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> Bottom line up front: I think the solution is to let small groups of people most directly affected by a new development vote on the development. I think this would make it possible to buy them off, and win the support or compliance of the most motivated opponents of the things we need to build.
This shifts the problem from one place to another. Who do you decide gets to vote?
> I realise that this is a very vague categorisation. Who is to decide what “significant” losing out means here? Bear with me, but ultimately that is what I’m going to suggest is the big, interesting research question for anyone who wants to solve vetocracy.
Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve.
This goes on and on for a ridiculously long article stating how awesome this would be, if we could only accurately identify those affected by change. Sure. Just given a sufficiently smart compiler. Given an omnipotent genie. We can all solve all of the problems when we bury them in some impossible wish.
All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. /sarcasm
If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution. So hand-waving it away as "an interesting research problem" means that you haven't solved anything at all. You could just as well get rid of democracy and keep only the mechanism of limit and the bribes.
It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.
Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities.
It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
> It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.
You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions.
You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust.
> It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case.
Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work.
We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King.
Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer!
It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.
I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. You’re framing this as just “shifting the problem” without acknowledging that problems have degrees of severity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying, “let’s make the problem less severe right now, but continue looking for a better solution”.
It seems to me the real front line of the debate is whether the problem is in fact made less severe by what’s being suggested. But apparently engaging in that debate isn’t quite as gratifying as attacking the person’s entire framework for finding solutions.
> I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”
Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm.
It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
The current NIMBY-ism status quo is actively harming the weak and poorer folks. Continuing it will continue harming those folks. In many areas it seems to be wealthy people from other locales or powerful city representatives with no actual skin in the game who block many beneficial building projects.
I believe the authors intent is to find ways to let people who are influenced the most have the most say. Even then he suggests rolling it out in small experiments which would allow checking the assumptions. If it's harmful, then stop.
> Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm.
Oh get over yourself. I used a “trite cliche” as a way to give a general sense of the point I was trying to make before going into it more detail. Had I responded with only that, sure, that would be devolving the argument, but I didn’t.
> It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
That’s a strong argument and one that I’m inclined to agree with.
> If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution.
All large democracies use limiting mechanisms, you don't directly vote for most things - which would be a direct democracy, which tends to break down on all but very small scales. All western democracies are a representative democracy, this is already a limiting mechanism, not everything goes everyone's way, we vote for representatives, and hope that they vote for the majority of our interests the majority of the time.
The core argument here seems to be that the catchment area of development (an already pre-existing limiting mechanism) is simply defined too broadly. I don't think identifying people who are genuinely affected from those that have nothing better to do between scoffing tea cakes than complain is worth while - So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest.
This is not moving goalposts. The further normal people are away from a development the less shits they give because they have their own problems to deal with.. unfortunately that just leaves the people with nothing better to do, who will complain about literally anything because they already have a house and a pension, seem to have lost all empathy of any struggle they had getting there.
> So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest.
There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one.
My challenge is: please, provide this algorithm that will work in all of the crazy cases that show up, from the small to the large. From a slight densification of a suburban area, to a commercial development like a shopping center or business park, to industrial use areas, to an infrastructure project like a new bridge or airport, to a massive development like a nuclear power plant.
I'm arguing that such an algorithm is beyond the possibility of man. You might as well ask for magic.
But as long as you believe such an algorithm is possible, while also refusing to provide it or to sketch it out, you can fall back on: come on bro, it might be better than what we have now, trust me, stop being such a downer. In fact you can turn it around on me - like asking me to prove it couldn't exist!
Meanwhile, my intuition is that any limits that are enacted to prevent participation will disproportionately advantage the existing elite and wealthy to the detriment of the middle and lower classes.
> There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one.
A catchment area is already being defined based on some rules, it's not magic. That's the place to begin. It's not going to be an algorithm, it's going to be a poor bag of heuristics. Suggesting the existing method needs refinements is not the same as suggesting magic.
> A catchment area is already being defined based on some rules
I don't know what the term "catchment area" means to you, but I have no idea how that applies in Canada. As of right now, there is no way that I am aware for me to vote on land use rights. That is, I am aware of zoning bylaws that define what I can use land for. The options that I am aware of are: I can apply for rezoning to an alternate existing zoning designation (including parceling out or assemblies) or I can apply for an amendment to the existing zoning bylaw. These are pretty opaque processes but certainly require involving the local district and they definitely involve public hearings, require public notices and invite public comment.
