Brasilia is interesting only insofar as it was an entire High Modernist planned city. In most places, the Modernists rarely got their hands on entire cities at once. They did build a number of suburbs, neighborhoods, and apartment buildings. There was, however, a disconnect. Most people did not want to buy a High Modernist house or live in a High Modernist neighborhood. Most governments did want to fund High Modernist houses and neighborhoods, because the academics influencing them said it was the modern scientific rational thing to do. So in the end, one of High Modernists’ main contributions to the United States was the projects – ie government-funded public housing for poor people who didn’t get to choose where to live.
I never really “got” Jane Jacobs. I originally interpreted her as arguing that it was great for cities to be noisy and busy and full of crowds, and that we should build neighborhoods that are confusing and hard to get through to force people to interact with each other and prevent them from being able to have privacy, and no one should be allowed to live anywhere quiet or nice. As somebody who (thanks to the public school system, etc) has had my share of being forced to interact with people, and of being placed in situations where it is deliberately difficult to have any privacy or time to myself, I figured Jane Jacobs was just a jerk.
But Scott has kind of made me come around. He rehabilitates her as someone who was responding to the very real excesses of High Modernism. She was the first person who really said “Hey, maybe people like being in cute little neighborhoods”. Her complaint wasn’t really against privacy or order per se as it was against extreme High Modernist perversions of those concepts that people empirically hated. And her background makes this all too understandable – she started out as a journalist covering poor African-Americans who lived in the projects and had some of the same complaints as Brazilians.
Her critique of Le Corbusierism was mostly what you would expect, but Scott extracts some points useful for their contrast with the Modernist points earlier:
First, existing structures are evolved organisms built by people trying to satisfy their social goals. They contain far more wisdom about people’s needs and desires than anybody could formally enumerate. Any attempt at urban planning should try to build on this encoded knowledge, not detract from it.
Second, man does not live by bread alone. People don’t want the right amount of Standardized Food Product, they want social interaction, culture, art, coziness, and a host of other things nobody will ever be able to calculate. Existing structures have already been optimized for these things, and unlesss you’re really sure you understand all of them, you should be reluctant to disturb them.
Third, solutions are local. Americans want different things than Africans or Indians. One proof of this is that New York looks different from Lagos and from Delhi. Even if you are the world’s best American city planner, you should be very concerned that you have no idea what people in Africa need, and you should be very reluctant to design an African city without extensive consultation of people who understand the local environment.
Fourth, even a very smart and well-intentioned person who is on board with points 1-3 will never be able to produce a set of rules. Most of people’s knowledge is implicit, and most rule codes are quickly replaced by informal systems of things that work which are much more effective (the classic example of this is work-to-rule strikes).
Fifth, although well-educated technocrats may understand principles which give them some advantages in their domain, they are hopeless without the on-the-ground experience of the people they are trying to serve, whose years of living in their environment and dealing with it every day have given them a deep practical knowledge which is difficult to codify.
How did Jacobs herself choose where to live? As per her Wikipedia page:
[Jacobs] took an immediate liking to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, which did not conform to the city’s grid structure.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
February 4, 2019
QotD: Brasilia and reconciling with Jane Jacobs
December 10, 2018
Minneapolis abolishes residential zoning to combat racist segregation
I’ve never actually been to Minnesota (despite being a lifetime fan of the Minnesota Vikings), so I didn’t realize that Minneapolis — and presumably other Minnesota cities historically instituted residential zoning to enforce racial segregation:
Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.
On Friday, the City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.
“Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity — which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing — only goes as far as the housing stock.
It may be as long as a year before Minneapolis zoning regulations and building codes reflect what’s outlined in the 481-page plan, which was crafted by city planners. Still, its passage makes the 422,000-person city, part of the Twin Cities region, one of the rare U.S. metropolises to publicly confront the racist roots of single-family zoning—and try to address the issue.
“A lot of research has been done on the history that’s led us to this point,” said Cam Gordon, a city councilman who represents the Second Ward, which includes the University of Minnesota’s flagship campus. “That history helped people realize that the way the city is set up right now is based on this government-endorsed and sanctioned racist system.” Easing the plan’s path to approval, he said, was the fact that modest single-family homes in appreciating neighborhoods were already making way for McMansions. Why not allow someone to build three units in the same-size building? (Requirements on height, yard space, and permeable surface remain unchanged in those areas.)
