A city here in Norway had issues because rich people would just pay the $75 fine instead of following the parking regulations (ie time limits). Somehow repeat offenses did not escalate the punishment.
Or they have unstated standards. People will regularly complain that my city (Milwaukee) doesn’t have enough parking when they really mean parking that is some combination of free, on street and adjacent to their destination. Which… sure but there’s a $5 garage a block away with 300 empty spaces.
There is an issue in some areas where most to all of the parking spaces are privately owned and not publicly offered at any price but in theory a culture of paying a fair price to store your large personal property would encourage those private holders to offer spaces up to the public and solve that issue too
Something that can solve this issue is removing the free spaces entirely. If all parking is a minimum of $5, then the garage is fine. But if there are SOME free spaces, people will circle to blocks for hours trying to find one. People are weird.
Interestingly it's easier in most markets for people to buy more of a scarce supply of houses at any price than it is for the same person to occupy parking spaces. I know you're being a bit facetious, but housing is a fundamentally more complex component of the economy, as well as being the easiest plaything of people with money; the only way housing wouldn't be so expensive is if most places never put constraints in place in terms of building, while putting serious constraints on buying. Much like trying to out-exercise a diet of cookies and fudge won't work, out-building an endless source of capital that wants to bank on renters having no choice is a losing game. We need a lack of dampers on one side, and huge dampers on the other.
How is a slab of asphalt or concrete, optionally with corrosive/toxic chemicals stored in underground containers, maximizing the value of the land? Something must be really fucked if that is what our society truly incentivizes.
Bike rack, sidewalk, or parking lot... The value of that land is in people wanting to travel to and from it. Notice how all the national car parks are near forests and other nature-y places.
The idea is that the politically active homeowners follow their self interest when they support policy which discourages new housing construction, driving scarcity in the housing market to raise prices.
Whenever you see the word "value," the critical question is "who's value." In the case of capitalism, it is wealth-weighted-people. In order to understand how the world works, picture a random sample of 10 wealth-weighted-people and ask yourself whether or not (screwball action) benefits them.
I mean, I think throwing out all zoning may be an over-step. I sure as hell don't want a chicken factory built next to my residence.
However, a scale-back of zoning (like what CA state recently did - threatening the "builder's remedy" on cities/counties that didn't plan to expand housing appropriately) is probably a good idea. CA also recently made it easier to basically convert SFH to essentially 6-plexes (cost is an issue, so it's not an immediate fix).
The major issue with most of America's woes has to do with us being an effective oligarchy and money having more say on what goes on than what most people want.
That's not what Euclid v. Ambler did, however. We had controls on legitimate health and safety concerns (e.g., pollution) prior to that ruling. The ruling dramatically increased the scope of police powers expressly and specifically against housing - things like floor area ratio, setbacks, number of habitable units, heights - that had not been within that scope before. It was unabashedly racist and classist, even in the text of the opinion.
> Family-friendly land use reforms make for more vibrant, joyous, and welcoming cities—they’re good for the entire city. Other cities hoping to stem the tide of families flowing to the suburbs should follow Austin’s lead.
Every single time I read about land use, I feel like people are running head first into exactly the point and still completely missing it. People think others must have the same opinions and worldviews as they do, so they don't even consider the real reason land use policies are they way they are. They don't realize that people are just racist.
Maybe you read this and think "that's crazy, I'm not racist and I am against upzoning!". Well, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the person who is so passionate about keeping the neighborhood's "character" that they will go to every single local planning meeting to keep black people out. I'm talking about the person who will talk about how they don't want "big city problems". I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The exclusion is the point. Over and over and over again I see well-meaning people think they can just convince people that it makes it cheaper, convince people about the economy, surely that will be the breakthrough! But it's racism. It has been racism ever since the first zoning laws that banned laundromats next to houses, knowing landromats were mostly owned by the Chinese. It's been racism ever since highways divided cities into the "good side" and "bad side".
Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs.
> Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs.
Counterargument: The same/equivalent zoning, land use and NIMBY problems happen in countries that are racially homogeneous.
I live in a city in Québec that is, according to 2018 census, 94.2% white. And the land use, parking and "neighborhood's character" policies are present. The divide is among the socioeconomic status.
The core underlying thing that is driving exclusionary zoning is not racism, but classism. But racial exclusion is the bonus on top because race and class are often related.
When zoning was beginning to be broadly implemented in the 1930s the core goal was to limit apartments. Apartments were filled of relatively low income, working class renters. They were often also racial minorities too. Two core reasons why wealthy single family home owners wanted to push them far away.
You are making the exact same reductivist mistake but in the other direction.
> I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The fact that you are making the huge logical jump from "I don't want crime in my neighborhood" to "You must hate black people!" says more about your assumptions and biases than it does people who simply don't want crime - regardless of the type of person who is committing it.
Why are you so quick to lump. Disagree with this individual, sure, but they gave you a lot of specific claims that you can argue against. Additionally, you’re implying that this person represents everyone that you disagree with, which is childish and crazy.
> since neighborhoods are not allowed to screen prospective buyers on an individual basis, using building restrictions and high-prices is the blunt tool available for limiting influxes from populations that have much higher rates of crime.
Let's translate.
"screen prospective buyers on an individual basis": neighborhoods cant deny certain people from having housing
"limiting influxes from populations that have much higher rates of crime": gives the first paragraph defines black people as a population that has a higher rate of crime, this is pretty much explicitly saying "building restrictions are a tool to limit influxes of black people".
> "limiting influxes from populations that have much higher rates of crime": gives the first paragraph defines black people as a population that has a higher rate of crime, this is pretty much explicitly saying "building restrictions are a tool to limit influxes of black people".
No, I'm saying you are getting the causality inverted. You then "translate" what I am saying by inverting what I am saying and then call me names. How about you argue with exactly what I write rather than trying to "translate" it.
2) The only tool available for keeping out crime, is to keep housing prices high and to keep out low-income housing projects, because low-income people disproportionately commit more crime.
3) Even though this is sub-optimal and I would like a much more fine-grained tool for keeping out crime (eg, being allowed to run criminal background checks on every person moving into my neighborhood), it is the only tool I have to protect my family and my children, and so I feel no moral guilt about using it.