As far as I know, no one locally gets a vote. So this isn't altering an existing process or narrowing it's scope (what I suppose you mean by refining), it is proposing an entirely new process. I can't speak for every jurisdiction in Canada, North America or Europe, but I feel that this isn't just re-drawing some borders. We aren't suddenly going to have councils at the 15 minute walking range, or councils for my street. And even if we did they are going to be more like HOA/Strata councils - which are a nightmare to behold.
Further - this doesn't answer the larger question which everyone wants to dodge. For example, he talks at length about larger infrastructure projects like wind power and energy power-line corridors. That is a kind of thing that spans multiple jurisdictions. How does one coordinate that?
None of that is thought out or proposed, just hand waved away as a "research project".
If we are claiming a process to solve vetocracy - I want to hear about how you are going to coordinate land use rights to build high speed rail. How are you going to manage defining the list of who is affected by that? Otherwise you are just wasting time on toy problems that can be trivially solved in other ways.
We've been wrestling with democracy for 1000s of years, and you demand perfect solutions. Right now. Otherwise it's all monkey motion.
Good grief.
Authorities which span and overlap other jurisdictions are common enough. In the small, water, conservation, school, fire, etc.
I think of regional and intrastate arrangements as like treaties. But I'm mosdef not a lawyer, so my analogy is prob more weong than right.
15 minute cites have become a bit watchword among urbanists. I think drawing a 15-minute walking circle around a development would be a very reasonable place to start. Pretty typical walking speed is ~5 km/h, so roughly an area about 1-1.3 km.
1 km is actually a pretty big circle, so there would probably be room for multiple circle sizes based on the proposed development size. Adding 50 housing units is a 5 minute concern. Adding 1000 is a 15 minute one.
Now we're firmly in the territory of motte and bailey. You can retreat to an argument based on "but all I want is to allow homeowners to vote on bike lanes in their own neighborhoods!" while dodging the harder topics that are really at the heart of land use.
No thoughts on heroin clinics or other social services initiatives. No thoughts on sensitive land issues like protected water-ways. No thoughts on major regional infrastructure initiatives. No thoughts on industry needs (e.g. pipelines).
Also not a general purpose solution to vetocracy. Now you just have an idea to handle squabbles in middle-class suburbs. That kind of thinking won't get high-speed rail built in California, so good luck.
Between direct and representative is participatory democracy. AKA citizen assemblies, citizen juries.
A diliberative body (council, legislature) selects a bunch of people (sortition), gives them a charter (scope of work), empower sthem to investigate (interview experts, research, dig into a problem). The assembly/jury writes up their conclusions and recommendations. The empowering body then acts or not.
All work and meetings are public.
Early experiences have been very encouraging.
> Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve.
This is most of political theory in a nutshell. Whenever you see "The solution is..." just apply this template.
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The problem is the phrase "the solution is". Most political problems with solutions so simply stated are nothing more than wishful thinking, and fails to fully understand the problems entirely.
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I'm genuinely curious.
First of all, what makes you think that person is American? Secondly, "American" means a group of 350 million people who have a broader diversity of race, culture, religion, etc. than any other country on earth or even in history. When you say "American" you're probably skipping all that and just talking about blond Republican males in Utah. Am I right?
The simplest exercise to follow this to its end: only parents should be allowed to vote on matters that affect children. Education, medical policy, school boards, etc.
It’s an easy case to make that always comes with pretty intense debate. Assume that…but with everything.
EDIT: To be clear, this is an example to show where this path leads. Not something I'm advocating.
Maybe it's only the children who should be allowed to vote on matters that affect them.
Definitely not, they are children after all and as such not yet ready to oversee the consequences of their choices - not because they are stupid but because they lack some essential skills which will come along later in their development. That is what it means to be a child, that is why children are not legally responsible for their actions, that is why they require adult supervision.
Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved.
Since we cannot exclude people from voting, well, that everybody can vote, directly on indirectly on almost everything is actually a good thing.
>Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved.
They shouldn't need to be qualified or emotionally not involved to vote on something that affects them, their families, and their children.
That's democracy.
Anything else is authoritarian dictums, whether they are based on god given or expertise given or gun given power.
