> That seems potentially right for Manhattan in a scenario where we could build quite a lot, it seems wrong for other boroughs.
I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here? Manhattan (mostly) has universally good transit access but relatively few places with really good upzoning opportunities, it's outer boroughs/jersey city where we have great building opportunities if we could only get better transit connectivity. Over the last decade or so the places in NY that have seems lots of new housing have mostly been LIC and downtown Brooklyn, which are also the main two areas outside Manhattan with really good subway connectivity. Making more subway hubs outside Manhattan could let us make more LIC-style neighborhood upzonings.
I'm an engineer, 30 years old, single, living in a small city with relatively cheap housing. If I had the option to live in my college dorm with a bathroom down the hall, but without the roommate, for less than I'm paying now, I'd jump at it. Instead I'm paying the mortgage on a 3 bed 2 bath house in a good school district. Most of those rooms I never set foot in except to clean. I used to live in a smaller apartment in the same city. My current mortgage payment, even accounting for insurance and property tax, is about 2/3 of what the rent on that apartment was. This in a city of less than 200k people in a flyover state. Housing markets are insane everywhere.
With respect to your early comment about the interstate commerce clause, I'm curious as to your thoughts on using bad tools to good ends more generally. I think that you will probably agree (your sort of seem to imply this) that the interstate commerce clause has been _dramatically_ over used and expanded to nearly the point of meaninglessness in a way that allows the Federal government to do lots of things it was not intended to allow (in my opinion, mostly bad things). As such, it is a tool that more often than not results in bad rules and bad outcomes. So, do you think that it is a good thing to use such a tool to a good end (and I think I agree that the end here is good), even if it reinforces the overall use of that tool, or is it better to instead try to break the tool (or at least not help make it stronger)?
Yeah. I wonder about that too, including in that particular case. Saying 'they started it' is not an adult response. As a Player of Games, my general principle (similar to 'don't hate the player, hate the game') is that you play by the rules to get the best outcome, while also being in favor of changing the rules to be better. The question then is, by using the bad tool, are you making the de facto rules worse? Another good question is, if you don't symmetrically use the rule, are you encouraging those using it to use it more rather than work to fix the problem? All depends.
So mostly I think once the door is opened you should walk through it, while also advocating for closing the door, and being willing to close it BEFORE you walk through it to make that happen.
> If they choose cheaper places without plumbing over expensive places with plumbing, such that this is how you maximize profits, I will absolutely bite that bullet and let them make that choice, and I do not see a problem so long as everyone involved knows what they are renting or buying.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I took the original tweet to mean there would be entire buildings with literally no plumbing at all. I assume (hope?) you would agree that shouldn't be allowed, for hygiene reasons at the very least?
My initial reaction to your window-free bedroom suggestion was similarly negative, and I would have guessed that it would increase depression etc. After searching for papers on the subject though it seems that you're right that total darkness when sleeping is good for mental health. My concern, however, would be that removing the window requirement could have a very negative impact on people who spend any significant waking time in their bedrooms. For wealthy people with a separate office and living area it sounds fine to me, but I can see how it could be hellish in other situations. Similarly for apartment size. There are people who spend very little time at home and are happy with a tiny place, but if people can't afford anywhere else I worry it violates their basic dignity. Although it is of course more dignified than being homeless.
If it was possible to offer these options to those who wanted them without risking harm to those who have no choice but to accept whatever they can get, I would be entirely in favour. Do you see any way of being able to calculate the costs and benefits?
So there are kind of two distinct things going on here - the question of whether people should be allowed to make choices on where to live under what conditions and choose 'bad' living conditions to get a location they want (or a place at all), and the question of the value/harm/risk of various kinds of conditions they might choose.
I would basically bite the bullet on requirements, provided they were disclosed - people make other impossible inhumane choices in the face of too-high housing costs, and as you note many spend little time there, or don't need what you think they need. I agree that access to plumbing is necessary, within some reasonable distance, but also there would be demand for it.
In terms of harms of particular things, the paranoia over dark rooms is such weird selective paranoia. Again, many people spend far more time working in their office with no windows than most people do in their bedrooms. Many are not allowed to leave. If we're allowing that, and it's damn common, what are we even doing? What exactly is so inhumane about a tiny place? Note that the *average* European place is less than half the size of the average one we have, kids in dorm rooms are often in ~0 space and do fine, this is a lot like forcing people to work for hours a day for that space often, etc.
If someone 'has to accept whatever they can get' then the practical result of banning such arrangements is that they have two remaining choices, both that are worse for them! They can either (1) not live where they want to live, or (2) spend an obscene percent of their money on rent. How is that... better?
