The upside for people who did manage to pay rent is that they don't have to deal with the resulting mass homelessness (and associated mass violence and sharp decline of public safety) that would result from landlords evicting everyone who couldn't pay rent.
We left California last year because our rent was too high for risky times. This fucking sucks. We could have stayed and
Saved a ton of our kid’s and our heartbreak and our landlord(a great guy) could have been made whole. Wtf?
Those laws did not happen immediately, nor was it clear what would happen if they did not pay their rent. Skilesare made the sensible move by presuming they would have a ton of unaffordable debt if they had stayed and ended up with a bill for all of the unpaid rent.
However, as US governments are prone to do, the decision is made to punish those who were prudent and made sacrifices, and to assist those who took risks. Which might be okay if the government was giving the cash to everyone, as that would not punish those who made sacrifices.
If anyone out there is involved with this I am very interested and very motivated to figure out if I can get a JavaScript engine running in a DFINITY canister. I just need a compiled wasm and a candid file to try it out. I think. The wasm might need to be compiled in a particular way.
Why not have a look at QuickJs. I assume your reason is to run js in the browser in an isolated environment for security reasons? I’ve found this article from figma to be an excellent starting point [0] Also useful to consider this benchmark [1] of js runtimes.
We’ve found quickjs-emscripten [2] to work really well thus far. You can see my implementation of it here [3] in Lowdefy. If still has a few rough edges, so would be really keen to make it better.
I’m interested to know, is spidermonkey more comparable to V8 than QuickJs?
When I heard that they were going to monetize with 'tipping' my heart sank. If ever there was an opportunity for 'a rising tide lifts all boats' style social experiment, clubhouse was it. Charge a subscription, let people listen to long tail content that interests them, pay the people that get listened to. You incentives the creation of interesting conversations. It would have been like a giant long tail podcast generator where serendipity and intellect could spin out a lot of new ideas. Boo.
There was so much promise. After a year of quarantine I had 5 of my most interesting non work/family conversations of the year in a one week period. There was no real way for me to connect with those people without wading into the morass of twitter or instagram. I tried to build a tool (https://inof.me) to help people connect by providing an invitation and an asking for an offer. No one was really interested...it needed to be integrated into the platform to work. I couldn't block topics. I couldn't search for terms of active channels. I couldn't politely ping interesting people and ask if they'd like to set up a time to chat.
I love talking about decaying currency, certain(non-NFT) blockchain topics, Longhorn football, some philosophy topics, etc and I'll talk to anyone about them most all of the time if I can find a conversation partner(especially during quarantine). I had no real way to make those connection on clubhouse even though I had spoken with interested folks previously.
Most of all, I couldn't catch up. If an amazing conversation happened that you were late to...too bad. You couldn't explore and find if the person speaking was really trustworthy by looking at their back catalogs.
I wanted a clubhouse that lets me pay $9.99 a month to have access to a back catalogs that will let me listen to the interesting conversations that occurred in the past about very long-tail specific topics. Then I want to star those people with different color stars and notification levels so that if they start talking again I can quickly see what kind of conversation it is and jump in. If I'm late I want to back up 30 minutes and listen at 1.75x until I'm caught up. Give me the knobs and dials to customize my experience.
Guy Raz makes a good point in the How I Built This episode with the Clubhouse founders. You can have a really interesting conversation with someone but that conversation doesn’t necessarily make good radio that’s interesting to others.
So much of that catalog would be gurus repeating the same stuff over and over again. It would be so hard to sort through all of it to the find interesting parts.
I think it’s wonderfully interesting to be pulled into the conversations of people I look up to because it feels genuine. But once the masses join the platform, everything becomes so curated to specific topics that it loses the magic. It isn’t any better than a badly produced podcast or blog.
Live audio and video will still be the future but this isn’t it. Or, isn’t yet.
Trying to find examples of optimized land use in Houston seems to be a bit....um....what is the word for "absurd beyond the point that reason and logic would allow"?
It’s also a wildly diverse multi-cultural melting pot full of interesting entrepreneurs from all over the word, and a place that offers significant upward mobility to millions of people.
Could you expound on this, please? I'm not too familiar with Houston's milieu, and I think hearing a reason why you believe this'd be really interesting.
Yes getting rid of zoning and things (which as the artificial nicely points out means going beyond what Houston has done) is still not enough.
