Just because I haven't seen it specifically mentioned yet,
You guys ever hear how the Grandpa in Princess Bride is Columbo?
This is why we oppose government ran healthcare.
This is the great socialized medicine the left brags about? They can shove that crap right up their fucking ass!
If true fuck the UK government
I find it very questionable when a government steps in and is like "No, kill your loved one instead of going to seek out better care." It's almost as if the government in question is afraid that this person will never contribute to society and will just be a drain on it and....wants to remove them like a tax cut.
It happens often.
This one is legit and they UK court said no you can't take your child to the people that take their Hyppocratic oath seriously either yesterday or Friday.
Parents are well aware of the odds, everyone involved is well aware of the odds, court is the only one that's unwilling to accept the odds and try anyhow.
I got a lot of issues with the Vatican but they're the only ones doing the right thing
No, but you don't understand how brilliant this actually is. He rewrote the song with some misheard lyrics in partnership with Specsavers because he's been experiencing hearing loss and needs to get hearing aids and wanted to raise awareness for hearing loss and the stigma around hearing aids. Like. My man. I love you.
It's not so much criticisms of capitalism in general as it is the fact that most posters on here have shitty analysis. A lot of people's understanding of anything like systemic analysis is 'if there is a bad situation and someone might make money in any way related to it, that's Bad', even if the money making is in fixing the problem. This is responsible for 70% of idiotic takes.
You make money in building houses and you suddenly have a vested interest in insuring that building houses produces as much money as possible.
As long as people are making money "fixing" the housing crisis, they will never actually fix them housing crisis.
Private developers will always, and purposefully, never build enough housing too reduce housing prices. They pay a pinch of economists and analysts to figure out how many building to produce to maintain scarcity.
Without a public developer, who does not profit of housing production. We will never, NEVER, ever the housing crisis.
Just look at these maps:
Who do you think owned these parking lots? I would bet money these are owned mostly by developers, who are sitting in them in their "land banks". Developer create housing scarcity by doing exactly what capitalism incentivizes them to do. They aren't "fixing" the problem.
Your post wrong in multiple ways, and therefore a good example of why I tagged my reblog of OP as "#housing is but one example of this".
You write:
Private developers will always, and purposefully, never build enough housing too reduce housing prices.
Private developers will always, and purposefully, build housing so long as it profits them to do so. It's not a question of whether prices are going up or doing down. As long as the big development company forecasts they'll be in the black at the end of the fiscal year/decade, they'll build, even if housing prices are falling.
(We seem to be excluding the owner-occupant developer from this analysis, which is: as long as the private property owner gets a home from their empty lot and can afford to build, they'll build.)
You do not need to imagine a Big Developer Cartel which keeps building housing - but not too much housing - in order to extract maximum profits from the construction of new buildings. There is no need for an illegal cartel to limit the construction of new housing. New housing construction is limited by many factors. The price of labor and the price of materials are two, but these have fluid prices and get priced into the cost of construction. No, there is one limiting factor which blocks all others.
New housing construction is severely limited by governments.
I follow construction project news in my city, because big things are interesting, and because I subscribe to the #kowloon manifesto solution for the housing crisis.
Every developer comes to the city, hat in hand, asking to be allowed to build a big apartment building.
- The apartment building will be affordable for the tenants because the fixed costs of construction will be spread across more rent-payers, instead of being concentrated on fewer tenants. The developer's expected profit on the development is likewise spread across more tenants, making for a lower share per tenant. Split $2400 in monthly profit and fixed costs across 6 apartments and they pay $400 apiece. Split that $2400 across 24 apartments and they only pay $100 apiece. More housing means more affordable rents, plus it leaves room in tenants' budgets to maybe pay $110/mo in fixed cost and profits, which increases the landlord's monthly revenue by $200 to $2600.
- The developer wants to build an additional 3 units (6 + 3 = 9) by adding another floor on top of the building. This will not reduce fixed costs, but the fixed costs are divided among more tenants.
- The developer wants to accommodate an additional 3 units (9 + 3 = 12) by replacing the required ground-floor commercial space with more apartments. The street already has several vacant ground-floor commercial spaces, so there isn't demand for this use in this area. Removing the commercial space means that the commercial space's mandatory parking (8 for retail, 27 for restaurant) does not need to be built. By replacing a vacant space with rent-paying apartments, fixed costs are reduced by $20/month, and the fixed costs are divided among more tenants.
- The developer wants to accommodate an additional 12 units (12 + 12 = 24) by replacing half of the parking lot with a second building, reducing the spaces-per-unit from 1.5 to 0.25, because this building is located on a transit line and is within walking distance of many major employers and several groceries. By decreasing the size of the parking lot, fixed costs are reduced by $10/month, and fixed costs are divided among more tenants.
