According to some developer/investor I met, these private student rental buildings took off in a huge way after 2008 for reasons I didn't quite understand. I think it was that people stopped building new stuff for commercial leases and home developments, but student demand was still there plus you could convert these things into lowish income rental housing for people who couldn't get home loans.
I am sort of puzzled by what the actual problem is. There are more students. And developers are building more housing to serve the students -- it's apartment complexes, so they're pretty compact, looks like. The fundamental problem is?
The article says housing prices are going up because of student demand. That is a problem, but it sounds to me like one where the issue isn't that developers are building student housing, it's that they're not building enough student housing. (The renting by the bedroom thing is weird, I admit, but seems solvable -- if it's a problem, prohibit it.)
Good question. I'd say it's a few things:
1. Scale of the apartment complexes. There is a party culture of throwing these Spring Break Cancun size parties that are amazing in scope. There was a party where the invitations went viral and there were not enough local cops to shut it down.
2. Nimby-ism with the scale.
3. Developers building in environmentally sensitive regions. The prettiest parts of the town have a bunch of endangered species and a bunch of ecologically fragile features.
4. Developers seemingly being completely uninterested in building in the part of town desired by the Master Plan for this kind of high-intensity high-density living thing.
Building more housing doesn't work everywhere. At least here, pricing housing at anything close to the cost of replacement would drive out a whole bunch of people. I mean, it has to happen in the long run, but people still expect to be able to rent a functioning house for $800/month or whatever.
I think it's confusing because there are a ton of things all balled up into one.
1) standard town/gown conflict
2) standard anti-growth/NIMBY stuff
3) new trends in housing (those single bedrooms)
4) new trends in hoovering up student loan money
5) new trends in University policies on building their own student housing
6) very poor growth management and urban planning by city council
2 - the flooding seems like a big problem, plus the city could probably extract more $$$ from the developers to pay for services to the private dorms plus money for other amenities. Otherwise I kinda tend to agree.
Even 6 is sadly typical these days. Lots of places are building on flood plains because of outdated 100-year flood estimates and because of mispriced flood insurance.
I don't know what the answer is in terms of affordable family housing. The floods destroyed mostly low income family housing, so now there's an even bigger crunch.
Is it a terrible idea for the student complexes to be more welcoming to families, ie have a playground? Would it be miserable for families because they'd be the calming force for a bunch of partiers, or would it select for calmer students who would enjoy being in a more diverse environment?
To own my poorly concealed pissiness, is this more "Oh my god, if I have to be aware that people who aren't at a life stage or with the economic resources to be homeowners exist, my life is insupportable. The existence of rental apartments where I can perceive them makes my home valueless." The problem probably isn't quite that simple, but to the extent that's what's going on, wow do I fail to care even a little.
By 6 I meant the town could use student loan money to build things like parks. Anyhow it should look at the developers as a giant cash cow, since that's what they are, and they lack various protections universities get.
Keep concealing that pissiness. It's more about the shit-ton of really fucking poor single moms. But thanks.
Seattle is having an analogous debate about "microhousing", i.e. dorm-style rentals. There are legitimate concerns about it, but it tends to get hijacked by the NIMBY crowd complaining about bringing poor people to the neighborhood in coded language.
9 crossed with a bunch of stuff that makes it look even pissier than it was meant to be. Sorry about that.
Like, I didn't see 3, but 3.3&4 both seem like very real problems, but very soluble problems -- that local government should be able to handle. If there are good places and bad places to build these projects... that's what zoning boards are for.
The scale seems like a policing problem: that it should be possible for local cops to respond to nuisance calls enough to keep the developments tolerable as neighbors.
Anyhow it should look at the developers as a giant cash cow
What are specific useful things to ask for, besides parks and greenspace? Free wi-fi? A certain number of low-income vouchers? That gets back to whether or not families and students should be mixed.
11: Again, crossed with you. But how does the building of student housing hurt poor single mothers? Building more student housing can't be what's driving up the prices, can it?
13.1: Sorry about being snappy in response.
This is a pretty low-wage area, right? Such that students, even just based on loan funding, could conceivably have more rent wrung out of them than working families?
In the long term the student complexes will probably tend to become poor person housing anyway, since they are remote and (I am guessing but this has to be true) are incredibly shittily built and have a deliberately short lifespan. So after 15 years the students will move in to the next developer's cash cow and you'll have a nice privately financed horrible low income housing project. But that's in the long term.
In terms of zoning boards, I have a real question: how do you get developers to buy-in? It seems like the zoning procedure is completely responsive - they buy the land, investigate the code, and try to figure out what to bring before the board. But there should be a crossroads at the time of purchase - one that steers developers towards the high-intensity part of town - and I don't know how that would ideally function?
15: Mostly indirectly - no one is building housing for anyone besides students. I can't figure out if the student housing should be integrated with family housing, or how to get family housing built.
The single-room renting situation is slowly being dealt with, but a lot of complexes are probably grandfathered in.
18 is true, and maybe that's the argument to make - that these should have playgrounds from the get go.
The single-room renting situation has proven almost impossible to enforce here in the areas closest to campus.
To put my reaction another way -- the way the article is written, the problem is "Developers are building too much housing, and as a result, housing prices are too high!" And that's nuts.
"There are too many students, and so even with the new housing, demand is making prices too high," makes sense. "Prices are high, because there's not enough housing, and the new housing that is being built is unpleasant/environmentally damaging/a policing problem," makes sense.
But "The amount of new housing development is raising prices to unaffordable levels," without some real attention to mechanisms, makes my head spin.
I think we can all agree that students are just the worst, but still they have to live somewhere.
14 - I was thinking carefully crafted property taxes, but that's probably beyond your jurisdiction. Maybe give the developers the option of subsidizing low income in their units or paying low income vouchers for rentals elsewhere -- if you price it right you could probably get the developers to help pay for poor peoples' housing elsewhere while avoiding forcing poor Mexican families to live in a beer soaked Sodom and Gommorah of kids from the Houston suburbs.
Doug Henwood's radio show has had a couple of good segments on urban planning and affordable housing in the last couple of weeks -- one of them specifically examining how college students price families out of markets. He interviews a business professor that asked a class full of MBA students to write down on a sheet of paper would they be able to be in business school right now without access to the "the Bank of Mom and Dad". Not a single yes.
19: I don't know anything about how zoning boards work. But would it be possible to explicitly telegraph the board's intentions to developers? Publish something saying "This area in pink is an environmentally sensitive floodplain. We are unlikely to approve anything more intense than a petting zoo. This area in orange is a great place for apartment buildings, on the other hand."
I mean, that's literally zoning, but it seems as if the board really wants to limit certain kinds of development to different areas, it needs to make it public that those kinds of development will only be approved in those areas.
23.last is a favorite argument of the NIMBY folks and it drives me mad.
I can really only think of one circumstance where building more housing doesn't eventually make housing cheaper. That's where the cost to build housing puts a floor on the price of housing. But most cities are so far from that level that it's a nonsense argument.
the way the article is written, the problem is "Developers are building too much housing, and as a result, housing prices are too high!" And that's nuts.
This is true, and it's exactly the town sentiment, and it deserves eye-rolling.
Apartments are good and dense, but somehow gigantic apartment complexes are hideous and awful. They don't occur in proper cities - they're the intersection of suburbia and poverty. What's the solution? How do you get apartment complexes without the parking lot sprawl? Mandate parking garages?
"Developers are building too much housing, and as a result, housing prices are too high!" And that's nuts.
As usual I haven't read the article, but isn't it really "Developers are building too much *student* housing, and as a result, *there's neither physical capacity nor investment capacity for other types of housing, at least not in sufficient quantities*, so housing prices *for everyone except students* are too high!" Because that's not nuts.
Mandated parking garages are probably a good idea. Dense packing is generally good.
Eh, apparently that's not the issue at all. I guess maybe I should read the article if I want to comment.
28: Building more housing leads to cheaper housing prices, but higher land prices. The people arguing against densification are thinking of the price of land and don't want that to rise until they are ready to move.
32: No, you got it exactly right.
This really rubbed me the wrong way:
San Marcos is also taking steps to address housing affordability. To respond to the fact that high rents have driven many Texas State employees to live outside the city, San Marcos offers a program that gives professors a $5,000 no-interest loan for home down payment and closing cost assistance; it's forgivable if they live in the house for five years.
Halfway through the paragraph, I was thinking "Oh, that's surprisingly decent", given the complete lack of interest the university had shown about housing issues earlier in the article. Then I realised when they said "employees", they didn't mean janitors and librarians.
In the long term the student complexes will probably tend to become poor person housing anyway, since they are remote and (I am guessing but this has to be true) are incredibly shittily built and have a deliberately short lifespan.
Not necessarily if enrollment stays high. The area around BYU has a ton of this by the bedroom type rentals and complexes. The big complex next to campus I lived in back in '95 was clearly already ten or twenty years old and it's still going strong.
35: The subtext is racism. The janitors and secretaries live in town, and are Latino, and the white professors want to send their kids to good school districts.
36: Doesn't BYU require not drinking and getting married before the sexing? That might make a difference.
Someone already referred you to David Sucher, and I have to say that as someone with strong feelings about how densely packed living is great if you're doing it right, he struck me as mostly right about this kind of thing. Um, buildings should have street-facing pedestrian entrances -- cars in garages, or maybe alleys leading to internal-to-the-complex parking lots. Mixed residential/retail: an apartment complex is a hideous desert if there's no reason for a non-resident to go there. If it's a captive audience for a good Mexican restaurant, a grocery store, a shoe repair place and a drycleaners, suddenly it's providing amenities for people who don't live in the complex.