4) Because black people have 10X-30X higher rates of crime, and higher rates of poverty, ANY policy that keeps out criminals or keeps out low-income populations will disproportionately keep out black people. But the end goal is not to keep out black people, that is not the point of the policy, that is an unfortunate side-effect caused by the higher-crime rates and higher rates of poverty among black people, which I have no power to fix.
It's a lot easier to label things racist than it is to address why some groups commit more crime or why people might not want to have more crime in their neighborhood.
Is someone who points out black populations have a 10X to 30X higher crime rate inherently an immoral racist?
Is any policy -- even if prima facie race neutral -- that tries to limit higher-crime-rate populations from moving into a neighborhood inherently racist and immoral if said policy has a disparate impact on black people?
My friend no longer send his kids to his local playground because the young men at the local scattered site public housing project were engaging in crazy shoot-out in the playground. Is it morally wrong for other people in the city to observe this and then oppose a housing project in their neighborhood? What is the moral thing for them to do? What policy do you actually suggest for keeping crime out of a family.
1. Is someone who points out black populations have a 10X to 30X higher crime rate inherently an immoral racist?
2. Is it immoral and racist to point out that because of (1) any policy which aims to reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood, will therefore have 10X to 30x the impact on black people?
3. Is it immoral and racist to advocate for any policy which will reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood? If not, which policies do you support?
This is bananas. You are chastising people you disagree with for not recognizing the nuance of the situation, and that they ought to recognize others don’t hold the same views as themselves. Fair point.
Then you forget you just said that and say the real reason is that everybody that doesn’t agree, for the most part, is racist. This is an insane and hateful point.
The sort of belief that if held sincerely can hurt people. Where do you get the confidence or the merge to claim something like this? You’re the one that seems to be comfortable ascribing beliefs to people you don’t even know.
This is the "not a racist bone" defense, implying that you need privileged insight into someone's intent, motivations, and personal beliefs to call them racist. Which of course we rarely ever have.
Another choice is to look at outcomes. Racial exclusion is a predictable result of these policies. It does not need to be the intent. People who consistently support policies with racist outcomes can be called racist. It's a useful shorthand, not a conviction of their soul.
Racism doesn't need to be a matter of personal malevolence. Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient.
> implying that you need privileged insight into someone's intent, motivations, and personal beliefs to call them racist. Which of course we rarely ever have.
Which is why loosening the definition has backfired so spectacularly. Some ascribe racism statistically, to the point that in some circles it's done a full circle to all white people being inherently racist. Most, however, perceive it as a moral judgement. If you loosen the definition to remove intent, it's no longer a moral judgement.
> Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient
But it's not racism by most peoples' definition. It is by the neo-academic revisionist one. But that loosening gave cover for the actual racists to come out and become accepted again. (If everyone who wants a parking lot is called a racist, it takes the bite out of the guy waving a Confederate flag. And if you're called a racist despite knowing you had no racist intent, it makes the other people being called racist more sympathetic.)
It's worth pointing out that some of the most problematic zoning regulations were indeed enacted due to racism. Huge minimum lot sizes with large setbacks, for example, made housing very expensive — combined with redlining and making it extremely difficult/impossible for PoC to get loans <- Very racist.
NIMBYs are self interested. It is that simple. Establishing a community and keeping outsiders out is nothing new. Is it morally wrong? Probably. Relaxing land policy required people to share and give some of what they have. Sharing is hard.
Where in the US is this happening? We're talking about developers developing land for landowners while other people are able to stop them for "reasons."
Is it morally wrong to take somebody's money for taxes? You never have an absolute right to your land. e.g there's eminent domain, or talk to the Texans that have oil rigs next to their McMansions drinking their milkshake.
I get it, but this person is comparing apples-to-oranges. Austin, TX is not Brooklyn, NYC.
Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
> By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and expensive to open new childcare centers.
> Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable, and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
What makes it onerous? Why does Brooklyn not have that luxury?
Because Austin, TX has a very small and quaint downtown district with big, wide sidewalks and lots of extra concrete space in the roadways and ample gaps between storefronts and pedestrian walkways. Downtown BK has none of that.
You do realise that for most of New York's history, when its construction was most productive, we had no real urban planning? If anything, the abundance and diversity of spaces in Brooklyn should make it easier to deregulate where childcare can be provided.
"Ample gaps" means walking and cycling FURTHER (often across paved, dangerous, parking lots) to get to your destination. American cities are built for cars, not for people.
In my country you can find child care located directly in apartment buildings. Seriously, some people simply buy an apartment on the ground floor and turn it into daycare facility. I guess it could be done in Brooklyn as well, if only zoning rules allowed it.
> In my country you can find child care located directly in apartment buildings.
Wow, that's very forward thinking. I'm curious what country this is. In my country, you can find child care literally in your own home!
We have this crazy system where instead of blowing all your money on status-seeking expenses like residing in the "right" neighborhood, monthly vacations, eating out all the time, luxury vehicles, golf outings, designer clothes, a closet with $35k of footwear that is valued only because of the name on the label rather than the build quality, daily microbrews and lattes, you and your partner make the decision in which the higher-earning partner works and the lower-earning partner stays home, and you budget accordingly.
I know this sounds like a very radical idea, that the long-term future of the children could be prioritized over what Frank would think about you not renewing the country club membership, but in my country, the law actually permits it!
Just be aware that there can be an evil microagression lurking in the details. If you are the sole source of income for the family, and you are male, you will be committing a Misogyny with a Capital M, because it's EMPOWERING to take orders from, and earn money from, a man in a necktie with whom one is not personally affiliated with, but earning money from a man IN PAJAMAS, from whom taking orders is optional, is PATRIARCHY. So, be aware of the pitfalls of taking this option.
I recommend looking into your country's laws to see if it is permissible to have a single-earner household.
In my country, there is also this brand-new legal structure called "marriage", in which the non-earning party is compensated by law in the event of dissolution. Judges will consider the financial impact of the dissolution on the non-earning party and issue a transfer payments order to the earning party.
But again, be aware of subtle patriarchy in this arrangement. When an employee is fired without cause by a man in a necktie after walking into their cubicle, is is extremely EMPOWERING, and the man in the necktie has no legal financial obligations to the employee beyond accrued paid time off. But if a man in PAJAMAS fires a non-earning partner because the non-earning partner was impregnated by an attractive man at a nightclub, and a judge requires the PAJAMA MAN to pay the non-earning partner half of their assets in addition to 30% of their salary in perpetuity, that is PATRIARCHY.
