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On September 29 2017 02:42 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2017 02:30 zlefin wrote:
Mohdoo, in terms of fixes; it is indeed the case that many peple push for fixes that are unsound and cause considerable long-term damage, like rent control. And also that many push for zoning laws to "preserve community character" that de facto price the poor out of living in the area.
The solution is to allow the creation of affordable housing in an area, by ensuring that it can be built cheaply enough for it to be affordable without subsidies. It's very hard to get such solutions implemented. Build this where? On what land? Is the thought that the state/city buys this land at the market rate and then just subsidizes the living hell out of the cost? So throw up a big apartment building and charge half price as a handout? Honestly, sounds good to me. Not really sure why we don't do that. I imagine it is way more expensive than I realize.
I can't account for every case; but often, build anywhere, on some land somewhere. Often, the creation of truly affordable housing (i.e. housing that would be affordable at market rate with no subsidies) is prohibited by law (due to various zoning restrictions and sizing requirements). removing those makes housing more affordable (though it does create other issues).
The way things currently work, tends to involve various programs that massively subsidized things (but there's never enough of this housing to meet the demand, so wait lists are very long). it would indeed probably be way more expensive than you realize (depending on what your estimates would be); and it's always hard to find money in the budgets to help the poor, as budgets always stretched thin.
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On September 29 2017 02:49 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2017 02:28 Gorsameth wrote:On September 29 2017 02:16 Mohdoo wrote:On September 29 2017 02:12 Gorsameth wrote:On September 29 2017 01:55 Mohdoo wrote:On September 29 2017 01:41 Gorsameth wrote:On September 29 2017 01:26 Mohdoo wrote:
From a Portland resident's perspective, gentrification is amazing. So many shitty little bars that go away and are replaced with amazing brunch places. There are so many areas in Portland that I previously had no interest in visiting that are suddenly useful.
I understand that there are a lot of people who aren't willing to live in a non-trendy city and that they are poor so they can't. I weep for them. Taking a 45 minute bus ride to work in the morning would be shitty.
However, from a bird's eye perspective, I see some serious benefits. There is a shit load of money being injected into the city. Average income is way up. Average education is way up. Areas are safer, cleaner and generally frequented by a straight up higher tier of person. There's something hilarious about groups of people wanting an area to remain low-income and to not have wealth injected into it. "sucks to be poor but at least I got so many brunch places". Take a moment to think about what you just wrote and how that looks if your part of the poor people who got displaced. Also, throwing out all the poor people to live in their own shit place where they don't steal wealth from us fine smart folk has always worked so well throughout history. I am saying that from the perspective of the city and related metrics, gentrification is unquestionably an improvement. If this was Sim City, you'd be rubbing your hands together watching your city get gentrified. In that regard, it is a ridiculous thing to argue against. A city managing to attract tech business, increase net revenue, decrease crime and modernize infrastructure/architecture is a plain and simple win. Speaking about Portland in particular, it has a few areas nearby that are very cheap. This essentially means that people who worked in Portland, while renting in Portland, now have to move away and take a 45 minute bus to work. This undoubtedly sucks ass. But my point is that there is such tremendous advantage to the "city as a whole". The entire idea of people protesting tech companies moving in, new condos (thus reducing housing scarcity) going up, old buildings being replaced is madness because it is such a clear net positive. I am using brunch places as a crude example of the fact that some shitty bar that never really did that well to begin with being replaced with amazing brunch is a good thing. The argument against gentrification is a clear argument against a greater good scenario. It disproportionately impacts vulnerable, poor, renting families, but that's where things get weird. Here is a situation that is very common: Person owns a house and rents it to people. They rent it at a rate consistent with a home value of $150K. People around this area are selling homes for upwards of $350K. You check the value of your home, speak to a realtor and it turns out you can walk away with $250K in your pocket by selling this rental property. But here's the catch: A poor family of 4 lives in this house. They pay $800/month in rent. Because the owner of the house sees an opportunity to make an insane amount of money, they decide to sell the house. Reddit loses their god damn minds. Many locals don't think that these home owners should be allowed to sell the house. They think these renters should be grandfathered into their current lease for the next 3-5 years until they can find somewhere else to live. So this dude who owns and rents the house out should be disallowed from selling it? How does that make sense? And