I'm trying to think of other stuff... relaxed parking requirements? Lots of places require each unit to provide multiple parking spaces. If you let developers build with what they think the market requires, rather than more than that, it'll be less sprawly.
Apartments are good and dense, but somehow gigantic apartment complexes are hideous and awful. They don't occur in proper cities - they're the intersection of suburbia and poverty. What's the solution? How do you get apartment complexes without the parking lot sprawl? Mandate parking garages?
Or force the developers to pay for transport infrastructure. I'm sure we've discussed this before, but is there really no Section 106 type mechanism they could use if they wanted to (I understand part of the issue here is that the previous city government didn't care)?
I downloaded and read Sucher's first book, actually, and the city planners are super on board with all of that - the three rules and so on. There is a SmartCode in place in the downtown area, and the land use code is being revised this year towards that end.
39.2: That might not work if there is really not a functioning transit option. And I don't know if there is or not there, but I sort of doubt it.
At this point, we often require the complexes to provide shuttle transportation for students back and forth to the university, as long as the complex stays 50%+ student housing.
39 was to 29.
To 30: I still don't get the mechanism by which building student housing makes it less possible to build other housing. There shouldn't be a fixed pool of housing investment that goes to one or the other, or at least I don't see why there would be.
There's a separate problem with not enough investment in low-income housing, I would completely believe. But I can't see how the student housing causes it.
42: Well, all I'm asking for is that you let developers use their judgment, rather than being required to, e.g., provide one parking space for every bedroom. Maybe the developer has a sense of the plausible tenants, and thinks they can get by with one space for each dwelling unit? And maybe the sky won't fall if they do?
But seriously: should apartment complexes be integrated between students and families? Or would it be unpleasant for both?
To 30: I still don't get the mechanism by which building student housing makes it less possible to build other housing. There shouldn't be a fixed pool of housing investment that goes to one or the other, or at least I don't see why there would be.
I wouldn't go as far as a fixed pool of investment but it's certainly the case in the UK that until a couple of years ago it was a lot easier to get development finance for student housing than for ordinary housing almost everywhere but London (and if you were a national builder you'd fund cheaper as a student housing provider than a homebuilder).
41: Do you think that sort of thing would solve the problems you see with the big projects? I mean, is the deal that "We're on board with that already, but compliant projects still suck," or "Maybe new projects that comply will suck less, but they haven't been built yet"?
In case it wasn't clear enough, I meant to imply that the student housing was actively drawing funds away from regular housing, rather than being complementary.
Should a ratio of family-friendly buildings to student-buildings be required? Like requiring that they match the ratio of respective populations in town?
38: Yeah, that helps keep the police type costs and issues down. Those apartments are a cash cow. It's a never ending supply of well behaved non drinking tenants who pay their rent on time.
I don't even understand that world.
48: I think the town will 2x-3x over the next decade or two, and that this is a really big opportunity to try and get it right the first time.
Off to do whatever it is that I get paid to do!
But seriously: should apartment complexes be integrated between students and families? Or would it be unpleasant for both?
Not all students are not families. Assuming you mean not-students and students, I suspect it would be unpleasant in most cases but could in theory be handled.
46: From the regulatory end, I would think that you'd want to enforce the laws against discriminating against families with children -- like, I think integration would be ideal. Screw the students if they don't like it. Whether families actually want to live in heavily student housing? They probably don't, at which point I don't know what to do about it.
It is a problem that students are both richer and worse neighbors than the rest of the housing market, and I'm not sure what to do about it.
45: Maybe the kinds of developers who build on flood plains aren't going to be very reliable on that count and the lack of parking in a completely car-dependent area will just result in a parking lot in the worst possible place because it is really needed and there's no other place left for it as it was not in the original plans.
Anyway, I'm all for appreciating the good in humanity as I see it, but I'm not very big on real estate developers in general.
I admit to not understanding Texas at all and to be basing my answers on my experience in reasonable places like Lincoln.
Wouldn't it be better to shove all those new people back into Austin which, I assume, as resources and infrastructure for density? Can you write a zoning code that requires Austin to build more multi-unit housing?
Like, expect undergrads to live a substantial drive away from the school they attend? That seems implausible.
They could just expand UT. It can't be that much better.
The school is already paying for shuttle buses to wherever these far-flung apartment buildings are. That's the commitment they make.
45: This is a widely-held conviction among people who aren't involved in development. If I had a nickel for every thinkpiece written by some Ygles-alike that is premised on the idea that developers don't want to build parking, I'd have enough money to do a development and put in a shit-ton of parking, because every developer I've ever dealt with has wanted more parking, not less, because they're terrified of having to tell someone who wants to rent a 1-bedroom unit that they can only have one parking space to go with it (same deal with retail, BTW).
Put it this way: the building code does not mandate bathroom count beyond 1 per housing unit. When was the last time you saw a new housing unit built with a bathroom count below N+0.5, where N=bedrooms? That formula is a slight exaggeration, but not by much: 4 BR, 3.5 BA is a common house form, as is the 2 BR 2.5 BA apartment. Developers, correctly or not, believe that their customers value an abundance of bathrooms, and they believe the same thing about parking spaces.
There are, of course, exceptions, but the exceptions are innovative developers in city centers, not the sorts of people building student complexes anywhere, let alone flood plains (per 57).
Or, if UT wants to be special, expand the Texas State schools in bigger cities.
Well, if that's the case, then it wouldn't help loosening requirements. Never mind.
Anyway, the mechanism that occurs to me is to make the statutory limits on housing low everywhere in town, with increases available to developers who do the things you want. So you can, as of right, build a dozen units per acre. With structured parking, you can double that. With structured housing and 25% affordable, quadruple it. If 50% of stormwater is handled on site, double again.
The point isn't to prevent development, but to make the "price" of intensity be doing what the city wants. Because it sounds like, right now, it's way too easy for developers do not do anything that the larger community wants.
When was the last time you saw a new housing unit built with a bathroom count below N+0.5, where N=bedrooms?
This is definitely another US/UK divergence. I don't think any of the new builds I looked at when house hunting had >N, and most had N-1. Is it a new(ish) thing in the US too? Remembering my grandparents' place in Champaign, It had five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
66: To be clear, municipal parking minimums are generally dumb, and are actively harmful in places well-served by transit, but it's hopelessly naive to think that they're causing most developers, especially in places like the OP, to do anything they otherwise wouldn't.
The only new housing I ever lived in had 2.5 bathrooms and three bedrooms.
69: Definitely new(ish), but rapidly becoming the norm. A big part of it is the smaller number of bedrooms combined with a lot of useless square footage in McMansions: you'll have a 5000 sq. ft. house that only has 4 bedrooms, so you may as well put bathrooms everywhere.
It's only going to get more common because the youth are growing up in a high privacy environment--no more showering after gym in HS, no more gang showers in dorms, not even public bathrooms in most newly-built dorms*, etc.
*actually, I seriously wonder when was the last time a US college built a dorm along the old model; that was already passe in the late '80s
Off to do whatever it is that I get paid to do!
I assume it's either swimming or code camp.
With all the fruits and vegetables we're eating, people need more bathrooms.
Rattled right now. ATM help needed!
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Our dentist referred Tim to an endodontist to get 2 root canals. The guy did one. he started the 2nd one and said he couldn't finish it because he didn't have the fancy new sealant he wanted to use.
Then he said that the first tooth had been the wrong tooth and had been healthy. He wants Tim to go back for the sealant and a "free" root canal.
I also think that the co-pay they charged us more than 20% of the contracted Delta Dental rate.
Our regular dentist wants to meet with him tomorrow.
Thoughts on what else to do? File a complaint with the state dental board. Report him to the insurance company?
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There are too many criss-crossing comments to cite numbers, but:
Yes, it's absolutely the case that student housing, and other non-affordable housing, soaks up development dollars, acres, and general opportunity that could otherwise go to affordable housing. This shouldn't be hard to comprehend: there are a limited number of suitable* building sites; large scale developments are big money, so we're not talking about an Econ 101 model where demand calls forth supply; market distortions make these places more appealing investments, and developers are legendarily risk-averse, such that they'd rather build the 20th student housing complex than the 1st mixed-use, family-oriented, partly-affordable complex.
Oh hey, maybe that's another carrot to add to the list in 68: include retail & services, and you get more density. You want a place to be family-friendly, include places where day care, doctors offices, and a Denny's (or whatever) can be.
*well-located, appropriately zoned, physically accommodating (soils/flooding/etc.)
It's only going to get more common because the youth are growing up in a high privacy environment--no more showering after gym in HS, no more gang showers in dorms, not even public bathrooms in most newly-built dorms*, etc.
And yet you still have double rooms, which are basically unheard of (other than for couples) here.
I doubt the liberal-internet-approved David Sucher high cost of free parking solutions have much direct application here, since they are designed to deal with a very different set of issues and problems.
I would view the key issue as this:the State of Texas andthe federal student loan program has decided to massively subsidize growth in your town. But too much of the benefits of that growth is going to non-local developers and indirectly to students who will shortly leave town. Your goal is to siphon off as much of the largesse as possible to pay for long term services and benefit to your town.
The best way to do this is to differentially tax the fuck out of the developments and use the proceeds to pay for schools, parks, police, etc etc. But that's a tax issue, not a zoning issue. In terms of pure zoning stuff I'd look at the following:
1) If restrictive zoning is preventing dense housing from getting built downtown or near downtown or near campus, priority 1 is to end that, so that you can use the developer money to pay for some nice dense mixed-use neighborhoods.
2) Try to give the developers other incentives to buildmixed use stuff near a town center. Maybe a green belt around the town, maybe variances of various kinds to build near the center.