Please consider the options available to you in your country. I understand that not all countries have these novel legal structures, and I myself have only recently been informed of their recent development in my own country.
I have heard, however, that the wild notions of "not living an extravagant lifestyle to impress others", and "raising your own children might provide more life satisfaction than writing spyware for adtech companies", and "marriage" are catching on in other regions, so I'm optimistic these may be options for you soon!
That said, I fully understand if you still opt to outsource childcare. Sure, the risk of physical and sexual abuse is significantly more likely at the hands of a random daycare facility employee than by the child's own biological parent, but I empathize that this is a small price to pay for exercising your God-given right to take orders from a man in a NECKTIE, who has no personal allegiance to you, who can fire you for no reason, with no further compensation than a corporate severance check in the amount of $1372.16. That ought to buy at least a few sessions of therapy to deal with your toddler's abuse at the daycare facility and the fact they barely even saw, let alone knew, either of their parents, so that's good!
---
When you're retired, remember that your teenager dying of a fentanyl overdose in a random alleyway because it was the only way to escape his pain of knowing that making a Powerpoint slide deck to pitch a way to force MORE ads down the ...
If you're going to point out that place X is not place Y, you are required to spell out the difference that makes it actually relevant in this context. Anything else is just noise.
Property taxes are assessed on land value + "improvements" (i.e., structures) value. A land value tax doesn't tax the imps. This generally encourages doing more productive things with the same parcel of land.
I think it's a bit different: property tax taxes the actual property that is located on the piece of land, i.e. single family home, for its current value. Land value tax works differently: tax authorities ask themselves a question: "what is the most profitable thing one could possibly build on that land?", and they tax you based on that. Which means that if you build a single family home in the neighborhood of 7-stories apartment buildings you will be taxed as if you owned an apartment building. And the only way for you to be able to afford those taxes is to actually build 7-stories apartment building there.
EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws might not be worded the way I described it, but the net effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?" question.
The problem is that it could work that way, or it might not. It depends on what tax rate the government sets, which could change depending on the time, the economy, and the current administration. If the government guesses the magic rate that discourages speculation without discouraging other relatively low-value businesses that society still needs to function, then yes, that's a great system. However, I'd the government overshoots or undershoots, then the land value tax doesn actually fix anything.
Property tax = you do not own the land, the government does and leases it to you. Setting the rate to the highest rate is stupid because it means the government confiscates all the land and leases it only to e.g. casinos and you get nothing but casinos.
Also, the idea is to make it heavy enough to neutralize the incentive to just hold the land, which is clearly not productive yet still lucratively "compensated." It's a highly regressive tax. The original highly regressive tax, as can be seen in some of the terminology (landlord) even if the details have drifted since.
I think there's far too much wiggle room in the analysis of land-value vs improvement and would strongly prefer a solution that moves away from perpetual ownership and towards revolving leases instead. The way to do this non-coercively would be to gate the enormous tax benefits we bestow to real estate windfalls (1031 exchanges, the $500k exclusion, the 15% and 20% capital gains rates) behind conversion to a 99 year lease. We won't see the shade beneath those trees but our grandkids will.
Anytime you see a plot that is just a parking lot with an attendant in a dense city, that is just a land speculation play. That parcel is still extremely underused, but putting a parking lot on it lets the owner extract some rent in the mean time. A land value tax would ideally be high enough that the owner of that plot would be losing significant amounts of money even with that parking lot there, and would be incentivized to sell it to someone who wants to actually develop it immediately.
The suburban version of this phenomenon is the self-storage place. Build cheap steel structure(s) that can generate a little income now while holding land that will presumably be more valuable in the future.
Isn't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a vacancy? It's the same problem, just with different clothes: a blighted building in the middle of an expensive city rather than a vacant field in the middle of an expensive suburb.
I can't speak to Austin, but I would expect to see the same thing in the form of low-value land use. It happens whenever appreciation competes with or outstrips productive activity. Which is extremely common.
Investors should pay the collective for exclusive use of a scarce resource, they should not get paid for holding exclusive access to a scarce resource. That's bad and backwards. Unless you're an investor, of course ;)
> Isn't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a vacancy?
Yes, but that's due to financing restrictions. Unless one is planning on putting a tax burden on every piece of real estate analogous to full leverage, the cost of financing an empty unit providing unsufficient motivation to fill it seems to imply a similarly-scaled LVT wouldn't either.
These loans are typically fixed rate and long term. The cost of leverage is nothing next to what appreciation has been, and it's the latter that LVT seeks to neutralize. So it would increase the incentive to actually use the land rather than simply hold a deed to the land.
Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic. If you ask me to defend it, I simply won't. Rolling leases are the way.
>Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic.
It isn't possible to calculate the tax with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't mean it is problematic to calculate with a close enough approximation. The process of multivariate analysis is relatively simple, relies upon public data, can be open sourced and is self correcting over time (with the addition of new data via sales).
It's also absolutely impossible to avoid. $0 needs to be spent on enforcement. You can't cart land off to a tax haven. If you don't pay you forfeit the land and property - simple. You don't need legions of forensic tax accountants to uncover a trail of transactions like you would for income taxes. You don't need arbitrary rules about where somebody's main residence is. You don't need elaborate machine learning models to detect VAT carousel fraud.
You need a bunch of publicly available data and a very simple model.
Article's recommendation is just another meaningless tug in the tug-of-war over parking. Conspicuously unmentioned is the public pressure to deal with "you have to drive everywhere and there's no parking when you get there."
If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use and there's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."
In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. And, really, many functional specs for anything. Your car, for example, has a ton of money and engineering put into it solely for the case of a crash. Heck, if you own a car, period, you spend far more time out of it than you do in.
> In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well.
But as a result of land use regulations.
Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
I wasn't intending my comment as anti-housing. More pointing out that "unused for most of the time" is a somewhat useless metric.
Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was?
Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
Numbers only mean something in a context. Doing that is more efficient, but at the cost that if you change jobs you also have to move. So it tends not to happen unless either real estate costs are high (i.e. towns/cities) or employees are pressured into it for the efficiency benefit of a large employer (company towns).
