https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/2/5/16974906/seattle-rent-prices-february-2018
Also - Drum is apparently okay with the planet burning to an uninhabitable crisp.
I believe Drum is wrong on NYC being one of the most expensive places to live - rent, yes, but when you factor in average spending on transportation it's one of the cheapest, at least out of major metro areas.
Also - Drum is apparently okay with the planet burning to an uninhabitable crisp.
To be fair, I've seen a reasonable case for arguing that is what we deserve.
The gerrymandering point seems valid. Democrats should campaign on moving large numbers of government offices to rust belt states as a jobs/income transfer program. I'm not just saying that because I could personally benefit.
Some of the Rust Belt isn't even that far outside of D.C. West Virginia is both close and has beautiful roads connecting it with D.C. If half of the capital can go kayaking there on a summer weekend, I don't see why the Department of XXX can't move 5,000 jobs there.
I don't what you're getting at about Chait. In this case he's arguing the liberal position while Kevin Drum is being a wonky regular guy from suburbia.
The attracts more cars/attracts more people analogy is a bad one. That is, building more roads actually increases miles driven. Building more housing doesn't increase the number of people in the world.
Department of XXX
First Secretary: Stormy Daniels
I may have been wrong in my assertion in 2, but there's some version of it in which I'm right. Amassing data.
It might, if substantial numbers of people are holding off starting a family until they get better housing.
That point by Drum is unusually stupid for him. The idea that building more housing attracts more people to the city is only true (in places, like coastal California, where housing prices are very high) if it makes housing prices more affordable to attract people at the margins. In which case, you've solved the problem.
No one thinks that the recent law (which has lots of other environmental benefits for dense-ification beyond just lowering housing prices) would have by itself made cities affordable. But it would have likely caused substantial decreases in rent over a few-year period (estimates were that if it had been in place in 2014 rents in LA and San Franscisco would have been a few hundred a month cheaper) and you'd have had a bend in the cost curve.
Also the idea that somehow US cities just can't be cheap is so dumb. There are lots of very successful, important US cities with cheap housing! The one thing that they do is build. In fact, LA used to be just like that, but we've now built out basically to the edge of the transportation system, so you need infill, which NIMBYs hate.
10 to 7. To be clear, I would argue that if appreciable numbers of people aren't starting families because they have insufficient housing, that is a problem we should fix.
I read Drum as pointing out that for people who drive all the time, new housing is a zero-sum game, and they've gotten theirs.
I guess the issue is how dedicated Americans-in-aggregate are to driving all the time-- is a big yard really worth being stuck in traffic to and from work and not then being able to walk to a meal or a place for coffee or beer?
For lots of people, the answer is basically yes, they're unable to conceive of a car-light or carless lifestyle. But to anyone who has actually lived in cities, there are definitely intermediate solutions to houses on big tracts of ground and arterial roads. (Specifically, townhouses to low-rise courtyard complexes-- you still get a yard, maybe a little one that's just yours, and a bigger shared but not completely public one). This is a happy middle ground missing from KD's argument that envisions either towers or happy suburbs. People write about this possible solution in detail
I live in a place like that, near DC. So does my mom, in Chicago. I know people who are similarly situated other places-- Seattle, Columbus years ago. The neighborhood I lived in in St Louis is like that as well. If a neighborhood is built to support at least corner stores, making the transition to doing a few things on foot is a lot easier. There are lots of people (still a minority realistically) who live in suburbs or outlying parts of cities that would be perfectly happy with worse driving and better walking. Building these places means relaxing zoning laws and especially parking requirements. It's the conflict over whether parking should be free and easy that's the real point of friction.
His point that supporting growth in Cleveland or Pittsburgh is a good idea.
1: Well, since AI is only 20-30 years away, and soon after that humans will lose interest in continuing life and die out, you can see why that doesn't seem all that big a deal to him.
How quickly they forget.
The website htaindex.cnt.org crashed while I was searching it, but interesting extract:
CBSA - New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA: average housing costs $2,000/month, transportation $831, total $2,831
New York City municipality only: housing $1,657, transp. $525, total $2,182
CBSA: Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX: housing $1,343, transp. $1,075, total $2,418
The 5 boroughs average less rent than the suburbs, not just transportation - is this plausible? Not that anyone can get in on that level of rent, granted.
15 to 5. It's hard to type fast when you're dead.
It seems like for the question "Will new housing in a desirable area benefit any people in any way other than those living in the new housing", left-wing people are divided 50/50 between "Yes" and "No" and have equally plausible arguments. It might be a real wedge issue someday if these debates happened in places with more than 20% Republicans.
I usually agree with Drum, but that article is pretty dumb. In addition to the dropping rents, Seattle's light rail ridership is increasing beyond projections.
Also, traffic in big cities is bad because there are a ton of people, too many of which need to use cars, and not enough public transit. Adding more people to the suburbs where they must drive 20-100 miles a day is going to do a lot worse things to traffic than dense infill in walkable neighborhoods.
Most of his arguments boil down to: people don't like cities and nothing we do will make it better so let's just keep things the way they are. Just because white Boomer suburbanites have convinced themselves that suburban density is comfortable and marker of success does not mean that people don't like cities. One might possibly argue that the housing affordability crisis is a clear indication that people do, in fact, like cities.
The disparity makes more sense now that I see median housing costs in NYC CBSA are composed of $1,988 for owners / $1,394 for renters, while in NYC municipality it's $1,394 for owners / $1,337 for renters. So it may not be strictly comparable in terms of what is actually available to low/middle-income people.
15: Nobody forgot. There are signs everywhere.
I think it's a mistake to think this is a static issue. A couple of years ago, forcing cities to upzone around transit was practically an unspeakable concept in California. SB827 just died, but only by 4-6, with a number of no votes speaking favorably of the concept.
Yes. There is at least hope, maybe, for the future, maybe.
The past doesn't actually get better, no matter what the old people say.
(Specifically, townhouses to low-rise courtyard complexes-- you still get a yard, maybe a little one that's just yours, and a bigger shared but not completely public one). This is a happy middle ground missing from KD's argument that envisions either towers or happy suburbs. People write about this possible solution in detail
This is 'seems-to-me' rather than data, but I do think there's a tipping point for a desirable level of density that's slightly but importantly denser than what you describe, and than what people are comfortable with. Sort of Queens/Somerville levels of density: a mix of single-family houses with postage-stamp yards, and no more than a small alleyway separation from the next house, and smallish apartment buildings on the main shopping streets.