that's the issue. The things that people advocate for as a way to fix this are all ridiculous. The only way to "fix" the problem is to prevent the property owners from selling their property. Even if you impose renting restrictions, they can always just sell the place for a great profit. Now imagine the other side of this story. Your poor, you get thrown out of your house and the only place you can go is a suburb ghetto. Your making longer days because you got an hour commute extra each day, there are no decent shops around, more traveling for shopping. The entire neighborhood is full of poor people thrown out so that rich people can build brunch places. Gangs move in, drugs move in. Your child falls in with the bad crowd. How could he not, there is no other crowd around. Downward spiral continues, the neighborhood keeps getting worse, police stop coming. gangs are the defacto law. If your lucky you only get mugged occasionally. You haven't seen your kid in days, maybe hes lying dead on someone's couch OD'd on drugs. Not like you can go looking for him without crossing some gang and getting mugged or killed. Atleast you live in the knowledge that some rich kid no longer has to look at poor people in his neighborhood, and as a bonus there are a lot of brunch places around for him. Now why doesn't every city go through this amazing revitalization process! So how do you stop this? How do you prevent property value from increasing? So long as Joe Shmoe can walk away with $200K in his pocket, he's going to do it. My point isn't that it has no negative effects. My point is that it is a net positive and that there are no viable mechanisms for decreasing property value. Property value is the key. Nothing can be fixed without property value decreasing. Your first 2 posts made incredibly light of the cost to human lives. That is why people are pushing back against you. Few things are as simple as 'do the net positive'. How do you stop it? Mandatory low income housing for example. A minimum of X% of homes in a neighborhood has to be affordable for people living on minimum wage. You can't mandate away the realities of the market. The market engages in a bidding war to decide who receive the highest utility from the land by who is willing to give up the most money to have it. If you then give it to someone else for less you haven't changed what the utility, and therefore the value, of that land is. All you've done is set up a wealth transfer from the state or landowner to Joe Random. The state cannot mandate that the utility of land be reduced. No one can.
If the entire industry is driven by lending, you can manage it through setting interests rates lower and adjusting the terms of the lending. Let’s not kid ourselves, the costs of land and education have skyrocketed mostly due to federally backed loans handed out by for profit industries.
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In Denmark we have "fixed" this by mandating that a certain percentage of all new apartments are "common" housing. This means, in theory, that they should be affordable by everyone. Sadly the politicians haven't kept up with times and with an increasing amount of people living alone even "common" housing options may be outside of the poor. The idea is nice in concept, but needs some tweaks to work.
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Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has turned Washington upside down.
In ways big and small, with implications tiny and vast, the campaign that delivered Trump the White House -- and the way he has acted since arriving in Washington eight months ago -- has totally upended conventional wisdom about what politicians say and do.
The latest example is the decision Tuesday by Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican, to retire after two terms.
In his announcement, Corker cited his commitment to being a citizen legislator as the driving force behind his decision.
"When I ran for the Senate in 2006, I told people that I couldn't imagine serving for more than two term," he said.
"Understandably, as we have gained influence, that decision has become more difficult. But I have always been drawn to the citizen legislator model, and while I realize it is not for everyone, I believe with the kind of service I provide, it is the right one for me."
Which is fine! But also odd by the traditional standards of Washington.
After all, the term limits movement long ago lost any of the perceived power it had to call out members who broke their pledges to serve some sort of set time in Washington.
More importantly, Republicans are not only in the majority in the Senate through 2018 but, given the map next November, could well add a few seats to that majority heading into the next Congress. Corker still had two years -- after 2018 -- left on his term as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. And, if Republicans held onto their majority in 2020, he would have been the chairman of the influential banking committee and a powerful player on the budget committee as well.
In the old days, NO member of the majority party with as many prominent committee seats as Corker would have even considered retiring. It just wasn't done.
Plus, Corker was an ally of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and someone who -- until recently -- enjoyed a relatively friendly relationship with the Trump White House. Corker was considered as a vice presidential nominee in 2016 and mentioned for a slot as secretary of state in Trump's Cabinet. And, at 65, Corker is positively a spring chicken in the Senate.