Maybe should've said in my comment that I'm from the UK and have never been to the US. But we've recently had similar proposals hoping to revitalise town centres by converting retail and office space to residential, which faced the same sort of criticisms you're arguing against. The free market argument doesn't get much airtime here though, which is why I'm interested in your analysis even if the specifics are quite different.
I don't want to bang on about plumbing, but I can easily imagine a scenario where a major relaxation of building regulations could combine with other policies (e.g. on immigration) and lead to slum-like conditions with serious overcrowding and disease. Obviously this is a worst case scenario, but I would take some convincing before I opened that door. Although again I will concede that an overcrowded flat in Glasgow was preferable to dying in the potato famine.
Regarding the paranoia, as an undergraduate student in a flatshare I had a room with barely enough space for a single bed, desk and wardrobe and was pretty happy with it given the price. But through bad planning I had to spend the second lockdown in another small room with a little window which didn't get much direct sunlight, a flatmate I didn't get along with and a mould problem, and while there are obviously a lot of confounding factors here I'm confident the bedroom situation made things worse. I wouldn't have predicted the effect on my mental health in advance, and in fact it was only when I left that I realised how much I had hated it. So I'm a bit skeptical that people can always make a rational decision about these things. In retrospect I suspect both options (1) and (2) would have been preferable to my choice, and having subsequently chosen (1) I'm quite a lot happier. You might argue that's the market working successfully, but the fact I moved was actually mostly coincidence, and in an alternate universe I could easily have stayed in the same place without realising I was unhappy.
I know it might not ever be possible to provide enough affordable housing in the most desirable locations within current regulations, so I'm not opposed to the deregulation solution if it were proven to be successful. But for now I'd need more data to convince me the benefits outweight the costs, and I'd be quite reluctant to volunteer the UK as the guinea pig. My political preference until that evidence arrives would be to explore solutions in the other direction.
There seems to be a strange thing here where increased housing availability implies more immigration / more people? If we hold immigration levels constant over both scenarios, and we open up more space to housing, then it seems impossible for on net housing conditions to get worse, except insofar as people choose to move to better areas in exchange for worse space, and I don't see why we should assume that is typically an error (and this opens up more room for people in other areas, as well).
I agree that your scenario combined a lot of things that sucked and this caused your experience to suck. The thing is, 'person confined to less space than they need' is the kind of thing these changes fix, not the kind of thing they cause? If anything, extra apartments that have windows only in common areas still leads to more people having more waking hour access to windows (and more space).
Slums exist because of a lack of better alternatives. From what I can tell, if you ban non-ideal conditions by adding a bunch of requirements, that actually forces people INTO slums because they lack reasonable alternatives - you take the lower part of the market out, without replacing it with anything, so people are forced to shack up. You can build housing in San Francisco if and only if it is in the form of a tent on the street, etc.
To be clear, this is about stopping things from getting worse, not making them better. If Yglesias et al had their way, the US would literally be receiving hundreds of millions of immigrants in the near to mid future. Getting some of them to live in shoebox apartments with no windows or toilet is necessary to avoid mass homelessness.
> Bike cuts both ways, the bikes we have in New York make walking more stressful and I am not convinced a lot more of them would be a net win.
This problem may be a cultural difference. If I understand correctly, in America people cycle on the pavement (sidewalk). In Europe people cycle on the road and don’t bother walkers much.
Seems most places the restriction on building far exceed the local externalities that building can cause. And the perceived externality is largely that street parking is not metered by location and time of day.
I am very disappointed that a guy with such a great reputation for thoroughness and clear thinking as you have has written this long wonk piece about housing and transit without mentioning crime / public disorder _even once_, though these phenomena are absolutely central to the way housing and transit are organized in English-speaking countries. I'll quote AnomalyUK's recent post [https://blog.anomalyuk.party/2022/07/cars-or-police/] about virtual nations. My comments and elisions are in brackets.
---
[Your post is like the] 2020 twitter thread [https://twitter.com/JonnyAnstead/status/1248187028237213701] by [urban planner] @JonnyAnstead. It is an excellently written thread, and makes perfect sense if you ignore the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, he is left to think that all these car-centric features [which you set out to combat in this post] are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
[W]e now live in a society of pervasive violent crime. I have written much about this over the years, because it is controversial, but I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. [...] There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.
And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.
But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.
> That seems potentially right for Manhattan in a scenario where we could build quite a lot, it seems wrong for other boroughs.