I see 'low-rise courtyard complex', and that just looks like something in a neighborhood that's denser than suburbs, but you still can't walk to anything.
Actually to the OP: yes, Kevin Drum has a typical suburbanite's I've-got-mine, any-change-is-bad perspective. It used to be standard that cities would grow and densify over time, now owner dominion over the approval process has practically ground that process to a halt, and people are undergoing intense financial suffering as a result (Bay Arean speaking). He doesn't have much idea of the tradeoffs.
I don't think just increasing supply without requiring affordability in some way is enough - or more specifically, it could work, but not for decades with all the luxury demand from across the world to shake out. I want both - build up like crazy in core areas, and require 90%+ of the new construction be affordable in perpetuity. The environs of North Berkeley BART are a shanda. Fortunately the debate around SB827 did bespeak a bridging of the gap between "build more" and "make more affordable" activist communities, as amendments required the upzoning be inclusionary.
That sounds a little bit like my neighborhood, leaving aside a few really rich streets and some mid-rise apartments that mostly store old people.
Drum's engaging in rhetorical bait-and-switch. SB827 was not about getting to New York heights in buildings. I believe it was aiming for 5 floors. Paris heights.
When I worked in Paris in the early 90s, I learned that there were laws regarding the height of buildings in the city. Specifically, aside from the Tour Montparnasse (and a single building on the University Paris 7 campus) all other buildings' heights were regulated by laws dating back to Baron Haussman (19th century). [Why? B/c the Parisians believed that buildings needed to be at most a certain height in order to preserve their human scale. Or something like that, I forget the precise argument.] And yet, Paris was densely populated. *All* SB827 would have done was mandate similar levels of density. Not effin' New York heights.
SB827 was precisely intended to bring about that missing middle - it would have force-enabled new development in large swathes of the state, yes, but only up to 45/55/85 feet (original text) or 45/55 (in the final amendments before failure). And no parking requirements.
Queens/Somerville levels of density:a mix of single-family houses with postage-stamp yards, and no more than a small alleyway separation from the next house, and smallish apartment buildings on the main shopping streets.
Many older parts of coastal California cities are roughly this dense (or even denser), but lack adequate transit and most importantly are aggressively zoned as exclusively residential so that it's fairly hard to walk to much of anything.
This, from Drum's post, seems really really dumb:
Consider New York City. Sure, building stuff there is hard, but it's a city that's basically friendly to high rises--and it has been since the invention of the safety elevator. By American standards, it also has a uniquely effective mass transit system. And yet, New York City is an expensive place to live. It's been an expensive place to live for the past century. If you want cheap housing, this means you have to think beyond New York City. Whatever your plans are, they probably won't work unless you have denser development and better mass transit than New York.
NY is expensive in part because it's almost unique -- if you want to live a totally walkable/mass-transit lifestyle, it's easy here and really difficult most other places in the country. That doesn't mean that it's not dense/mass-transity enough, it means that the demand for areas that are dense and mass-transity is greater than New York alone (with the assistance of the other parts of cities that are like NYC) can satisfy.
30: Sure, the density alone won't do it, but I think you need that level of density to make the necessary transit/mixed-use zoning work.
I really like my neighborhood. The houses are affordable on local-university salaries (or at least they were 15 years ago) and I can be at my desk a half hour after walking out my door by taking a bus that is free to me.
And yes, SB 827 would have allowed building at roughly that level of density (but significantly w/out parking requirements and near transit, to encourage use of transit).
Plus, I'm a short walk from two bars I never go to and a moderate walk from an area with a half-dozen bars, many of which I go to often.
And yes on midheight development. A few years ago (probably a decade, I'm old) someone posted a web page here that ranked zipcodes by population density, and most of the densest ones were in Queens. Not so much with the apartment towers, but exactly what I described in 25. That's enough density for all the benefits of density, it's just hard to make a neighborhood like that anyplace where lot sizes are already set.
The way it was done here was for years, up until the old people revolted, the property taxes were based on the land value only, not the building value.
33 - yes, agree. One of the tragedies of (in particular, LA, but also much of the rest of the State) is that the neighborhoods we're talking about for infill were actually built for a streetcar system and thus with just a *little* more investment in available transit and some significant changes to exclusive zoning would absolutely be much more walk-friendly.
That is, and I'm expanding on a thought that's new to me but is probably perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks about this stuff, if you've got a neighborhood laid out with wide streets and no sidewalks and big dumb lot sizes, you can add density to it by buying a few lots and building a tower, but it's harder to change it to a neighborhood of small, tightly-packed houses on narrow streets with tiny yards. The original layout is going to be persistent.
I went on at boring length this morning (whilst on the bus!) on wittering.com re: Wiener's success in building a legislative coalition last year and how I have solid hope he will be back with a future version of sb827 in future years, have no time to repeat here, but go go wiener.
a couple of years ago i suggested here inside-peripherique-paris level of density west of arguello/7th and unleashed ridiculous hostility. insert continuously rolling eyes ever since. just as the kids have a fighting chance of saving us on gun insanity, hopefully they can save us on planning and transportation policy as well.
On the west coast, can't they just wait until after the big quake clears lots of space?
42.last Per something I saw somewhere the kids don't seem to be registering to vote in any greater numbers than previous so it doestn't appear that they'll be saving us from anything at all, unfortunately.
I feel weird having this conversation (not that I don't jump into it with enthusiasm whenever it comes up) because I do recognize that my preferences are genuinely extreme -- I've lived on the eighth floor of one apartment building or another most of my life (fourteen of my first sixteen years, and then the last sixteen. I've been on lower floors, but rarely ground level and I find sleeping at ground level kind of creepy).
But there's room for a whole lot of density without being like me.
25. The places I'm thinking of have main streets with shops, another with one or two strip malls within a half-mile. You can't walk for everything, but there are a few useful or pleasant-ish places. Maybe there's regional variation-- a lot of Chicagoland is built with a mix of 3-story courtyards and single family homes on the same block.