Cars are still uniquely terrible. I'm beginning to view them re development like a gene drive is to geneics: a single piece of technology that upends the careful balance from before and takes over everything.
Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it, still also has increasing returns though. Do a LVT and Carbon tax too to accelerate that.
>Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it
Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things? For that to be true, your definition of "rich" would have to include the approximately 90% of Americans who bought a car and a home in a place that requires driving.
Having a back yard and guest bedroom and driving 15 minutes to the grocery store is preferable to the vast majority of people to living in a small apartment and relying on public transportation. If it wasn't these western US cities would have developed differently.
America has laws (zoning) that almost require a car. Thus people drive and then more car centric areas are built which requires more driving and more cars. It is a loop that reinforces itself. Most Americans do not have a choice of car ownership since it is effectively required because of lack of other options. You say that it is preferable, but that is difficult to say since car ownership is so subsidized and prioritized.
a) We have terrible transit even in places that approve ballot measures about transit, suggesting part of the problem is the administrative state's inability to deliver rather than the fundamental policy preference.
b) Small transit-connected apartments fetch much better prices than many sprawl houses, suggesting that the preferences people express with their wallets and they preferences they speak into the microphone at zoning board meetings are pretty different.
a) Its too late at that point. Denver is a good example of a suburban car-based city that is pouring billions into pubic transportation that can never compete with cars. pick two random spots and compare the driving directions with public transportation. The city would need to be rebuilt as high-density.
b) You have cause and effect backwards here. Apartments are built in those areas because real-estate is already expensive. The real-estate is not expensive because they built an apartment building in the middle of nowhere. Things have to be high-density from the beginning for it to work, and everyone building housing since the automobile has chosen to go low-density whenever possible.
Building a high-density city today would require preventing people from building low-density just outside city limits and driving into town, zooming past all the suckers who bought a cramped apartment waiting at the bus stop.
> Building a high-density city today would require...driving into town
Actually you just said the solution. Let them buy all the exurb crap the want, but make driving hell in all the main destinations. Do that, and your transit investments will actually work.
Only spinless politicians that want to appease both sides make transit fail and let the car win.
>Only spinless politicians that want to appease both sides make transit fail and let the car win.
Welcome to democracy. The only way this could work is if you could decide to have a city where all the people who want cars aren't allowed to live there (or at least aren't allowed to vote there). In other words, a hard boarder with immigration controls, and ideally an independent budget so the Federal or State government can't tax you are require you to build highways to get your tax money back in the form of grants.
Not at all. Small towns and cities have been pedestrianizing a few key blocks for years.
In the case of Denver or some place like it, do a few blocks around the light rail stations. The car owners won't really notice (yet), but the small businessmen will complain. Ignore the small businesses, they are wrong about their own situation: Foot traffic will more than make up for any lost parking.
In fact there is a name, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_urbanism, for this sort of bootstrapping, to build a loyal constituency over people defending their new car free privileges rather than merely imagining an alternative future.
This sounds wonderful. I would love to live somewhere like that. Cars suck to be around and having a massive boulevard all to yourself to walk down is a fantastic feeling. I'm not sure Tactical urbanism will be enough to overcome the problem you identified above.
I mean, America is deeply behind and I'm not sure it can be reformed. Maybe the best thing to do is move some place that does it better and hope to help set an example, I'm not sure.
But stuff like congestion pricing, the 14th street bus lane, and bridge conversions, in NYC gives me a little hope. Manhattan can also set a better example for the rest of the US --- active measures rather than simply basking in good decisions made 100 years ago.
The same metro area can present a tradeoff between short train ride/tiny apartment and long drive/big house. If your statement were true there would be little demand for the former. But it turns out there’s a lot.
Anywhere that’s a candidate to become high density is low or medium density first. Crossroads becomes village becomes town becomes city becomes megapolis. Incumbents were not consulted about these changes; they were economically inevitable. Then progressivism took hold, institutions got more democratic and accountable, we stopped letting economics run roughshod over the hapless little people. Plus the high modernists did some incredibly tone-deaf fuckups which prompted every community to develop a hair-trigger immune system against sweeping changes from above. Heavy consultations and veto points mean a handful of motivated people can kill any project.
The first time a place is developed it’s almost always going to be low density. And once a place is developed the first time, the only way it can be substantially changed is with near-unanimous consent. There are enough people with an innate distrust of change that this consent is not forthcoming. So the initial conditions are permanent. Cities can’t evolve anymore.