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The education your children get affects me if I have to encounter your children. If you live in my community, then it is also likely that my tax dollars pay for your kids' educations. The medical decisions that you make for your children (vaccinations) can also affect me.
So no, that's a non-starter.
That which explains everything explains nothing. Literally everything affects you in the sense implied here, so "it affects me" is quite plainly insufficient justification for intervention. Everything affects you in some sense.
I don't expect to get a vote over what happens in Cleveland, because I don't pay taxes in Cleveland, but I sure as fuck expect to have a vote in what happens with my money here. I'm not an "investor." I'm a citizen. There are no extra shares or votes which I can buy. These are different classifications with different expectations.
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> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶
Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.
> Who do you decide gets to vote?
Proof of work, the human version. Like a giant captcha.
So, if you spend enough work on a certain task you prove that you care about the issue at hand, and you can vote.
just like proof of work, this favors those who already have power & resources. the wealthy, corporations, etc.
Why? Nobody said that more work == more voting power. It could be just a small threshold of (say) 1 hour of work to gain access to voting.
So busybody NIMBYs get more influence. Not different from the status quo.
Do you think the best way to come up with a fair or ethical decisionmaking process should be based on whether it will an outcome favorable to you?
If you don't like the outcome, you can just work for the right to vote against it. Sounds fair to me.
Then the infinite righteous energy of some cause will win out. Do we always want that? Do we ever want that?
As soon as I read "buy them off" I closed the article.
Why shouldn't people affected by a development be able to partake in the benefits? Otherwise they're "paying" for a project by disruptions to their lives and environments without getting anything in exchange.
No, vetocracy has always been the solution to majority votes. What's the problem with majority rule? That when 100 people vote, 51 can vote to take away the vote from the other 49, 26 can vote to take away the vote from 25, and so on until you have 2 voting to take away the vote from the third.
The major problem of democracy is the preservation of minority rights, and this article takes an enormous amount of time to say that, and to propose a further question (should the minority affected by the decisions of a group have a bigger say than everyone else?) which has been discussed to no consensus since the Greeks.
edit: if there's any answer, it's that a group needs to come up with a set of shared principles/axioms, and develop their decisionmaking process based on those (and how deliberative bodies have justified their processes in the past), rather than trying to cargo-cult some high-level framework built on sand.
Agree with some of what you say... in the case of fundamental rights. But that's not what the article is referring to. Vetocracy in practice is usually small minorities of privileged people protecting their right to keep things that aren't even theirs - in the case of NIMBYism, their "right" to keep a neighborhood from changing in any way, whether in terms of what types of homes are allowed to build there (no multifamily homes, even if they're constructed to be indistinguishable from the other homes!), whether there should be street parking should or not (of course, already wealthy detached home owners love being able to park their vehicles on public streets, at all other taxpayers expense), whether a bike lane should be allowed to pass through the neighbourhood or not (looking at you Chelsea Kensington), if a school, hospital, 7-11 or any other kind of service or business should be allowed to be built in the area or not etc etc. These are things best decided by majority and not left to vetocracy.
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I love the idea of this, but I see one huge obstacle to making this happen: the current property owners.
The whole reason we're in this situation is because the power asymmetry between property owners and renters seems to be growing at a significant rate. Rapidly rising property values benefit property owners at the expense of the renters and redistributing the rights of a property owner to the community would have massive ramifications for how real estate is valued.
The main hurdle to overcome is finding the politicians you'd need to take power from property owners to give to non-owner residents, and the big problem (at least in the US) is that even at the local level, governments tend to be run by property owners and supported by property-owning donors. Money is fundamental to who gets elected, and as long as this is true, balancing the power disparity and giving real voting power to non-property owners to determine what happens to property will be a massive challenge.
> The main hurdle to overcome is finding the politicians you'd need to take power from property owners to give to non-owner residents
The opposite is true. We need to overturn Euclid and similar rulings that took rights away from individual property owners. Property owners should be allowed to build housing on their own land. There is no legitimate public interest in preventing it (beyond banal, ordinary preferences that are better expressed in a market) and an immense public interest in allowing it.
You get rid of the veto point by restoring property rights, not by further limiting them.
This might work if you put a hard cap on how much property any entity can own individually or by proxy. Otherwise Blackstone, et al. will build the cheapest apartment blocks they can everywhere and lock average Americans out of ownership until the revolution comes.