November 19, 2018
“You call someplace paradise/kiss it goodbye”
The Eagles song “The Last Resort” references a generic paradise, not the California town of that name, yet it fits disturbingly well, as Gerard Vanderleun describes:
Paradise is not a town on some flat land out on the prairies or deep in the desert. Paradise is a series of cleared areas and roads superimposed on an extremely rugged terrain composed of deep, narrow ravines and high and densely wood ridges. The Skyway is fed by hundreds of paved and unpaved roads that twist and turn and rise and dip and then, at their OFFICIAL ends, run deeper still and far off the grid. If you live in Paradise you know there are hundreds of people living back up in those ravines and ridges that would be hard to find before the fire. In those places, the poor are lodged tighter than ticks.
I’ve seen, before the fire this time, people in the outback of Paradise so abidingly poor they were living in trailers from the 70s resting on cinder blocks and at most only two winters away from a pile of rust. These people would have had no warning of a fire, no warning at all. Instead of “sheltering in place” they would have been “incinerated in place.”
In the ravines and forests of Paradise, cell reception was so spotty that AT&T gave me my own personal internet driven cell-phone tower. If those off the grid in Paradise actually owned cell phones they would have been lucky to get an alert. But most of those did not own cell phones, and landlines didn’t run that deep in the woods. When the fire closed over them they would have had no warning. No warning until the trailer melted around them. And then there was, out behind but still close to their trailer, their large propane tank.
November 17, 2018
Modern houses are not flexible
Kate Wagner, of McMansion Hell fame, discusses the pressures that have combined to create the modern western house and why they are not as flexible in use as we really need:
Houses are a particular paradox. We expect them to serve as long-term, if not permanent, shelter — the word “mortgage” even has the prefix mort, death, implying that the house will live longer than we will — but we also expect them to shift in response to our needs and desires. As Christopher Alexander writes in his treatise The Timeless Way of Building, “You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate … to reflect the variety of human situations.”
That is exactly what we want — and we’ve gone about it in exactly the wrong way. We’ve ended up with overstuffed houses that attempt to anticipate every direction our lives could go, when what we need are flexible houses that can adapt to the lives we’re actually living.
But flexibility rarely comes up, as [Stewart] Brand points out in his book [How Buildings Learn], in the fevered brouhaha of building and architectural consumption. And if we’re going to rethink how flexible our houses are, we need to do so at the level of our structures and the way they are built.
[…]
Of course, the premier example of a house designed for stuff is the McMansion, which, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is designed from the inside out. The reason it looks the way it does is because of the increasingly long laundry list of amenities (movie theaters, game rooms) needed to accumulate the highest selling value and an over-preparedness for the maximum possible accumulation of both people (grand parties) and stuff (grand pianos). This comes at the expense of structure, skin, and services. The structure becomes wildly convoluted, having to accommodate both ceilings of towering heights and others half that size, often within the same volume. Because of this, the rooflines are particularly complex, featuring several different pitches and shapes, and the walls are peppered with large great-room windows (a selling feature!), and other windows on any given elevation consist of many different sizes and shapes.
The skin — which often features many different types of cladding — and the roof are, due to their complexity, more prone to vulnerabilities, such as leaks. Because of the equally complex internal space plan, often following the trend of more and more open floorplans and large internal volumes, services like heating and cooling have to combat irregular volumes and energy leakage through features like massive picture windows. Rooms are programmed for specific activities: craft rooms, man caves, movie theaters. This is a kind of architectural stockpiling, devoting space to hobbies that could easily be performed in other parts of the house, out of a strange fear of not having enough space.
November 6, 2018
An alternative explanation for the population explosion of the “land whales”
Tim Worstall suggests that the real reason for our collective expanding waistlines isn’t evil capitalist exploiters pushing us to eat unhealthy fast food:
We don’t, for example, eat more than our forefathers did. Sure, we can all play games with how much people lie on those self-reported surveys about calorie intake. True, to make sense of it being lies we’d have to assume that people lie more now than they used to. So, instead, let’s look at official guidance. In WW1 the aim was, for the Army, to stuff some 4,300 calories a day into each frontline soldier out there in the trenches. Something they largely achieved too. In WWII rationing peeps started to worry that diets of less than 2,900 calories a day would lead to weight loss. Today official guidance is that 2,500 a day for men, 2,000 for women. Well, that’s the last one I recall at least.
