed each morning into train like a sardine...
That's not to say places don't need to solve public transport and bike infra.
jacobolus 2021-08-18 03:24:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It doesn’t seem to me that the claim that Japan has a worse quality of life than the USA is supportable by data: surveys of self-reported satisfaction are notoriously incomparable across cultures. But there are also many differences between these countries besides urban planning and zoning laws (e.g. the USA is much less densely populated, is younger, has more immigrants, has more natural resources, uses much more energy per capita, has much higher GPD per capita, has a shorter life expectancy, has a far larger number of drug addicts, has dramatically more violence, ...).
A cheap 10–15 minute standing rush-hour subway commute is much less objectionable than a 1.5-hour highway traffic-jam commute. I haven’t been to Japan, but the subways in China and various European countries are clean, orderly, quiet/smooth, and have trains every few minutes. They put even the best US subway systems like NYC and Boston to shame.
I know multiple groups of people in San Francisco who live with ~4 unrelated adults in a 1-story 2-bedroom single-family house, either sharing bedrooms or using every room in the house as a makeshift bedroom, and still pay out the nose for the privilege (the only other choice they could afford was living 1+ hours away in a suburban wasteland) who would much prefer to have their own separate 600–800 square foot apartments instead. The Bay Area housing market is such that people get locked into their current place and cannot afford to move if their needs change (e.g. get married, get divorced, have kids, have their kids move out of the house, get a higher-paying job, get a lower-paying job, ...). People who work full time for decades still can’t dream of scraping together a down payment unless a wealthy relative dies and they land a sizable inheritance. Building a couple hundred thousand additional small apartments throughout the Bay Area would relieve a ton of market pressure and drive down the price of housing of all shapes and sizes, including larger condos and houses.
ninthcat 2021-08-18 01:38:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]
gwbas1c 2021-08-18 02:01:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 01:30:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
riversflow 2021-08-18 01:48:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]
You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
whimsicalism 2021-08-18 02:06:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The average American would be paying $0.
chidg 2021-08-18 03:15:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.
While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.
rascul 2021-08-18 03:21:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.
whimsicalism 2021-08-18 13:24:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It's not done at time of purchase because it is not a gas subsidy.
jacobolus 2021-08-18 01:35:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
closeparen 2021-08-18 01:53:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lumost 2021-08-18 01:40:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.
SilverRed 2021-08-18 01:45:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lumost 2021-08-18 02:49:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Cars are also one of the few greenhouse emissions sources which we have a plausible market driven path to eliminate over the next 2 decades via battery electric vehicles.
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:16:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
We need good planning but then we also need to factor in the environmental costs of driving to eliminate it.
lumost 2021-08-18 13:41:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]
In my case driving would increase my commute time by about 20 minutes due to traffic. My city has no appetite for improving driving options or reducing congestion through the addition of new roads.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2021-08-18 01:51:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Why do so many people want to play dictator these days?
SilverRed 2021-08-18 01:56:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
_carbyau_ 2021-08-18 02:27:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]
thebradbain 2021-08-18 02:50:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]
[1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:30:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If I say "I will give you $20 to not drive" or "I will take $20 from you if you drive", the only thing that really matters is that there is a $20 price differential between two actions so you will be at a $20 disadvantage to do the current thing regardless of how you word it.
Money and wealth is relative so the actual final amount doesn't matter as much as how much you have compared to the average person.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2021-08-19 00:40:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2021-08-18 06:05:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
dzhiurgis 2021-08-18 02:47:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]
oblio 2021-08-18 08:21:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The number of electric cars sold in 2020 was ~250k.
The average age of a car in the US is 12 years.
If electric car sales quadruple each year until they reach the total number of cars sold in the US (around 16 million cars per year), it will take at least 18 years to replace all the combustion engine cars on the road.
And this is wildly optimistic, electric cars are too few and too expensive, even as second hard cars, for the general population. I estimate that they'll reach a sort of break-even point with combustion engine cars around 2025 or so. So you can probably add 3-4 more years to those 18 I counted. So at least 20 years to have a mass replacement of existing cars on the road.
And in the rest of the world it's even worse. The rest of the world is poorer, has lower disposable income, cars are around for longer, and electric car sales are ramping up even slower.
nradov 2021-08-18 04:33:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:13:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]
A tax/higher prices on fuel would push people to more efficient methods faster and will put more money in to investments on new technology.
dzhiurgis 2021-08-18 03:43:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
SilverRed 2021-08-18 04:38:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 03:28:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
oblio 2021-08-18 08:27:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.
dragontamer 2021-08-18 01:36:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:18:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]
rascul 2021-08-18 03:25:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:27:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.
rascul 2021-08-18 03:42:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]
DoreenMichele 2021-08-18 03:27:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I wish it were so. I desperately wish this were entirely true.
2021-08-18 05:12:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]
smileysteve 2021-08-18 01:49:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax.
Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.
bluefirebrand 2021-08-18 01:40:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport.
There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.
Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.
soperj 2021-08-18 01:54:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I've done transit in most of the major cities in Canada to/from work & school, or airports, and most are pretty decent.
I don't know that transit should really serve outlying areas?
bluefirebrand 2021-08-18 05:32:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
But of course it's not really practical.
whimsicalism 2021-08-18 02:02:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.
bluefirebrand 2021-08-18 05:30:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]
I don't see why it would, why do you think that?
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 12:07:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]
ineedasername 2021-08-18 02:01:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.
This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 03:31:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Yes, the purpose would be to reduce consumption of basically all things, since cheap fossil fuels are the basis of manufacturing and transporting almost all things. Hitting people hard would be a necessary effect of reducing carbon emissions, although wealth transfers from the rich to poor via taxation can modulate how much the poor are hit relative to the rich.
Karrot_Kream 2021-08-18 03:23:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]
In the short term, but it may incentivize more local production chains in the future. A large part of the reason food is grown in such large, factory farm setting is because transport is a fraction of the cost of the food itself. As you say it's a complex problem and there aren't any simple solutions.
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:20:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]
ineedasername 2021-08-18 14:10:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 16:13:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]
ineedasername 2021-08-19 03:27:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If the bottom 25% of the economic ladder get stomped on and pushed into poverty (when not already there) how does that help? It will set things back: Because the people getting stomped, going hungry, working 2 jobs and 60hours a week-- they're not going to sit back and suffer in silence as things get worse. The backlash would be enormous and political pressure insurmountable.
We need solutions that account for the people impacted by them or we'll get nowhere. Throwing your hands up and saying Fine, "live is up while we can" because a simple solution doesn't solve a complex problem is defeatist. And stops you-- likely a very smart person-- from contributing to the dialog of how to solve an extraordinarily complex problem and implementing some of those countless big and little things we can do to keep moving forward.
patothon 2021-08-18 01:37:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 01:55:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]
garmaine 2021-08-18 02:11:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 02:31:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]
One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down.
A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person.
There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.
heavyset_go 2021-08-18 03:15:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]
How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?
SilverRed 2021-08-18 03:18:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]
If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.
closeparen 2021-08-18 01:52:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]
We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 03:56:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]
goatlover 2021-08-18 01:58:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]
lotsofpulp 2021-08-18 03:41:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself.
However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.
prawn 2021-08-18 05:02:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]