I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
Sounds almost like the opposite of autism. Temple Grandin's book about her autism is called "Thinking in Pictures." She said: "One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills." Words, she says, are a second language to her.
She explains that visual thinking made it easy for her to relate to non-human animals, who lack language and, therefore, also think in pictures.
I still want to hear more about the Vox departure! Or maybe not the departure specifically so much as: how the Vox of 2019 differed from the one you envisaged in 2014, and what contributed to that divergence
On EA for political donations, how does this square with Matt's common criticism of the non-profit sector and their seeming non-representativeness of voters?
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.
I agree about phone banking, but not so much about door to door. Most of the time it's just to leave a flyer, not talk and it unlikely to ever got the annoying stage.
I can see the argument from both sides. If people are going to donate to individual candidates, there does need to be some place to go to figure out where that money is going to get the biggest bang for your buck, instead doing stuff like people from both coasts flooding Amy McGrath's campaign with money just because they really, really hate Mitch McConnell.
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I moved to Silicon Valley for my well-paying tech job and was surprised to find there was nothing here and I couldn’t afford SF. Eventually from that I found Sonja and SFBARF (the founders of YIMBY) who had started just going to every city council meeting and speaking in favor of all infill development.
I remember reading about the New York Islanders' attempt to build a new arena for themselves as part of a larger real estate development that would include housing, retail, office space, the works. This was maybe 15 years ago. The team's owner was going to fund all of it with his own money (not the norm for new sports facilities) and it was going to be located on the site of (I believe) an old racetrack that was next to a highway and wasn't being used for anything else. The local politicians sat on the proposal until it died on the vine, saying how concerned they were about how it would tarnish the suburban character of Nassau County. The team ended up moving to Brooklyn.
I'm not an Islanders fan or even much of a hockey fan, but I do generally like sports arenas so I followed the story with some interest and I remember thinking how absurd the whole thing was. Long Island has been decaying for a long time and here you had someone offering to build something cool there, with his own money, for the first time in forever, and the answer was "no thanks"? One of the first times I really realized how irrationally averse Americans are to any development other than McMansions, big box stores, and surface parking.
Mine was as an intern at the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority when they were in the planning stages for an underground garage at the Library Lot. The idea was to put a large mixed use building above the garage since its in the middle of downtown. I was surprised how much "concerns" about character and parking drove the politics the DDA faced, and that housing was seen by so many as only a source of negative externalities. Over a decade later, the garage is there with nothing above it.
I was a reporter at a small newspaper in Georgia a few years ago, and one of the towns I covered was just a suburban nothing place: all single entrance subdivisions and strip malls. For years, the people wanted to develop a downtown and would bitch about how there was nothing to do there. Then a developer came forward with a plan to basically build a downtown from scratch, with over 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 800 apartments. Of course, everyone lost their shit over the apartments part.
A Facebook group against the development got 2,000 members in a few weeks and was flooded with comments like "But what happens when it all goes Section 8?" and "We don't want those kind of people living here." One of the town's kindest people, a lady who organized the Special Olympics every year with money out of her own pocket, pulled me aside after a council meeting and said "If Trump doesn't build his wall, and this thing does get built, this whole town will be full of criminals in a couple of years."
The whole plan fell apart a couple months later, even though the developer was revising down his plans to include fewer apartments. I don't think anyone is ever going to try to build anything except subdivisions and strip malls in that town. And if the people that live there want to have a night out or go shopping, they're always going to go somewhere else.
Ah, the exurbs. They try to have the "best of both worlds" by being both somewhat rural and somewhat urban, but end up being the worst of both worlds instead.
The ability to hear songs in your head has a name too- audiation! There's at least one neat YouTube video about it by Adam Neely if you are into that sort of thing. Many people cannot play songs back in their head accurately, or really at all. It's a skill worth developing for musicians, and it's really cool that you can do it without any practice at all.
To refer to your answer of being a Philosophy major, which philosopher you think stands closest to you on ethics? By ethics, I mean your overall take towards any economic or social policy.
P.S. I have noticed that you avoid any grand philosophical argument or political movement in your posts, that your policy positions focuses on the marginal utility of competing proposals. But even in that case and especially because of the small differences between them how do you choose?
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
A shame about the visualization issues but you seem to have transcended them and found your way. I think, given that you think and ask good questions, you might have made a pretty good engineer.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
About your opinion that giving money to candidates is the best thing you can do to help them win, what about getting out the vote on on Election Day or the day before? Isn’t voter contact important here?
I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
"I can’t make pictures appear in my head."
Sounds almost like the opposite of autism. Temple Grandin's book about her autism is called "Thinking in Pictures." She said: "One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills." Words, she says, are a second language to her.
She explains that visual thinking made it easy for her to relate to non-human animals, who lack language and, therefore, also think in pictures.
