Billy Crystal looks pretty good for being old.
Planning a trip to Europe with my son. Trying to figure out how to fit in Lisbon at one end and Florence at the other, and Barcelona in the middle. Would you choose to spend a day in Nimes, Arles, Avignon, or Grenoble?
Florence is hard to get to. Maybe its better to spend the time screwing around Provence? But I really want to see Florence.
Florence is fine, but Venice is sinking. I spent a month in Florence and regret not seeing Venice.
I think Portugal has beautiful coasts, but Lisbon is not that interesting to me.
Florence is fine, but Venice is sinking. I spent a month in Florence and regret not seeing Venice.
I think Portugal has beautiful coasts, but Lisbon is not that interesting to me.
Ooh, I am just making plans to go to a meeting near Porto, Portugal in July. Keep the Portugal reviews and recommendations coming. Probably going to lure my wife to join me by tacking on a 4-5 day bike tour. I guess it will be hot?
A decision we have to make is whether to invite the 19 year old or not. Is this a parents getaway now that the kid is 19 and has a job? Or is this our last best opportunity to take him on an overseas trip? Whether he's willing to get on a bicycle for 5 days might be the decider. Probably we will invite him if he wants to go. Our 16 year old will be at music camp.
Can anyone convince me the world isn't shit? I just read this, about landlord collusion in NYC to make rent skyrocket while actual population is falling:
https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Just the latest in late capitalism.
Also: dark chocolate is poisoning us, any alcohol or sugar is bad for us, coffee will go extinct, Walgreens bought out Rite Aid, large companies are firing customer service people and replacing them with AI, if at all, my office no longer provides coffee for morning meetings, etc. etc. etc.
And of course, inflation that is in part caused by collusion.
Unfortunately the world is actually shit.
My understanding is the article in 8 is highly credulous and/or disingenuous. I haven't read it yet.
7: Data points for your decisions: I went on an overseas trip or two with my parents in my late teens or early twenties and had fun. On the other hand it wasn't my last overseas trip with them. They joined Cassandane, Atossa, and I for our trip to Spain last year.
7: My inclination would be to take the kid. I've been looking at a lot of old photos lately, and I think there's an opportunity for a magical halcyon period when your kids are adults but don't yet have their own kids, and you can have some really wonderful trips and memories together.
I suppose it depends if your kid mostly acts like an independent adult yet, or if he mostly acts like a prolonged high schooler. But whenever that transition happens, savor it!
When do you stop finding whole Doritos on the floor of the hallway?
You mean someday I'll be able to find the floor of the hallway?
When the chips are down, conservation efforts fail.
By the visibility-of-floor criterion, he's definitely still a prolonged high-schooler.
I can't currently get past the Curbed paywall but reviewing my Twitter feed on the subject, it seems data on exactly what is happening with New York's population in the past year (even the past several years, even Census data) is highly imperfect and somewhat contradictory, and this author withheld the datapoints not matching their prior that people are not returning.
3: Are you going by train? I think I went from Florence to Geneva to Paris to Lisbon in 2001 because getting the TGV (Geneva to Paris, then Paris to the southwest border, then to Lisbon) made a huge difference over not taking HSR on a more direct route. But probably HSR is more extensive now because European countries actually build it.
Anyway, on your list I've only been to Avignon, which was interesting if you're into schisms. Probably I'd choose Grenoble today for outdoorsy reasons.
I was in Portugal last year. Agree that Lisbon isn't super interesting (nice, but mostly just a big city) compared to Porto, but if you can make it into Cascais for a bit, it's ridiculously beautiful.
Nimes and Arles are both very nice, there's an intact Roman amphitheater in the center of Nimes, TGV connection with Paris. Florence is also incredible, though if I remember right the train station is pretty far from the center.
I was in Florence a long time ago. I've forgotten the details, but there was a place with lots of really good art. You should look it up.
7. M and I are planning an overseas trip with my parents (and my sister and brother and BIL) this spring, so this might not be your last chance, although I guess that may depend on whether and how long your children remain childless. (My siblings and I don't have kids so this trip was pretty easy to agree to.)
I went on an overseas trip with my parents when I was 19 (if the Pacific ocean between LA and Hawaii counts as a sea) and I was definitely too much of a teenager to enjoy vacationing with them at that time. I'm really looking forward to this trip. My dad is getting very much older so this is probably my last best chance.
My parents took a trip to Italy without us kids when we were little. I remember the thing I was most afraid of is reassuring myself that their plane wouldn't have to cross the Bermuda Triangle.