Basically, if the street layout supports it, single-family neighborhoods can incorporate some places like this, with the higher density then supporting a few new businesses, which attract people who are OK getting out of their cars.
Or maybe it's just generational and I'm seeing neighborhoods getting younger instead of being abandoned.
44: If you take up camping, you could get a hammock.
42 - Yes, I just heard an interview w local celebrity seismologist Lucy Jones that was basically "you think the housing crisis is bad now, just wait until 500,000 people have no homes after their homes, built to current code which is designed to allow homes to be totally destroyed, are destroyed. Oh btw the event that destroys them happens on average once every 200 years and hasn't happened in more than 200 years."
And I might be mis-visualizing. Anyplace where you could practically do your grocery shopping on foot is dense enough for me.
You know what I don't understand about weird American zoning? I disapprove of lack of density, but I understand it. I really don't understand the resistance to mixed usage. Why don't people want to live near retail? Retail is great! Walking home from bars and restaurants is great!
I mean, I'm being goofy here, but I legit don't understand that bit of the dynamic.
49: Because black people go to stores. Seriously.
That doesn't mean that it's not dense/mass-transity enough, it means that the demand for areas that are dense and mass-transity is greater than New York alone (with the assistance of the other parts of cities that are like NYC) can satisfy.
That's his point, I'm pretty sure. You can't make NY much more dense/transity, you have to take the model elsewhere.
if it makes housing prices more affordable to attract people at the margins. In which case, you've solved the problem.
Solved what problem? You will have housing for pretty rich, not filthy rich, people. I don't realy see an argument against the "supply will just get gobbled up" point. Look at Vancouver, which has tons of high-rises, but where everything gets gobbled up (by foreign investors? I'm not sure if that's just anecdotal).
28. Paris' other constraint is adequate sewers for taller buildings.
52 link: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89gouts_de_Paris
You can't make NY much more dense/transity, you have to take the model elsewhere.
That's the idea, right? Not necessarily the Manhattan model, but the Queens model.
You will have housing for pretty rich, not filthy rich, people
And you have reduced traffic, and reduced human misery. You have made the situation better.
I find sleeping at ground level kind of creepy
I am well accustomed to sleeping at (just above) ground level but I think I'd like sleeping on the second floor better. I do like when windows look into tree canopy.
It's not enough to be a phobia, but the idea of a window as something that a person could be standing immediately outside feels strange and un-private to me. I'm sure I'd get used to it in time.
You will have housing for pretty rich, not filthy rich, people
Dude. You are better than this. If the housing market is made cheaper by new supply, then the new supply impacts (in some way) the market as a whole. If you build new housing that pretty rich people move into, then the pretty rich people aren't driving up the housing costs for the just a little bit rich people, and on down the line.
you have reduced traffic
How? You'd have more traffic.
I thought most of the traffic is Trump voters who live in Cranberry and drive downtown.
and on down the line
This is the part I don't agree with. I get that the competition for housing will be diffused among more housing, but I'm saying that you'll never really move the floor. It will continue to be out of reach for almost everyone, unless cities become truly enormous, which I think is Drum's point as well.
You all have your own local Cranberry.
There does seem to be something genuinely strange about luxury high-rises in central cities. Like, NYC downtown, there's clearly a lot of housing with no one meaningfully living in it, and I've heard the same about London and I guess Vancouver as well. So building towers that are going to be unoccupied by absentee rich owners is pointless in terms of meeting housing demand.
But additional housing that upper-middle-class people are going to move into and live in, that's genuine new supply.
There does seem to be something genuinely strange about luxury high-rises in central cities. Like, NYC downtown, there's clearly a lot of housing with no one meaningfully living in it, and I've heard the same about London and I guess Vancouver as well. So building towers that are going to be unoccupied by absentee rich owners is pointless in terms of meeting housing demand.
But additional housing that upper-middle-class people are going to move into and live in, that's genuine new supply.
58: Same worker, same job, now they can live closer and drive less or not at all.
Maybe we could just mandate all the new houses have toilets that explode unless somebody shits in them once a week for eleven months of the year. I'm trying make it harder for them to get a house sitter.
The problem with Drum's "encouraging growth in other cities" is that other cities aren't where the jobs are. I mean, we could try to get jobs to move, I dunno put a giant tax on having employees located in Silicon Valley, but no amount of growth in Nashville is going to substitute in terms of economic growth for turning Palo Alto into Manhattan, San Francisco into Brooklyn, and Mountain View and San Mateo into Queens.
I mean I get it psychologically. "My rent is going up and now they're putting up that fancy new tower for rich people! The fancy new tower for rich people must either be causing my rent to go up, or having no effect on it at all!" But if you didn't build the fancy new tower for rich people, the rich people (on aggregate) would be looking at places other than the fancy new tower, and your rent would be going up even more.
Would a lot of building be necessary to make cities actually "affordable"? Probably (assuming that the economies of the cities stay strong). But (a) there's nothing preventing a lot of building other than rules that make it hard to build (b) even if prices don't drop to affordability you have to consider how worse off you'd be without the additional supply.
As I said above, respectable estimates are that if SB 827 had gone through three years ago, median rents in LA/SF would now be about $2-300 cheaper. That's still extremely unaffordable! But is better and makes a difference at the margins. And that's only a relatively small tweak, that only seems like a big deal because we've been so obsessively no-growth in CA for so long.
66: Put the Department of Energy in Nashville.
You know where Drum and Ogged are going wrong, I think? They're continuing to overvalue the interests of current residents over people generally.
Possibly there is enough demand for dense housing in LA that if you build it, people will move to LA and keep the price up. If that's true, you know why it's true? Because those people are stuck in some suburb where they don't want to be, with a shitty commute and no access to the big city amenities they want. Even if the price doesn't go down, those people are meaningfully better off, the environment is better off, (I hate to say this but I think it's true) the economy is better off (because workers can more efficiently get to their jobs and move among a choice of jobs.) Things are better, they're just better for people who don't live in LA yet. But those are still real people, and improving their lives counts.
If building more supply doesn't lower prices enough for the working class, then we need to build subsidized housing, and that's almost certainly necessary. But building more dense urban housing supply is a good thing for the population at large even if it doesn't by itself supply affordable housing for the poor and working class.