Against all of those positives, Corker's explanation that he simply wanted to stay true to his roots as a citizen legislator rings hollow. Or, more accurately, it rings incomplete.
The simple fact is that life in Trump's Washington -- and Trump's Republican Party -- is just no fun for a guy like Corker. While he's a conservative, he's no ideologue. He developed a reputation as a dealmaker shortly after coming to Washington and has worked to maintain that rep in his 11 years in the chamber.
"The Tennessee Republican has been a point man on banking reform, with President Barack Obama endorsing the proposal he developed with Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His amendment to increase spending on security along the US-Mexican border helped win passage in the Senate of an immigration bill that is loathed deeply by tea party activists."
That profile has become increasingly unattractive to Republican primary voters. Corker faced the likelihood of a challenge next year form his ideological right -- spurred on by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. He would have started as the favorite in that race but a win was far from certain.
Then there is the more-difficult-to-quantify stress and strain of being a pragmatic and policy-focused Republican in Trump's Washington. For Corker, who thinks big policy thoughts and wants to find ways to make government work, Trump's unpredictability and yo-yoing moods -- as expressed via tweet -- had to be frustrating.
He let that frustration slip last month while talking to reporters in Tennessee. "The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful," said Corker. "We should hope that (Trump) aspires that he does some self-reflection, that he does what is necessary to demonstrate stability, to demonstrate competence, to demonstrate that he understands the character of our nation and works daily to bring out the best of the people in our nation."
Trump -- natch! -- attacked Corker on Twitter for those comments. "Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in '18," tweeted Trump. "Tennessee not happy!"
The prospect of six more years of answering questions from reporters day in and day out that began "Did you see Trump's tweet ..." was surely not one that Corker relished.
Corker follows a series of other pragmatic Republicans out the door in 2018 including Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (Florida), Charlie Dent (Pennsylvania) and Dave Reichert (Washington).
The conclusion? The "governing wing" of the Republican Party -- as Dent put it -- isn't having any fun in Washington anymore.
Source
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On September 29 2017 02:57 Ghostcom wrote:
In Denmark we have "fixed" this by mandating that a certain percentage of all new apartments are "common" housing. This means, in theory, that they should be affordable by everyone. Sadly the politicians haven't kept up with times and with an increasing amount of people living alone even "common" housing options may be outside of the poor. The idea is nice in concept, but needs some tweaks to work.
I know that a lot of the EU and countries like Japan have developed different ways to assure housing for their lower citizens. It isn’t a problem with one solution, but something that needs to be managed over decades. There is no single solution that will last 100 years. But everyone wants that.
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On September 29 2017 02:57 Ghostcom wrote:
In Denmark we have "fixed" this by mandating that a certain percentage of all new apartments are "common" housing. This means, in theory, that they should be affordable by everyone. Sadly the politicians haven't kept up with times and with an increasing amount of people living alone even "common" housing options may be outside of the poor. The idea is nice in concept, but needs some tweaks to work.
there's some similar programs where I am; but there's never enoug hhousing made for them; and the way they're setup they amount to a wealth transfer/hidden tax.
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You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen?
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On September 29 2017 03:09 opisska wrote:
You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen?
It likely will. It's a question of timescale. Take San Francisco - there was/is a poor mans ghetto where people were essentially too poor to move away from. So you are more or less waiting for these people to die out/get thrown out/disappear. That can take decades depending on how quickly the progress is.
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United States42016 Posts
On September 29 2017 03:09 opisska wrote:
You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen?
People are not rational economic actors in a perfectly free market. If they were we wouldn't have the problem in the first place. If they were then the workers whose labour provides insufficient utility to justify the land they require would go elsewhere. But they remain, with each day actually making everyone poorer as the economic value they consume by existing exceeds the economic value they generate.
Humans can't just up and leave. A lot of them have ties. A lot more lack the means. A lot lack the initiative.
Capitalism proscribes a solution to the problem created by capitalism but humans are not the perfectly rational and informed actors capitalism requires them to be.
Trump's commentary on this issueI’m going to start explaining to people: When you have an area that just isn’t working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you’ll have another area 500 miles away where you can’t get people, I’m going to explain, you can leave. It’s OK. Don’t worry about your house.