3) Encouraging mixed use is the key. To the extent possible, you want developer/student loan money to be paying for space for local businesses in a nice commercial area. That turns short term students into long term community assets.
4) Beyond that, don't worry too much about affordability. The goal is to get more housing built while doing so in a way that suctions up money for the town. With a lot of growth and building the housing market equilibriums will be shifting constantly. You almost certainly can't zone your way into affordable housing and it's probably foolish to try.
5) Don't let the flood situation get worse. I mean come fucking on.
I did think that was nice when I was in the U.K. for a semester. I had my own room, with a sink/urinal combination.
Austin, it seems, has the opposite problem. Increasing rents in residential areas where students have traditionally lived have priced out all but the richie richest and/or unreasonably indebted students. My current unit has doubled in price in 5 years.
Finally, on the ubiquitous "more housing, of any type, increases affordability" thing: in urban places, transit access is extremely lumpy. Building expensive new units in good transit nodes does the following: 1. create new, unaffordable housing; 2. permit existing landlords to raise their rents; 3. encourage existing landlords to demolish existing affordable units in order to build new expensive units; 4. drive out affordable retail/services and encourage less affordable; 5. force people who used to be able to afford units in the good transit nodes out to bad transit nodes, such that, even if their rents hold steady, their transit budget doubles, as does the amount of time spent in transit. Worst case, they now need to buy a car.
In theory there are empty units created elsewhere in the metro, but in no meaningful sense has the construction of these new units created affordability for anyone. It's a sign of the easy ubiquity of Econ 101 thinking that liberals cling to it so fiercely in a case where it clearly doesn't apply (easy entry/exit? No. homogenous product? No. Etc.). At some point someone's going to figure out that, just as you can't build your way out of highway congestion, you can't build your way into affordability without direct intervention (which is to say, building affordable units, not shrugging at luxury units and insisting that they are indirectly creating affordability).
The expansion of the university is the big problem, but if they would have built dorms they could have kept the local housing market relatively unaffected.
Building student apartment complexes so far away from the center of town seems nuts though.
It's probably worth noting here that the places where housing is affordable--the Sun Belt, basically--are always cited in these arguments as places where it's cheap to build, thus somehow proving the "luxury condo==affordable units" thesis. But A. Texas has not come up with some magical way to build dense, urban housing cheaply; suburban Houston has nothing to teach San Francisco on that front; and B., sprawl is "cheap" because it's all hidden costs, from expensive infrastructure that will fail before the muni raises enough tax dollars to replace it to all the externalities of sprawl (wetlands destruction, pollution associated with car commuting, social anomie, etc).
If sprawl were priced properly, it wouldn't be cheap at all, and we'd have to face facts: it is not possible to build housing that Americans consider acceptable at prices that the median American can afford.
83: Can you explain .2? I'm a landlord charging X. A new building goes up nearby that's built to a standard that lets them charge X+Y. How does this help me raise my rent -- if there were people who wanted to live in my building at the rate of X+Y, wouldn't I be renting to them already, new building or no?
.3, sure. If affordable housing is being destroyed and replaced with expensive student housing, that would explain why there's less affordable housing. The article didn't say that was what was happening, but it could happen. .5 depends on .2, which I still don't understand, unless .3 is the whole explanation.
86.1: The subtext is racism. Not joking. The new, expensive building is full of white people and turned a segregated black neighborhood into a mixed one.
Also to 83: I would also like to stake out a slightly less idiotic Econ 101 position -- not that building luxury/student housing should make the rest of the housing market better, necessarily, but in the absence of something obvious like literal destruction of affordable housing units to be replaced with luxury housing, I don't see how it makes the housing market worse.
I agree with 88. Also, luxury housing near transit should help provide political weight for making transit less shitacular. Or that's what I tell myself.
87: You mean it's sort of reverse blockbusting? Drop a bolus of students into what was previously a segregated black neighborhood, and suddenly other students feel safe enough to rent what were previously cheap apartments and drive the price up? I could imagine that happening in some specific circumstances, but it seems weak as a general explanation.
88: not worse in a static model, no, but worse in a dynamic model. It's not that affordable housing disappears (although sometimes it does), it's that new affordable housing that needs to be built isn't, because developers are chasing new student housing opportunities instead. (See 78.) Which over time leads to a shortage.
90: I assume the whole world looks to East Liberty.
It's mostly not students there. It went straight up young professionals I think. Anyway, the apartments he's talking about rent for more than my house payment.
Again, I could see that, I guess, but you need a long time horizon. What percentage of the affordable housing stock is usually new every year that this decade's emphasis on student housing is going to crowd it out? It seems unlikely that it's all that much.
If the student housing exacerbates floods that destroy affordable housing, then it's not a direct replacement, but the end result on affordability is the same.
Sure, that's exactly the same as if the affordable housing was torn down to be replaced by student housing.
Except somehow worse because they didn't even have to spend money buying the affordable housing.
I doubt that the building of an apartment building in one location is going to cause a one-for-one destruction of housing units elsewhere, but to the extent that's what's happening, that'd make the market worse.
True. But is has certainly happened here that the construction of new subdivisions resulted in floods that took out whole neighborhoods of previously existing towns. I'm not sure what the ratio is, housing unit wise.
I have been puzzled by a similar phenomenon in Columbus's rental market. THE Ohio State University has a new requirement that second-year students live in dorms, and has recently constructed several huge new dorms. There has also been a surge in high-rise "luxury apartment" development, some of which is marketed to students and some of which is not. Rents are (relatively) through the fucking roof everywhere, including in the dumpy hundred-year-old 1-bathroom duplexes traditionally occupied by students, and in the historically segregated black neighborhood of Weinland Park.
I had supposed that either Columbus was growing very quickly or more demographics are renting that before would have purchased homes. This thread is making me rethink my assumptions.
This thread is super helpful, btw, in terms of me working through ideas that have been percolating in my mind.
Have you considered a visit to East Liberty? It's very nice. There's a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe's, a google office, and Kelly's all right there. Plus a Target with parking under the store and some other stuff I can't remember.
At this point, we often require the complexes to provide shuttle transportation for students back and forth to the university, as long as the complex stays 50%+ student housing.
Building on this, maybe there should be language that when shuttles are discontinued, the developer/owner pays for a bus stop and some playgrounds? Is that feasible?
Is it better for the community if students are put on city buses? Or not a big win?
In my experience, students on city buses block the aisle with their backpacks. But that's probably an education issue.
Wouldn't it be better to shove all those new people back into Austin which, I assume, as resources and infrastructure for density?
Austin is super crazy expensive these days.
104: That seems hard, in that the original developer may no longer own the project, so while you could impose future obligations to travel with any sale of the project, they might be hard to enforce in the future.. Um, what does 'paying for a bus stop' mean? The literal physical infrastructure? Because maybe you could require that the shuttle-bus stop be physically appropriate for repurposing for a municipal bus stop.
Same with playgrounds, maybe? Require some sort of open greenspace that's designed to be refitted into playgrounds? I have no idea if that's even vaguely plausible, though -- it sounds pie in the sky.
104, 105 - If you can plausibly get the developers to pay for not only a bus stop, but for the costs of extending town bus service to the compounds, that's a HUGE win with tons of follow-on effects. E.g. you can start planning other commercial development near a development-funded bus line.
Listen to Tigre -- that sounds right.
Read the comments, and nope, nobody gets it. Think macro, Obama/Bernanke/Yellen have blown another bubble. In addition to the oil bubble. And the health care bubble.
Private housing-as-investment based on unsecured and iffy (student) loans, this time not backed by securitization but directly guaranteed by the US gov't meaning prole taxes.
Party like it's 2005 again.
I presume some kind of chain or ladder could be traced back up to the megabanks, Obama's and Clinton's buddies and bankers. If we are lucky we will get another crash. If we are unlucky several generations will live their entire lives in debt peonage.
Are all these students not counted as unemployed? Also makes the economic numbers look better.
Anyway, very good article discussing micro and local issues. Thanks h-g.
Plus, if the university becomes reliant on having a high-quality town bus service, that's a powerful constituency with an interest in maintaining high-quality town bus service. But if they rely on private buses, their natural preferences would run counter to the public bus system, in as much as various administrators would prefer to keep their taxes low.
Wow, that all happened fast.
We moved onto our street 15 years ago. It was mixed race, mixed income, mixed age, about 1/3 homeowner by building (lower rate by unit, of course; 3 homeowners also rented units). Whole Foods opened a couple blocks over, and since then rents have gone steadily up. Working class (black and white) have almost entirely been replaced with grad students and recent (white) grads. Standard gentrification stuff, but my point is that the presence of $1200/mo. units in fancy new buildings blocks away allows landlords to go from charging $600/mo to $800/mo on my street.
I can't emphasize enough that this is always what happens, and (white) people always want to deny it. Nice new housing makes neighborhoods more desirable, and raises the potential rent of every unit in it.
...in the absence of something obvious like literal destruction of affordable housing units to be replaced with luxury housing
This is very common, though.
There are not going to be jobs for these students and sooner or later no loans for these students children.
It's just another Ponzi scheme, a looting, a primitive accumulation.
The crash when it comes, along with the health care crash, will be put on the ordinary people, in other words since the Feds are responsible for the debt it will be used as a further excuse for neoliberal downsizing of services and programs.
The players will already have taken their winnings from the table.
