Kinja reply list

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Freddie DeBoerHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 9:57am
And I would add, for New York especially,

1. Impose a truly discouraging tax on mostly-unoccupied apartments (pied-a-terre and investment properties) which have contributed to NYC having both growing total square footage and units for rent AND rising housing prices, and

2. Enforce the already-existing laws against Air B’n’B, which sucks up housing at an unbelievable rate and turns what could be affordable apartments into slightly-cheaper hotels for convention goers.
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  Gary-XFreddie DeBoer
  7/18/16 10:07am
  They were talking about doing no 1 for absurdly expensive apartments and somehow it still caught a lot of flak from everyday people. It’s fucking madness.
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  LuckyDuckFreddie DeBoer
  7/18/16 10:11am
  How would you keep of track of how often every person in New York City occupies their apartment?
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Gary-XHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 10:05am
It’s a mixed bag, though. You want permits to be issued faster, naturally (and trust me, everyone in NYC at least is already pushing the DOB to get those permits out as fast as possible), but you want to be careful that doesn’t start to happen at the expense of proper building code reviews.

Then again, I’ve been fitting out a clinic in the ground floor of a housing building built in Queens that has yet to close out and get a CO, and I have no idea how they’re going to pass the final inspection on it. The built building is wildly different from the drawings and is constructed in a lot of non compliant ways (using wood framing in a non-combustible building type construction, using flex duct work over the length limits prescribed by code, swapping out LED fixtures for cheaper florescent that invalidate the environmental lighting calcs, etc), so it can all pretty much be a nightmare already. Basically, if you wanna talk about all the way building things in this city can get fucked up, we could be here all day.

ETA: I can’t read the linked WSJ article, but does it talk about taking into account things like landmarks into its permit process? That, along with ADA clearances with both the DOB and Mayor’s Office of Disabilities, can really run up the length on permit reviews. I guarantee there’s still people calling all the time to get that shit reviewed as fast as humanly possible, though.
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  Hamilton NolanGary-X
  7/18/16 10:10am
  Love to hear more, feel free to expound.
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  TzaGary-X
  7/18/16 10:14am
  This is an issue. I live in FL during the bom and we did have some flagrant violations of even the policies the average joe knew (like “X distance between buildings plus one foot for every story”). Hell this one condo got the hell sued out of them by a local restaurant because for some reason during construction they dangled scaffolding sideways so it hung over the restaurant’s thatch roof (and we’re not talking by a couple feet we’re talking like a whole catwalk sticking off the side of the condo). Naturally almost no one wanted to go in to what was normally one of the top places on the beach. Heck the guy who built my parents’ house made the septic pipes one size to small and we couldn’t shower if the washer or dishwasher was in use until they fixed it.
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Vanguard KnightHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 9:59am
Hamilton, what bout NIMBYs?

They just shot down a major low income housing expansion recently in my area because no one wanted “those people” around.

If you want non-rich people to be able to live in our nation’s greatest cities—and you should—then you must accept the fact that we need to build a lot of new housing.

From my experience rich and middle class people don’t want those people around. A great example of this is Atlanta.
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  Hamilton NolanVanguard Knight
  7/18/16 10:00am
  They are bad.
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  levarienVanguard Knight
  7/18/16 10:04am
  Austin’s problem in a nutshell. Locals want “them” there to work for minimum wage in their service industry jobs, but they refuse nearby affordable housing, nor will they allow mass transit expansion.
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Sid and FinancyHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 9:57am
The libtards at Gawker won’t be happy until every-damn-one has food, clothing and shelter.
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  libwitchSid and Financy
  7/18/16 10:05am
  jesus, we aren’t we just awful?
  
  Oh wait. I think that is pretty much what Jesus wanted.
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  Sktrooplibwitch
  7/18/16 10:55am
  Depends on how you read the Bible, I guess.
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ChrisMSFHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 10:52am
All of your housing posts are so incredibly devoid of context and information and research, it’s fucking exhausting. Stop doing it. Here are two massively salient points you completely ignored, missed, or simply aren’t prepared to consider:

1) Of course permitting is slow in the cities you mentioned. There’s nowhere to build. And because the cities are exactly the “liberal and progressive” areas you claimed they weren’t, there are more hoops to jump through should you wish to develop what little open land you can find: hoops like environmental and traffic impact studies, hoops like minimum levels of market-rate housing, and more. Those cities aren’t Omaha: land is finite.

2) We are in a bubble. A swollen, distended bubble that will burst soon.Silicon Valley in particular is already ceding jobs to TX and PNW and other areas. What, then, happens with all this new office space and all this new housing you’re begging for? It sits empty, and the market crashes, and things are just as bad but in a different way in a year or two or five. Proper urban planning has to consider today, tomorrow, and years down the line, and easy answers don’t work, and “durrrrrrr build more housing” is about as broken of an easy answer as there is.