> There are enough people with an innate distrust of change that this consent is not forthcoming.
No amount of 'trusting change' will transform the millions of spread out homes already constructed over 80 years into densely packed apartment buildings without tearing the houses down and putting the apartment buildings up. Pre-car cities were built high-density from the beginning. They were never low-density.
Even New York started out looking like a small town. There are lots of places that look like this in California today, and are under comparable economic pressure to grow. They're just choosing not to respond.
My local paper regularly rails against an imaginary phalanx of anti-car jihadists. Any dollar not spent in support of automobiles is sufficient evidence of a nefarious anti-car agenda. Meanwhile, pre-apocalypse, mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity.
Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™.
There are definitely some activists for whom the label "anti-car" might be fairly applied, as these activists appear to reflexively oppose any project involving cars. However, virtually every time I've seen the charge of "anti-car" labelled at an organization or individual, it's generally by the sort of people you describe, people who define "anti-car" as spending a dime on anything that doesn't support cars, irrespective of whether or not the targets also support car projects.
The national newspapers I've seen have broadly been pro-infrastructure of all kinds, whether car or mass transit.
Right but mass transit are cars in inherent conflict. There's no way to "do both" and not be incredibly wasteful.
A lot of newspapers are for a little for-show light rail with park and drive for 9-5 commuters only, but this is a waste that just begets more car-oriented suburbs.
True urban development is going to force a lot of people comfortable in their subdivisions and predictable slowly-to-the-moon single family home prices to comfort a different world, and nobody likes change.
So it's rich people + status quo inertia. That's a lot to confront.
Rich people aren't anti-car. They are pro-car for themselves and anti-car for everyone else. Donald Trump will have no problem affording the Manhattan congestion tax. All the food service workers in Long Island will have to abandon their homes and communities or pony up an extra $300 per month.
Well, I welcome this. Cars do exclude people so it's about time they divide the rich and the aspirational.
There is plenty written about making the LIRR more than a rich suburbanite's 9-5 commute booster, and likewise making the long island buses complement rather than ignore a train service that runs east-west throughout the day.
Nobody need pony up 300 a month because there's no other choice.
Ok. But "the rich" have instituted the congestion tax without instituting any of those improvements to public transportation. Donald Trump is not taking a bus to Mar a Laggo.
> it's about time they [cars?] divide the rich and the aspirational
I'm somewhat shocked by this. Why would you want rich people to be able to avoid all the problems they create for everyone else with their greed?
> Ok. But "the rich" have instituted the congestion tax without instituting any of those improvements to public transportation. Donald Trump is not taking a bus to Mar a Laggo.
In NYC the congestion tax at least was going to be linked to more MTA funding pre-pandemic.
> I'm somewhat shocked by this. Why would you want rich people to be able to avoid all the problems they create for everyone else with their greed?
So right now cars and homeownership are still broadly popular. People view them as the hallmark of prosperity and essential middle-class-and-up status symbols. There's still a deep sense in many parts that urbanism is just part of the the Democrats fetishizing poverty, non-white people, etc., and that apartments and public transit are palliatives for people that didn't make the American dream or whatever.
And indeed "middle class" in general is the aspirational LARPing the landed rich. Big cars because fancy carriages. Suburb houses with lawns to mimmick country estates (and feudal manors before that). And yes ownership to mimic the land ownership itself.
So for urbanism to win, we need to break the coalition between the rich and the wannabes, break wealth in homeownership as a safety net when the state provides none, and break car ownership as the normal way to travel etc.
If congestion taxes heighten the underlying truth car usage always excludes others from the street, that's great. Hell, if wall street keeps on buying up subdivisions to rent out, I can approve of that in an acceleration way: better we pay rent than mortgages if realigns class consciousness. Likewise with some super-car-sharing world where no one can afford a car if they don't rent out rides.
> Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things
1. Most national news, by number of publications leans left. Conservative publications get more eyeballs per outlet, though. Most local news, of course, takes the installation of a single bike lane as evidence that the ghosts of Pol Pot and Stalin have just succeeded in an unholy socialist coup of the local city council.
2. Right leaning billionaires tend to keep their mouths shut more than left-leaning ones.
>People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many.