I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here? Manhattan (mostly) has universally good transit access but relatively few places with really good upzoning opportunities, it's outer boroughs/jersey city where we have great building opportunities if we could only get better transit connectivity. Over the last decade or so the places in NY that have seems lots of new housing have mostly been LIC and downtown Brooklyn, which are also the main two areas outside Manhattan with really good subway connectivity. Making more subway hubs outside Manhattan could let us make more LIC-style neighborhood upzonings.
I'm an engineer, 30 years old, single, living in a small city with relatively cheap housing. If I had the option to live in my college dorm with a bathroom down the hall, but without the roommate, for less than I'm paying now, I'd jump at it. Instead I'm paying the mortgage on a 3 bed 2 bath house in a good school district. Most of those rooms I never set foot in except to clean. I used to live in a smaller apartment in the same city. My current mortgage payment, even accounting for insurance and property tax, is about 2/3 of what the rent on that apartment was. This in a city of less than 200k people in a flyover state. Housing markets are insane everywhere.
With respect to your early comment about the interstate commerce clause, I'm curious as to your thoughts on using bad tools to good ends more generally. I think that you will probably agree (your sort of seem to imply this) that the interstate commerce clause has been _dramatically_ over used and expanded to nearly the point of meaninglessness in a way that allows the Federal government to do lots of things it was not intended to allow (in my opinion, mostly bad things). As such, it is a tool that more often than not results in bad rules and bad outcomes. So, do you think that it is a good thing to use such a tool to a good end (and I think I agree that the end here is good), even if it reinforces the overall use of that tool, or is it better to instead try to break the tool (or at least not help make it stronger)?
Yeah. I wonder about that too, including in that particular case. Saying 'they started it' is not an adult response. As a Player of Games, my general principle (similar to 'don't hate the player, hate the game') is that you play by the rules to get the best outcome, while also being in favor of changing the rules to be better. The question then is, by using the bad tool, are you making the de facto rules worse? Another good question is, if you don't symmetrically use the rule, are you encouraging those using it to use it more rather than work to fix the problem? All depends.
So mostly I think once the door is opened you should walk through it, while also advocating for closing the door, and being willing to close it BEFORE you walk through it to make that happen.
> If they choose cheaper places without plumbing over expensive places with plumbing, such that this is how you maximize profits, I will absolutely bite that bullet and let them make that choice, and I do not see a problem so long as everyone involved knows what they are renting or buying.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I took the original tweet to mean there would be entire buildings with literally no plumbing at all. I assume (hope?) you would agree that shouldn't be allowed, for hygiene reasons at the very least?
My initial reaction to your window-free bedroom suggestion was similarly negative, and I would have guessed that it would increase depression etc. After searching for papers on the subject though it seems that you're right that total darkness when sleeping is good for mental health. My concern, however, would be that removing the window requirement could have a very negative impact on people who spend any significant waking time in their bedrooms. For wealthy people with a separate office and living area it sounds fine to me, but I can see how it could be hellish in other situations. Similarly for apartment size. There are people who spend very little time at home and are happy with a tiny place, but if people can't afford anywhere else I worry it violates their basic dignity. Although it is of course more dignified than being homeless.
If it was possible to offer these options to those who wanted them without risking harm to those who have no choice but to accept whatever they can get, I would be entirely in favour. Do you see any way of being able to calculate the costs and benefits?
So there are kind of two distinct things going on here - the question of whether people should be allowed to make choices on where to live under what conditions and choose 'bad' living conditions to get a location they want (or a place at all), and the question of the value/harm/risk of various kinds of conditions they might choose.
I would basically bite the bullet on requirements, provided they were disclosed - people make other impossible inhumane choices in the face of too-high housing costs, and as you note many spend little time there, or don't need what you think they need. I agree that access to plumbing is necessary, within some reasonable distance, but also there would be demand for it.
In terms of harms of particular things, the paranoia over dark rooms is such weird selective paranoia. Again, many people spend far more time working in their office with no windows than most people do in their bedrooms. Many are not allowed to leave. If we're allowing that, and it's damn common, what are we even doing? What exactly is so inhumane about a tiny place? Note that the *average* European place is less than half the size of the average one we have, kids in dorm rooms are often in ~0 space and do fine, this is a lot like forcing people to work for hours a day for that space often, etc.
If someone 'has to accept whatever they can get' then the practical result of banning such arrangements is that they have two remaining choices, both that are worse for them! They can either (1) not live where they want to live, or (2) spend an obscene percent of their money on rent. How is that... better?