Put it right in that Parthenon 2.0.
And, yes to 66. There's clearly an economic trend in the modern world towards ever-greater geographic concentration of jobs. But housing rules are making it extraordinarily difficult to move to where those jobs are.
then we need to build subsidized housing
Yes, and the only remotely realistic way to do that is to both (a) generally relax development rules (b) expand the tax base by allowing new devlopment and/or get extractions from developers.
For one thing, if density is allowable generally, living in dense subsidized housing isn't as explicit a mark of poverty.
Just to be clear, not that anyone should care, but I'm all for relaxing the rules and making places more dense. I just don't think it's going to do much good.
69 right on all counts *and* you get lower per capita emissions.
69 - and I don't have a cite handy, but I believe there's vanishingly little evidence that new luxury construction in fact only attracts foreign pied-a-terre buyers in the first place. And, there's little evidence that foreign pied-a-terre buyers require new construction. For example, the San Gabriel Valley in SoCal has prices that are largely driven by rich Chinese buyers who are buying property for speculation and/or because they want to send their kids to US schools and have a place to park their assets. But, because it's difficult to build, they're not buying new construction, they are simply part of the market that's raising prices for everyone else.
We're now up to three different downtown condos on the market in 850K-1M range. I'm really confused about who will buy them, and whether it's rich Chinese students or not.
I mean the easiest way to make housing prices collapse would be to massively raise interest rates to kill off borrowing and/or have a huge economic contraction. Even with a ton of new building San Francisco* is going to be way more expensive than Youngstown, OH. But nobody wants *that* so the question is how do you moderate housing prices while creating density and letting people have good jobs.
OK, I have now officially spent way too much time here today.
74: I think what I'm objecting to is your statement that if prices don't go down, you've just made life worse in those places: that nothing good has happened. And I'd argue that you're not making life much worse at all for current residents, and you're doing something very good for new residents who wanted city life but there wasn't space for them.
Certainly whole neighborhoods were established and sold on the premise that nobody without money and a car could possibly live there. Everybody in that type of neighborhood would consider themselves made worse if it got denser.
This used to make me feel conflicted, but since Trump won, it makes me want to drone on about the property rights of the owners who want to see to people building apartments while holding back laughter.
Everybody in that type of neighborhood would consider themselves made worse if it got denser.
Sure, but from a utilitarian point of view, if people who bought on that basis are immiserated, that's a positive social good.
I suppose I shouldn't have said that bit out loud.
One more! Just to point out how particularly ludicrous San Francisco in particular is on this issue. If you look at it from a distance or overhang view it looks like you're looking at, say, the Bund in Shanghai in Mao's Cina 1970 -- i.e., a city that was developed heavily by capitailsts decades ago and then where development just completely stopped in about 1950. You have the world's most advanced economies and wealthiest populations in a city that basically stopped building in 1960. That's completely motherfucking insane!
The problem with Drum's argument is that (almost) everybody can contribute to the supply of cars on the road. We all have about the same amount of time to spend commuting.
But not everybody can contribute to the supply of purchasers for $600K two-bedroom condos. Most people don't have the money. Building $600K condos doesn't attract new purchasers in the same way that new highways attract new cars. And when the purchasers of the $600K condos are housed, they are no longer competing with the people who can only afford $500K two-bedroom condos. Etc.
Yes, building 600K condos does nothing for the people who can only afford 80K condos (at least immediately), but that is why you tax the 600K condos to fund development of affordable housing for the bottom end of the market.
I actually wonder if denser development really does make traffic worse past a point. That is, if you keep everyone in the same jobs, but have them live either at low or high density, even if we don't assume a mass-transit unicorn, don't you decrease car miles? Likewise, if you turn some car trips into foot trips because pedestrian errands are possible, doesn't that help?
To put it another way, I don't think Drum is objecting to LA getting denser so much as he's objecting to it getting bigger (either in residential or employed population).
69 captures it all, I think. Denser cities are more effective cities for pretty much everything we want cities to be effective at. And if the effectiveness of cities increases so much through density that proportionally more people want to live there, well that's fine, too.
Saying "Nobody wants to live there, it's too expensive" is akin to saying "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded." People are so devoted to cities that they'll live in the suburbs just to have an affordable way to be near a city.
I was always an advocate for new, denser development in Austin, despite my hating being around it as it actually happened. Living in an urban area that's in a constant churn of construction is not pleasant. A lot of the dense, mixed-use development that came into Central East Austin the years I was there (2010 - 2015) was pretty characterless. None of this Nimbyism should be a dispositive reason not to build (and I kept advocating for new, denser development in Austin), but I do think the caricature of Nimbys as just self-interested elites is mostly off. Not wanting your neighborhood transformed from the way it was when you moved into it (or grew up in it) is just a normal human bias that I imagine is pretty constant across ethnicity and class. Rich people just have more power to do something about it.
https://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/data/data.htm
Transportation single largest source of emissions in CA at 39%. Residential emissions are another hefty whack. The state legislature's attempts to achieve better land use decisions by local agencies have achieved approximately fuck all. This isn't an issue we can afford to decide on personal preference for a car-centric life. Plus long car commutes make people miserable & unhealthy.
What if they switched to electric scooters?
Now I'm just going to insult Pittsburgh neighborhoods until I get bored.
Bloomfield. Why do people pave their yard?
It's one thing to buy a house and have to redo a yard, but to have to get a jackhammer and find the dirt is just too much.
Friendship isn't really a neighborhood. It's just the part of Bloomfield where people knew enough to not pave their yard.
Greenfield is a nice residential community dedicated to nobody ever having to open a can of paint in their lives.
Morningside is only a separate neighborhood because Highland Park is full of people too lazy to walk up a hill.
On Herrs Island, they point out George Washington slept there. But they gloss over that it wasn't on purpose and probably was very uncomfortable.
Plus, it's right next to Millvale with its ass-biting dogs.
Squirrel Hill North has too big of lawns thus keeping the density of the city too low and resulting in asshats living in Butler County.
Nobody in Windgap gets the fart jokes I make about their name.
97 is the hottest of hot takes. The assholes would move to Cranberry anyway.