I suspect that people actually do lie more on self-reporting surveys of that kind than they once did, if only because we’ve had several decades of prissy lecturing about what we should consume … the temptation to shade the answers in the “right” direction I’m sure plays some part, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. If you doubt that this happens, remember that a significant number of people vote for the party they expect to win rather than the party that best represents their interests or desires. Sucking up to teacher is a very common psychological trait.
However, back to the swelling obesity numbers:
Actually, 40 years ago is about when central heating became a commonplace in Britain. Anyone of my maturity in years – which includes G. Monbiot – and even those from thoroughly upper middle class backgrounds – both me and G. Monbiot – will recall ice on the inside of bedroom windows in winter. Houses simply were not fully heated throughout. Actually, pretty much the entire country was in what we’d now call fuel poverty. That fuel poverty that we have standards for these days, you should be able to heat the entire house to such and such a temperature on less than 10% of income. A standard which just about no one pre-1950 reached, few pre-1970 did.
America had that heating rather earlier than we did. Americans also became land whales that little bit earlier than we did. Anecdata I know but a move to the US in 1981 was marked with an observation of how warm Americans kept their houses in winter.
We do actually spend quite a lot on all this public health stuff these days. It might be worth someone doing a little study of correlations. Different nations became lardbuckets at different times. Different nations adopted central heating as a commonplace at different times. Why don’t we go see what the correlation between those two is?
After all, the idea that mammals use some significant portion of their energy intake for body temperature regulation isn’t exactly fringe science, is it?
October 16, 2018
Fast food outlets cluster in poorer areas – because they’re low-margin businesses
Tim Worstall debunks the “fast food restaurants are preying on the poor” myth:
Contrary to the musings of Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times there is a cause and effect going on over the placings of fast food restaurants or outlets in British towns. The provision of burnt chicken and maybemeatburgers to the hoi polloi is a hugely competitive business. This means that it is also low margin. So, where do you put the places that are in a low margin line of business?
[…] this is about clustering of those nosh joints. Why are they in the poor areas? Well, for the same reason the poor are in the poor areas. They’re cheap. This being rather the defining point about poor people, they look for cheap places to live. The two are therefore synonymous, poor and cheap. And what is it we’ve just said about nosh? That it’s a low margin business. Therefore purveyors of the deep fried and battered saveloy – that joy of the ages – are going to be clustered in the poor part of town where they can afford the rents.
And that’s our cause and effect. Some poor people are poor because they’re, or have been, ill. They’re in the cheap part of town because they’re poor. Fried gut shops are in poor areas because they don’t make much money therefore they’re in the poor part of town. Absolutely any analysis of the phenomenon which doesn’t account for this is wrong. And no analysis done by anyone does take account of it – therefore all current analyses of the point are indeed wrong.
There are also other factors to consider, including the fact that poor people are less likely to have the ability or facilities to prepare their own meals (or the habit of cooking for themselves), so the easy availability of high-calorie fast food or snacks is rather important to them. When you’re hungry and don’t have a fridge or freezer full of food at home, a burger or fried chicken has a much stronger appeal than it does to more wealthy folks with well-stocked pantries. If you’ve been raised on high-fat/high-salt foods, the “healthier” alternatives may not appeal, as they also are less flavourful than their fast food options.
October 2, 2018
Costs of Inflation: Financial Intermediation Failure
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 7 Feb 2017In the previous video, we learned that inflation can add noise to price signals resulting in some costly mistakes from price confusion and money illusion. Now, we’ll look at how it can interfere with long-term contracting with financial intermediaries.
Let’s say you want to take out a big loan, such as a mortgage on a house. The financial intermediary (in this case, a commercial bank) is going to charge you an interest rate as their profit for loaning you the money. In this situation, inflation has the potential to work against you or it can work against the bank.