I think that's why so many flights to Europe used to connect through Iceland.
23: Cascais looks interesting an maybe close enough to Lisbon that we should just stay there. Not that we need to go to Lisbon, its just the place my son has heard of and wants to see.
Also I think there was a pretty Portuguese girl in his fifth-grade class that he's hoping to bump into.
We're doing a 4-week cross-Europe trip this summer (Norway, Germany, Czechia, Switzerland, Italy) and our 18yo is going to meet us halfway through because he has other plans overlapping with part of the itinerary. Wife is also doing her own branch ahead of time (Italy and Poland then meeting in Oslo) because she has more time off. Yes I know the joke.
My in-laws organized family trips before and after we had kids- California, Italy, Hawaii, Dominica, Costa Rica. It was pretty complicated but was nice having a lot of babysitters around for when we did the trips with young kids. They also funded most of it.
The coastal border of Spain and Portugal is supposed to be quite nice. You could probably walk there, I heard a lot of people do.
Oh really? How long is the coastline?
Michael Collins got into lots of different fields.
I hope that book discusses Meadowcroft rock shelter/harness racing.
I haven't read it so I couldn't say. Its theory is very controversial and not widely accepted.
Is that because the little wagon looks silly?
That's true. People always assume that when you want to measure the coastline, you're going along the beach, rather than traversing from ocean to shore. Why put the coastline in a box like that?
7. If you want a few days bike ride from Porto, take the road that follows the Douro up river. Much of it is a UN listed area of outstanding beauty.
Also, the world is fine. It's the human beings that are shit.
If you're going to drink fortified wine, the ones from Portugal are classier than Night Train.
8, etc: saiselgy argues that the reason rent is going up is that the pandemic increased people's desire for space ("Thanks to remote work, fewer people want to live with roommates, more people want spare rooms to use as home offices, and many people have benefitted from a mix of rising wages and diminished commuting costs, allowing them to afford more square feet per person."):
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-pandemic-is-still-upending-the
I don't know if that's true, but could easily imagine NYers deciding that it was worth more money to not have a roommate.
re: 44
That seems ... implausible.
In the UK, at least, there's a lot of pressure on the rental market as it has become increasingly difficult for people to buy their first home and interest rates are higher than they have been for a while, so landlords are passing on the cost. Also, a lot of landlords are price-gouging bastards taking advantage of the rental shortage to jack prices up.
My own rent went up by about 10% this year.
I'm betting there's a lot of collusion behind many of the price increases, including rent. The lesson of 2016-2021 is "rich people can do crimes."
I mean, they can do them with more impunity than was thought before.
Rich people buy a lot of sushi and then don't pay.
44: It's not "the" reason, the reason is lack of housing supply adequate to the demand. But the argument he's making is that wfh has increased demand for housing space.
It's undoubtedly the case that a major cause of housing shortage is that people buy a lot more housing than they used to. Basically every city has less population than it did at its peak, and that's mostly driven by demand for more space and not by empty units or knocking down buildings. A big one is that kids used to share rooms. But wfh seems part of that trend.
The other big issue caused by wfh is that it's allowed people to move out of the most extremely overpriced areas to other places, which means more places now have a housing crisis than before. (See every nice town in the west that's now full of Californians.)
48 That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.
44: It's not "the" reason, the reason is lack of housing supply adequate to the demand. But the argument he's making is that wfh has increased demand for housing space.
Yes, that is correct, I was summarizing too quickly.
That seems ... implausible.
I don't know NY, but locally part of the real estate demand is driven by people from Seattle who are able to work remotely (some or all of the time). For example, here's an ad in the Seattle times for a new housing development by the Canadian border ("Sit back and take in the views from the Salish Sea to Mount Baker, or make the most of work-from-home life in a beautiful small town that's just a day trip away from Vancouver.")
As 50 notes, the reason prices go up is when demand is increasing faster than the supply. I don't know how much of an impact WfH has, but I believe that it does increase demand.
I'm betting there's a lot of collusion behind many of the price increases, including rent.
Maybe, but what does, "collusion" mean (as opposed to, say, "market research").
I'd read it, more or less as this -- property owners face a trade-off between risk and return (higher rents increase the chance the unit will be vacant and they won't make anything). If owners act individually they will be risk-averse and set the price lower than the profit-maximizing price because they are scared of having an empty property. Collusion reflects them making an agreement to share the risk (by all increasing prices together so they aren't competing against each other for tenants by keeping prices low) and set a profit-maximizing price.