Beechview is too smug about having a train.
"Mount Washington" and "Polish Hill" are only interesting if you read the first word in each name as a verb.
The Whole Foods is in Shadyside. The taxi parking lot that was in the exact same place before that was in East Liberty. Nice trick there, Shadyside.
Squirrel Hill South residents fill message boards with absurd requests about stray cats and go through the grocery store with white bread through a colon.
If it weren't for an eagle that eats kittens, nobody would remember where Hays is.
"Summerset at Frick Park" is booming because everybody wants to live on a slag heap and have view of Target's parking lot.
That is, and I'm expanding on a thought that's new to me but is probably perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks about this stuff, if you've got a neighborhood laid out with wide streets and no sidewalks and big dumb lot sizes, you can add density to it by buying a few lots and building a tower, but it's harder to change it to a neighborhood of small, tightly-packed houses on narrow streets with tiny yards. The original layout is going to be persistent.
This is right, and the word you're looking for is "platting": you only get one shot at platting a neighborhood, and at least around here, the only requirement is that it conforms to city code - it doesn't get approval besides compliance - and so it's insanely important to have a well-written code.
Yeah I don't really get ogged's point that helping pretty rich rather than filthy rich people won't make a difference for everyone. One of the striking things I noticed when I moved to LA from Pittsburgh was how many 'pretty rich' people were living in absolutely crappy housing---significantly worse housing than what I lived in as a grad student in Pittsburgh. A crappy 2BR house in Boyle Heights costs >half a million dollars and when I lived there half the people in my building had a PhD, we were paying what they call "hipster rents", but people still said we lived in the 'ghetto'. From my anecdotal experience it seems true in LA that 'pretty rich' people are buying crappy housing stock that could otherwise be priced for middle class people, because they don't have a choice. They're pushing out the middle class from certain neighborhoods, and the middle class are pushing out the working class in others.
Which reminds me, South Oakland is full of students who appear to be unable to distinguish between "putting on the trash" and "littering".
The gerrymandering point seems valid.
This is conventional wisdom - that Democrats self-pack into cities - but Moon Duchin (the mathematician behind all these gerrymandering conferences) at least thinks this is faulty and at best overly simplistic. Her argument was roughly: in Massachusetts, Republicans are 30% of the population, but they're dispersed so evenly that you can't possibly carve out a majority-Republican district. When you start looking at degrees of clumpiness and streakiness of a minority population, for various minority percentages, and look at large numbers of sample districts to see what sort of representation is predicted, you get complicated dynamics that aren't well understood yet.
Anyway, when people from California move here, they seem to buy $500,000+ houses, I guess because that's the style there.
I don't really get ogged's point
I did say in the most desirable places, and whatever the charms of Pittsburgh (I've heard there are many!) it's not drawing people like the coasts.
You can still smoke in bars and you can't legally park on the wrong side of the street.
Also, Mr. Rogers, Willa Cather, and Howard Fineman all lived in the same neighborhood. Probably not at the same time though.
The best thing about Pittsburgh is that if you are from here and write plays that people not from here have heard about, after you die, we'll build a giant horizontal penis-building for you.
You can still smoke in bars
Wow! That one truly does seem like from another time.
it's not drawing people like the coasts
Yes, but Mr. Stibbons' point was about Los Angeles. Case in point: I am pretty rich, and I live in a what I think of as extremely nice but what in any midwest city would be a straight up middle class or poorer's person's house, and is in a mildly gang-ridden area. If you build a nearby highrise with apartments for 7 of me, the other me-equivalents in the area can stop buying up the middle class houses.
115.1: Not all bars. They have to not allow anyone under 21 in at all and meet some criteria about selling more booze than food.
Anyway, according to me, I'm remarkably underpaid. We still have a house, a couple of cars, and the ability to pay for drinking more often than my gastric system will let me drink. I feel like I should have land in the country, but I don't.
Yeah, I was *contrasting* LA with Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh grad students could buy houses of the same quality that you're paying close to a million dollars for in LA.
Moby, the Department of Energy should not move to Nashville (although they may thrill to my friend Jack's voice at Parthenon 2.0), but to Oak Ridge. Like radioactive salmon returning to their spawning grounds.
I live in London. By national standards I earn a very good wage. Our household income is pretty high. I still can't afford to buy anywhere to live.* And we live in a middling bit of zone 4, not some fancy area. It's perfectly nice, but our neighbours are teachers, clerical workers, etc. Not bankers and doctors. So it _should_ be affordable.
* actually, I'm at the point now, where in another 6 - 9 months I probably could afford to buy somewhere, but only if I bought somewhere shitty, and too far from my son's school.
120: But how old are you? My parents had bought by age 30. That's the part that's so frustrating. My brother-in-law got something after serious digging and lucking out in Ottawa at the age of 35, and he doesn't have a driveway in a neighborhood where everyone else does. (Toronto is tougher.)
We're older and don't own. Now part of that is that I really struggled for non economic reasons, but Tim's brothers wife was out of the labor market for about 4 years after she had her kids, and things were pretty tight for them until she got a job and then the big promotion when her boss died.
46. So, I buy in the next 2 or 3 years, or I never do (in which case, I'm homeless when I'm old).*
* that sounds dramatic, but, I don't think it's completely absurd to say that. There's zero chance that any pension I'll have is going to cover market rate for rent.
122: Yep, that's going to be me too. Eventually I may inherit half my mother's house, if it doesn't have to be sold to pay for nursing care. But as she comes from a family of women who almost all lived to around 100, that could be another couple of decades, by which time I'll be in my 70s myself. And I'll only have the state pension to live on.
So my strategy, quite seriously, will be to carry on working until I can no longer support myself, then drink a nice yew berry smoothie.
It does fill me with despair that in the five years I've been back in the UK I've paid almost £100,000 in rent, which could have been mortgage repayments if any bank had been willing to lend to me when I first arrived. But by the time I'd built up enough of a credit record in this country again, prices had spiralled out of reach. Gaaaaaaaaaaah.
122: I guess you'd have to pick up and move somewhere cheaper once you're no longer working. Tim's family's city has a lot of retirees. They are now retired but they complain, because these aren't rich people, and the local hospital has to come up with a certain portion of its budget or something. They feel that they have to provide a lot of services for old people.