If the bank charges you a nominal interest rate (i.e., the interest rate on paper before taking inflation into account) of 5% and inflation climbs unexpectedly to 10% for the year, the real interest rate (nominal minus inflation) falls to -5%. The bank actually loses money. However, if inflation has been higher and banks are charging 15% for mortgages and inflation rates fall unexpectedly to 3%, you’re stuck paying a real interest rate of 12%!
The above scenarios are similar to what actually happened in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Inflation was low in the 60s. But then in 70s, inflation rates climbed up unexpectedly. People that purchased a home in the 60s lucked out with low interest rates on their mortgages coupled with higher inflation, and many were able to pay off the loans more quickly than expected. But anyone that purchased a higher interest rate mortgage in the 70s only saw inflation fall back down. It was good for the banks and a costly choice for the homeowners. They were saddled with a high-interest mortgage while lower inflation meant a lower increase in wages.
It’s not that the people buying homes in the 1960s were smarter than those in the 70s. As we’ve noted in previous videos, inflation can be very difficult to predict. When banks expect that inflation might be 10% in the coming years, they will generally adjust their nominal interest rates in order to achieve the desired real interest rate. This relationship between real and nominal interest rates and inflation is known as the Fisher effect, after economist Irving Fisher.
We can see the Fisher effect in the data for nominal interest rates on U.S. mortgages from the 1960s through today. As inflation rates rise, nominal interest rates try to keep up. And as the inflation rates fall, nominal interest rates trail behind.
Now, if inflation rates are both high and volatile, lending and borrowing gets scary for both sides. Long-term contracts like mortgages become more costly for everyone with much higher risk, so it happens less. This is damaging for an economy. Coordinating saving and investment is an important function of the market. If high and volatile inflation is making that inefficient and less common, total wealth declines.
Up next, we’ll explore why governments create inflation in the first place.
September 7, 2018
QotD: Government distortion of the housing market
Behind the veneer of free-market governance is a deep expanse of government involvement in massive areas of the economy, such as the housing market and health care. People don’t make decisions on housing and health-care concerns every day, but when they do, they would benefit from the information that markets provide about whether they can afford a large house or whether a particular drug is worth the price. Government distortion of these key markets has scrambled these signals.
An annual congressional report, “Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures,” gives insight into how Washington manipulates supply and demand in these sectors. Consider house prices. This year, Washington will pay homeowners $99 billion in forgone taxes to borrow money to purchase or refinance a house or to sell that house and reap the profit. Americans will buy or sell about $600 billion worth of houses this year. Government subsidy, then, represents nearly one-sixth of this market. The federal government also provides a guarantee for most mortgages, thanks to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-supported mortgage companies that benefited for decades from an implicit government guarantee before they got an explicit guarantee during the 2008 financial crisis.
These subsidies have fired the growth of the housing industry. Between 1975 and 1979, the U.S. Treasury paid out $102.6 billion in mortgage-interest breaks in today’s dollars. Between 2015 and 2019, the Treasury will pay out $419.8 billion in such tax favoritism — a more than fourfold rise, nearly ten times the population increase. The hike is particularly extraordinary, considering that in the late 1970s, the annual interest rate on a mortgage was 9 percent, twice what it is today. Taking today’s lower rates into account, Washington has increased the mortgage subsidy more than eightfold.
It’s no surprise that mortgage debt has soared, to $9.5 trillion, from $2.6 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1981. Back then, mortgage debt constituted 31 percent of our nation’s GDP. Today, it makes up nearly 53 percent. [Dierdre] McCloskey, who thinks that free markets are generally healthy, acknowledges that “there are examples of the price signal not coming through.” The mortgage-interest deduction is “a silly idea,” she says, yet “very hard to change.”
Indeed, government subsidy is a critical factor in whether families can afford to purchase a home, and what kind of home, how large, and in what zip code. The home-mortgage deduction, then, helps determine how people live — yet we barely notice. Few of us consider how the government shapes one of the biggest decisions we’ll ever make, or how the U.S. government’s presence in the housing market maintains the value of our homes.
Nicole Gelinas, “Fake Capitalism: It’s not free markets that have failed us but government distortion of them”, City Journal, 2016-11-06.