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On September 29 2017 03:13 Ghostcom wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2017 03:09 opisska wrote:
You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen? It likely will. It's a question of timescale. Take San Francisco - there was/is a poor mans ghetto where people were essentially too poor to move away from. So you are more or less waiting for these people to die out/get thrown out/disappear. That can take decades depending on how quickly the progress is.
I highly doubt it. Automation will kill most of these jobs, instead of driving wages up.
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On September 29 2017 03:19 Piledriver wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2017 03:13 Ghostcom wrote:On September 29 2017 03:09 opisska wrote:
You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen? It likely will. It's a question of timescale. Take San Francisco - there was/is a poor mans ghetto where people were essentially too poor to move away from. So you are more or less waiting for these people to die out/get thrown out/disappear. That can take decades depending on how quickly the progress is. I highly doubt it. Automation will kill most of these jobs, instead of driving wages up.
I highly doubt automation will do all that you predict it will do.
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On September 29 2017 03:19 Piledriver wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2017 03:13 Ghostcom wrote:On September 29 2017 03:09 opisska wrote:
You guys are mostly addressing what the state should do for the problem and fails, but that was not my question.
If people can afford to live in the area while working on minimal wage, the supply of people willing to work for minimal wage in the area should dry out, forcing employers to pay more. Why doesn't that happen? It likely will. It's a question of timescale. Take San Francisco - there was/is a poor mans ghetto where people were essentially too poor to move away from. So you are more or less waiting for these people to die out/get thrown out/disappear. That can take decades depending on how quickly the progress is. I highly doubt it. Automation will kill most of these jobs, instead of driving wages up.
The jobs in the center of a big city is janitors, cleaners ect. Automation won't get rid of them for a while.
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Mohdoo, I am going to have to disagree. Where are these very cheap areas your finding anyways? I guess define very cheap your probably a bit wealthier than me so our context is a bit different.
I've taken average 45 minute commute to downtown last three years and I wouldn't say my rent is cheap, in fact I've moved all of the past three years because the landlords/managers pushed us out with "The owner wants to sell" as the excuse only to have new people in within a week in two of those properties at much higher rents. I guess define "cheap"?
Maybe if we had fixed the I5 bridge into Washington up with Max we would have decent housing options there, but as it stands Portland is just going to keep pricing people out. Also you know how that whole project turned out after we spent tens of millions on the EIS. Maybe Washington will finally come to play?
There are benefits to gentrification sure, but there are a LOT of people that are hurt and moved around because of it. Working in environmental justice sometimes my job gets easier. When people with money are in harms way things tend to happen faster. When people without money are in harms way then things get difficult. Portland is really weird because we have industrial and residential butted right up against each other and all mixed in.
And yes , Portland is pricing me out. I'm probably taking a job in Little Rock. Meh, it is what it is, but realize Im fortunate enough to move on and a lot of these people being pushed out to the far reaches of east gresham are not. I've met a lot of wonderful people in my time here and it's really unfortunate to see so many suffer during our housing crisis.
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United States42016 Posts
Technology doesn't tend to kill jobs so much as redefine the field. If you look at financial auditing, for example, historically the practice has been to take a representative sample of transactions and extrapolate to reach conclusions about the whole company. The plan isn't to continue doing that, but at a fraction of the cost. The plan is to start doing 100% of transactions. To an outsider it looks like the same number of people working in the same building as before for the same number of hours. And sure, they're not performing twenty times the number of audits. But the audits they're performing are twenty times more thorough, achieving a level of accuracy and completeness that was previously undreamed of.
The jobs still exist, but what they're doing is incomparable.
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Canada11279 Posts
I really don't know how you would stop gentrification- unless you forbid people from making capital improvements on their properties. Neighbourhoods have a cycle- a new area tends to be bought by the rich, but what is new becomes old and run down- eventually the rich move out and the poor move in. Things continue to degrade so long as people continue with only minimal maintenance. However, some enterprising people move in- maybe they are poor, or middle class, or rich. Their distinction, however, is that they are going to put sweat equity into the property and invest their own money to not just maintain but to improve. The ratio of sweat equity to money will depend on the enterprising individual's finances.
