Slashdot Mirror

Folks don't realize how heavily the US Government subsidized their lives in the 50s, 60s and 70s...the government ain't paying anymore

Actually, city governments heavily subsidize low-density housing for the affluent, wasting land on single-family residential homes that could be used for apartments which house more people, bring in more tax revenue per acre, and require less infrastructure per person. Inefficient zoning is why housing is in such short supply and expensive, why cities have so much traffic, and why cities have budget problems. It's all a big mess, and government is the problem. Yes, much of it started after WWII, with government-backed mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction, but these subsidies continue to exist to this day.

And property taxes assessed on the value of the land perversely incentivize people to come out in droves to oppose anything that can raise the value of their properties. For example, relaxed height limits, minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and minimum parking requirements--these things all attract NIMBYs like flies to a feast. It's all one big, fantastic mess.

you can't import more land from China, like you can with other goods.

True. But there are tradeoffs you could make. Maybe a rich guy with a family wants a huge mansion with a yard, but maybe a 20-something who rides the bus would be happy just to have a space all her own, even a tiny one, at a rent she can afford. So build micro-housing, where the same amount of land has many more apartments, and thus the rent per apartment is lower!

Seattle was actually where micro-housing first started out. And Seattle... killed it.

People in the Seattle government have used government power to keep the home builders from making more units of housing that would rent for less. There's less supply, and what supply remains costs more. Lose/lose.

The articles below have floor plans. When I was a 20-something I would have much preferred to live in any of those micro-apartments than to live in a shared space with housemates. But the Seattle city government doesn't think that people should have that choice.

http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/

http://www.sightline.org/2017/03/20/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing-again/

you can't import more land from China, like you can with other goods.

True. But there are tradeoffs you could make. Maybe a rich guy with a family wants a huge mansion with a yard, but maybe a 20-something who rides the bus would be happy just to have a space all her own, even a tiny one, at a rent she can afford. So build micro-housing, where the same amount of land has many more apartments, and thus the rent per apartment is lower!

Seattle was actually where micro-housing first started out. And Seattle... killed it.

People in the Seattle government have used government power to keep the home builders from making more units of housing that would rent for less. There's less supply, and what supply remains costs more. Lose/lose.

The articles below have floor plans. When I was a 20-something I would have much preferred to live in any of those micro-apartments than to live in a shared space with housemates. But the Seattle city government doesn't think that people should have that choice.

http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/

http://www.sightline.org/2017/03/20/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing-again/

Some search came back with this: http://www.sightline.org/2012/...

Developers will never, ever build enough units to drop rental prices. That would be stupid.

This idea only makes sense if these "developers" you name can keep some kind of monopoly. If just anyone can build more units and enter the market, then your idea falls apart. Your idea is that by underbuilding, the developers can collect a premium... but the higher the premium, the more attractive the market becomes, and the more likely some new players are to try to build more units and enter the market.

If the developers have the ability to keep new units from being built, then sure. It's why I'm a big fan of the free market, and not at all a fan of crony capitalism.

There is no incentive whatsoever to build cheap apartments.

Oh, yeah? If there is an underserved market segment, someone could make money by serving it. Your statement makes exactly as much sense as saying there is no incentive whatsoever to build a fast-food hamburger shack instead of a fancy steakhouse. The steakhouse can charge more per meal, but would leave money on the table from the lower end of the market. Someone who wants all the money is incented to build both.

It is true that there are forces working against people who want to build affordable housing. One obvious way to make affordable apartments is to design them to be super space-efficient and just pack more of them into the same space; Seattle has made that practice illegal.

http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/

But that's not the free market failing. That's government putting its boot on the neck of the people who want to build small apartments.

It could very well be that the current property owners used crony capitalism to get the city of Seattle to block the tiny apartment projects. In a truly free market they would be unable to do that... someone would build apartments for the low end of the market as well as the high end.