The counter-argument is that there are already enough risk-tolerant property owners who will feel comfortable raising prices that they would go up even without collusion (and the smaller property owners would raise their own rents after a delay when they observer market rates going up).
That's an Econ-101 description (and should be viewed with some skepticism) but I think the vacancy rate is going to have a huge impact on behavior and that you would expect rents to go up in a low-vacancy situation with or without collusion.
I also suspect that more units are owned by people who know that Econ 101 argument. Small landlords are often super lazy, and so don't want to deal with the hassle of finding new tenants (or fixing the house), and can't run the risk of losing a large fraction of their income. Larger management companies can just factor in an expected vacancy rate and are finding new tenants every year anyway and it's full-time people rather than just some guy who has a real day job and doesn't want to be bothered. Not sure if larger companies are collusion exactly, but I think more housing is held by smarter profit-maximizing owners.
I think they are fixing prices by discussing rents among themselves.
I think they are fixing prices by discussing rents among themselves.
I'm sure that happens but, again, there's a question of scale and impact.
Let's imagine a market with 1000 property owners, how many of them would have to discuss rents for it to affect the market?
If 10 of them get together and all say, "I was thinking about raising rents, but I'm not sure the market will support it. If we have all be thinking that, let's all raise our rents together."
From the point of view of a renter, or the other 990 property owners that's going to be indistinguishable from 10 people just deciding to raise rents.
But if 300 property owners get together and make the same decision that will be more consequential -- but even in that case, if 300 owners raise rents and start seeing higher vacancy rates relative to the other 70% of the market, that's not going to encourage other people to raise rents as well. It's only going to cascade through the market if everyone (both property owners and renters) sees that they're still renting all of their units at the higher price.
Also, as Unfoggetarian asks, what if, rather than 1000 individual owners the 4 largest owners control 30% of the market by themselves (or, what if there are small owners but large property management companies, who will sometimes suggest rent increases). That complicates the pricture, but I still think the Econ 101 argument of, "people will notice if the high-priced properties are full or empty" is still an important factor.
It's not separate. Larger owners are buying out smaller ones because the larger owners can pay more because they can do collusion more easily.
I haven't read the links yet, but leaving this here to read later.
Most rental housing in the U.S. is developed, financed, and owned by a diverse group of private, for-profit companies. Government entities such as local public housing authorities own a relatively small share of rental housing. Even in the below-market rental sector that serves low-income renters, most properties are developed and owned either by not-for-profit organizations or private, for-profit landlords.
Private landlords run the gamut from individual investors (one person or family) to large institutional investors, such as insurance companies, real estate investment trusts (REITs), private equity firms, and other corporate entities. Individual investors own a majority of small rental properties (one- to four-unit buildings), while institutional investors own most large (50-plus units) rental properties. Since the Great Recession, institutional investors have acquired an increasing share of the single-family rental market. Ownership of rental housing is not highly concentrated nationally, but exhibits some concentration within local geographic areas. The real estate industry has consolidated somewhat since the Great Recession, with a few large firms making up a larger share of both development and property ownership.
...
Over the past 40 years, the legal and political environments have become increasingly hostile to developing new rental housing. Land use planning and development permitting are primarily the responsibility of local governments. States exercise some authority over land use regulation, while the federal government has quite limited powers. Local governments use a wide range of tools to regulate new housing development, particularly zoning laws that specify where structures of different types and sizes may be built. Zoning generally sets rules by structure type (multifamily versus single-family) rather than housing tenure (rental versus owner-occupied). Nearly all local governments have zoning laws that are more favorable to single-family homes than apartments and other high-density structures. Many affluent communities ban development of multifamily buildings on the majority of land. Where permitted, apartments are often constrained by strict size rules such as maximum building height or caps on the number of homes per acre of land. Since the 1970s, procedural barriers to apartments have become widespread, such as requiring extensive community reviews and discretionary approvals.
...
Low-income renters everywhere in the U.S. face high housing cost burdens. HUD defines nearly 20.8 million Americans as "cost-burdened," meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities. Some 25% of renters are severely cost-burdened, spending more than 50% of income on housing.
Excessively strict land use regulations are limiting the supply of rental housing and increasing rents, particularly in large metropolitan areas along the West Coast and the Northeast Corridor. Local zoning makes it illegal to build multifamily buildings (either owner- or renter-occupied) on most land in urban areas. The development process has become increasingly long, complex, and risky, which also adds to the cost of finished housing.
Did we really let that Chinese spy balloon get shot down without someone here commenting with an "NMM to..."? Standards are slipping.