That some people prefer suburbanism does not imply suburbanism is not being forced on a large proportion of the population that prefers affordable housing in cities dense enough to support efficient public transit. When people moved to the suburbs, large corporations followed and built sprawling offices, often in areas with poor public transportation and without sidewalks. When the choice is between an apartment with a hellish commute and a house close to work, of course many opt for the suburbs, but that does not imply that this is their preference. A suburban home and a car are nice to have if it's an option, but too frequently it's a requirement to own a car, and painful to not live near your suburban office.
Who wants to own a car? Between tolls, parking, insurance, maintenance, and the sticker price, it's a large hole in the ground that I throw money into.
I do want to be able to use a car... To go out of town a few times a year.
Plenty apparently. Like I said, the public transportation is great here but owning a car is very popular. No more waiting for transit. No more trips that take 30 min that you can drive in 15 min. Easier to cart your kids around.
And it’s not cheap at all (import tax of 100%), yet people are more than willing to pay it.
Ah, so the problem with this is that it stops being something to aspire to when everyone gets one. Because then, that 15 minute trip turns into 30 minutes of gridlock, followed by 15 minutes of looking for parking.
That's the problem with cars. They are great in theory, but absolutely ruin a city in practice. Which is fine if you are the only person on your block who owns one...
This is mentioned in the article. The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. But, that wouldn't have undone decades of too-large lots for SFH and lot size so large THs were completely untenable.
All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
> The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s.
Only inside the loop, which is a small fraction of the city's area. They also point out the pervasive use of restrictive convenants, which make most of the suburbs much like their counterparts in other cities.
One thing they didn't mention is that some parts of the inner loop are not getting any kind of development; mostly the south west loop. As always it's complicated but there are socioeconomic and race issues bundled up in it. At least that was true a dozen years ago.
> All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
The problem is that Houston is extremely lacking in offering any transit-based options for people, which means the "solution" is going to be extremely biased towards whatever is most comfortable to people who travel exclusively via single-occupant vehicles.
If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density. No one puts an apartment building down that size in a ghost town.
Odds are good that density is still desired across the street. Or maybe one step down into something more mid-rise. A single family home uses an entire lot to house a single family, maybe just 1-2 people.
It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
> If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density
Who is "you"? The way your sentence is structured is from the perspective of a city planner zoning a city or a powerful central authority actually building these structures.
In Houston, "you" is an individual and if you are placing a 16+ storing housing building down, you're doing it because you think you can make money renting or selling the units. The idea of relaxed land use regulations (zoning) is to allow demand to plan the city.
> It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people. If it was, we'd all live in dormitories and eat in the cafeteria because private bathrooms and kitchens are wasteful. I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
You means the developer. If a developer has decided to put a big building there, it's because there is demand. Obviously there's no central planning authority, just developers building where they can.
I should have been more specific in 'need the density'. Yes, in today's climate that means 'because someone thought it would be profitable. That's because they saw there was demand for housing there.
> Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people.
You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."
> I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
Speculators are buying houses and renting them out in hopes that the land prices will skyrocket as demand for city life increases. By holding the stock of single family homes near urban cores in reserve, they are preventing the land from being used to build large housing developments. Because there is a lack of large housing developments, housing costs are higher than they would be if speculators instead sold all their lots to developers for developing low/mid/highrise housing.
> You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."
I did that entirely on purpose but it wasn't to say that you hold that position. The point was to show that efficiency isn't black and white and, if your justification was efficiency (which it was), there was an even more efficient position than yours. What you're asking for is something more efficient than a multi-acre unoccupied vacation villa and less efficient than military barracks. I wanted to demonstrate that, on the spectrum of efficiency, you're choice of preferring a multi-level housing to a small single family home is just as arbitrary as any other choice.
This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of these discussions:
Is personal ownership of land like other property ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To what degree does society at large retain some ownership rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?
It's different, but similar. We do actually care about other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used, of cost to dispose of, etc.
But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that encourages maximizing housing/business/service utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty story mixed use residential building on the same lot. Even worse are property speculators who purchase abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in hopes that property values will rise considerably in an urban core.
Land is something that comes in an (essentially) fixed supply, and is (almost never) human created.
Chairs are created by human (or machine) labor.
Since the provenance of the owned thing is entirely different in each case, it seems likely the legal/social/moral understanding of ownership in each case would be quite different.
The land under the single-family home might carry a tall building that would bring much more business into that city block. A city might incentivize that through a land value tax, which would be high for this lot.
But Houston has relatively little urban fabric; to me it looks mostly like a really large suburban agglomeration, a place where you cannot get anywhere without driving a few miles in a car.