But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply.
"Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
You are loading the discussion, though? I never made an appeal to efficiency. I only pointed out that "unused most of the time" is pointless. Heck, for schools it is especially pointless, as they are specifically only designed for daytime use during school hours. Would be akin to worrying about how much space you have to set aside to support a stadium for sports. Similarly kept empty the vast majority of the time.
And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case.
Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.
> Heck, for schools it is especially pointless, as they are specifically only designed for daytime use during school hours.
That's how they're used, but that doesn't mean that's optimal or that doing otherwise is "pointless". For example, a high school campus is typically suitable for any kind of school, and using the same building to hold college night classes would hardly be pointless.
> Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
Only if those costs are unrelated. You could lower staffing costs significantly by, for example, offering on-site living quarters for staff, but not if that's prohibited. Likewise, land use rules can constrain where you can put the facility, which in turn affects how much you have to pay staff, who may then have a longer commute and refuse the job unless you pay more.
> many jobs have been service oriented for a long time.
It's not obvious what that has to do with it. A nail salon, barber shop, veterinarian, etc. are all service jobs, but they're also all small business where the owner/family could benefit from living on the same property as the business.
Fair that you can look to reclaim use of buildings during non-school hours. Though, that almost certainly gives rise to more need of parking, such that I'm not clear on where that would go for this discussion. :D Indeed, local schools to me are used by some church groups on weekends. Such that the parking lot is filled on weekends for that. (And churches, themselves, are often mixed use for preschools and such.)
I think the efforts to lower costs by being creative is worthwhile. I am personally skeptical of many initial ideas, but that is no reason not to explore them. And you are right that many of these things almost certainly interplay with each other. But, the more expensive the housing and general land use is in an area, the harder all of these tradeoffs will become.
Regarding the service jobs, many older service jobs were traveling services. You can't go to a roofer's to get your roof fixed. Nor did you historically go to the doctor's office. Since delivery vehicles were rather costly and large, it wasn't uncommon for most people to not go and buy things on the regular. Certainly you didn't load up the equivalent of a car's worth of groceries to bring home. Indeed, the milkman was a job. None of those services would have had you living where you work, as it were. And labor jobs, which were also very common, were definitely not performed at home. So, again, I'd be interested in the numbers.
If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school.
I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
If you live somewhere hostile to walking, like Los Angeles, that's not an option. You're describing living somewhere that's already solved the car-oriented urban-hellscape problem a priori.
> If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school.
I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading done.
Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
As a kid who had go get up at 5am to catch a bus to school, maybe they might. The issue is not riding the bus, but impeding on sleep. As a teen, I would have preferred to wake up st 6:30 to be to school at 7AM rather than wake up at 5AM to be there at the same time because I'm the first stop. My mom wasn't kind. I did survive, but I also had less sleep which isn't great for a growing mind. I'd drive my kid in the same situation. Hell, I drive my kid now because I don't want a kid who can't write letters yet walking around any real distance without me. Especially in a semi-rural area where we've encountered wildlife and feral pets that weren't dangerous to me, but were dangerous to her.
Many schools are starting later for this reason. Just because the bus may take long doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues that should be solved to make buses a more viable option.
And just don't ever have events at the school for families to go to? Or are we talking not just "school busses" at this point? I'm all for public transit. Is a heavy lift for a lot of urban locations, though. And certainly not in the budget control of most schools.
My kid's middle school had a small lot for staff and about a dozen additional spaces. Overflow parking was on the street. Zero need for a giant parking lot. If grandma can't walk the two blocks, then drop her off closer. Everyone else is less than 5 minutes from the school the handful of times a year there was a schoolwide event.
The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
The schools I remember from denser city living would have had you parking far more than 2 blocks away. Sadly, there was also a fair bit of crime not far away, either. :(
Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common.
Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
The busses aren't running because our spendthrift government "cut spending" to enable property tax cuts. This is a big unspoken part of the charter-school transition.
How far back are you going? It was a problem in the 90s and early 2000s, even with multiple buses. It doesn't take very many parents to pick up or drop off at once to create a traffic jam. What amazed me was how many parents just accepted the jam instead of dropping off or picking up about a block away.
By eliminating parking requirements. You can't make meaningful progress on other things while continuing to force one mode of transportation on everyone.
Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
Drive then, that's not a problem. The issue is adding 800 single occupancy vehicles into a queue built for 40 buses (with the same capacity!) that we all pay to maintain for this exact purpose, then acting surprised by the traffic.
Your children will get a better education, in far fewer hours, without the commute, without suffering under the prison bitch culture of the public school social heirarchy.
If your child is even just slightly neuroatypical, sending them to public school is child abuse, and you are a bad person, full stop.
You are no different from the guy who drinks a fifth of whiskey and beats the shit out of his kids - you're just keeping your hands clean by outsourcing the beatings to the kids on the playground.
In my place (a large city in Europe) there is no parking for schools and only a handful of parents sometimes come with cars, presumably because they drive on to their workplace afterwards. Most people by far come on foot, the rest with bicycles (in my case, for some reasons we didn't pick the school closest to us so it's about 5 minutes away by bike, 15 minutes by foot).
In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours.
I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
In our region of the US, charter schools have come in and fucked up the whole process so we can't even make those kinds of reasonable municipal policy choices.
I think here in Belgium private schools are just a bit more common than public schools (56% private from a quick Google search) but I don't think they are very different. (although in my opinion the very existence of private schools is weird, as they're not that common where I come from).
Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
How does parking fix this, though? The same number of cars need to arrive and leave at approximately the same time. Each car takes up the same amount of space. And it's not like children can all just run around the parking lot looking for their own parent's car, which is almost certainly in a different place than it was at drop-off, never mind the danger of having a parking lot full of lost children wandering around.
Since you aren't expecting that many cars to be parked, necessarily, you can take advantage of the parking lot to provide a queuing area for the cars that are showing up. Yes, you probably want it done in such a way that cars can, in fact, also park during events. But it doesn't have to be a fixed configuration lot.
There's a difference between parking mandates versus parking built at the developer's discretion. Parking mandates (what the article talks about) are onerous because they force the developer to build more parking they potentially would have otherwise (based on a rational assessment of the opportunity cost of the space parking uses vs. the benefit to their business).