Guys instead of having you be homeless or suicidal or both, why don't we invest jointly in a large croft on Shetland or Orkney. Prices don't seem too high and I feel like Shetland is a good place to die.
I mean if you're going to die homeless why not come to my Shetland death farm? We can have sky burials.
118: I wasn't disputing that. Just taunting the hard-working Californians.
125 is what I was thinking. You move to a small English village. Somebody gets murdered and the local constable, unwilling to turn everything over to the Scotland Yard people, keeps looking into the case on his own even though he's been warned away. He's heard you know a lot about computers he asked you come over for some tea and to explain what a "blockchain" is.
I feel like Shetland is a good place to die.
Not too dramatically. I'm busy.
127: Do you offer Viking ceremonies? I'd quite like to go out in a blazing longship, my head pillowed on my long-suffering MacBook.
You'd have to call you MacBook a thrall to meet requirements.
But by the time I'd built up enough of a credit record in this country again, prices had spiralled out of reach. Gaaaaaaaaaaah.
If it's any comfort, London house prices are tanking (still mostly at the top end, but it's spreading), and when interest rates go up, the rest of the country will follow.
I thought all the Scottish vultures were killed by anthrax.
You can have sky burial with crows. It just takes longer.
If it's any comfort, London house prices are tanking (still mostly at the top end, but it's spreading), and when interest rates go up, the rest of the country will follow.
How far do you think house prices can drop, though, given the massive pent-up demand lower down in the market? I'd think the floor would still be pretty high.
I'd think the floor would still be pretty high
Though not as high as in Heebie's house, obviously.
You can build your own house out of cob. I think it's easier to do legally in the U.K. than in the parts of the U.S. that have building codes. Maybe not if you want to live in London.
How far do you think house prices can drop, though, given the massive pent-up demand lower down in the market? I'd think the floor would still be pretty high.
Kind of depends what happens to the economy as a whole. With a hard Brexit, I doubt the floor is very high. History suggests the floor won't be very high regardless, though prices might bounce back fairly quickly. 25%+ falls are pretty common in UK housing.
Of course, the flipside is that mortgages will be much more expensive in that scenario.
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Another case study confirming the dsquared maxim "fibbers' forecasts are worthless".
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The Whole Foods is in Shadyside. The taxi parking lot that was in the exact same place before that was in East Liberty. Nice trick there, Shadyside.
I always thought it was odd that Shadyside didn't have a post office. Guessing the tendrils have spread so that the East Liberty post office beyond the new Target is now the Shadyside post office.
Nope. That's still East Liberty. That's the main post office for the whole east end and the others have had hours/services cut.
re: 124
That was my situation. I was just finished graduate school when the financial crisis hit, so by the time I had a stable salary high enough to get a mortgage, lenders weren't lending without a large deposit, which I didn't have. Then we had a baby, and were punting out 1200 quid a month in child care, so saving took a back seat. And now that I am saving a decent amount each month, I'm getting older, and so the mortgage term (and thus the amount I can borrow) keeps getting shorter.
My friends who left university 4 or 5 years before me are all basically asset rich, because they bought houses pre financial crash.
For me, I think, a fall in house prices, even if it comes along with higher interest rates and thus higher monthly mortgage payments is probably a good thing. I could certainly -- because I'm doing it now, by saving that amount over and above rent -- handle a 50% increase in monthly housing costs without it crippling me.
And now that I am saving a decent amount each month, I'm getting older, and so the mortgage term (and thus the amount I can borrow) keeps getting shorter.
I don't think mortgages work like that here. The term is never more than 30 years that I ever heard (except right before the crash) and I haven't heard of anybody worrying about giving a 30 year mortgage to a 45 year old person.
25%+ falls are pretty common in UK housing
Hmm. A 25% fall would bring prices back to 2014 levels where I am, which would just have been on the edge of affordability for me then. But as Matt says, the mortgage term would be shorter (I've been told I can borrow until I'm 70), so coupled with higher interest rates I still probably couldn't afford anything here. OTOH, once the boys finish school I can move somewhere cheaper. I'd still feel horribly guilty about hoping for a hard Brexit, though.
A lot of the dense, mixed-use development that came into Central East Austin the years I was there (2010 - 2015) was pretty characterless.
This is right and drives me crazy. We do need denser areas, but developers are terrible, soulless people and they're the only ones with enough money, and so it looks like their tacky vision of a Modern Exciting Vibrant Life of the Future, and it stays that way for thirty years until it ages into background and gradually bits and pieces get changed by individual local owners or other chains.
Also, now that I'm finally catching up, Moby's run from 89-105 should be applauded.
Matt s/b ttaM. Sorry.
And am I misremembering, or is it this weekend that Dalriata's in town?
The depressing thing about 126 is the change in Halford's aspirations. No more sex grotto robber baron shrine to Halfordismo.
I don't think mortgages work like that here. The term is never more than 30 years that I ever heard (except right before the crash) and I haven't heard of anybody worrying about giving a 30 year mortgage to a 45 year old person.
25-30 years is the norm here. There are rules about lending into retirement, and most lenders are loath to do it outside of specialist products (which cost more and/or require some sort of dedicated repayment mechanism ).
Specifically:
If the term of a regulated mortgage contract or home purchase plan would extend beyond the date on which the customer expects to retire (or, where that date is not known, the state pension age), a firm should take a prudent and proportionate approach to assessing the customer's income beyond that date. The degree of scrutiny to be adopted may vary according to the period of time remaining to retirement when the assessment is made. The closer the customer is to retiring, the more robust the evidence of the level of income in retirement should be. For example, where retirement is many years in the future, it may be sufficient merely to confirm the existence of some pension provision for the customer by requesting evidence such as a pension statement; where the customer is close to retirement, the more robust steps may involve considering expected pension income from a pension statement. In accordance with MCOB 11.6.12R (1), a firm should take a common sense view when assessing any information provided by the customer on his expected retirement date.
I don't think anybody doing mortgage lending here thinks past the first five years of the mortgage term.
Why is it called Shadyside? Who thought that was a good idea? Pittsburgh isn't known for its brutal desert sunlight or anything.