Seriously, the lack of depth in your housing posts borders on incompetence and gross negligence. These are so bad they’re dishonest. Stop doing it.
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  ChrisMSFChrisMSF
  7/18/16 2:24pm
  Further: data released today shows that there’s actually a massive availability problem in SF. Too many units are EMPTY: just not the types of units that working people can afford. So again, it’s NOT as simple as “just build more,” because they have. WHAT’S been built is inappropriate, which again feeds back into the slow permitting process. HamNo, do your research homeboy.
  
  http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/b…
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  RiverWalkerChrisMSF
  7/21/16 12:07pm
  hey, Omaha is cramped and shitty.
  
  Maybe when we get last-mile fiber internet here people will start taking this “silicon prarie” thing a little more seriously.
  
  What I don’t understand is why it seems so... whatever, to suggest things like:
  1) high speed rail to empower people to travel further, easier. if it were cheaper, faster and easier to reach big cities on occasion, perhaps people would be less averse to living here.
  
  2) arrange programs to enable people who can’t afford to live in the big city, to GTFO and live someplace more reasonable. sure, moving is expensive and all that. would jobs be a problem? potentially, sure. but isn’t it a better and more solvable problem than the blood-from-a-stone problem of making cheap housing on land thats already packed and ridiculously high-value?
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Jeb! & The HologramsHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 9:54am
“...areas where lots of people want to live...”

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  OhioGrownJeb! & The Holograms
  7/18/16 9:59am
  I always have to laugh when people talk about affordable housing around me in Central Ohio. There is plenty of affordable housing just not in the trendy high desirable neighborhoods. If all the people complaining about it moved into one of the sketchier areas of town, it would be a desirable area and all the overprice coffeeshops and hangouts would follow.
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  NicoOhioGrown
  7/18/16 11:44am
  Ummmm.... then the prices would go up in that neighborhood. You just described gentrification.
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BrianGriffinHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 10:13am
I own several plots of land I purchased for less than $10k/acre. Hell, there’s some places in the southwest that go for less than $20/acre.

If your job only requires a computer, you can work from anywhere. Build where it's cheap (plus there's better renewable energy solutions there).
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  benjaminalloverBrianGriffin
  7/18/16 10:24am
  We all thought telecommuting would have a bigger impact on housing crunches in cities, but the types of jobs that require people to physically be there are the ones at salaries or wages too low to rent or buy in the city.
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  DressagesWithWolvesBrianGriffin
  7/18/16 11:16am
  The issue is, the toilets of the Park West penthouses can’t be scrubbed over the internet, and the people who scrub them can’t commute in from rural New Mexico. Given the choice between “Pay them $30 an hour” or “Pass laws to make it legal to chain people up in the basement”, it’s pretty easy to see which is a better capitalist solution.
  
  When I worked in bars, I knew quite a few barbacks (who are typically squirrely little hispanic dudes who work harder than anybody else in the place) who paid $7 an hour to park in downtown Chicago and made $2.50 an hour plus tip-out from the bartenders. They usually did okay, but it was entirely up to the whim of their coworkers if they made money or paid money at their job that day.
  
  Like another commenter said, it’s the lowest-paying jobs that require physical prescence.
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Frankenbike666Hamilton Nolan
7/18/16 2:06pm
The upscale housing industry is one of the most lucrative in New York, and you can guaranty that they make political contributions. So if the permitting entities are taking too long, take a look at who benefits the most from that: real estate developers who have the money to wait out the process, and those who have existing developments in the market.

The reason the permit process is slow, is that the people in power don’t want to expend the city funds to staff those positions at a high enough level. All they have to do to benefit their “constituents” is have too few inspectors and permit processers, and also to not finance updating the computing systems and software. They’re in a big city, and there are always other things to spend money on.
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  ReversionToTheMeanFrankenbike666
  7/18/16 4:59pm
  let me take what you said and say if differently:
  
  if the permitting process was fast for everyone, what would the value of a quick approval be? nothing.
  
  if the permitting process is painfully slow on the other hand........
  
  a process that needs a political appointee to intervene to make work is of great value to political appointees
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  Frankenbike666ReversionToTheMean
  7/18/16 10:35pm
  Indeed, that is a part of it. It is an impossibly difficult system to fix, too. Because no one has ever succeeded in driving money out of politics, even in socialist countries in which that was the whole theme of their political system.
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EvanrudeJohnsonHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 10:04am
If you are wondering whether it is “progressive” or “liberal” to create a situation in which no poor or middle class people can afford to live in your city: it is not.

You say this, but there are an awful lot of SF and NYC liberals who love the poor and middle class in theory, but only want them around to clean their homes and serve them coffee. They don’t want those people as neighbors.
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pre-emptive sighHamilton Nolan
7/18/16 9:56am
Or here’s an alternative...in a country of nearly 4 million square miles, people could live outside of 3 places.
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  Nicopre-emptive sigh
  7/18/16 11:46am
  Shhhhhh, we don't want more people. Trees are better.
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