2 and 9 strike me as oblivious to why people move to smaller towns in the first place. I live in one. Here the local Town Council, consisting of the only group of Democrats that I have known in my 50 years as a Democrat, have in effect decided that guaranteeing profits to real estate developers is their highest calling. The developers make contributions to the local pubic university, which in turn admits far more students than it can house, and so pushes the town council (who are eager to roll over for the university since, surprise, some of them work there) to make its plan of development include more student housing.
None of these developments include affordable housing. The contractors aren't local. It's a one-party town and that party is in bed with the university and the developers. If people here wanted to live in a city or in a dense suburb they would have moved there. Referring to a desire to not turn the town over to large economic interests as nimbyism is clueless.
The developers make contributions to the local pubic university
snicker.
113: I'm not denying that gentrification happens, but isn't it driven by demand? That there are these grad students and white graduates who want to live in the area, and they'd pay $800/month on your street even if there weren't luxury buildings nearby?
In the linked article, for example, I believe that the existence of students who can pay high rents is going to make the housing market tighter; that makes perfect sense. I just can't see why building more units for them to live in would exacerbate rather than ameliorating the problem.
113: What's the answer - making these buildings rent-controlled?
Developers make contributions to the local university to get good seats at sporting events.
Around here, at least, the universities have come to see good transit as good for them, and include bus passes on student IDs. I assume the bus operators view this as an unambiguous good, but I don't know. Our city is big enough that the universities don't distort the bus system (badly), but that would be a risk in a place where the students are a larger share and are using the busses effectively as shuttles.
$1200/mo. units in fancy new buildings blocks away
brb moving to Pittsburgh
I'm not denying that gentrification happens, but isn't it driven by demand? That there are these grad students and white graduates who want to live in the area, and they'd pay $800/month on your street even if there weren't luxury buildings nearby?
Where they want to live is driven by development. In 2001 there were literally zero students and recent grads on this street. The luxury apartments didn't drive the gentrification--Whole Foods did, and then other stuff--but they are accelerating it now.
Think of rental prices as signaling: a $600/mo. apartment with 2 BR in a non-shitty building must have something wrong with it (too many black people nearby). Same apartment for $800 doesn't have anything wrong with it except that it's not in a luxury apt building. Landlords aren't doing (much) to improve their buildings, they're just riding the market.
City-wide, new apartments like this aren't that common at all, so to some extent they create their own demand. That is, if you are the target demo, you will move wherever they are, as long as the location isn't absurd.
Just on the general principle, I try not to understand graduate students, but I think they are nearly all from out of town, huge numbers of them from out of the country. They seem to all want a "safe" neighborhood on the bus line and to all ask the same three people what neighborhoods might meet that criteria.
119: one thing the City is exploring is land banks, where the land is held by a nonprofit community org, and the building on it is separate. I'm explaining it terribly, but essentially what happens is that a low income homeowner can only sell to another low income homeowner, but they are building equity. It puts a drag on property value, without encouraging disinvestment.
AFAIK, no one has a good solution that's large scale, which is part of why people want to believe that the solution is letting the high end market run rampant.
White people got to live somewhere. The alternative is sticking them out on half-acre plots in the distant suburbs, into dangerous, segregated neighborhoods that breed Republicans and white-collar crime. Nobody wants that.
I just want to be able to sell my house for a condo and a boat when I retire. Is that too much to ask for something I'm not willing to put any effort into?
It's probably worth noting here that large apartment complexes of poor people* are almost universally considered a problem, while large apartment complexes of middle class/rich people are a good thing. When they tore down the (genuinely problematic) public housing towers in East Liberty, they replaced (some of) the units with new low density housing to avoid the pathologies of public housing towers. There would have been an outcry against replacing the old towers with new ones, but nobody** has a problem with the new apartment blocks for yuppies. Standard underlying racism stuff.
*no matter whether they're actually poor or just working class
**well, the displaced have a problem with them. And a lot of people think they're ugly. But nobody talks about them as places of pathology
I'm explaining it terribly, but essentially what happens is that a low income homeowner can only sell to another low income homeowner, but they are building equity. It puts a drag on property value, without encouraging disinvestment.
Under President Sanders, these will be mandatory.
I am 100% on board with pushing back against Econ 101-ism on housing issues. But surely Pittsburgh is not in any meaningful sense an unaffordable city or near to becoming one.
I think there are certainly places where anti-developmentism has become so ingrained that the right solution is just to support essentially all new development almost no matter what (I mean, not ruining flood plains or whatever) and let the chips fall where they may. San Francisco for sure, and I think we're at that point here right now in LA. But that's not because magical supply and demand curves immediately adjust, it's because housing is already ludicrously expensive and has been so restricted for so long that the only solution is to build and to build up. But that's not true everywhere in the country or the world, by a long shot. Heebie's situation is one where, like I say, the right solution is for the city to try and take as much of the student loan largesse while it can, to try and convert it to long-term goods for the city.
But surely Pittsburgh is not in any meaningful sense an unaffordable city or near to becoming one.
If I had to buy my house today, I would never be able to afford to go to the bar twice a week.
Yes but don't all you guys live in or near one of the few Swpl McUniversity districts? There's like a whole huge rest of the city.
If I had to do that, I would have moved to Philadelphia.
Agree with 130. Seattle is there too.
Another annoying anti-development trend in Seattle is trying to declare ugly-ass buildings as historic. No, just because that auto shop or former Denny's has been around for 50 years doesn't make it a building worth preserving.
132: It wasn't SWPL McUniversity when I bought here, but now Google's on the other side of the neighborhood, and my $60k house would go for $250k or more.
Median income here is $52k. 30% of that is $15k, which means half the city needs to find housing that costs, all-in, $1200/month or less. Christ, my property taxes are $4500/year because of gentrification. Meanwhile, "affordable housing" is generally applied to what's affordable at 60% of median, so now we're down to rent + utilities at $700. You can no longer find that in this well-located neighborhood unless you go to a couple high-crime pockets. Where you can find those rents are in outlying areas with sporadic bus service, poor grocery access, etc. Some of the people whose affordable buildings are being demolished for luxury apts are moving 20 miles outside the city; only a fraction were able to stay in the neighborhood.
BTW, I agree with 130.2. Increased density is its own reward in an urban context. Indeed, in our park fight with the developer (the one demolishing the affordable buildings), we told him we'd be happy to support increased density if he included affordable units in the development; he wasn't interested.
Which brings up something I don't think has been made explicit: developers actively oppose affordable units near their developments. It's incredibly, obviously true, but I don't think we like to talk about it. But, with few exceptions, people investing $100M to build 300 high-end units alongside high end retail are really not interested in having a bunch of poor black people living nearby. Displacement is a feature, not a bug.
Our town has many of the same issues. Lots of huge luxury apartment complexes for students have been built in the past 10-15 years, and they've taken over a significant chunk of the downtown land. A lot of students rent houses and make the neighborhoods they rent in undesirable to non-students. (Students are loud, don't keep their building looking nice, and are attractive to lazy landlords.) Finally, although housing costs are comically cheap here compared to most places, for our state people think they're very expensive and it's hard for non-faculty to afford housing.
I think the fundamental issue is that students have much more money to spend on housing than townies do. There's a huge influx of very rich students during that same timeframe, and there's more and more students living off campus. The students can just outbid everyone else, and so prices go up everywhere.
I think the luxury apartment buildings do contribute though, by changing students expectations of what's reasonable for them to spend. That is, the students have no idea of what is reasonable for them to spend other than what their friends are spending. If their friends are moving into these expensive new buildings then they'll think it's reasonable to pay more for rent at other places too and so landlords can afford to charge more. People aren't making absolute decisions like "is it worth it to pay $800 for this apartment", they're making relative decisions like "is it worth it to save $200 to live in a building that doesn't have it's own gym, pool, and tanning facilities."
135.2 - the City of LA has a median income of about $55k/year,not far from Pittsburgh's, and a housing market that is ... maybe 2-10x as pricey as Pittsburgh's? There is a genuine housing crisis here.
Pittsburgh doesn't have a median income of $52k. In the city, the median income for a household is $29,000 and for a family it is $39,000. For the metro area, those figures are $35k and $45k.
Pittsburgh's nicer neighborhoods have median incomes above that level.
Ladybird: JRoth seems to have it right throughout. The best tool that seems to exist is a consistent, enforced zoning code. The reason you get developers buying land anywhere and assuming that they can just build is that zoning doesn't prevent it--or the council approved enough variances that there's no need to check to see if the land will work as high occupancy apartments; with maybe some concessions, everywhere is okay.
In bay area towns, it's common for projects like apartment projects to have 10-15 pages of conditions (often 80-200 specific conditions). A pattern of few exemptions and strict conditions of approval when they are allowed will make people check the zoning of the property before they buy.
140 -- I really really hope that Ladybirdville does not get run like bay area towns.
If they could, it might move all the development to surrounding towns.
143: Locally, that's an issue. When the city tightens standards or tries to "encourage" growth to specific areas, the county tends to gain new houses/developments where the city was trying to prevent development/growth and annexation. Coordination is hard!
134: If you don't think a Denny's that has a bar is historic, then you, sir, have sense of what's important in history.
I have no idea who Becky is or why her hair so nice. Is this something I need to google before I vote tomorrow?
re: 69
We live in a 2 bedroom new build flat, and we have 1.5. Assuming that 0.5 means a cupboard sized toilet/shower en-suite. I have to admit, it's quite good to have two toilets with a toddler being potty trained in the house.
My issue with our place is the entrance hall to the flat is strangely bigger than it seems it needs to be. I guess to accommodate the various doors and the wedge shape of the space the flat is in.
A .5 bath means a toilet and sink with no tub or shower.
You place would be said by some to have 1.75 baths, I think.
147: You're choosing between hope for the future and the destruction of everything you hold dear. Choose wisely.