Homeownership only has value because it's effectively (buy-in) rent control. Without rent being too expensive, there's no real need for homeownership. It's actually a negative when you consider reduced mobility and the cost of selling.
> It's actually a negative when you consider reduced mobility and the cost of selling.
A lot of us homeowners enjoy the things you described here. I want to live in a neighborhood with people who have lived here 5-10+ years. The last thing I want is for my family to be amongst a transient population who have no vested interest in their neighborhood.
Up until the phrase "real estate" this same argument could be applied to all sorts of ownership/rentership dichotomies, e.g. subscription-based services (streaming, SaaS, etc.) vs ownership of content media (buying albums, self-hosting, etc.).
Software and digital media more generally really calls into question the notions of property per se.
The benefit of this proposal is that it pits property owners against each other. It might be in the interests of property owners as a class to not build in order to see values increase but the greed of individual owners will lead to some cracking and building in order to maximise their individual wealth.
Given there are enough property owners, this is expected. But in the presence of a few property owners, the opportunity for collusion is higher because the opportunity cost of defecting is higher than the opportunity cost of not defecting. This centralization of property into a few owners is something that is happening all over the Anglosphere.
OP's identified problem: Sometimes good projects are unable to proceed because some small set of losers of the project veto it.
OP's policy proposal: "for a development worth doing, it should be possible to pay off most of the people who object and still make the development worthwhile."
OP recognizes that some people will pretend that their losses are very large even when they are quite small. "But if we could clearly and strictly demarcate the “true losers” from a project, and allow them to retain their veto, we would perhaps be on the way to making this intractable problem tractable "
They don't really have a clear idea on how to correctly identify the "true losers". In fact, I would argue that identifying true losers is where the intractability of the larger problem emerges from.
Well, it sounds like you could come up with a set of useful heuristics, like living next door to the property.
It feels intrinsically pretty cheems to just say "this sounds tricky so we shouldn't bother" when the existing system is completely dysfunctional
> Well, it sounds like you could come up with a set of useful heuristics, like living next door to the property.
This is a political problem, so it recurses quite a lot. Whatever set of heuristics you come up with, someone will object to them because they will be losers if we use those heuristics. Then someone will object to the composition of the committee that generated the heuristics. Then someone will object to the system that system that came up with the committee....
Of course, we should try to figure out solutions. But these are "wicked problem" [1]. Solutions are not easy to come by, and there will always be objectors. You can't turn this into a well-defined technical problem with a well-formed solution.
Part of the problem is that this isn't as fungible as economics leads us to believe.
If some working class knob will lose his home, then it's often enough to just offer him twice as much as the home is worth (maybe with helping him find another equivalent home). Such a person knows that it's a good deal, and they end up better off for it. Any perceived reluctance is often just a negotiating tactic, and can be quickly resolved by making the bargain sweeter.
But if Sterling Fitzbillionaire has a mansion with the most beautiful and exclusive view of the shoreline has to put up with an offshore windmill... there's literally no amount of money that makes up for him losing this. You could offer him $10 trillion, and the money is worthless because the mansion with that view is rare enough (or even unique) that money can't buy him another one like it with an unspoiled view. You've reached the fungibility limits of money/property.
Say whatever you want about greed or spitefulness, there is a much more fundamental issue going on here, and it doesn't seem very tractable. It's only aggravated by the plain fact that such people are often in much more influential positions, if not in political offices outright.
The best I can come up with is by disallowing the vetoes entirely, unless they are accompanied by some counter-offer that outlines what would be required for them to withdraw it. Wouldn't matter so much whether the terms were absurd (or seemingly impossible), by forcing them to draft those, it might shift their mindset enough that negotiations (however troubled) could commence. I'm not certain this works, you'd have to run the experiment. I think it might solve some minor fraction of these issues, maybe that improvement's better than nothing.
You make a useful point. I will note though that you don't have to be rich to not care about money. For instance, many people will refuse to give up their ancestral home or land no matter what money or other incentives you offer them.
I appreciate the thought put into this, and really don't get the nihilistic response of "Oh, it will never work, why even bother trying".
If you have suggestions for improvement, raise them, or critiques that need a response, raise them.
My suggestion would be to combine this approach with quadratic voting. Then there's no need to decide who does or doesn't get to vote on a development proposal. People who care about it will use their votes on that. Those who don't will use their votes elsewhere. Because votes are finite, people have to prioritize.