If you read a New Yorker article in which someone in NYC is complaining about the difficulty of getting her kid into "a 40k preschool" you are probably meant to interpret that not in the way I interpreted it.
57: An interesting twist to this is that the scrambling of housing markets from COVID relocations is really showing how little elasticity there is in housing markets. The thing I read today was that homelessness is shooting up in Maine, basically because of gentrification by remote workers. Thing is, the absolute numbers aren't large--it's not as if 100,000 people moved to Portland in the last 3 years--but, like most markets, it only takes a little extra, unanticipated demand bump to tighten things radically, raising costs, and, in the case of housing, putting people on the street.
I'm actually not sure what to do in the big picture. Maybe it's the case that, if blue cities had been permitting more housing all along, the whole system would have enough slack. But what would have caused people to invest in significant amounts of rental housing in Maine over the decade prior to 2020? For that matter, it wasn't zoning that prevented people from investing in Pittsburgh housing prior to 2005 or so--it was very simple, very obvious economics that said there was no return on investment for doing so. Plenty of lots zoned for apartments sat vacant--it had literally nothing to do with regulation. But once people started moving in, supply got tight in a hurry, sales prices and rents went up, and while homelessness has really only shot up in the past ~5 years, Black residents have been getting pushed out for over a decade.
The longtime rule of thumb is that 5% vacancy is needed for smooth market operation. How much more do you need for resilience to rapid shifts, in a world where even lightly-regulated housing takes over a year from conception to completion? I'm pretty sure 10% vacancy is a recipe for demolition by neglect.
61: if you read an article about someone struggling to pay $26k for day care in MA, know that that is average in my county and Boston is more.
Re: NY. I learned yesterday from someone that her daughter in Brooklyn (?) has a kid in public 3-K which saves a lot of money.
50: Boston has fewer people than it did in 1950, but more units of housing. Basically, Boston residents have fewer kids than they did back then when Irish Catholics and Italians didn't use birth control, people stay single longer, and there are divorced people living alone.
Maybe they used birth control but wanted more kids?
Also, Protestants had more kids back then too.
64: My dad lives in a planned community built in the '30s that was conceived as worker housing for clerical types. Almost all of it was built as attached 2BR/3BR houses (the second phase added some 4BR, but not many). Now it's become a NORC, but when it was new, it was all young families. Now those houses are considered too small for families, even though families are much smaller than they were.
Shifting norms, but also a much wealthier country (that subsidized sprawl).
67: The road down from the hill scared us.
I'm actually not sure what to do in the big picture.
It's an interesting question. I think part of it is definitely having loose enough regulation that supply can be scaled up relatively quickly if necessary, but as you say in a lot of places it's really the underlying economics of the housing market that keep people from building more even if they're allowed to. Another piece probably is scaling up the supply of non-market-rate housing, whether that's new public housing or nonprofit-operated supportive housing. Shelters too. Basically building up a more robust safety net so when you do get those demand shocks people don't just get forced out entirely, plus ensuring a sufficient supply of housing that's buffered a bit from market forces. That's my best guess anyway.
53 is excellent, btw.
One thing that rising markets do is to drive out lazy landlords--not through nefarious means, but by basic dynamics. I'll illustrate anecdotally, but I know for a fact that this has been studied and broadly corroborated:
In 2000, Pgh is still a sleepy backwater with an oversupply of housing and a rental market dominated by small-time, lazy landlords who just want to cover expenses, make some $$, and not have to hassle with finding new tenants. $600/mo for a decent 2BR in a good neighborhood.
2005, market begins to rise--cheap houses in desirable locations start to get scarce, that same apartment is probably getting $800, and if you invest a little, you can get $900. But lazy landlord doesn't want to invest, and $800 seems like a lot anyway.
By 2010, the market is genuinely hot*, but that 2BR is kind of rundown. It needs investment to remain attractive even at $800, but with more investment, $1200 is in reach. Alternatively, there are now Googlers in town who'll turn the 3-unit house back into SFH. Depending on various factors, either a serious investor or the Google will offer the lazy landlord a LOT of money--2-3X what the house was worth 8 years prior--to simply sell.
So now, in 2015, there are two outcomes for that building: a smart, non-lazy landlord has invested $450k in buying and improving it, and will be sure to maximize his return, or it's now a private house, reducing supply and eliminating a lazy, non-maximizing landlord from the market.