138: Google let me down. Not surprised, though.
147: I just went to the LWV info site; we don't seem to have any Beckies on our ballot.
Even if, in the absence of regulation, the market provided displaced people with affordable housing, they've still been displaced. It's enormously disruptive, expensive, and often traumatic to be forced out of one's home and to have one's community scattered. It's a large negative externality that falls upon those who can least afford it.
I'm going to assume 151 means I should vote Clinton.
I just learned that the woman at work everybody calls Becky signs her emails with Rebecca so I've started calling her that.
I'm getting a lot out of the book on evictions that F I think recommended. I started it last night so I'm not too far in, but it's interesting and seems pertinent to this.
I'm thinking about moving rather than buying Lee out of the house I love just because being free of her is worth giving up anything. Well, and also because I'm afraid it will get appraised for more than I want to pay. So I'm trying to decide how cheap a cheap house on the other side of town I'd want to get and whether I can trust that gentrification to minimal levels will happen and so on. Mostly I'm being selfish and classist and petulant about not wanting to move even though the girls would be closer to their schools and classmates (since most of our neighbors white-flight their kids elsewhere) and it wouldn't be so white. And it's not as if I sit around discussing the best potential Herodotus tattoos with my neighbors, though I could if the need arose. But this time last year I wasn't sure whether to put flowers in the ground because I wasn't sure I'd get to see the and decided to do it because the girls would see them when they were with Lee if she was the one who kept the house. We've had a good year here together and whatever comes next will probably be good too. But having to actually make that decision is tough.
I always get stuck, in this conversation, on the question of where is it good for non-poor people to live? When I say it out loud, I feel as if I'm just being an annoying jerk, but there is some kind of a problem there that I'm not phrasing correctly, but that it feels as if this sort of discussion never addresses head on.
Like, in the OP, the students exist. They're going to live somewhere. If the big projects are undesirable, then something else should be built. But talking about what's wrong with the development, any solution that doesn't address where the students are going to live seems doomed.
Same with gentrification generally. There are people with money to pay for housing, who want to live in areas accessible to their jobs. While I really do understand the desire to protect neighborhoods currently occupied by working-class and poor people, any plan to avoid displacement seems to me like it has to include a containment plan for the housing demand that would otherwise be causing the displacement. Maybe that doesn't mean market-rate housing to be built in gentrifying neighborhoods, but doesn't it mean that it has to be built somewhere?
Speaking of evictions, this cat is finally on her way to having babies, woooooo!
I don't think you can have a nice rug and a 3-year-old, but no, under my bed on the bottom of the linen curtains I never got around to hemming properly.
Maybe just cut that part off after.
I can, and now that it's covered with cat blood and whatnot I probably will. Welcome to the Mineshaft, shiny black kitten!
160.3: This is where anti-development energy actually is pernicious. Because the answer to the question, "Where should rich white folks live?" is, approximately, "Where they already do." But they have the means to prevent new units from being built in adequate numbers in their neighborhoods, which is why gentrification is always seeking & spreading. We're across the tracks from a famously tony neighborhood--it's where Annie Dillard's family went to church with all the other families whose fathers ran Pgh industry. For a long tim it was mildly surprising that such a tony neighborhood could be cheek-by-jowl with such a poor, black one. But pressure kept building in Shadyside until eventually it spilled over into East Liberty, and East Liberty has been colonized. So we're getting 2000 units of new housing that is targeting people who, until 5-10 years ago, wanted to live over there, but almost literally no new units have been built there, because people like the Dillards are very very good at preventing apartment blocks from being built.
To be clear, economic segregation isn't a good thing, but gentrification doesn't solve that problem either; other than the transitional period, it just relocates the boundaries between populations.
Specifically on the student housing, that's where good master planning should have come in. It sounds as if some thought was given to the issue, but maybe the scale wasn't a appreciated, and the zoning code certainly seems to lack the teeth to do what's necessary.
But going back to my 68, you need to build in better projects at a granular level. Developers have tremendous power, but it's possible to grab back some of that--as long as you're ahead of the curve. It's a bit like the old line, "The real scandal is what's legal." If these guys can build their giant cash cow projects while shunting the externalities onto everyone else, they absolutely will. But if they're hemmed in from the outset, then they need to capture those externalities to get to the cash. Granted, that can lead to pushing them across borders, as noted above. That's a problem. But avoiding that by giving away the store is hardly a solution.
BTW, has anyone mentioned getting the school on board as a partner? The school has a long term interest in the community and enough clout to counterbalance the developers. I don't know if they have any direct leverage, but at the very least they could have a system of Approved Housing or something. Not that it would be an easy lift, but it's something they could do unilaterally.
I thought the conventional answer to 160 was that neighborhoods should have a wide range of price points - ideally any given neighborhood has both super cheap housing, super expensive housing, and everything in between. That economic segregation is the enemy.
Be sure not to let the cat eat the kittens. Or maybe that's guppies.
That would be ideal, I think as well, if there were a way to encourage the mixed state to be stable.
if there were a way to encourage the mixed state to be stable.
I'm not aware that anyone has been able to pull this off on a prolonged basis in the US. You can get it for awhile, at least, but AFAIK it always breaks down.
My immediate neighborhood is pretty good, mixture-wise, and has been since we moved in twenty years ago. Prices have gone up a lot in the spendier buildings, but the neighborhood as a whole remains fairly economically integrated. But that may be just super fluky.
And living in a really peculiar neighborhood may drive a lot of what throws me about these conversations. That is, some fairly expensive housing in a working class neighborhood doesn't, IME, lead to quick displacement of the other neighborhood residents. But that literally may just work here for fluky reasons.
Like, in the OP, the students exist. They're going to live somewhere. If the big projects are undesirable, then something else should be built.
They exist, on Planet Earth. Texas State University decided that they would be in this particular town.
Sure. Does the town have any ability to prevent TSU from increasing enrollment? That seems unlikely, but if they can, that'd be a way to address the problem.
They could build dorms. Married student housing.
I may have misunderstood when I read it this morning, but a university with 38k students in a town of 58k has responsibilities, that it doesn't sound like this U is stepping up to.
Living in London, all of these conversations are depressing. I live in an apartment block of small non-luxury flats, built on a former brownfield industrial estate, in a reasonable, but by no means wealthy, bit of London.
Flats start at about 750,000 US. An ordinary small terraced house round the corner, over 1 million US.
I thought the conventional answer to 160 was that neighborhoods should have a wide range of price points - ideally any given neighborhood has both super cheap housing, super expensive housing, and everything in between.
Are you secretly the NYC council member who was quoted in the NYTimes (about the "poor door" building) saying something like "A lot of people say rich people don't want to live next door to poor people, but I don't think that's true"?
If it makes you feel better, I probably pay lots more for some thing than you do. Like $450 a month for health care, or more if somebody uses health care. Plus, I think university tuition would be much higher even after recent changes on your end. The cheapest good state school here would be about $15,000 per year tuition (that is, no books, room, or board). And if I didn't work for that university, we'd have to pay that much.
I live next to two mathematicians. Which worked out very well, but their moving.
Their s/b they're. They're not grammarians.
re: 181
FWIW, tuition here is about the same. For university, I mean. £9000 p.a.
It is true that I don't pay for healthcare, and that's great. I pay marginally more income tax, based on rough comparisons, I suppose, but I'd still chose the peace of mind of the NHS.*
* plus, I believe in socialised lots-of-things.
Also, if I didn't get a free pass from work, I'd have to pay for the bus and that would be $5 a day.
Heheh. My monthly commute costs me around 450 USD, and my wife's around 300 USD.
174: Its hard to know what's going to happen with Manhattan. ISTM that a lot of neighborhoods that seemed gentrification-proof are now super-expensive, or getting there fast.
But aside from that larger picture, the thing about Manhattan is that the scale of things is so intense that it's a different dynamic. I mean, your building has hundreds of occupants, right*? That's more than my immediate neighborhood of 3-4 blocks. So the "who is my neighbor?" question is very different from ordinarily dense urban places. A given block in, say, the West 80s can be pretty consistently UMC while the next block closer to Broadway is much more mixed, and the people on the first block are much more secure in their status than they'd be if the blocks consisted of smaller building, or more spread out buildings.
At least, that's how the economic diversity of the city has always made sense to me.
*and even if yours doesn't, that's not an uncommon size of building
Holy cow, I knew London housing was expensive, but I didn't realize the commute costs were so high. I pay $165 a month for a pass that gets me unlimited travel on regional rail,* bus, trolley, and subway in the Philadelphia metro area.
*I would actually have to pay $2 or so per trip to travel to exurban areas during the week, if I wanted to go there. But I don't.
We've got over a hundred occupants, but probably not two.
And I'd believe that mixed income neighborhoods work because of the super high density, but building apartment buildings my size (eight floors, twelve apartments on six of the floors, and I can't remember the other two) doesn't seem to be the answer either. Or, I can't figure out why it isn't the answer, but no one else in these discussions ever thinks it is. Like, it's economically viable to live in super-dense neighborhoods, but there's no economically viable way to build them? Which is a shame, because they're really nice.
I mean, my building itself is pretty mixed income, but it is admittedly flipping -- no one who's bought since us has been any poorer than we are. It'll take a long time to finish flipping, because people stay in their apartments forever, but the process is definitely happening.
London public transport is stupidly expensive compared to pretty much every other city in the world. Also their taxis. Hence why I use a bike and Uber when I have to, haha screw you overpaid entitled rent seeking bigots, I'll see you in the job centre when they replace you with a Raspberry Pi or a Nigerian immigrant as appropriate.