August 2, 2018
Manufacturing the Engineered Wood Floor Joists
Bob Vila
Published on 30 Mar 2015Bob visits the Willamette I-Joist Mill in Woodburn, OR, before returning to Yonkers where the crew is assembling the second floor walls with structural insulated panels.
July 31, 2018
A gruesome experiment in determining the actual need for social housing
Tim Worstall discusses an aspect of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London that I hadn’t considered:
The fire at Grenfell Tower in London, 14 June 2017.
Photo by Natalie Oxford via Wikimedia Commons
That the Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy is obvious. That lessons need to be learned is equally so. At which point, OK, which lessons would we like to learn? One that would be useful is to work out how much of social housing in London – for that’s what the evidence allows us to estimate – is illegally sublet. Or, as we might also put it, how much social housing in London is not actually needed as social housing?
For sublets are, by their nature, at something close to market rents, the difference between those and the social rents being pocketed by those doing the renting out.
No, we don’t know and that might be just because we’ve not been paying the detailed attention required. But it’s also something we tend to think will have been glossed over in investigations into the events. Something that perhaps should not have been glossed over – if indeed it has.
[…] The thought that a place, in the centre of London, where we could house – safely perhaps this time – several hundred people not be used to house several hundred people? We have a housing shortage or not?
However, it’s the insight into that larger question that interests. We know that some amount of social (and or council) housing in London is illegally sublet. The very fact that it is shows that it’s not needed. Those who are paying the landlord a reduced rent clearly don’t need the property as they’re not living in it. Those paying the near market rents don’t need social housing as they’re paying near market rents. Thus subletting shows that the entire structure of – at least in that instance – the social rent isn’t necessary.
So, how prevalent is it? We know that some of it occurred at Grenfell. We’ve all admitted it, clearly, for we’ve not insisted that only those on the tenants’ listing are those who should be granted aid for having had their home burned down. So, we know there’s some. So, how much?
It’s unlikely that we’ve as much information on this concerning any other building in the country. Thus this is an excellent place to actually conduct such research.
June 8, 2018
The spiritual and aesthetic brutality of Brutalist architecture
In City Journal, Catesby Leigh looks at (and shudders at) some of the best-known examples of Brutalist architecture in the UK:
World War II left Britain in urgent need of rebuilding. The Blitz destroyed 200,000 homes and left another quarter-million uninhabitable. In the severely overcrowded urban slums, often blighted by industrial pollution, families lived without indoor plumbing, and they shared outdoor privies with neighbors. Others found shelter in temporary prefabricated homes produced by the aviation industry. In 1946, the government legislated the creation of new towns that, along with extensions of existing ones, would eventually be home to more than 2 million Britons. Aside from the new towns, a multitude of urban renewal and greenfield-development schemes emerged during the economically vigorous 1950s and 1960s. Housing “estates” erected by city and other local councils, mainly for lower-income residents, sprang up at a vertiginous rate, along with new office buildings, civic centers, shopping centers, parking garages, schools, hospitals, factories, and university buildings. Some 1.5 million prewar homes were demolished in the three decades following the war. Old urban centers were transformed: “Post-war Birmingham rebuilt itself in austere raw concrete, like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila,” Christopher Beanland enthuses in Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World. But by the late 1960s, it was obvious that most Englishmen weren’t keen on the idea of Birmingham looking like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila.
[…]
Park Hill, half-abandoned council housing estate, Sheffield, England
Photo via Wikimedia CommonsMany of the buildings that Harwood’s book covers make you wonder whether it is really about architecture at all. Consider Park Hill (1961), a huge council-housing estate containing nearly 1,000 duplexes and single-level flats that partially replaced a demolished slum overlooking downtown Sheffield — a crime-ridden precinct that, for all its problems, had housed a resilient community. Laid out as four long, interconnected slabs inflected so as to form an utterly antiurban, vermiculated footprint, Park Hill owed an enormous debt to the Unité d’habitation. At every third story, it featured elevated open-air “streets” or “decks” — the Corbusian fetish of the day — that ran indoors and out, connecting the slabs. As at the Unité, the imagery was nakedly industrial, with the apartments stashed in a “bottle-rack” grid of concrete that soon assumed a depressingly drab tincture and also proved prone to spalling. A ruthless rationalism likewise asserted itself in the level height maintained throughout the complex, which ranged from four to 13 stories, despite the irregular, sloping site. Park Hill was less a work of architecture than a huge, strange contraption inflicted on the urban skyline. Visual amenity, such as it was, came in the form of soft-hued brick within the concrete grid.