And this gets repeated literally hundreds of times across a relatively limited number of desirable neighborhoods, without any collusion or master planning. Fewer old ("naturally affordable") units than there used to be, fewer lazy landlords, and unless a bunch of new supply comes on line, the remaining lazy landlords are still charging way more than they did or could have less than 2 decades earlier. And it doesn't take a big ramp-up in demand--Pittsburgh's population is a full 10% lower than it was 20 years ago.
*the years are symbolic, but FWIW, Pgh was really not affected by the Great Recession, including the housing crash aspect.
I have no idea if these people are googlers, but they are very, very slowly walking down their price. This at well over 200% of what they paid 8 years ago.
It's not just about being zoned residential, it's about being able to build a project immediately and not after several years of hearings. Simple clear rules that don't require exceptions or approval from the neighbors.
The process for redeveloping the hospital they're tearing down behind my house is just so slow, and got derailed by declaring the hospital admin building as "historic." The hospital closed down over a year ago, start building housing already!
I built a house once. Or the wood frame part of it.
Or, 2x6s if it's a tall house or if the builder is building for an owner who has thought about heating and cooling.
76: Tim's parents when they bought their house as part of a development, but I guess they had their choice of builder and those did 2x6.
It might not be a choice in Canada. It's more space for insulation and Canada is cold.
79: I think in the 80's it was a choice, because their house was better insulated than the others on the street, and, believe me, I heard about how well insulated it was.
Yeah. Canadians can be really boring.
Another piece probably is scaling up the supply of non-market-rate housing, whether that's new public housing or nonprofit-operated supportive housing. Shelters too. Basically building up a more robust safety net so when you do get those demand shocks people don't just get forced out entirely, plus ensuring a sufficient supply of housing that's buffered a bit from market forces. That's my best guess anyway.
Yeah, I think that's correct. Worth noting that this was essentially the original concept behind public housing: it was supposed to fill in the gaps that market-rate housing would tend not to fill. Then, for contingent reasons, it became both functionally and reputationally warehousing for the poor, which meant that it couldn't function as short term/temporary housing during demand shocks and economic downturns. You can't ask a nonprofit to shoulder high vacancy rates, but in theory you could charter government-owned housing as intentionally running high vacancy rates most of the time, only filling up when needed. But obviously that's an incredibly heavy lift in the US.
What nobody has an appetite for is short-term, substandard housing, which frankly has been the historical solution. If you outlaw shoddy worker housing and Quonset huts, you've basically made the problem insoluble. Architects LOVE designing clever, short-term shelters, but they're never really practical*, and we all know what garbage FEMA trailers were. I wonder if other OECD countries have FEMA trailer equivalents that are actually good.
*I'm sure many of them are practical in the sense that, if a billionaire set up a factory and a giant warehouse to store them, they'd work, but that's what it would take. They can't work in the market, and they're too weird/specialized for government purposes
Incidentally, the community in 67 was conceived as a market alternative to public housing, but the idea was for it to be kind of a semi-charitable investment that would return $$, but not as much as you'd get from other investments. Basically, "We can build decent* housing for 40th percentile households without public subsidy if investors are willing to accept 3% ROI." And it worked, except there isn't a large pool of investors willing to accept that.
*actually, really fucking nice, if compact
Worth noting that this was essentially the original concept behind public housing: it was supposed to fill in the gaps that market-rate housing would tend not to fill.
Arguably this was the flaw in US public housing from the inception - that largely due to real estate lobbying, it was limited to low-income people only, which left it vulnerable to Reagan-era cuts and the Faircloth Amendment. If it had been designed to have internal cross-subsidy from more expensive units for middle- and upper-income, which is how it tends to work in the European cities that manage more abundance, it would have been more able to self-sustain and might not have had the same level social stigma applied.
the idea was for it to be kind of a semi-charitable investment that would return $$, but not as much as you'd get from other investments
I'm working with someone a bit on how to revitalize this kind of investment - maybe from the state, but also from other big pots of slightly-public-minded money, like union pension funds. There's an example we found in Oakland, some ~15-year-old nonprofit construction where 80% of the units are theoretically market-rent, but are still several hundred dollars cheaper than comparable new construction in the area because they are just bound to cover their costs and get a basic ROI. If this could be funded with revenue bonds we could blow out the construction pace, limited by materials and labor but not by capital, since each building could pay off its own bond in full.
85: There's a complex like that in Boston that Episcopal city mission was involved in. Friends lived in a market rate apt when she was doing her residency. They said it was way cheaper than anywhere else.