I think few people would argue against allowing developers to build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than the cost of it.
Been there done that. with the added twist that all the parking lots were city owned and required a parking permit, of which there were a limited number, to get one of the limited number of permits you had to get on a waiting list by filing a form in person a city hall and then wait and hope someone let theirs lapse. eventually got a call about one after a few years when already planing to move. in the mean time had to park on the street about four blocks away as anything closer was 2 hour parking.
Similar story with my home towns community college, where they had a habit of building new buildings on what used to be parking lots but refused for years to build new lots and when asked by the student counsel to build a parking structure the college president refused to consider it. I suspect if he hadn't had a had a reserved parking spot less the 30 yards from his office door his tune might have been different.
The would expect developers to be driven mainly by the fact that constructing buildings for businesses and residences is much more profitable than building adequate parking. I'm not saying the current system is ideal, but leaving it up to developers, a group highly motivated by short term profits, will likely create as many problems as it solves.
There are places I avoid going due to inadequate parking. I assume business would take that into account when deciding where to lease space. Why does the government have to be involved with this?
To answer my own question, I think the externalities of insufficient parking space is something government could address. Like by allowing much stricter enforcement of parking prohibitions. Or just outright not allowing street side parking. Like governments don’t typically provide free houses to people, why should they give free house to personal vehicles? Why should my take dollars go to pay for storage of other people’s personal al property?
> Or overpopulated cities. Cities can be too large.
There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to this point. We're still on the beneficial end of densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes on practically every metric.
Zero evidence noise pollution is an unavoidable consequence of density. Plenty of New York apartments have better acoustic isolation than the average suburban dwelling. (If anything, as buildings get higher the problem gets simpler.)
Stupid title, land use policies make everything that uses land expensive. I can assure you childcare being expensive is not bottlenecked by land, but by caretaker's wage levels driven by the fact that they need to rent in the same expensive location. It's equally expensive to hire someone into your home without the need of any extra land, but much less expensive if they live in.
Which is still land use regulations making childcare more expensive. Otherwise the daycare solves the problem by providing an on-site apartment for its employees.
Learning about the wages paid at my son’s daycare was the main motivation for my wife and I to keep him at home for the 18 months before he was old enough for pre-k.
The teachers at his daycare were paid about 30% of the living wage required to live in our town. They were all driving from at least an hour away for the opportunity to earn a non living wage. There is no way I could reasonably expect any of them to be concerned with my child’s well being when they could even afford their own lives.
Isn’t it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare is much more a function of Baumol’s cost disease than parking minimums or land use requirements? It’s hard to bring any kind of desirable productivity revolution to childcare - it’s inherently a pretty one-to-few proposition at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how you get away from the labor intensivity of it all.
Absent subsidies (whether provided by a government, employer, religious order or other specific community), I’m honestly not sure how a safe, sensible, desirable product can be delivered at what anyone would consider a reasonable cost.
I grant that there is probably some room in there for in-home child care that probably more closely resembles a hobby business than a true commercial endeavor - I can see zoning type issues being completely determinative on whether child care at this scale is feasible or not. But I also don’t think those are the types of arrangements that the author of TFA was really describing.
> Isn’t it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare is much more a function of Baumol’s cost disease than parking minimums or land use requirements?
If labour were the principle cost component of childcare, yes. That does not appear to be the case. (EDIT: Never mind, labour is the principle cost [1].)
Consider, for example, how the problem would be solved if people could (legally) run childcare out of their apartments.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly open to the argument that land use policies are a problem. And I am no fan of minimum parking rules. At the same time, I also know that parking doesn't cease to be a problem just because you don't want to build it. I've had the joy of going to a doctor's office where I couldn't figure out where to park within a 5 block radius of it. What was a convenient doctor when I lived within that 5 block radius turned into a miserable experience when I moved a bit further away. Same experience when dropping the kids off for a birthday party in some denser part of town. (At least there I can gripe to the kids saying they need to bike the 10 miles next time. Isn't that far, all told. :D)
Back to the question, labor strikes me as a thing that would be rather expensive for child care. Specifically, child care that isn't staffed by teenagers and has adequate staffing for the number of kids being cared for.
Fascinating paper that I'll have to dive on later. I don't know that I understand it well enough to consider the "out of their own apartments" claim. What page supports that? I saw the 70+% of cost is labor. I confess I was surprised not to see liability insurance in there.
Edit: Realizing I may be reading the original comment wrong. I don't remember the apartment claim on my first read, so I thought you added it with your edit. I'm guessing it was there and I just didn't remember it?
What percentage of the labor costs are being used to paying the laborers rent? How much is it in paying the laborers food? For healthcare? For education? How expensive are all of these things in San Francisco compared to other cities?
If you think about it, the "productivity revolution" is only needed because of how expensive it is to run a childcare facility in a place where there are lots of children. If you lower the intensity with which a facility in a city needs to produce income to carry the cost of parking minimums and housing for its employees, then that would eliminate the problem too.
In-home childcare that resembles a hobby is called "parenting" and in the absence of a commercial option one half of a couple often ends up spending all of their time doing this until the child is of age to be placed in school. I think a lot of the problems our society has come from not valuing this or denigrating it as "hobby" work.
I won't try to tell anyone what they should do with their time, but all I'm saying is that calling "keeping children in a home and raising them" a "hobby business" feels like it's denigrating that type of work when it's actually really important to having a functioning society. If you hire someone to change diapers and bottle-feed your child I'm not going to judge you for it. I've had similar conversations with my partner about our baby. Modern society is complicated and we're expected to live so intensely that it's hard to find time.
By "in-home child care hobby business" I assume what nocoiner means is: If San Francisco childcare costs are $25/hour why is anyone pouring coffees or flipping burgers if looking after three kids brings in $75/hour?
Obviously some people don't have the space - but many do. Surely it's lucrative enough that there shouldn't be a shortage of supply?
SF childcare costs are usually around ~20 an hour per child in 1:2 (under the table, where folks who can afford it get an indirect subsidy from the government via Medi-cal and dodging fica) nanny shares where the nanny goes in your home. It’s a vaguely healthy market from what my friends tell me.