I still want to hear more about the Vox departure! Or maybe not the departure specifically so much as: how the Vox of 2019 differed from the one you envisaged in 2014, and what contributed to that divergence
On EA for political donations, how does this square with Matt's common criticism of the non-profit sector and their seeming non-representativeness of voters?
I think in his view you should be giving directly to the candidates you like, as opposed to the non-profits and such.
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.
I agree about phone banking, but not so much about door to door. Most of the time it's just to leave a flyer, not talk and it unlikely to ever got the annoying stage.
Wait. this is important. Does Matt recommend donating to individual candidates over to state parties or voter registration/turnout organizations?
I can see the argument from both sides. If people are going to donate to individual candidates, there does need to be some place to go to figure out where that money is going to get the biggest bang for your buck, instead doing stuff like people from both coasts flooding Amy McGrath's campaign with money just because they really, really hate Mitch McConnell.
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I moved to Silicon Valley for my well-paying tech job and was surprised to find there was nothing here and I couldn’t afford SF. Eventually from that I found Sonja and SFBARF (the founders of YIMBY) who had started just going to every city council meeting and speaking in favor of all infill development.
I remember reading about the New York Islanders' attempt to build a new arena for themselves as part of a larger real estate development that would include housing, retail, office space, the works. This was maybe 15 years ago. The team's owner was going to fund all of it with his own money (not the norm for new sports facilities) and it was going to be located on the site of (I believe) an old racetrack that was next to a highway and wasn't being used for anything else. The local politicians sat on the proposal until it died on the vine, saying how concerned they were about how it would tarnish the suburban character of Nassau County. The team ended up moving to Brooklyn.
I'm not an Islanders fan or even much of a hockey fan, but I do generally like sports arenas so I followed the story with some interest and I remember thinking how absurd the whole thing was. Long Island has been decaying for a long time and here you had someone offering to build something cool there, with his own money, for the first time in forever, and the answer was "no thanks"? One of the first times I really realized how irrationally averse Americans are to any development other than McMansions, big box stores, and surface parking.
Mine was a combination of visiting Japan and seeing the train system there, as well as reading Matt's old blog and The High Cost of Free Parking.
Mine was as an intern at the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority when they were in the planning stages for an underground garage at the Library Lot. The idea was to put a large mixed use building above the garage since its in the middle of downtown. I was surprised how much "concerns" about character and parking drove the politics the DDA faced, and that housing was seen by so many as only a source of negative externalities. Over a decade later, the garage is there with nothing above it.
I was a reporter at a small newspaper in Georgia a few years ago, and one of the towns I covered was just a suburban nothing place: all single entrance subdivisions and strip malls. For years, the people wanted to develop a downtown and would bitch about how there was nothing to do there. Then a developer came forward with a plan to basically build a downtown from scratch, with over 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 800 apartments. Of course, everyone lost their shit over the apartments part.
A Facebook group against the development got 2,000 members in a few weeks and was flooded with comments like "But what happens when it all goes Section 8?" and "We don't want those kind of people living here." One of the town's kindest people, a lady who organized the Special Olympics every year with money out of her own pocket, pulled me aside after a council meeting and said "If Trump doesn't build his wall, and this thing does get built, this whole town will be full of criminals in a couple of years."
The whole plan fell apart a couple months later, even though the developer was revising down his plans to include fewer apartments. I don't think anyone is ever going to try to build anything except subdivisions and strip malls in that town. And if the people that live there want to have a night out or go shopping, they're always going to go somewhere else.
Was this town an actual suburb or just a rural town built in the suburban style? Because the latter would be even more depressing.
It was on the very outskirts of Atlanta, so I guess the former. But it was still plenty depressing. I'll never underestimate status quo bias again.
Ah, the exurbs. They try to have the "best of both worlds" by being both somewhat rural and somewhat urban, but end up being the worst of both worlds instead.
That ALL-Time Wizards starting five is pretty average.
Missed opportunity to title this installment, "2 Mails, 1 Bag."
The ability to hear songs in your head has a name too- audiation! There's at least one neat YouTube video about it by Adam Neely if you are into that sort of thing. Many people cannot play songs back in their head accurately, or really at all. It's a skill worth developing for musicians, and it's really cool that you can do it without any practice at all.
To refer to your answer of being a Philosophy major, which philosopher you think stands closest to you on ethics? By ethics, I mean your overall take towards any economic or social policy.
P.S. I have noticed that you avoid any grand philosophical argument or political movement in your posts, that your policy positions focuses on the marginal utility of competing proposals. But even in that case and especially because of the small differences between them how do you choose?
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
A shame about the visualization issues but you seem to have transcended them and found your way. I think, given that you think and ask good questions, you might have made a pretty good engineer.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
About your opinion that giving money to candidates is the best thing you can do to help them win, what about getting out the vote on on Election Day or the day before? Isn’t voter contact important here?