85: There's a complex like that in Boston that Episcopal city mission was involved in. Friends lived in a market rate apt when she was doing her residency. They said it was way cheaper than anywhere else.
83: I wonder if other OECD countries have FEMA trailer equivalents that are actually good.
Germany has these things called "Baucontainer" (lit. "building containers") which are a standardized shape, maybe even a TEU or whatever enlightened and topless piece of equipment Europe uses in trucking. Anyway, they're used as offices on construction sites and similar locations all over. They're attachable and stackable, though I don't think I've seen them stacked more than three high.
They also got used as temporary housing for refugees in the 2015 wave. I'm sure there are Ukrainians in them now, though possibly some of the 2015 people are still there. I dunno.
Does "Bauhaus" mean "Housing container"? I could look that up, but prefer just assuming I'm right.
I don't think standard shipping containers are built in a way that accommodates insulation well. Not that it's not possible, but the various adaptations mean it's not necessarily cheaper than just building conventionally.
89: All your questions answered: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time/id73330895?i=1000585476378
It is possible to use shipping containers as buildings. You see it sometimes in Alaska, especially in rural areas where backhaul costs are prohibitive and once you've got the thing there you might as well use it for something. I don't know if or how they're insulated etc.
I definitely don't think it's a scalable solution to anything.
91: I also don't know how to play a podcast.
Shipping conventional building materials to rural Alaska is also very expensive, of course, so the economics may just work out differently in general from less remote places.
You can, if you go on Etsy, buy a grain bin that is converted into a small cottage. It's pretty nice, but shipping is going to be a problem.
What if I want to buy a small cottage that's converted into a grain bin? I need to store my grain, but I want it to be cute.
Mice. And probably rats. That's what happens.
Grain storage isn't something to fuck with.
I understand the best granaries are made out of cob.
Its worth the cost. Only the best for my grain. That's why I'm shopping on Etsy.
90 et seq.: According to a short (for German values of "short") paper on the history of building containers, there are now two companies that dominate the market. Presumably they've just retained the shape and connectibility of TEUs but have licked the insulation problem and now provide overengineered modular offices and temporary housing.
89, 91: I like things better when Moby just assumes he's right.
103: in the UK they're Portakabins (trademark-to-generic) - they're very common, mostly as offices on building sites, but you see them as temp accommodation for workers on remote sites etc. Some of them are pretty nice and though I don't know how the insulation works they seem pretty warm inside in winter.
Back in 2012 they put about a thousand of them in an instant FOB in Epping Forest, complete with Dannert wire, to support the Olympics.
You can build houses out of them if you have an engineer handy to look at the big holes you cut in the sides.
https://www.eco-home-essentials.co.uk/container-houses.html
62: An issue with Maine is that its one real city (Portland) has been hip for like a decade now, and has had standard-issue American zoning problems, so there was already some spillover from there to its would-be suburbs and rural towns nearby. There may not have been any reason to build housing in rural Maine ten years ago, but there was reason to build in Portland, and that didn't happen either.
EPPING (participial vb.) The futile movements of forefingers and eyebrows used when failing to attract the attention of waiters and barmen. -- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff
For that matter, it wasn't zoning that prevented people from investing in Pittsburgh housing prior to 2005 or so--it was very simple, very obvious economics that said there was no return on investment for doing so.
Another issue is that we never really industrialized construction - it's not only flat in productivity long-term, but possibly worsening. Building codes don't get balanced with costs/efficiencies and while buildings are certainly safer it seems likely we could have gotten to the same level of safety in much more efficient ways (see the staircase discourse). If it cost $200/square foot to build anywhere with things like prefab panels - as it does in topless enlightened Germany - there would be ROI to build in much more places.
Plus all the workforce issues - construction workers are alternatively constrained by narrow pipelines there is no effective policy to widen (skilled trades like mechanical/HVAC) or hyper-exploited in horrible conditions (non-licensed workers, usually undocumented), so their numbers are relatively static and costs go up even more.
(Why would costs go up related to the workers who are hyper-exploited? I surmise because the contractors hiring them assume the risk of the illegality and capture all the surplus from the exploitation, passing little of the savings up the ladder.)
Holy shit https://twitter.com/aerodork/status/1623757599219875843?s=46&t=3cYys7su59ahbaPZeLHEnw
Still going to go back to what I was doing.
If you were really the best cabinet refacing company in Toronto, you wouldn't need to fuck around spamming like a shit. Have some self-respect.
117 is too great for me to delete 116.
That might be my fault for responding. Sorry.
I actually think these unrelated businesses are connected.