Speaking of late capitalism and transportation, would an Uber come get me at 4:00 on a Saturday morning if it was a brand new account or would they figure I was just a naive serial killer with a stolen credit card?
Also, would they come if I only wanted a three mile ride instead of a trip to the airport?
I thought one issue of contention between Uber and its drivers was that it didn't show them the destination / length of trip, even if entered.
I took an uber car for the first time, on Saturday. The payment system really is smooth and easy.
Holy cow, I knew London housing was expensive, but I didn't realize the commute costs were so high.
That struck me as well. $750/mo combined is nuts.
One more question. The person who drives for Uber at 4:00 a.m. on a Saturday isn't going to be serial killer, are they? Tweaker is fine, but not drunk would be important also.
For 4 of the 6 years I've lived in this neighborhood I've managed to pay below market rent, either due to being a bit lucky/clever* or to sheer dumb luck. At present I pay a stupidly low rent compared to most people in big cities (there are trade offs, but none of the negatives outweigh the positives).
Public transit costs in London are insane. Here a transit pass is 100-something a month. A bus/subway ticket is $2.25, with a 25 cent transfer.
*I rented a three bedroom, furnished one room cheaply, and sublet it at furnished room market price, which was about $100 month above the unfurnished price.
For comparison, ttaM's transit costs for himself are more than my rent and utilities combined, including internet.
If I had to drive, like working people forced into less transit accessible neighborhoods by encroaching students, my commuting costs would be about $300 instead of nothing.
(Back on topic)
And it would drop to about $200 after I got off the waiting list and into one of the employee lots.
I don't really trust your analysis of hypothetical commuting costs. You need to run a few thousand monte carlo simulations accounting for different variables, or something. Please do that and get back to the blog then.
I just figured parking plus $.60/mile plus a .02 probability of sideswiping a parked car and somebody getting my plates.
And you think that kind of shoddy work is enough to be accepted here?
I was busy registering for Uber. I guess if I want to know how long it takes to get me a ride a 4:00 am, I just wake up early and see what the little indicator says.
This will be an expensive app if I start getting lazy about going home from the bar.
198:
You hear a lot about Dallas housing, but after 1,250 for rent+utilities for a 2-bed here ($850 or so for a one) there's maybe $100 worth of toll roads you have to pay if you want to get to work in a reasonable amount of time.
re: transport costs in London.
A zone pass like the one my wife uses (we are in Zone 4) is about £180. Where we used to live in Zone 6, about £220.
My own commute is to Oxford, which is a pretty standard London/SE commute, except people are usually (but not always) travelling the opposite way. If I bought a monthly train ticket, plus paid for the bus to and from the train, that'd be £442 plus another £100 or so for in-zone travel to and from the stations (in winter). So, $800 US or so for me alone, if I used public transport. I drive. Hence actual costs of more like $450 or so, including parking and car maintenance.
That is a personal annoyance of mine. The high cost of public transport in the UK. I'd much prefer to do some combination of cycling and train, but when it's getting on for double the price of driving on my own ...
I don't see any good reason why an ordinary rail ticket should be more expensive than a single individual driving a car with no car sharing.
How long is your commute to and from Oxford?
Driving? About 1hr 10 minutes. But it can be a little less, or a lot more if there's traffic or a crash.
It's not dreadful. My wife's commute on the tube to central London for work isn't much different.
Downside is no reading, and I find audiobooks annoying, so I'm always looking for things (podcasts, music exercises, etc) that I can do in the car.
Let me add to the chorus of moans about UK transport costs. I would have seen a lot more of this not-very-big country by now if the inter-city rail prices weren't so absurd. I can fly damn near anywhere in Europe cheaper than I can get a train to Manchester.
Something's broken in that market.
I can fly damn near anywhere in Europe cheaper than I can get a train to Manchester.
Always remember a Welsh friend of mine at university complaining loudly "I can get from here to Florence more easily, more quickly and more cheaply than I can get from here to west Wales. Plus, at the end of it I'm in Florence, not west Wales."
Train costs are indeed ridiculous. Even if you book months out... London-Manchester return is £42 if you want to go in late July. The pricing system is highly opaque (it seems like it is almost always cheaper to get two singles than a return ticket).
What kind of music exercises can one do while driving?
An off-peak return to Milton Keynes, which is a little over half an hour each way on the fast train, is £30. It's insane.
214: Maybe they want you to remain in Manchester and thus relieve some small part of the London housing crunch.
re: 215
I'm still working that out. I listen to a lot of music I want to learn, and try to sing* along with solos, etc in the car so that I get the basic feel and sound memorised. I listen to a few podcasty type things that have music instruction elements. I also had a little look at doing some ear training or even some konnakol but I've only touched on those and not really started trying them in earnest in the car.
* I'm a hilariously tone deaf singer, so don't imagine that's some George Benson style scat singing.
Something's broken in that market.
Demand for transportation increases. You are a limited liability company with a contract to provide rail transportation from A to B; you can respond to increased demand either by investing heavily in capital goods (rolling stock, engines, upgraded platforms, etc.), which will cost a great deal of money, or by creating disincentives to additional users of your product by increasing fares to a point at which only wealthy and subsidised travellers will use it. You regard your primary responsibility as making short term profits for the benefit of your shareholders.
Which do you choose?
Can I be Sir Topham Hat? More fun that way.
"We would upgrade the engines except the ones we have now are sentient and have made it clear that a terminator-style rise of the machines will be the result of any attempt to replace them."
"We always knew they could think but never feared them. Until we bricked James into a tunnel because he was unwilling to work in the rain. He came out, well, changed. And not for the better, even though he was no long afraid of the rain. History will probably call us cruel. History may be right, but I was only acting as I had been taught.
Regardless, I can't undo what I have done or stop the coming horror. Stay as far from the rails as you can and check around your house for hidden lines lightly covered by dirt. God have mercy on our souls."
"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, except at West Hampstead Thameslink, St Pancras International, Farringdon, City Thameslink, London Blackfriars, London Bridge, East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, Three Bridges, Haywards Heath, Wivlesfield, Burgess Hill, Hassocks, and Preston Park".
They're two, they're four, they're six, they're eight,
Shitting bricks and mauling mates.
"The TOCs were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many franchises. And they have a plan."
I know now why you subsidise affordable mass transit. But it is something I can never do.
You could live in Charlotte, do most of your work remotely but visit the UK twice a month and probably come out ahead.
I wonder if a sentient tram is more or less satisfied depending on your technique for depositing the token.
Let's all post how much our transit costs are!
My monthly bus card (good anytime) is about $80, and that's pre-tax money, so more like $60 out-of-pocket. Looks like the most you would pay to ride our one little commuter rail line is about $250/month.
They're two, they're four, they're six, they're eight,
Shitting bricks and mauling mates.
So great.
I think we spend about $400/month in gas. Maintenance for the cars on top of that is still less than a car payment, but not cheap. Probably $600/month is a reasonable estimate of our transportation costs.
They're not allowed to sell them in Texas because the dealers have a monopoly on car sales and there aren't any Tesla dealers here, or something. So people buy them out-of-state but I think it makes it tricky to get them serviced.
Aside from that, if they're free, we're all over it.
You can send me the money and I'll mail you one.
Or, I can't figure out why it isn't the answer, but no one else in these discussions ever thinks it is. Like, it's economically viable to live in super-dense neighborhoods, but there's no economically viable way to build them?
A few things: Manhattan levels of density require more intensive infrastructure than more typical urban density, which means that, unless you need that density, it's hard to justify financially. Furthermore, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing: what makes that density desirable* requires that much density to happen. If you just randomly built 8 blocks of Manhattan apartments in any given city, you wouldn't end up with Manhattan conditions. Among other things, you'd need constant inflow, because there'd be a constant outflow of people moving just a few blocks away where they can get a little more elbow room while still being a couple blocks from this vibrant cluster. And that's where you get into the mixed-income thing: everyone in Manhattan is accepting certain restrictions (shared walls, little or no private outdoor space, with none of it truly private), which means that you can't relocate a short distance to evade those restrictions. At which point physical segregation becomes beside the point. That is, the difference between UMC suburb and UC suburb isn't just self-sorting: the latter features actually-bigger houses on actually-bigger lots, and the UMC folks can't afford it, and live a few miles away (because all those large lots add up). But as I said above, the difference between a UMC and UC block in Manhattan can be 1/8 mile, and the divisions are often not going to be that stark (because it's not rigidly defined by acreage; it's a doorman building next to one without, or brownstones that are intact across form ones that are 2-3 units).
Mixed income aside, it's a long-standing problem in urban planning of how to achieve urban vibrancy in the absence of forced density. People (seem to) prefer not to live in rowhouses and apartments, but you need at least some of that to support the retail that makes a place walkable. In the abstract we know how to do it, but actually making it happen is trickier.
*tremendous amounts of street retail, cultural richness, a bazillion jobs, transit, 24-hour city
Its about 50 cents to ride a maxi taxi here, which is basically a jitney. Its not bad if you can get one to stop, and don't mind being stuffed into a microbus with 14 other people, a crazed driver and loud soca music. I usually drive, though.
People (seem to) prefer not to live in rowhouses and apartments, but you need at least some of that to support the retail that makes a place walkable.
On the "seem to", I wonder how much the rowhouse style of construction saves on costs. Foundations, driveways, sewer pipes, and the like are expensive. If you can share most or some of those expenses, I'd think it would make it a lot cheaper, but I don't really know how to price that out.
"Ever since I can remember I always wanted to be a train operating company"
People (seem to) prefer not to live in rowhouses and apartments
Is this a peculiarity of English speaking countries? Because cities in most other places seem to be overwhelmingly apartments, and nobody appears to be bothered.