Outlawing poverty doesn't make it cease to exist. This is not the only example of this, but it is curious that San Fran has so many similar issues. A major reason that there are homeless people in San Fran to start with is the insane cost of living which is made by having the minimum mandatory apartment size be high. In general, in the US there has been in the last 100 years a trend for stricter and stricter zoning laws and related laws. And now cities are actively fighting attempts to come up with workable solutions within the legal codes such as microapartments where shared kitchens and other shared spaces http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/. Do you want to actually make homeless people go away? Then you need to make cheap housing affordable. How do you do that? By getting rid of the unnecessary zoning rules about height, massive number of parking spaces, large yards, etc.

Because that would mean turning off power, water, sewer, phone, and cable services to a large number of people pretty much on a daily basis

No, it wouldn't.

How do you move a water or sewer line without turning it off?

Without turning it off on a daily basis? By building the new line almost to completion before turning it off just once to make the final connections.

You're talking about making homes cheaper so poor people can afford them, you complain that parking requirement make homes more expensive by driving up building costs, why is it irrelevant if this also drives the costs up?

Because then it's a result of natural market forces, not government meddling.

And allowing the sale of goods and property unfit for their intended purpose is also a market failure.

No, it isn't, at least not by any definition of "market failure" that I'm familiar with.

A source is no good if it won't be looked at; and I can tell you, this one won't be.

Then just read the synopsis and assume that it accurately describes the content.

Your original argument about legislated two-car garages has still not been supported.

My original argument is that minimum parking requirements drive up the cost of housing.

the end result is a poor neighborhood, as only people too poor to afford cars would live there.

As I said, developers won't let that happen because the profit motive prevents them from building for the poor.

those spaces are usually taken by patrons of local businesses and people parking to go to work; where to residents park?

Why would those residents have cars if there's no place to park them?

Also, quite often, the reason it's illegal is less to do with zoning laws...and more to do with maintaining property borders and right of way for utilities and infrastructure; the apartment building simply won't fit on the plot while allowing for this so, of course, it is not allowed.

So it's illegal because it's impossible? Should the government prohibit anything that's impossible? That could lead to some very amusing laws!

It's illegal to build housing in high-pollution areas with an elevated danger of catastrophe that would wipe out those homes, potentially killing the occupants?

So it's illegal because nobody would want to build a house there? Should the government prohibit anything it thinks people wouldn't want to do?

We don't get many supporters of totalitarian governments in Slashdot's comment threads. Welcome!

are you saying there's a necessary correlation between economic status and race? Black people must be poor?

No, I'm saying the perception of that correlation led to us passing discriminatory laws, just as the perception of certain grammatical errors led to creating literary tests that prevented people of certain ethnic races from voting.

Sure, poor people don't live near rich people, but that's because they can't afford the prices...

Exactly, and zoning laws artificially raise the price of housing. For example, why does a poor family who doesn't own a car need a 2-car garage? Yet zoning laws say that for every 'x' rooms, you need 'y' number of off-street parking spaces, and this prices poor families out of middle-class neighborhoods.

if you drink and then drive, you are an irresponsible asshole and you deserve punishment.

And what about the cities that encourage that very same behavior?

One could even call it entrapment when the city encourages people to drink and drive and then arrests anyone who does so.

horsepower-deprived 1970s

Um, no. Cars were unmitigated leaded-fuel-guzzling muscle cars (or land yachts, depending on your preference) until the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It would take 20 years of technology before horsepower was restored while keeping MPG high. And as you can see from that linked graph, the 1973's war effects on horsepower were not realized until model year 1977. And since not everyone rushed out to buy new cars at the same time in 1977, that means the vast majority of cars on the road throughout the entire decade of the 1970's were "high" (1990's level) horsepower.

It's those early 1980's cars that were underpowered -- follow-on effects of gas rationing and Nixon price controls.

Actually, you might want to check that. I've heard that trains can actually be worse than cars, and a plane on a long trip is much more efficient than a car. While a short hop flight isn't too efficient, a plane at cruising altitude is actually quite efficient.