Because they knew that in the future, that's where the Apple Store would go.
153: Post-GFC mandatory underwriting standards for mortgages are much stricter in the UK than in the US, and will be even more so once Mulvaney dismantles the CFPB. Five years is still a key horizon for a lot of things (eg interest rate stresses), but thanks to a lot of reckless interest-only lending pre-crisis, there is a requirement to assess affordability over the entire life of the loan.
Apparently the name comes from having lots of shaded streets. Which is, as you note, not exactly a very distinguishing feature around here.
But it's not like the only hill covered in squirrels is Squirrel Hill.
It's Moby bait. Her aversion to sunlight is well-known.
Having finally in 2017 unloaded a condo that's been a financial albatross around my neck for years, I'm sort of immune to the attractions of owning. I'm not really sure why it's still such a universal aspiration since the phrase "safe as houses" is now the punchline to an unfunny joke.
Or maybe the moral of my story is just "don't buy in Cleveland".
161 "Her" = where did that come from???
Cleveland property is going to be fucking golden once the coasts start flooding.
Maybe it'll be okay once the NY refugees have officially conquered it?
165: In looking for investments I keep looking for REITs that are centered geographically on the Great Lakes region. Or even specifically Michigan. But haven't found one.
But it's not like the only hill covered in squirrels is Squirrel Hill.
It's the only place I've ever seen a flying squirrel.
That's because NY doesn't have anything so grand as a turnpike, just a mere thruway.
170.last: Like being carried away by a hawk or something?
OT: When taking the on-line training on reporting child abuse, the quizzes are pretty easy if you remember that nobody would make you take a training and an on-line quiz if the answer was "don't bother."
5: But whom would they hire? Utah is trying SO hard to make "Silicon Slopes" a thing, and it is a good area for tech. (But the branding is obnoxious.) But it's not going to attract Bay Area talent without Bay Area universities.
We already have the universities. CMU people can abuse the privacy of the public just as well here as they can in California.
I don't know what's in Utah besides the desert and some Mormons.
I know BYU is there, but I don't think that compares to Pitt or CMU. Other rust belt cities have well-known universities in or near them. It's not like industrialization didn't let people build institutions before it ended.
I've started going to free lectures and shit at the local Elm City State College. Turns out its actually a great resource, in addition to being an economic anchor for the city.
Unfortunately, its been hemorrhaging students ever since the Pumpkin Riots. A whole lot of faculty are taking buy-outs next year.
176: CMU is impressive, but I though the plan was West Virginia. Pittsburgh's obviously doing very well.
Pittsburgh is doing very well, but it is still shrinking in population and the metro area is basically not growing at all except for the more ridiculous exurbs.
The plan is to move government offices to West Virginia and exploitative tech companies to Pittsburgh.
If you are going to move government offices to fly-over states, it should be to large fly-over states that can swing blue. So, Ohio, not West Virginia.
You can only expect government workers to suffer so much.
Let's relocate the national capital every ten years to the new Census's mean population point. Public works, full employment, etc. Everyone likes Missouri, right?
How about a contest where children fight to the death to decide who gets to pick where the capital goes?
I am now a certified permissive reporter. Laydeez.
185
Not every ten years, but moving the Capitol to somewhere near St. Louis should be a serious proposal.
188: I, for one, am impressed.
Accessory Dwelling Units (in CA) are getting even more creative interpretive help from state agencies. In March the Energy Commission decided that ADUs (which, by law have to have separate entrances to serve a separate household) all get entered as 1 dwelling instead of two, except in the rare case where they don't share walls with the existing house at all.
And, when less than 700 square feet, they're exempt from modern insulation requirements; R-22 in the attic, instead of the R-30 and R-38 that are required for any other new construction. And they get to omit continuous wall insulation from any wall aligned with existing walls.
Is that like an attic over the garage where you put your elder/offspring?
ADUs are any second residence... so, yeah, the classic converted garage, mother-in-law suite, shed for warehousing parents, etc. are all ADUs.
They're the current tool the state's using to squeeze extra housing in lots designed for single family houses.
When Pittsburgh was really full, like before the end of WWII, they let people build houses in their backyard with entrances on the alley. Nearly all of these are gone, but you can still see a few around.
what would happen if everyone threw caution to the wind and just hong kong'ed up the places? or more moderately like narnia even; everything new they build now, including public housing, is 30 stories or more. this is despite there being plenty of older complexes that are 10 stories, or like mine, five 25-story towers and then rows and rows of 4 story "maisonette" blocks, each with two two-story apartments (that's what we live in now, the upper walk-up unit. it's very nice. we moved out of our nicer 24th story condo apartment but we're saving tons off our old rent.) I just got back from shopping at one of the 10 or so malls within walking distance, centered around the MRT station (maybe 10 minutes walk). there are hawker centres too. the walkability is limited only by how fucking hot it is. it's a very legit way to have a city.
it doesn't look as nice as new york, but my neighborhood is functionally equivalent. I walk in a big nearby park for an hour every morning, there's a 7-11 four minutes away (the time is spent walking out of my apartment complex which is huge, but I can walk on the garden side). big local grocery story six minutes away. fancier one eight minutes. there's room for more infill on one side of the MRT station; there's no way that's not becoming either a condo of huge slender towers or public housing about the same. it wouldn't be popular at first to do this kind of infill in america but it is a good idea.
I believe i have already suggested the federal government spending x days in each state capital where x is the number of electoral college votes from that state. Allowing for holidays that would give a complete circuit every two years, at an average pace of five miles an hour, like the Ruum. And it would give a wonderful circus-comes-to-town feel.
I live in a low rise block in London. 5 floors, with 10 apartments per floor. Underground parking under it.
It's great. It reminds me of a modern update on the tenement/brown stone. Except it's a single standalone building, rather than an entire street. There are basically 50 apartments in the kind of ground footprint that'd maybe fit 4 family homes. If you replaced the shitty* family homes on the next street you'd gain housing for thousands more people on the same footprint, without massively changing the tenor of the area.
There's a fair bit of NIMBYism locally over some new (private) developments the council has approved, and I'm sympathetic. Because they are big enough that they'll turn the surrounding houses into dark little pits, and they have no parking, which means that everyone who lives there will just park in the surrounding streets (which are insanely over-parked already).