A typical deck in the Park Hill Flats, Sheffield.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.As with many postwar housing projects, Park Hill offered practical amenities that residents had never before enjoyed: indoor plumbing, hot water, mechanical heating, even a sophisticated garbage-disposal system. Harwood mentions that, Britain’s many council-housing catastrophes notwithstanding, Park Hill “stood firm.” This is not true. By 1979, less than 20 years after its completion, Park Hill was an urban basket case — riddled with graffiti, terrorized by hooligans, afflicted with irruptions of black mold and the terrible stench resulting from waste-disposal blockages. Deserted decks and stairways provided criminals with multiple escape routes.
[…]
Local journalist Peter Tuffrey’s Sheffield Flats, Park Hill and Hyde Park: Hope, Eyesore, Heritage — whose title might seem to play ironically off Harwood’s but for the fact that the book appeared two years earlier — allows us to study a map and old photographs of the slum that Park Hill and Hyde Park supplanted. What we see are blocks, courts, and alleys teeming with row houses and low-rise tenements — streetscapes displaying a human scale, much solid construction, and considerable dereliction, all to be swept away by the desolation of the Corbusian superblocks.
Harwood doesn’t trouble herself with the Hulme Crescents (1972), another assemblage of concrete slabs on the vermiculated, “streets-in-the-sky” plan that rose from the blank slate of a demolished Manchester working-class district where 90,000 people once lived — “the human engine-room of the Industrial Revolution,” as Lynsey Hanley calls it in her largely autobiographical and often engrossing Estates: An Intimate History. The Crescents, designed to house more than 13,000, were conceived in emulation of Bath, the gorgeous Georgian city. Things didn’t work out that way.
“Almost immediately, the estate’s infrastructure began to suffer from the same problems that beset Park Hill and Broadwater Farm [a troubled north London estate]: leaky roof membranes, infestations of vermin and insects, uncontrollable damp, deserted walkways, and an endemic feeling of isolation,” Hanley notes. “The flats were so expensive to warm that many tenants never turned the central heating on, and communal areas were so difficult to maintain that the [city] council could not cope. When a small child died after falling off the top-floor ‘access deck’ of one of the Crescents in 1974, families decamped to the outskirts, belatedly following the rest of old Hulme.” The Crescents’ descent into chaos did make it possible for an anarchic punk scene to flourish in an upper-level hangout known as The Kitchen. The party ended with the estate’s demolition during the 1990s.
[…]
Still, the folly of concentrating lower-income populations in tall buildings eludes her, just as it eluded the Tory government that, in 1956, introduced hugely generous subsidies for the construction of high-rises, relative to row houses and semidetached houses. Not only are tall buildings much more expensive to build and maintain than houses; they were not even essential to achieving the residential densities that postwar planners sought. Tall buildings are highly artificial and complex structures housing temperamental machines, like elevators, that require a heightened degree of maintenance, often by highly paid technicians rather than handymen with toolboxes and stepladders, as Hanley observes. Tall buildings also require an elevated degree of social discipline, as well as security features like intercom systems, closed-circuit TV, and doormen or concierges. The tower blocks and high-rise slabs at the Barbican Estate, the carefully developed, elaborately landscaped, intensely picturesque Brutalist “bankers’ commune” in the City of London, have been very successful. The appropriate synecdoche for the Barbican’s low-end counterparts, however, might well be a broken-down elevator littered with trash, defaced by graffiti, and reeking of urine.
April 13, 2018
QotD: Reynolds’ Law
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com, 2010-09-23.
April 1, 2018
QotD: Modularity
I was able to repair my sewer system because everything in it was modular. The pipe leading out of the house was made up of identical sections of fired clay pipe put together like legos. They were made of durable stuff, and they were installed to work using gravity alone. They worked for over one hundred years despite the efforts of dozens of people to screw them up in the interim. If they were a unitary system of some sort, and they failed, I would have been forced to replace them as a unitary system. To translate, that would have meant moving into a cardboard box behind a strip mall dumpster.