Then again, if you can design a high speed rail line to be both efficient(light?) and fast, it would be extremely efficient.

Though this tends to say rail is quite efficient, though using the estimater for the plane shows that the emmisions drop down to half that of the car, solo driver, with a long trip.

A critical point of this estimate might be occupation - the rail estimate assumes 50 passangers per car. Now, I haven't ever used commercial rail, so I have no idea if it's 100% capacity, or 25%. I think 50% might be it.

If you start up a cross-continental rail service and get 50% less occupancy on average, you'd be competing with planes for efficiency.

The occupancy rate is actually to the advantage of the plane, I think.

Don't take me wrong - I think that we NEED high speed passanger rail, not to mention something like a PRT system in the cities(and probably even running between them). Still, I think that a east coast line, west coast line, then two cross continentals would be a very good idea.

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

They were marketed here as luxury cars, and have always been loaded to the gill with electronics that go bad

I think you just pinpointed the problem. The US just saw a tiny amount of the available cars. You only get the "very high end" and back in those days electronics were not ready for prime-time in cars. My Audi had no electronics. The S in 1.8S means "Standard" and as such it had a carburetor, not injection. Even the windows were not electric. My father had a 1983 Audi 100 which ran for 13 years before a tree fell on it. No rust, no engine problems ever.

I once talked to the Volkswagen representative of US sales. Back then (a good ten years ago), he said that the only Jetta sellable was the R32, because a 1.8l 4-cylinder petrol engine was just not in demand. It had to be "big-blcok". The R32, being the only V6 3.2l engine in the Jetta series was as such the only car in demand. Of course, that's the most expensive model and comes with quite a few "extras" standard. In a similar vein, I assume that's why Audis of that period were loaded with tons of gimmicks that weren't really ready for prime time. Similar to the BMW series 7 iDrive fiasco.

Anyway, to me Audi means reliability. In the 3 years, I had the 80, I never had a problem. In the 8 years I had to TT, I had a problem once. A sensor went haywire and erroneously reported that the engine was overheating. It wasn't, but if the board computer flashes "overheating", you can believe me that you stop at once.

However, I'm not here to defend Audi.... It's just anecdotal evidence in the first place.

The reason I post is to explain the perceived inversion in fuel efficiency. We Europeans (perhaps not the people in the UK) do indeed use litres per 100km.

I think it's mainly a cultural difference: to us, it matters how much it will cost to get somewhere. Imagine I want to drive to my mother in law, who happens to live exactly 50km from where I live. As mentioned my car has a 10l/100km fuel efficiency. That means to get there, I have to sacrifice 5l of gas, or at current price of 1.3€/l (Unleaded 98oct RON) I have to spend 6.5€ to suffer her presence. Another 6.5€ to get back home.

In the US, fuel price doesn't (didn't) matter but the distance is very important because the US is very vast. (I went road tripping in the US, you have to see it for yourself if you're European) The priority lies thus on distance. So, if you know that you have a 25mpg car, and you have 15 gallon tank you know you can drive 375miles and as such you know your range, which is very important in a sparsely populated area where you might have to drive for hours before finding a gas station.

Of course, that's my interpretation. Now, there is also the idea that l/100km (or gallons/mile) is a better unit for comparing fuel efficiency. To me miles per gallon is completely unintuitive, so I'm not going to defend either. However, I found some interesting explanations by Googling around.

As for the multiplication by 100, I guess, that's to avoid having to use decimal points. I mean, 0.05l/km does sound a bit silly. ;-)

No no no no. That's an obvious cia attempt to misdirect people's attention.

What we really need is a tax shift. Increase taxes on the consumption of natural resources while decreasing the taxes on labor. Given the example most of us face in technology, this means more people could be hired to write more effecient code rather than just throwing more hardware and power at the problem. The way it is today, it's horribly difficult to hire a new head; instead, managers generally opt to buy more hardware. (See http://www.sightline.org/research/taxes for more on this idea.)