This otherwise very fine article misses one simple explanation, esp wrt France vs UK:
The majority of the UK is owned by very few people.
Cite: "Who Owns Britain" by Brian Cahill.
This ownership has not been transparent. Nor do they pay their share of taxes; rather they receive an outside amount of subsidies.
The first step to fixing UK's vetocracy by fixing UK's gini coefficient.
I'm sure Thomas Piketty would say much the same, but I haven't read his books yet (just reviews and interviews).
Of course, the plantation class will continue to wage class war to prevent any reasonable reforms.
It can never work, it just never has and smarter people than us have tried.
Democracy will be captured and corrupted like it already has, by an oligarchic elite. It happened to the Greeks, it happened to the Romans and it's happened to us.
And now we have such hypnotic tools like mass/social media that mass delusion can be instilled at the drop of a proverbial hat. And no, Science wont save you as it can be bought too. Even tobacco and sugar companies were able to deny the obvious by purchasing a few scientists of fortune.
> Even tobacco and sugar companies were able to deny the obvious by purchasing a few scientists of fortune.
For a time, but then the science won out. First culturally then legally for tobacco. Now sugar industry is loosing culturally and more realize the effects of overconsumption.
That's not as good as it first looks, it was well understood by the turn of 20th century that there was a strong correlation between smoking and disease, it took the better part of a century to bring this to the fore. Imagine how prevalent a misconception could be if the disconnect is less clear.
Science is a methodology nothing more. The problem is any appeal to human authority, it was quite easy to keep smoking and say "but the science says so...".
Look, this might work in the UK where the space is at a premium. In the US there is plenty of land available, and in some states you can buy houses for basically free.
What we need are policies to make sure jobs don't flee from into several monstrously oversized cities.
Sidenote, the industrial collapse of 90-s and 2000-s was the reason a lot of US states veered hard-right.
What kinds of specific policies do you have in mind?
Seems like the reason people in the US don't build houses in the empty patches in the US is because the economics of agglomeration mean much greater efficiency/economic growth when you build them in existing large cities. How do you fight this without making the country much less economically dynamic?
> What kinds of specific policies do you have in mind?
Limit the amount of office space density (cap&trade style, or with a direct tax). Promote decentralization via tax credits, etc.
These are all old ideas, but these days they can be turbo-charged by promoting WFH.
> Seems like the reason people in the US don't build houses in the empty patches in the US is because the economics of agglomeration mean much greater efficiency/economic growth when you build them in existing large cities.
Yes. It's more efficient to open an office in a large city, where you have access to a larger talent pool. And in turn, it's more advantageous to live near a dense city core, as it provides you with more options for employment.
This leads to a never-ending densification and price growth spiral. Manhattan is a good example of the end-game of this kind of death spiral.
And these are exactly the same kinds of market forces that forced companies to dump toxic waste into rivers. After all, if you take care to clean up your toxic waste, then your products will be more expensive and less competitive.
You're looking at a side effect, deeming it the problem and trying to solve that problem rather than solving the actual issue at hand.
For example let's look at Japan. Japan does not have what you dubbed a densification and price growth spiral despite having cities far more dense than any city in the US. This should tell you that your initial problem is the wrong problem.
The answer is that they develop high-speed transportation to and from dense cores in addition to smaller sparser towns. This means property value is far lower because distance doesn't matter and in fact housing value inverts where it purely depreciates.
If we did what you propose, you would see what's happening to cities like Austin. Where offices are built in a purely sprawling fashion, highly dense traffic and shifting property value to areas along traffic corridors.
> You're looking at a side effect, deeming it the problem and trying to solve that problem rather than solving the actual issue at hand.
Nope. I'm looking at the root cause here.
> For example let's look at Japan. Japan does not have what you dubbed a densification and price growth spiral
Fucking what?!? Tokyo is the example of shitty densificaiton.
Young people in Japan are forced to live in tiny apartments where you can literally sit on a toilet while cooking food: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-apartments-...
All while at the same time having millions of beautiful empty houses readily available: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
And they managed to screw themselves up while having a _declining_ population.
> If we did what you propose, you would see what's happening to cities like Austin. Where offices are built in a purely sprawling fashion, highly dense traffic and shifting property value to areas along traffic corridors.