Maybe should've said in my comment that I'm from the UK and have never been to the US. But we've recently had similar proposals hoping to revitalise town centres by converting retail and office space to residential, which faced the same sort of criticisms you're arguing against. The free market argument doesn't get much airtime here though, which is why I'm interested in your analysis even if the specifics are quite different.
I don't want to bang on about plumbing, but I can easily imagine a scenario where a major relaxation of building regulations could combine with other policies (e.g. on immigration) and lead to slum-like conditions with serious overcrowding and disease. Obviously this is a worst case scenario, but I would take some convincing before I opened that door. Although again I will concede that an overcrowded flat in Glasgow was preferable to dying in the potato famine.
Regarding the paranoia, as an undergraduate student in a flatshare I had a room with barely enough space for a single bed, desk and wardrobe and was pretty happy with it given the price. But through bad planning I had to spend the second lockdown in another small room with a little window which didn't get much direct sunlight, a flatmate I didn't get along with and a mould problem, and while there are obviously a lot of confounding factors here I'm confident the bedroom situation made things worse. I wouldn't have predicted the effect on my mental health in advance, and in fact it was only when I left that I realised how much I had hated it. So I'm a bit skeptical that people can always make a rational decision about these things. In retrospect I suspect both options (1) and (2) would have been preferable to my choice, and having subsequently chosen (1) I'm quite a lot happier. You might argue that's the market working successfully, but the fact I moved was actually mostly coincidence, and in an alternate universe I could easily have stayed in the same place without realising I was unhappy.
I know it might not ever be possible to provide enough affordable housing in the most desirable locations within current regulations, so I'm not opposed to the deregulation solution if it were proven to be successful. But for now I'd need more data to convince me the benefits outweight the costs, and I'd be quite reluctant to volunteer the UK as the guinea pig. My political preference until that evidence arrives would be to explore solutions in the other direction.
There seems to be a strange thing here where increased housing availability implies more immigration / more people? If we hold immigration levels constant over both scenarios, and we open up more space to housing, then it seems impossible for on net housing conditions to get worse, except insofar as people choose to move to better areas in exchange for worse space, and I don't see why we should assume that is typically an error (and this opens up more room for people in other areas, as well).
I agree that your scenario combined a lot of things that sucked and this caused your experience to suck. The thing is, 'person confined to less space than they need' is the kind of thing these changes fix, not the kind of thing they cause? If anything, extra apartments that have windows only in common areas still leads to more people having more waking hour access to windows (and more space).
Slums exist because of a lack of better alternatives. From what I can tell, if you ban non-ideal conditions by adding a bunch of requirements, that actually forces people INTO slums because they lack reasonable alternatives - you take the lower part of the market out, without replacing it with anything, so people are forced to shack up. You can build housing in San Francisco if and only if it is in the form of a tent on the street, etc.
To be clear, this is about stopping things from getting worse, not making them better. If Yglesias et al had their way, the US would literally be receiving hundreds of millions of immigrants in the near to mid future. Getting some of them to live in shoebox apartments with no windows or toilet is necessary to avoid mass homelessness.
I am confident MattY endorses building more housing regardless of how many people we let in.
> Bike cuts both ways, the bikes we have in New York make walking more stressful and I am not convinced a lot more of them would be a net win.
This problem may be a cultural difference. If I understand correctly, in America people cycle on the pavement (sidewalk). In Europe people cycle on the road and don’t bother walkers much.
In NYC they do it in bike lanes, which don't obey lights, which means that every street crossing requires worrying about 4 things.
Fair enough. Legally or Illegally?
In London there’s a culture of ‘lights don’t count for bikes’ which hasn’t been the case in any other British city I’ve lived in.
Legally. And no, lights do not count.
Seems most places the restriction on building far exceed the local externalities that building can cause. And the perceived externality is largely that street parking is not metered by location and time of day.
I am very disappointed that a guy with such a great reputation for thoroughness and clear thinking as you have has written this long wonk piece about housing and transit without mentioning crime / public disorder _even once_, though these phenomena are absolutely central to the way housing and transit are organized in English-speaking countries. I'll quote AnomalyUK's recent post [https://blog.anomalyuk.party/2022/07/cars-or-police/] about virtual nations. My comments and elisions are in brackets.
---
[Your post is like the] 2020 twitter thread [https://twitter.com/JonnyAnstead/status/1248187028237213701] by [urban planner] @JonnyAnstead. It is an excellently written thread, and makes perfect sense if you ignore the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, he is left to think that all these car-centric features [which you set out to combat in this post] are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
[W]e now live in a society of pervasive violent crime. I have written much about this over the years, because it is controversial, but I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. [...] There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.
And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.
But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.