I certainly wouldn't want to live without my own access to outside and, while I don't want an actual yard, I wouldn't want to live without a patio either. Where would I put the grill?
I mean, how far should I have to carry groceries?
That's done here, but it is illegal. I don't think it is pleasant to be the guy with the balcony above the guy with the balcony and the grill.
We live in a small flat with a balcony. It's fine. I'm pretty sensitive to noise, so I wouldn't want to live in a converted flat again* as they are terrible for that, but purpose built flats are fine.
Glasgow style tenements are great. Often with high ceilings, and quite a lot of interior space, considering how dense the population can be for a given area of land.
* i.e. where someone has converted a house into two or more flats.
Don't rowhouses have tidy little narrow backyards?
Illegal to build a balcony? Shurely shome mishtake?
Yes, but mine is small enough that it is really just a patio. There isn't anybody back there. Just a very steep hill (I can't walk it without grabbing trees) and, as I learned the hard way, some poison oak.
246: Illegal to use a grill on a balcony. Or, within ten feet of a structure.
As far as I know it's not illegal for me to have a barbecue on the balcony but it is a breach of my (long) leasehold agreement.
Personally I much prefer living in a flat than the alternative, but then I'm really not a garden person.
I don't know why everybody assumes living in a yurt is worse than living in a flat.
If your job is transhumant animal herding in cold, dessicated regions, it's probably better.
Even if not, no upstairs neighbours wearing clogs.
How the Banks Stole Higher Education ...April 24
Train costs in the UK are insane for the distance. We have a commuter rail which goes into the northern state, and to take a bus from my neighborhood on the south of the city, transfer to the commuter rail (different company), and take it an hour north to a northern suburban town is $8.50 one way, adding up the bus + train costs. Taking it into Wisconsin would be more, but not terribly more. Our commuter rails tend not to hook up to other major cities, but our major cities are more spread out.
Amtrak is expensive though not quite UK expensive, and I don't know if people commute on it. Checking Portland -- Seattle (4+ hour train ride, 3-4 hour drive depending on traffic) is $26 one way if you book 2 weeks in advance, so less than half the cost of London Manchester. We also have cheap bus travel aimed at college students (Megabus) and Chinese immigrants (Chinatown bus), which can get you to nearby cities for often well under $20, in addition to Greyhound, which is more expensive but cheaper than trains and more extensive. In the US, "nearby" means within 8 hours drive. These buses aren't very commuter friendly, but by the time you're going those distances commuting would be a giant pain.
northern state = state to the north of us.
Coaches are *relatively* cheap here (particularly given the disparity in petrol costs). If I got the one to Manchester at 7pm, it would cost £13. But it would take 5 hours.
We're airbnbing our place for a ridiculous amount while we're away later this year. And while we're traveling we're mostly doing Eurpoean budget airlines because they're so so much cheaper than trains. Seats for 6 people from Italy to Spain for $220 total.
I had no idea airplane tickets could be so cheap.
We thought it was a mistake or something, that it was the price per person instead of total.
Of course we've been warned that they'll do anything they can to get more out of you- assigned seats were extra which we paid for since we have to sit with kids, we failed to pay for that once and ended up with our then-2 year old 10 rows behind us. But another scam we were told about is that there are no electronic boarding passes, and if you want to print one at the airport it's $50 extra (for a $35 ticket!) so make sure you have access to a printer while traveling.
Is this a peculiarity of English speaking countries? Because cities in most other places seem to be overwhelmingly apartments, and nobody appears to be bothered.
I thought about specifying "Americans", but didn't want to get into it. I don't know why it's true, but it is true: ceteris paribus, Americans prefer detached living. Perhaps true for other English-speaking peoples but undeniably the case here.
I prefer ironic detachment, severally and not.
Follow up question from yesterday: Most of the benefits recommended above to wring out of a developer assume that the development is in the city center. If there is a plan in motion already, and it is in a designated area-of-stability (environmental compromises are a fait accompli), and too far away to make retail/walkability make any sense, what are useful chips to ask for? Besides playgrounds?
But another scam we were told about is that there are no electronic boarding passes, and if you want to print one at the airport it's $50 extra (for a $35 ticket!) so make sure you have access to a printer while traveling.
At a push you can bring up the email on your phone/tablet and get them to scan the barcode off that. I did that last time I flew.
How is that not an electronic boarding pass?
263: Make them promise to never, ever do it again.
Would it be crazy to have them include a shuttle which is open to the public and also stops at the town square, grocery store, and medical district?
261. Certainly true of England, less so of Scotland.
Availability bias? The places Americans tend to visit abroad are probably more apartment-heavy than the same countries at large.
For Americans it's also somewhat age based. Millennials are more willing to live in high density urban housing than older generations. IME, Australians are at least as likely if not more so to prefer single family homes with yards than Americans.
Trying to find US equivalent statistics.
263: Paying for municipal bus service out to it? I have no idea how that works, but if it's a possibility, that'd be a thing. Underground parking? Design for stormwater control (like, drainage gardens or whatever the hell green designers do)?
Rain gardens are a big thing here.
How is that not an electronic boarding pass?
Well it's called an e-ticket, and in some cases it includes a boarding pass. Some airlines are fine with just a passport and a reference number, and will print a physical boarding pass. Some (like Ryanair) want the actual barcode, whether on paper or otherwise.
Perversely, the vast majority of what the Census puts out on housing treats the housing units as the basic unit of interest, not population. The best I've found is that in 2014, 74% of Americans lived in single-unit structures, including both detached and attached, and only 13% lived in structures with 5 or more units. 6% lived in mobile homes, boats, RVs, vans, etc.
IME, Australians are at least as likely if not more so to prefer single family homes with yards than Americans.
It's the serenity of the place.
How many of those vans are down by the river?
More of 263: I don't have a feel for your environment. But if there are any similar developments that exist where you think "That's a good one", see if there's anything that make sense to ask for, similarity-wise.
263: Ask them to change the name from "Jefferson David Apartment Homes" to "The Estates at Not Enslaving People Place."
Thanks!
I think this is basically a good one - townhomes, dense-ish for the area, individually sold. It's just in an area that we'd like not to develop, but that ship has probably sailed due to a 2009 agreement. But we can maybe extract some nice things.
Oh, hey, ask people who know things about trees whether there's something you want to ask for in terms of landscaping? Like, are there good trees as opposed to shitty trees in terms of what it'll all look like in thirty years, or allergies, or environmental considerations that I fail to understand? I think specific tree decisions may be a big thing.
Yes, it is. I have no idea beyond that.
If you don't want to deal with the consequences of picking the wrong tree, there are charities that will have them planted in places where they can't possibly inconvenience you. Israel and various rain forests appear to be common choices.
Related: the town should have a forester. Urban forests are a big deal, for a lot of reasons you can think of. If a full-time forester is impossible, someone at Planning should have it in their portfolio, and they should find money to hire a private company to survey the existing urban forest, make recommendations, etc., and then those recommendations can be applied by the Planning person.
One example from here: if your development cuts down trees, you need to replace them with comparable total caliper*. Your plans need to include street trees, and the forester reviews your plan for suitability. Etc. Just a day or two ago CityLab (at the Atlantic) had an article about the quantifiable value of urban forests.
*how you measure tree size: diameter of trunk at 36" above ground. I don't actually know how they define "equivalent caliper", but if you cut down a big, old tree, you need to replace it with a bunch of smaller ones.
We have a town forest whose name is Phil.
And if you're haggling, you could haggle total amount/quality of trees up.
Oh, huh. You said it's in an environmentally sensitive area where it's kind of a shame that it was approved at all, but it's unstoppable now. Someone who knows what's environmentally sensitive about the area, and what the problem is with building there, may have a clear idea about what would make it less objectionable. Stormwater control is what I came up with, but this is really not my thing -- there's got to be a person you can find who can give you a locally tailored enviro wishlist. If not within the town government, someone at U Texas?
283: an old colleague of mine is the urban forrester in Austin, TX. I dunno if there's anything like that in Ladybird's locale, but if there is, they're probably the next thing to a Communist by Texian standards, so they'd likely be a good ally in all of this.
Actually, wherever LBJ may be located, possibly your old friend might be able to find a local expert for her through the forester's network. You wouldn't still be in touch with them enough to provide contact info?
Yep, I was just going to do that, wanted to make sure there wasn't an obvious person to talk to in LBJville
I don't know if the county extension office can help municipalities and not just individuals, but Texas has those and here it's the best place to go for information on what to plant and so forth.
192/195: just a friendly reminder that, despite its convenience, Uber is a profoundly evil company. All people of goodwill are strongly encouraged to seek out a competitor service whenever and wherever possible.
297: Are any of the other ones better? I see an ad for one on the MBTA whose ad isn't good enough for me to remember the name. But they said they were charging the driver a flat fee and not a percentage.
297: That doesn't even seem regular evil, let alone the profound kind. Trying to hire away your competitors employees is how salaries go up.
I will, however, also check out Lyft.
300: we can disagree about whether Uber's actions in that particular instance are evil--that link is only meant to be representative. If that doesn't stir you, this may be better. Or, alternatively, here is a good defense of Uber that nonetheless acknowledges that they are in fact evil and that the author has switched to using Lyft.
Yes. I'm fine with saying however evil Uber is, the previous taxi system was worse.
Some years ago I had to go to Manchester by rail on short notice from London. It was £220. I have flown to NYC for less. The full return fare at peak time for the 70 mile journey to London from here is something like £50; outside commuting hours it is very much cheaper -- with my Decrepit Person's railcard, around £20 and on Sundays around £12.00
Everyone responsible for the privatisation of British Rail should be tried by a People's Court and after the verdict sentenced to life on commuter trains to London.