And this is great! Houston is giant, but it's extremely efficient because it doesn't have The Downtown where you _have_ to be. As a result, industry and offices tend to be interspersed with residential areas. So the average commute stays short.
> Young people in Japan are forced to live in tiny apartments where you can literally sit on a toilet while cooking food: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-apartments-...
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. It's an entirely separate cultural issue. If you had read the article in question you posted, it mentions the fact that there are multiple cheaper apartments nearby that aren't as trendy due to age. And that these microapartments are explicitly chosen for the sake of living near ultra-trendy areas, though it's not necessary due to the convenience and wide reaching networks of transportation.
> All while at the same time having millions of beautiful empty houses readily available: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
Again, read the articles you post. These sit empty due to cultural issues. This is because houses depreciate in value and buying older homes is not viewed as a good thing.
"Houses in Japan typically decrease in value over time until they are worthless — the cultural legacy of post-World War II construction and shifting building codes — with only the land retaining value. Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh. But that can be expensive."
> And this is great! Houston is giant, but it's extremely efficient because it doesn't have The Downtown where you _have_ to be. As a result, industry and offices tend to be interspersed with residential areas. So the average commute stays short.
Efficient? Have you lived in Houston or Austin? Because I did. For 5 years. It was a nightmare getting to anywhere because it's a sea of paved-over bullshit with zero avenues to get anywhere outside of using a car. And if you do use a car, you have to wade through awful traffic and a city that isn't design to accommodate people. Houston literally ranks among the worst cities for traffic. Calling Houston efficient is so downright divorced from reality that I would have to question if you've looked at any cities outside of the US. Let alone lived in the cities you extol the virtues of.
> This isn't the gotcha you think it is. It's an entirely separate cultural issue.
Well, yeah. It's called: shitty densification.
> If you had read the article in question you posted, it mentions the fact that there are multiple cheaper apartments nearby that aren't as trendy due to age.
In other words: they are even shittier.
> "Houses in Japan typically decrease in value over time until they are worthless — the cultural legacy of post-World War II construction and shifting building codes — with only the land retaining value. Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh. But that can be expensive."
Again, you're looking at symptoms. Tokyo is basically being rebuilt all the time, mostly as a result of corrupt wheeling-and-dealing by real estate developers. But the countryside and smaller cities stay empty and decaying.
> Efficient? Have you lived in Houston or Austin?
Yes, I have. I hated the climate and the (lack of) nature around it, but loved the city.
And yes, Houston is much more efficient than a similarly sized NYC in pretty much all categories: commute time, cost of housing, income inequality (0.48 GINI index vs 0.56 for NYC), infrastructure spending per capita, number of municipal employees per capita, etc.
> Because I did. For 5 years. It was a nightmare getting to anywhere because it's a sea of paved-over bullshit with zero avenues to get anywhere outside of using a car.
And why is that bad? Cars enable more efficient cities. They are objectively far superior to transit for several fundamental reasons.
> And why is that bad? Cars enable more efficient cities. They are objectively far superior to transit for several fundamental reasons.
Then we're done here I guess. You live in an entirely different reality that just isn't true. There's no point to continuing this argument.
What are your objective facts? I.e. numbers that can be easily checked. If your reality is so real, you should be able to find them!
Cars provide faster commutes than transit. Always have, always will, except for very narrow exceptions.
Cars provide far more access to people, making them more likely to succeed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2
Heck, EVs even have a smaller carbon footprint than most transit! See: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
It's a weird article. The focus on productivity is odd, especially comparing productive parts of the country to others. A lot of those parts of the country serve as dormitory towns to London, it's simplistic to say they are not productive - yes, but it's ignoring that all the jobs are in London and a few other places. A bad thing about many of these places is they don't have much "place" to them, there is barely any investment in the things that would make that happen. Even in places that don't suffer this there is short term thinking that means compared to London there is virtually no investment in transport outside of roads.
I think there's 2 things being conflated here.
1 is opposition to large scale government projects, for example demolishing existing houses to build infrastructure.
2 is opposition to smaller development, for example building something in a lot you own.
1 should be under scrutiny, especially given governments history of screwing over their minority citizens.
2 should be completely outlawed. I believe we need a "mind you own business" approach to development. No, a developer doesn't need to ask the local community before building something (that complies with zoning) in a lot they own.