However, if they built a load of blocks much like the one I live in in the same spots, they'd get 70% or so of the density, while not fucking everyone else's quality of life. Which is more likely to enable them to build many more of them.
* most of the housing round here is Victorian workers terraces, which are small, pretty dense, and quite attractive. But there's one street of really shittily maintained mid-20c former council housing which is ripe for replacement.
Underground parking under it.
Underground parking above it would be better.
My apartment building is a former public high school that was built in 1910 and sold and converted to apartments some time in the 80s.
They knew how to build things back then, the place is like a fortress.
They had to keep the Irish kids locked up good.
You can make New York New York much more dense. There is a lot of 2 or 3 story apt building and so much of Queens is just single family detached homes. You just might need to actually build more Subway again.
And la metro is already dense than NYC metro.
Doesn't England have street parking zones that are only available to the people living in that neighborhood (that the people living in the new buildings can't access)?
We are about to buy a single family home, of the American Foursquare style. Its on a tiny lot and does not waste any space. They were a popular choice for infill back in 1925 - the houses around it are probably 50 years older. If you are trying to increase density, you could do worse.
202. Yes but erratically. It's up to the local government to create "Residents' parking zones", and they do or don't with the peerless logic of local politicians the world over. We're thinking of starting a campaign for one in our neighbourhood because they're building a new school up the road. But it's anybody's guess if the council will listen. After all, we only vote for the bastards.
re: 202
Yes, but it's as Chris says in 204. Plus, it's quite possible that any plausible zone would actually include these buildings. It'd had to be some kind of strange gerrymandered shape to include the current buildings and not these new one which are being built on a a retail/warehouse site that is being bulldozed and on the site of a garage, both of which are inside the likely boundaries of a controlled parking zone.
It might conceivably be possible to create two zones, following road boundaries, which would include one of the new apartment buildings but exclude the larger of the two.*
* which will be 9 floors, surrounded by single or two story houses, and have several hundred flats, but parking for about 30.
Our residents' parking zone contains around 100 fewer spaces than there are permits issued. That makes for fun times trying to find somewhere to park on Saturdays, when people are home from work but parking on yellow lines is still restricted. The council makes a *lot* of money from parking tickets.
I have two off-street spaces, one enclosed. And I'm a two minute walk from frequently run bus routes that go both downtown and to the university.
I also have a siphon drawing water out of my garage because I'm into half-assing home repairs.
And am I misremembering, or is it this weekend that Dalriata's in town?
It is, but I gave up trying to organize--wasn't getting much response to my updates, ttaM seemed very busy and I didn't want to be a pest about it. If people still want to get together tomorrow or Monday night (assuming it doesn't go too late), we could try that. Email's in the sig.
Anyway, central London feels like money, even more so than San Francisco does.
I'm up for tonight, if it's still potentially on.
Anyway, this study seems timely and relevant. No idea as to the quality though.
Speaking of housing, my AC has been getting a bit weaker as the weather is getting hot so I had maintenance come this morning to clean the filters and maybe check the compressor, they end up tearing up half my kitchen ceiling, water and dust and dirt is everywhere in my kitchen and tracked into other parts of my apartment as what should have taken 20 minutes takes almost 3 hours and I spend another hour and a half cleaning/mopping up and bleaching everything down. Gross.
re: 210
I might be able to make something tonight (might not). I'm not working in town today because I had to work from home for childcare and transport related issues. But depending where you are this evening, if you do something, let me know, and I'll try to make it.
My email is my surname (in correct not reversed order), minus the last two letters, at googlemail.
212: That sucks. Sorry, Barry.
And la metro is already dense than NYC metro.
This is a dumb stat. As far as i can tell, what it means is that over the huge LA metro area, there's much more consistent medium-high but not walkable density. The NYC metro area, on the other hand, once you leave the city limits goes to countryside with towns in it much faster.
Average density is pointless -- the ideal is very low density punctuated by very high density.
193: Welcome to Victorian Leeds: https://backtobackhouses.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/a-short-history-of-back-to-backs-houses-in-leeds-from-1890-1937/
"Victorian leads" is the chain running to a Prince Albert piercing.
Is anyone still interested in a dalriata meetup? I am in Kings Cross until six or seven
OT: Did you know that if you type "work ethnic" or "pubic schools", MS Word will highlight that? I suppose everybody else knows, but it just saved me right now.
218: Yes. I'm near Southwark Bridge, but could get to KX pretty easily.
In truth, the John Goodman of word processors.
We have Dalriata contact! 6:30 in the Lincoln Lounge on York Way, on, I hope, the sofas at the back.
paging GY and ttaM
All Protestants but four are probably out drinking to drown their sorrows at being one more step removed from inheriting the crown.
That's next to the Graun's complex, right?
220: Nice discovery. When I went to replicate it I found it doesn't always highlight "work ethnic", it seems to depend on its place in the sentence. And it needs the sentence to be over.
"He has a good work ethnic." => highlight
"He has a good work ethnic now." => no highlight
"A work ethnic is important." => highlight
"A work ethnic environment is important." => no highlight
I was writing a letter of recommendation, so it was very handy to have caught that.
On the other hand, it's hard to have expected them to catch when Penn State types "going outside" instead of "running an unaccountable athletic organization."
229: What's the backstory there? Were leaders being abusive? All I find on googling is news outlets and Reason.com elaborating on the press release.
I have no idea, I just know that kids doing things outside was something Penn State was known for.
Maybe their insurance company just hates them for obvious reasons?
I like that when Kevin Drum stumbles, we often get to see his continued investigation and evolving thought process.
Semi-Raw Data: Urban Density and Productivity is an interesting look at which industries benefit from density, and which don't.
Raw Data: How Green Are Our Cities? has a nuanced look at how much better cities are on emissions than suburbs, largely boosted by fewer cars per resident. He also notes, however, that once you include consumable resources imported from elsewhere the effects are less dramatic, and includes a discussion of the effect's scale.
Raw Data: The Price of Housing in America includes data from several indexes on homeownership and rentals.
No dalriata London meet-up live blogging?
Alright, alright, I got it the first time. Jeez.
Like I said, they talk funny.