Doesn’t work in the suburbs where you won’t find a family 3 blocks from your house with a similar age child. You would think it would be more common though given how much useless sqft folks in the suburbs have.
"in-home child care hobby business" means stay-at-home parent.
But in the non-urban areas around here there are in-home childcare setups, that have to follow specific laws. I assume something could be done similar in urban areas, but the size of house that is amenable to it may be limited in number.
I mean, we subsidize stay at home parents in the US today: you pay your daycare with after tax money, their employees pay taxes, the business pay taxes, health insurance. Stay at home parents get a huge tax break in the form of the doubling of tax brackets, it’s pretty scandalous.
Not everyone is in this situation though. My wife is a stay at home mom because there is no way any after-tax wage she could earn would exceed the cost of child-care. So it makes more financial sense for her to stay home.
Urbanists strike me as being cult-like at this point. It's like absolutely everything is a pain in the arse in a city, and it's all because of some sort of conspiracy by Big Car.
A more balanced viewpoint is that there are many advantages to living in a city, but cheap land and raising a family are not one of them. The suburbs of smaller towns have always been easier places to raise children. Rural areas, or smaller villages with schools, were better before the car was even invented.
A non-urbanist counterpoint: here in Canada, the federal government has been making big strides towards $10/day daycares. No anti-car. Just extra payments to daycares. We live in an urban area (middle of Toronto), succedsfully raising children, lots of childcares around, and daycare costs have gone down by 50%. No need to move to the suburbs.
One interesting aspect of childcares in this area: they buy out an entire house. I believe that a major part of making a childcare work financially is to use it to cover a mortgage/invest in real estate. Without that, there is very little profit to be made.
Expensive, maybe, but I see child-care groups in downtown Washington, DC, fairly regularly--three-year-olds with a hand on a rope, grownups in front and back. I could walk in fifteen minutes past two day-care centers.
177 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadThere is an issue in some areas where most to all of the parking spaces are privately owned and not publicly offered at any price but in theory a culture of paying a fair price to store your large personal property would encourage those private holders to offer spaces up to the public and solve that issue too
(There's something of a way that this may be true, but people won't like it.)
However, a scale-back of zoning (like what CA state recently did - threatening the "builder's remedy" on cities/counties that didn't plan to expand housing appropriately) is probably a good idea. CA also recently made it easier to basically convert SFH to essentially 6-plexes (cost is an issue, so it's not an immediate fix).
The major issue with most of America's woes has to do with us being an effective oligarchy and money having more say on what goes on than what most people want.
Every single time I read about land use, I feel like people are running head first into exactly the point and still completely missing it. People think others must have the same opinions and worldviews as they do, so they don't even consider the real reason land use policies are they way they are. They don't realize that people are just racist.
Maybe you read this and think "that's crazy, I'm not racist and I am against upzoning!". Well, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the person who is so passionate about keeping the neighborhood's "character" that they will go to every single local planning meeting to keep black people out. I'm talking about the person who will talk about how they don't want "big city problems". I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The exclusion is the point. Over and over and over again I see well-meaning people think they can just convince people that it makes it cheaper, convince people about the economy, surely that will be the breakthrough! But it's racism. It has been racism ever since the first zoning laws that banned laundromats next to houses, knowing landromats were mostly owned by the Chinese. It's been racism ever since highways divided cities into the "good side" and "bad side".
Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities away from "pure" suburbs.
Counterargument: The same/equivalent zoning, land use and NIMBY problems happen in countries that are racially homogeneous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/prague-is-the-third...
The core underlying thing that is driving exclusionary zoning is not racism, but classism. But racial exclusion is the bonus on top because race and class are often related.
When zoning was beginning to be broadly implemented in the 1930s the core goal was to limit apartments. Apartments were filled of relatively low income, working class renters. They were often also racial minorities too. Two core reasons why wealthy single family home owners wanted to push them far away.
> I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
The fact that you are making the huge logical jump from "I don't want crime in my neighborhood" to "You must hate black people!" says more about your assumptions and biases than it does people who simply don't want crime - regardless of the type of person who is committing it.
Let's translate.
"screen prospective buyers on an individual basis": neighborhoods cant deny certain people from having housing
"limiting influxes from populations that have much higher rates of crime": gives the first paragraph defines black people as a population that has a higher rate of crime, this is pretty much explicitly saying "building restrictions are a tool to limit influxes of black people".
The parent comment is agreeing with me.
No, I'm saying you are getting the causality inverted. You then "translate" what I am saying by inverting what I am saying and then call me names. How about you argue with exactly what I write rather than trying to "translate" it.
1) YIMBY's want to keep out crime.
2) The only tool available for keeping out crime, is to keep housing prices high and to keep out low-income housing projects, because low-income people disproportionately commit more crime.
3) Even though this is sub-optimal and I would like a much more fine-grained tool for keeping out crime (eg, being allowed to run criminal background checks on every person moving into my neighborhood), it is the only tool I have to protect my family and my children, and so I feel no moral guilt about using it.
4) Because black people have 10X-30X higher rates of crime, and higher rates of poverty, ANY policy that keeps out criminals or keeps out low-income populations will disproportionately keep out black people. But the end goal is not to keep out black people, that is not the point of the policy, that is an unfortunate side-effect caused by the higher-crime rates and higher rates of poverty among black people, which I have no power to fix.
Is any policy -- even if prima facie race neutral -- that tries to limit higher-crime-rate populations from moving into a neighborhood inherently racist and immoral if said policy has a disparate impact on black people?
My friend no longer send his kids to his local playground because the young men at the local scattered site public housing project were engaging in crazy shoot-out in the playground. Is it morally wrong for other people in the city to observe this and then oppose a housing project in their neighborhood? What is the moral thing for them to do? What policy do you actually suggest for keeping crime out of a family.
2. Is it immoral and racist to point out that because of (1) any policy which aims to reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood, will therefore have 10X to 30x the impact on black people?
3. Is it immoral and racist to advocate for any policy which will reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood? If not, which policies do you support?
https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xfds110-introduction-sta...
Then you forget you just said that and say the real reason is that everybody that doesn’t agree, for the most part, is racist. This is an insane and hateful point.
The sort of belief that if held sincerely can hurt people. Where do you get the confidence or the merge to claim something like this? You’re the one that seems to be comfortable ascribing beliefs to people you don’t even know.