There is at the beginning a comparison of various structural differences between the UK, France and Germany to motivate the piece so I was sort of expecting to see at some point how decision making structures compare and the impac to that. Anecdotaly NIMBY behavior and vetocracy is quite widespread across Europe (at least). Or, to turn the argument around, if there are concrete practices that can be shown to have worked elsewhere one does not need to reinvent the wheel.
Observing the behavior of a democratic system as a whole and over time, it seems inevitable that it leads to polarization and many other undesirable behaviors at the system level … just share this as a straw man for ideas to improve…
That article pretty much ignores centuries of political scienes and historians' work. All based on some unconnected charts and a personal opinion on what projects are "good" and which ones are not.
What political science work is it ignoring?
Everything regarding how democracies and voting work. There countless of ways how it implemented, studies on how those affect outcomes, you name it. I didn't see a single reference to that body of work in this blog post. In short, everything.
Oh, I thought you meant there was some particular flaw in the logic of the post.
Yes, the whole post is a flaw. Because, as so often, it tries to argue simply based on logic without considering the basics of the covered topic.
The system is of minor importance. What's of major importance is the benevolence and competence or lack thereof of the decision makers.
Democracy is essentially mob rule. It's great when the mob is doing what you want, not so great when it isn't.
Currently most Western democracies are designed to protect minority rights against the majority because of this. In fact, the Bill or Rights in the US can be seen as a great example of this: it prevents the current majority from removing rights deemed essential.
If you look at states that have weak individual property rights (all the communist states, most of the Iberian colonies) you can see the issue: weak property rights by individuals go hand in hand with authoritarianism.
Those who want "change" always want to destroy the system. Historically speaking, that has led to disasters of one sort of another.
The US has had the Bill of Rights and its constitutional system / property protection for a long time but only recently has had the degree of NIMBYism that it's had.
It's easy to pretend the bug is actually an important and noble feature, but sometimes it's just a bug that needs fixing.
The UK is one of the Western democracies without the protections you're talking about (no written constitution, no ability to bind future parliaments, law passed by a simple majority of parliamentarians, first-past-the-post and strong third-parties leading to parliamentary majorities with ~35% of the vote) but has one of the longest and proudest histories when it comes to freedom and liberty.
Mob rule is always a risk but it's often better than rule by an out-of-touch elite.
Why does the elite automatically have to be out of touch? They are the most invested in it all and are incentivized to have a functional state. Democratically elected representatives have no such incentive. Their only incentive is to convince enough people to grant them power.
An aristocratic monarchy is preferable to an oligarchical “democracy” like we have today.
The solution to people not wanting their neighborhoods destroyed is to destroy them anyway. You are properly understood.
"Aberfeldy Village" is apparently a poor area, and so the ruling class just kind-of exasperatedly assumes that they can run roughshod, and I find it pleasant that it's not the case. Why don't the rich fucks knock over their own houses if that's such a wonderful thing?
Huh? The impoverished residents of the estate voted to have it "destroyed" (from which they would personally gain) but it was rich elites that blocked it because it's a vote winner in the wider community to be viewed as anti-development
It's an odd situation, but I can see where the sentiment comes from. Poorer communities are usually the target of redevelopment, frequently with promises on how things will improve, only to discover that the promises were hollow down the road. In a case like this, where there is supposed to be an incredibly large change in the demographic of the community, I can understand how some would interpret the small increase in social housing as being a hollow promise.
Let AI optimize everything to minimize the number of people that are unhappy.
(without killing or drugging the unhappies)
So they want to replace an estate that is 76% social housing, with one that's 23% social housing?
I can see the objection.
It seems foolish to say we can never do anything that makes the life of the poor better just because it also helps the non-poor
It adds to the total number of social housing. You need to look at the absolute numbers and not just the percentage.
You have to look at both. Consider a simplistic example: what would prevent the new majority from holding a vote to convert the social housing into market housing? (More realistically: they owners would either lobby to change the agreement or outright break the agreement, realizing they have the community support.)
Yes, there has to be an increase in the absolute numbers. It may be acceptable to compromise on the composition of the community to get those numbers. On the other hand, ignoring the percentages altogether will produce a change in dynamics that will ultimately be detrimental to those in need of social housing.
An increase in the number of properties perhaps, but I would like to see the number of people each property can comfortably house. There's a difference between a three bedroom house and a 1 bedroom flat or bedsit.
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