301: I use Lyft instead of Uber as they seem less evil (less creepy management, less stories about exploitative practices), but has anyone done the investigation into precisely how much less evil they are?
re: 303
Off-peak Ealing to Oxford is £21.60. Peak is about £50.
Top Gear, iirc, did a show where they bought and insured a cheap second hand car, fuelled it, and drove it to Newcastle from London, all for less than the cost of the full price standard train fare.
For more irony, they should have filled the boot with coal.
With Lyft at least you can tip, though of course that's retail feelgoodism.
Deeply confused by 306.last since I just looked up fares and they ranged GBP 50-120. Is the missing piece that they resold the car at the end of the trip?
re: 309
Nope. They bought a car for under £100, which you can easily do if you look for a junker in decent running order. My first car cost me £25 quid (2004 ish), and I drove it for nearly 2 years. At the time the walk-up price for the train was over £200. Looking, it seems to be around £130 now.
Huh. I haven't actually tried, but I'd expect it to be hard to find a car that starts at all much under $1000 here. But maybe I just literally don't know what I'm talking about.
You said it's in an environmentally sensitive area where it's kind of a shame that it was approved at all, but it's unstoppable now
The owner owned about 150 acres back in 2009, and agreed to donate 2/3 of it to parkland in exchange for much higher density on the remaining acreage. Most of that has been sold off and developed, since. This is the last chunk. So it wasn't a terrible deal all around, but it all long pre-dates me and mostly pre-dates the current master plan. Nevertheless, it's changing hands now, and does need approval, so there's an opportunity.
311 is about what I was going to say. I poked around Craigslist and looked at what I saw under $500. The ones I looked at all said they wouldn't pass inspection or were about to need major work.
In 1996, I got $600 for a trade in on my car and it didn't have a working transmission. Forward was great, but reverse didn't work. I told them this and they told me that if I could drive it there under its own power, they would give me $600.
That is a really surprising US/UK difference. I wonder why that is?
Anybody want to go in on this one with me?
I'd pay fifty cents to see if I remember how to drive stick.
I'm thinking he'll want something over $10k.
The "$1" in the header wasn't serious? I feel cheated.
If it was a bit lower, I could maybe work a trade with him for our newer, old car.
I think the Top Gear guys bought their car at an auction, which is a way to get very very cheap cars, but where it's very much buyer beware and you need to know what you are looking for.
I bought mine from someone at the university, and it was in terrible cosmetic order. Huge dents and rust all along the passenger side where someone had hit it with a van or something while it was parked. But ... apart from a water tank that eventually sprang a leak, and central locking that was broken when it was stolen (from me), it drove fine.
I'm not sure I'd want to trust a 100 quid banger if I didn't know about cars or have a friend who did.*
* I don't know about cars.
316: With that grammar I wouldn't be surprised if the seller wants a deposit sent by Western Union.
If you've never been to Leechburg don't put on airs. I once saw their high school production of Footloose.
I once saw their high school production of Footloose.
So... Footloose?
Even if I could get him to take an even trade, that's probably the kind of thing you can't just do without telling your spouse first, right? Even if she has a different car.
I've heard in auctions here you might get the vehicle ID number to look up history but you often don't have an opportunity to physically inspect, so it only makes sense if you're buying in bulk.
325: "Can't" is a funny word. You certainly "can" do that sort of thing without telling your spouse. Maybe she'd find it a delightful surprise?
324: Sally and Newt's school just did Footloose this last year. I had 80s earworms for a week.
327: I guess only my name is on the title.
I thought the Carter Center had eliminated 80s earworms.
316: That guy could make a lot more if he played the indie rock saddo market right.
|| This is really good. Much closer to Tracy Kidder than to EliteDailyThoughtCatalog.mic
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/
|>
332: I keep seeing links to that (mostly from one person) and it never loads - keeps returning errors.
333, try in the insecure version sans s in https:
http://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/
What was the listing in 316? It's gone now.
332 is good; also, The Soul of a New Machine is excellent.
Well, that was unexpected. For the time being, no environmentally sensitive development, period. I had thought we were just voting on a minor change.
335: It was a Ford Galaxie 500, a cool-looking car after which the much-loved Boston band was named.
In high school a friend of mine had a Ford Galaxie with three on the tree. It was the least reliable transmission I have ever seen on a running car in my life (including 314 above). He used to have to open the hood and move something with a screwdriver to get it to go into gear.
He used to have to open the hood and move something with a screwdriver to get it to go into gear.
That must have been fun when stopped at lights.
Also, it wasn't like every time he had to open the hood to get it into gear. It was nearly always only just the first time after starting the engine.
A guy I went to school with and his sister had to go to the ER one day because they got CO poisoning while riding in the car as it was driven outside.
We had shitty cars in a way kids today don't understand.
338 is interesting indeed! Will the development go elsewhere in town or is it just dead in the water?
or is it just dead in the water
I see what you did there.
A child born in the year 2000 will have never played tag in the back two rows of seats in a moving station wagon that had the seat belts deliberately disabled to stop the buzzer from going off.
And with cars today, if you crashed one into the post office had enough to knock off pieces, you probably wouldn't be able to just pick up the pieces and drive away without telling the owner of the car or anybody else.
Grandma really moved the Overton Window on bad driving with that one, and right before I turned 16.
I don't know! I'm pretty confused by the whole thing and trying to get people to explain their reasoning to me retroactively. At the time, I asked people to explain their reasoning, but didn't press much for a more helpful answer.
I mean, I think it was the right vote. But I don't know if the other people who voted felt that it was so ecologically destructive that nothing should go there, or if it was just a bad proposal.
349. True, that. The original (Iconic!) Minis had the engine installed in such a way that the distributor was directly behind the grille. So any time it rained hard it got wet and the engine cut out. You dried it with the towel you had learned to carry, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and carried on.
How long would the bag last before it melted?
I don't remember that ever happening. It wasn't on the hottest part of the engine. What usually happened was the rubber bands holding it on perishing. Theoretically, it might then have blown into some moving part, so you kept an eye on it.
These things happen. My grandfather had a Model T (before my time), and the fuel injection was gravity fed through a hole that, on a level surface, was at the bottom of the tank, slightly to the front. However, said my granddad, if you were trying to negotiate a steep hill and were low on fuel, the level would fall below the intake and the car would stop. You tried to make sure you refilled frequently, but in case of need the accepted kludge was to reverse up the hill, so that the intake was better aligned.
Farewell, My Lovely. (E.B. White on the Model T.)
341 Growing up my neighbor had a mint condition 1963 Ford Galaxie with a three on the tree manual transmission. By the time I was in HS his younger son (who was 2 or 3 grades older than I) was driving it and used to give me lifts into school. It was a very cool car. And the son was a crazy cool guy, he had some NY state swimming records that may well still stand and set a couple of them while tripping on mescaline. The father died in his sleep napping on the couch. The son later married their Colombian housekeeper. Weird family.
The guy I know didn't even have a housekeeper or a swimming record.
My first car had a crank starter and a manual choke and a door that wouldn't latch but the *best part* was that the lug nuts had the wrong twist on one side of the car, so driving slowly loosened them, and I found this out when both those wheels came off the axles. That's an exciting feeling.
I could pick up the boot end of the car, and I think after freshman year of crew I could pick up the engine end just to show off, and then it died.
----
On real estate developments and college students: it seems relatively new that students *could* raise rents anywhere that was already a town, let alone a city. I asked my townie-gownie friend from Portland if her parents thought of students as too rich, when growing up, or just louche and slobby, and rumor has responded: not rich! Rents went down if you had to rent to students. And yet R33d certainly had trust-fund kids even in the 1980s.
I nearly moved into a student-aimed development in Da\/is, but I visited on a Wednesday evening and it was already shaking with "pre-party". On Wednesday? I said. Yes, because many students have figured out how to have no Friday classes.
My first car had a crank starter and a manual choke and a door that wouldn't latch but the *best part* was that the lug nuts had the wrong twist on one side of the car, so driving slowly loosened them, and I found this out when both those wheels came off the axles. That's an exciting feeling.
So much so that I'm surprised you're still alive. You must have been going pretty slow.
It wasn't a car that *went* fast, but it was "an Island car", meaning useful as long as it wasn't expected to go into the city or to get over any of the mainland hills.
A Renault ... uh... I can't remember the model. The 4CV looks right and the name seems familiar but surely I'd have remembered suicide doors. (Although, as the passenger door opened whenever I turned left and I had to lean over and close it, maybe not.) Engine looks right.
My dad and I did a lot of fixing-up on it when we got it, which is to say I cleaned and followed instructions, but I have driven with brakes I'd replaced myself. A useful comparator for "am I doing this as if I really cared?"
And it was great working with my dad, not least because he was so gleeful at having a car apart in the yard. He was an engineer brought up to be respectable in the South, and his mother would have just died. We tried hanging the engine from a tree but second-growth Doug fir are not as useful for that as oaks.
"am I doing this as if I really cared?"
My dad never got so ambitious as to work on brakes. He did install his own seat belts. Not replacing them, but installing new ones in the back of the van (right near the the "not to be occupied while vehicle is in motion" sticker).
360/etc.: A few years ago I took this picture just a block or two east of the University of Minnesota.
I wanted to murder someone even before I saw the other side, which included ""Starting at $179,900!".
With a couple of roommates paying cash, that could be cheaper than the dorm.
Especially since your parents are buying it for you!
I meant cheaper for them assuming they're paying either way.
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