Another choice is to look at outcomes. Racial exclusion is a predictable result of these policies. It does not need to be the intent. People who consistently support policies with racist outcomes can be called racist. It's a useful shorthand, not a conviction of their soul.
Racism doesn't need to be a matter of personal malevolence. Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient.
Which is why loosening the definition has backfired so spectacularly. Some ascribe racism statistically, to the point that in some circles it's done a full circle to all white people being inherently racist. Most, however, perceive it as a moral judgement. If you loosen the definition to remove intent, it's no longer a moral judgement.
> Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust outcomes is sufficient
But it's not racism by most peoples' definition. It is by the neo-academic revisionist one. But that loosening gave cover for the actual racists to come out and become accepted again. (If everyone who wants a parking lot is called a racist, it takes the bite out of the guy waving a Confederate flag. And if you're called a racist despite knowing you had no racist intent, it makes the other people being called racist more sympathetic.)
Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators because it was entirely reasonable and not onerous to do so. Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
> By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and expensive to open new childcare centers.
Again, Austin, TX is not NYC.
What makes it onerous? Why does Brooklyn not have that luxury?
Wow, that's very forward thinking. I'm curious what country this is. In my country, you can find child care literally in your own home!
We have this crazy system where instead of blowing all your money on status-seeking expenses like residing in the "right" neighborhood, monthly vacations, eating out all the time, luxury vehicles, golf outings, designer clothes, a closet with $35k of footwear that is valued only because of the name on the label rather than the build quality, daily microbrews and lattes, you and your partner make the decision in which the higher-earning partner works and the lower-earning partner stays home, and you budget accordingly.
I know this sounds like a very radical idea, that the long-term future of the children could be prioritized over what Frank would think about you not renewing the country club membership, but in my country, the law actually permits it!
Just be aware that there can be an evil microagression lurking in the details. If you are the sole source of income for the family, and you are male, you will be committing a Misogyny with a Capital M, because it's EMPOWERING to take orders from, and earn money from, a man in a necktie with whom one is not personally affiliated with, but earning money from a man IN PAJAMAS, from whom taking orders is optional, is PATRIARCHY. So, be aware of the pitfalls of taking this option.
I recommend looking into your country's laws to see if it is permissible to have a single-earner household.
In my country, there is also this brand-new legal structure called "marriage", in which the non-earning party is compensated by law in the event of dissolution. Judges will consider the financial impact of the dissolution on the non-earning party and issue a transfer payments order to the earning party.
But again, be aware of subtle patriarchy in this arrangement. When an employee is fired without cause by a man in a necktie after walking into their cubicle, is is extremely EMPOWERING, and the man in the necktie has no legal financial obligations to the employee beyond accrued paid time off. But if a man in PAJAMAS fires a non-earning partner because the non-earning partner was impregnated by an attractive man at a nightclub, and a judge requires the PAJAMA MAN to pay the non-earning partner half of their assets in addition to 30% of their salary in perpetuity, that is PATRIARCHY.
Please consider the options available to you in your country. I understand that not all countries have these novel legal structures, and I myself have only recently been informed of their recent development in my own country.
I have heard, however, that the wild notions of "not living an extravagant lifestyle to impress others", and "raising your own children might provide more life satisfaction than writing spyware for adtech companies", and "marriage" are catching on in other regions, so I'm optimistic these may be options for you soon!
That said, I fully understand if you still opt to outsource childcare. Sure, the risk of physical and sexual abuse is significantly more likely at the hands of a random daycare facility employee than by the child's own biological parent, but I empathize that this is a small price to pay for exercising your God-given right to take orders from a man in a NECKTIE, who has no personal allegiance to you, who can fire you for no reason, with no further compensation than a corporate severance check in the amount of $1372.16. That ought to buy at least a few sessions of therapy to deal with your toddler's abuse at the daycare facility and the fact they barely even saw, let alone knew, either of their parents, so that's good!
---
When you're retired, remember that your teenager dying of a fentanyl overdose in a random alleyway because it was the only way to escape his pain of knowing that making a Powerpoint slide deck to pitch a way to force MORE ads down the ...
Correct. Parking mandates are even less sensible as a policy in NYC than in Austin, TX.
EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws might not be worded the way I described it, but the net effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?" question.
I think there's far too much wiggle room in the analysis of land-value vs improvement and would strongly prefer a solution that moves away from perpetual ownership and towards revolving leases instead. The way to do this non-coercively would be to gate the enormous tax benefits we bestow to real estate windfalls (1031 exchanges, the $500k exclusion, the 15% and 20% capital gains rates) behind conversion to a 99 year lease. We won't see the shade beneath those trees but our grandkids will.
This isn't really a problem in downtown Brooklyn or Austin, though.
I can't speak to Austin, but I would expect to see the same thing in the form of low-value land use. It happens whenever appreciation competes with or outstrips productive activity. Which is extremely common.
Investors should pay the collective for exclusive use of a scarce resource, they should not get paid for holding exclusive access to a scarce resource. That's bad and backwards. Unless you're an investor, of course ;)
Yes, but that's due to financing restrictions. Unless one is planning on putting a tax burden on every piece of real estate analogous to full leverage, the cost of financing an empty unit providing unsufficient motivation to fill it seems to imply a similarly-scaled LVT wouldn't either.
Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic. If you ask me to defend it, I simply won't. Rolling leases are the way.
It isn't possible to calculate the tax with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't mean it is problematic to calculate with a close enough approximation. The process of multivariate analysis is relatively simple, relies upon public data, can be open sourced and is self correcting over time (with the addition of new data via sales).
It's also absolutely impossible to avoid. $0 needs to be spent on enforcement. You can't cart land off to a tax haven. If you don't pay you forfeit the land and property - simple. You don't need legions of forensic tax accountants to uncover a trail of transactions like you would for income taxes. You don't need arbitrary rules about where somebody's main residence is. You don't need elaborate machine learning models to detect VAT carousel fraud.
You need a bunch of publicly available data and a very simple model.
If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use and there's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
But as a result of land use regulations.
Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was?
Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply.
"Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case.
Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.