I could fix the broken components, and leave the others alone. Don’t underestimate the importance of this concept. In housing, everyone desires everything to be unitary, and wants it to be brand new forever. I can’t fix a modern house. I’m a dolt, but that’s not why I can’t fix it. In general, everything to do with a modern house can be replaced, but it can’t be fixed. If your hardwood strip flooring is worn, you can sand it and refinish it and get another fifty years out of it. If someone puts a coal out on your Pergo floor, you can lump it, or you can replace it. It’s sold as permanent. In real life, “permanent” really means “disposable.” The word “sustainable” is similar. It really means “in need of massive, permanent subsidy.”
Sippican, “You May Not Believe This, But ‘Weapons-Grade Nuts’ Is the Name of My Psychedelic Furs Tribute Band. But I Digress”, Sippican Cottage, 2016-03-16.
March 6, 2018
Real estate reality may finally be changing minds in Silicon Valley
I’ve never lived in Silicon Valley, and my one vist there was over 25 years ago — but even then, I thought the real estate market was far higher than it should have been. The sale of a tiny house in Sunnyvale (for $2 million or $2,358 per square foot) is symbolic of real estate values all around the area, as the stories get told of new employees living in their cars because even on six-figure salaries, they can’t afford to buy or even rent near where they work. Iowahawk linked to a New York Times article which shows that some movers and shakers acknowledge that Silicon Valley has a serious problem:
Silicon Valley execs devise strategy to solve Silicon Valley affordable housing crisis: GTFO of Silicon Valleyhttps://t.co/MlRDfqJWbD
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 5, 2018
If there was ever an industry that had no reason to be concentrated in one geographic location, it's software tech.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 5, 2018
In 95% of the American landmass, this is a $75,000 house. (ht @rdmcghee)https://t.co/sv8pwNS0g1
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 5, 2018
I mean, I can kind of understand expensive housing in NY or SF, but Silicon Valley? It has all the excitement of Dubuque, at Monaco prices
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 5, 2018
"I'm only 1 hour from the mountains and beaches!" – Silicon Valley drone coding at 2 AM to pay his $2 million house trailer mortgage
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 5, 2018
February 8, 2018
The revenge of the return of the bride of rent control
Megan McArdle on the unexpected return of one of the very worst economic policies known to mankind, or as our beloved Prime Minister would insist “peoplekind”:
According to the Wall Street Journal, rent control seems to be making a retro comeback. Most forms of intelligent life could be forgiven for asking why.
Serial experimentation with this policy has repeatedly shown the same result. Initially, tenants rejoice, and rent control looks like a victory for the poor over the landlord class. But the stifling of price signals leads to problems. Rent control starts by producing some sort of redistribution, because the people with low rents at the time that controls are imposed tend to be relatively low-income.
But then incomes rise, and rents don’t. People with higher incomes have more resources to pursue access to artificially cheap real estate: friends who work for management companies, “key fees” or simply incomes that promise landlords they won’t have to worry about collecting the rent. (One of my favorite New York City stories involves an acquaintance who made $175,000 a year, and applied for a rent-controlled apartment. He asked the women taking the application if his income was going to be a problem; she looked at the application and said, “No, I think that ought to be high enough.”)
So the promise of economic justice erodes over time, as lucky insiders come to dominate rent-controlled apartments, especially because having gotten their hands on an absurdly cheap apartment, said elites are loathe to move and free up space for others.
The longer the rent-control policies remain, the more these imbalances grow. The gap between the rent that is charged, and the rent that could be charged in a competitive market, widens. Deprived of the ability to make a profit, landlords skimp on maintenance and refuse to build new housing. If you loosen the law to incentivize renovation, or new building, this only creates new forms of dysfunction: discrimination against tenants who might stay longer than a few years (limiting the ability to raise rents); a decontrolled market that has to absorb all of the excess demand created by locking up so much of the housing market in rent-controlled leases that rarely turn over; even landlords who renovate too often, the better to raise the rent. This arrangement is very good for the people who happen to have gotten their hands on a rent-controlled apartment, and very bad for everyone else, especially newcomers to the city.