Nonetheless, when a handful of these people start reversing the second law of thermodynamics, other people start catching vision, realizing that the properties are low in value, but that the neighbourhood is turning around, so now is the time buy in before prices rise substantially. And so you get gentrification.
I really don't know how you would stop this (or that you would want to), because you would have to stop the industrious workers- whether poor or rich who seek to improve rather than maintain. I don't really think that's something we want to stop... the problem is what to do with the people that get displaced as their neighbourhood gets too expensive to live in. I don't really know the solution to that as it's ultimately an issue of housing supply.
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The main concerns with automation is that the rate that skill set needed to maintain the new technology outpaces the rate that we are retooling the existing workforce.
Automation is increasingly replacing jobs that paid well and provided a relatively high standard of living for relatively low amounts of skill, without creating new jobs that these same people can realistically obtain.
It's pretty easy to see in the near future that we will eventually have robots that can maintain robots better than humans, as well as robots that can handle many of the current service and IT jobs better than humans. This will push the standard of valuable human labor higher and higher, but it's not realistic for everyone to become engineers or for us to need that great a quantity of them. Ideally at this point, the robots will be so productive that we can afford to have a wellfare state for the structurally unemployed.
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On September 29 2017 03:46 Falling wrote:
I really don't know how you would stop gentrification- unless you forbid people from making capital improvements on their properties. Neighbourhoods have a cycle- a new area tends to be bought by the rich, but what is new becomes old and run down- eventually the rich move out and the poor move in. Things continue to degrade so long as people continue with only minimal maintenance. However, some enterprising people move in- maybe they are poor, or middle class, or rich. Their distinction, however, is that they are going to put sweat equity into the property and invest their own money to not just maintain but to improve. The ratio of sweat equity to money will depend on the enterprising individual's finances.
Nonetheless, when a handful of these people start reversing the second law of thermodynamics, other people start catching vision, realizing that the properties are low in value, but that the neighbourhood is turning around, so now is the time buy in before prices rise substantially. And so you get gentrification.
I really don't know how you would stop this (or that you would want to), because you would have to stop the industrious workers- whether poor or rich who seek to improve rather than maintain. I don't really think that's something we want to stop... the problem is what to do with the people that get displaced as their neighbourhood gets too expensive to live in. I don't really know the solution to that as it's ultimately an issue of housing supply.
It's a cycle. It will always be a cycle. There is no stopping it. The only way to make it better is to figure out a way to allow poorer people to remain where they are or to find different areas to develop that aren't as developed. You don't need to gentrify the arts district and push the artists to the meatpacking district. You need to develop both as close together as possible, so people have a choice.
As an aside, no idea where I posted my 3000th post. Probably in the anime thread 
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I think the reality of the fact that the near term goal of automation is to replace a good chunk of the fast food industry while we haven't even been able to reintegrate the coal industry is the stark issue here.
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On September 29 2017 04:01 chocorush wrote:
The main concerns with automation is that the rate that skill set needed to maintain the new technology outpaces the rate that we are retooling the existing workforce.
Automation is increasingly replacing jobs that paid well and provided a relatively high standard of living for relatively low amounts of skill, without creating new jobs that these same people can realistically obtain.
It's pretty easy to see in the near future that we will eventually have robots that can maintain robots better than humans, as well as robots that can handle many of the current service and IT jobs better than humans. This will push the standard of valuable human labor higher and higher, but it's not realistic for everyone to become engineers or for us to need that great a quantity of them. Ideally at this point, the robots will be so productive that we can afford to have a wellfare state for the structurally unemployed.
This is where we start shipping people to Mars to start the colonizing there. Or you move to a developing country and start over from there. But as time goes by, those countries will just emulate the more industrious countries, take what they've built, apply it to their economy, and people will still be out of a job. So there is no real solution to this, besides welfare state.
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On September 29 2017 04:05 Gahlo wrote:
I think the reality of the fact that the near term goal of automation is to replace a good chunk of the fast food industry while we haven't even been able to reintegrate the coal industry is the stark issue here.
Because the US started horribly late on the coal industry, and from the looks of it still hasn't started in many places.
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