That's how they're used, but that doesn't mean that's optimal or that doing otherwise is "pointless". For example, a high school campus is typically suitable for any kind of school, and using the same building to hold college night classes would hardly be pointless.
> Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem.
Only if those costs are unrelated. You could lower staffing costs significantly by, for example, offering on-site living quarters for staff, but not if that's prohibited. Likewise, land use rules can constrain where you can put the facility, which in turn affects how much you have to pay staff, who may then have a longer commute and refuse the job unless you pay more.
> many jobs have been service oriented for a long time.
It's not obvious what that has to do with it. A nail salon, barber shop, veterinarian, etc. are all service jobs, but they're also all small business where the owner/family could benefit from living on the same property as the business.
I think the efforts to lower costs by being creative is worthwhile. I am personally skeptical of many initial ideas, but that is no reason not to explore them. And you are right that many of these things almost certainly interplay with each other. But, the more expensive the housing and general land use is in an area, the harder all of these tradeoffs will become.
Regarding the service jobs, many older service jobs were traveling services. You can't go to a roofer's to get your roof fixed. Nor did you historically go to the doctor's office. Since delivery vehicles were rather costly and large, it wasn't uncommon for most people to not go and buy things on the regular. Certainly you didn't load up the equivalent of a car's worth of groceries to bring home. Indeed, the milkman was a job. None of those services would have had you living where you work, as it were. And labor jobs, which were also very common, were definitely not performed at home. So, again, I'd be interested in the numbers.
If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school.
I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.
Busses.
The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common.
Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.
Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
Your children will get a better education, in far fewer hours, without the commute, without suffering under the prison bitch culture of the public school social heirarchy.
If your child is even just slightly neuroatypical, sending them to public school is child abuse, and you are a bad person, full stop.
You are no different from the guy who drinks a fifth of whiskey and beats the shit out of his kids - you're just keeping your hands clean by outsourcing the beatings to the kids on the playground.
In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours.
I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
I think few people would argue against allowing developers to build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than the cost of it.
if you stop right there, your statement is far more credible
Isn't the clear implication you shouldn't own a car?
Similar story with my home towns community college, where they had a habit of building new buildings on what used to be parking lots but refused for years to build new lots and when asked by the student counsel to build a parking structure the college president refused to consider it. I suspect if he hadn't had a had a reserved parking spot less the 30 yards from his office door his tune might have been different.
To answer my own question, I think the externalities of insufficient parking space is something government could address. Like by allowing much stricter enforcement of parking prohibitions. Or just outright not allowing street side parking. Like governments don’t typically provide free houses to people, why should they give free house to personal vehicles? Why should my take dollars go to pay for storage of other people’s personal al property?
There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to this point. We're still on the beneficial end of densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes on practically every metric.
Case in point: the densest parts of Manhattan don't smell. (Minus trash days.) Neither do Paris, Tokyo or Seoul.
Hint: It did smell. Every spring and a few other times each summer.
Zero evidence noise pollution is an unavoidable consequence of density. Plenty of New York apartments have better acoustic isolation than the average suburban dwelling. (If anything, as buildings get higher the problem gets simpler.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
I'd like you to meet my neighbors (both above and below) from the last time I was unfortunate enough to have to live in an apartment.
The teachers at his daycare were paid about 30% of the living wage required to live in our town. They were all driving from at least an hour away for the opportunity to earn a non living wage. There is no way I could reasonably expect any of them to be concerned with my child’s well being when they could even afford their own lives.
Absent subsidies (whether provided by a government, employer, religious order or other specific community), I’m honestly not sure how a safe, sensible, desirable product can be delivered at what anyone would consider a reasonable cost.
I grant that there is probably some room in there for in-home child care that probably more closely resembles a hobby business than a true commercial endeavor - I can see zoning type issues being completely determinative on whether child care at this scale is feasible or not. But I also don’t think those are the types of arrangements that the author of TFA was really describing.
If labour were the principle cost component of childcare, yes. That does not appear to be the case. (EDIT: Never mind, labour is the principle cost [1].)
Consider, for example, how the problem would be solved if people could (legally) run childcare out of their apartments.
[1] https://raisingnewyork.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/1...
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly open to the argument that land use policies are a problem. And I am no fan of minimum parking rules. At the same time, I also know that parking doesn't cease to be a problem just because you don't want to build it. I've had the joy of going to a doctor's office where I couldn't figure out where to park within a 5 block radius of it. What was a convenient doctor when I lived within that 5 block radius turned into a miserable experience when I moved a bit further away. Same experience when dropping the kids off for a birthday party in some denser part of town. (At least there I can gripe to the kids saying they need to bike the 10 miles next time. Isn't that far, all told. :D)
Back to the question, labor strikes me as a thing that would be rather expensive for child care. Specifically, child care that isn't staffed by teenagers and has adequate staffing for the number of kids being cared for.
Edit: Realizing I may be reading the original comment wrong. I don't remember the apartment claim on my first read, so I thought you added it with your edit. I'm guessing it was there and I just didn't remember it?
Now how correct are you?
In-home childcare that resembles a hobby is called "parenting" and in the absence of a commercial option one half of a couple often ends up spending all of their time doing this until the child is of age to be placed in school. I think a lot of the problems our society has come from not valuing this or denigrating it as "hobby" work.
Some people enjoy that work, but a lot of people don't. The empirical result of forcing it is people have fewer children.
Obviously some people don't have the space - but many do. Surely it's lucrative enough that there shouldn't be a shortage of supply?
Doesn’t work in the suburbs where you won’t find a family 3 blocks from your house with a similar age child. You would think it would be more common though given how much useless sqft folks in the suburbs have.
But in the non-urban areas around here there are in-home childcare setups, that have to follow specific laws. I assume something could be done similar in urban areas, but the size of house that is amenable to it may be limited in number.
/s
This is like complaining that you won’t want to have $1M of income every year because you pay more tax. You pay more because you make more.
A more balanced viewpoint is that there are many advantages to living in a city, but cheap land and raising a family are not one of them. The suburbs of smaller towns have always been easier places to raise children. Rural areas, or smaller villages with schools, were better before the car was even invented.
One interesting aspect of childcares in this area: they buy out an entire house. I believe that a major part of making a childcare work financially is to use it to cover a mortgage/invest in real estate. Without that, there is very little profit to be made.