- Bigger buildings, more affordable for tenants, more profit for the developer, more riders for transit, less GHG emissions from private cars, less urban heat island from reduced asphalt. Everyone wins.
The developer's vested interest in making money tells them to build bigger, taller, more affordably.
The city says no.
The city's zoning doesn't allow you to build housing that is inexpensive or transit-oriented.
- The city won't grant the parking reduction because the neighbors two streets over object to hypothetical cars hypothetically parking in front of their houses on formerly-empty neighborhood streets.
- Now that we've denied the parking reduction, you can't build the second building of 12 units. Your amended proposal to build a second building with 9 units on top of one floor of parking is illegal even if it were affordable. Too many accidental car fires setting small apartment buildings on fire, and it doesn't matter that we have modern fire control technology. And you'd still need a variance to reduce the minimum parking below 1.5 spots per unit, which we won't grant.
- You can't build the 3 third-floor apartments. Building a taller building might make things too windy at street level and 60yo deliveristas might catch a chill when walking from their double-parked car to the pick up food from the restaurant. Also, we don't like that the shadow will stretch to the opposite street curb at precisely solar noon for three days on either side of the summer solstice. We don't need more shade in this city; shade makes homeless people comfortable. Why are you talking about heat islands again? That doesn't have anything to do with the height variance; we're concerned about preventing another Marilyn Monroe incident. Wind tunnels promote public indecency!
- You can't build the 3 ground-floor apartments. We want to see a restaurant in this space. No, you can't have a liquor permit; why would you want to attract customers?
Your application for 24 units is denied. You can only build 6 units of housing. Unrelatedly, can you tell us how you plan to make this housing affordable?
Oh, the zoning constraints make this project no longer financially viable for you, because it makes the cost per unit higher than you can charge for rent? And now you're turning the empty property into a treeless parking lot? We don't like that. To discourage the use of downtown lots for parking, we're going to raise property taxes on surface parking lots, to incentivize development of housing. You should build housing here. Have you considered building affordable housing here?
The above Catch-22 is why YIMBYs exist.
The constraint on cheap housing construction is not a lack of construction capacity or a lack of construction materials or a lack of developer will or some imagined cartel to prevent more construction. The constraint is zoning.
Zoning is why there are parking craters in all the downtown areas, instead of more housing and more offices and more businesses. Why are things zoned that way? Blame 1950's zoning and development decisions that promoted the car, and racist development practices that tore down affordable dense housing near desirable locations. It's very hard to tear out an interstate highway, but it's a lot easier to fix carbrained zoning.
"We don't need cars! Just build transit!" people say, but what does the Federal Transit Administration and the local transit operators and every other government body involved say? "We don't have dense enough housing to support transit." Why isn't housing dense enough? Zoning.
"Just build public housing!" people say, but because of the Faircloth Amendment, public housing authorities are capped in how many housing units they can directly operate with federal funds. Federal funds are the primary source of their funding. Public housing authorities get more housing-per-dollar by giving rental assistance to residents who are living in privately-owned buildings. Public housing authorities would love it if the private developers built more affordable housing. Private developers cannot build more affordable housing, because the zoning code blocks construction.
"Apartments aren't affordable enough! We need Single Bedroom Rentals!" Rooming houses are also blocked by zoning.
"Build more shelters!" Again, blocked by zoning.
This is a tangled mess of systemic issues, and none of it is fixed by removing the profit motive for development. The tangle is paid for and maintained by the people who don't have a profit motive. If you untangle the tangle, they lose their jobs. If you keep the profit motive, then there's someone whose job it is to untangle the tangles. You can make a lot of money selling housing, but only if only you're allowed to build housing to sell. So to build more housing in order to generate profits, you first have to lobby to fix the tangle. Profit motive is what gets more housing.
In conclusion: housing is a perfect example of what @phaeton-flier said in the OP:
A lot of people's understanding of anything like systemic analysis is 'if there is a bad situation and someone might make money in any way related to it, that's Bad', even if the money making is in fixing the problem.
First Post!
I deleted my old tumblr because... man idk why it was covid-times and the prefrontal cortex was not in the room with us!! Anyways, I was reminded by my lovely friend @repecca that tumblr exists, and that some of my work has been going around on here, so I decided to post some of my work up officially!
Starting off with my most notable (?) work to date, here's my LOTR: The Middle Kingdom Project.
Now, it's been over a year since I posted this, and at the time I was... really searchingfor myself artistically, and I decided to go all in on something that I'd been ruminating on for a long time.
So, hello, again. I'm Leia. I do visual development/BG design, and I'm also a writer of things. I love fantasy and transformative work. It's nice to meet you.
Challenge accepted
That’s the kind of challenge that deserves to go viral!!
Fuck yes
I love this!!
Individuals taking ownership of their community!!
takashi0
