[HN Gopher] Land use policies make urban childcare expensive and...
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Land use policies make urban childcare expensive and rare
Author : jseliger
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-04-03 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ryanpuzycki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ryanpuzycki.com)
| brailsafe wrote:
| I feel like land use policies make everything expensive and
| everything except parking lots and gas stations rare.
| HPsquared wrote:
| In my city at least, parking is in perpetual short supply.
| antognini wrote:
| That is because it is underpriced.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A city here in Norway had issues because rich people would
| just pay the $75 fine instead of following the parking
| regulations (ie time limits). Somehow repeat offenses did
| not escalate the punishment.
| kgermino wrote:
| Or they have unstated standards. People will regularly
| complain that my city (Milwaukee) doesn't have enough
| parking when they really mean parking that is some
| combination of free, on street and adjacent to their
| destination. Which... sure but there's a $5 garage a block
| away with 300 empty spaces.
|
| There is an issue in some areas where most to all of the
| parking spaces are privately owned and not publicly offered
| at any price but in theory a culture of paying a fair price
| to store your large personal property would encourage those
| private holders to offer spaces up to the public and solve
| that issue too
| bombcar wrote:
| Something that can solve this issue is removing the free
| spaces entirely. If all parking is a minimum of $5, then
| the garage is fine. But if there are SOME free spaces,
| people will circle to blocks for hours trying to find
| one. People are weird.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| That's the idea. Gotta pump that land value!
| NewJazz wrote:
| How is a slab of asphalt or concrete, optionally with
| corrosive/toxic chemicals stored in underground containers,
| maximizing the value of the land? Something must be really
| fucked if that is what our society truly incentivizes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That represents travel and allows the average person to
| visit places in the city. Like having a bike rack.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Bike rack, sidewalk, or parking lot... The value of that
| land is in people _wanting_ to travel to and from it.
| Notice how all the national car parks are near forests
| and other nature-y places.
| drozycki wrote:
| The idea is that the politically active homeowners follow
| their self interest when they support policy which
| discourages new housing construction, driving scarcity in
| the housing market to raise prices.
| zbrozek wrote:
| We would do well as a nation to overturn Euclid v. Ambler. That
| Supreme Court decision was a mistake.
| alexb_ wrote:
| > Family-friendly land use reforms make for more vibrant, joyous,
| and welcoming cities--they're good for the entire city. Other
| cities hoping to stem the tide of families flowing to the suburbs
| should follow Austin's lead.
|
| Every single time I read about land use, I feel like people are
| running head first into exactly the point and still completely
| missing it. People think others must have the same opinions and
| worldviews as they do, so they don't even consider the real
| reason land use policies are they way they are. They don't
| realize that people are just racist.
|
| Maybe you read this and think "that's crazy, I'm not racist and I
| am against upzoning!". Well, I'm not talking about you. I'm
| talking about the person who is so passionate about keeping the
| neighborhood's "character" that they will go to every single
| local planning meeting to keep black people out. I'm talking
| about the person who will talk about how they don't want "big
| city problems". I'm talking about people concerned about the
| "riff raff" that more permissive land use will bring.
|
| The exclusion is the point. Over and over and over again I see
| well-meaning people think they can just convince people that it
| makes it cheaper, convince people about the economy, surely that
| will be the breakthrough! But it's racism. It has been racism
| ever since the first zoning laws that banned laundromats next to
| houses, knowing landromats were mostly owned by the Chinese. It's
| been racism ever since highways divided cities into the "good
| side" and "bad side".
|
| Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness", or
| preschool availability, or anything else, because you are
| immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's
| that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities
| away from "pure" suburbs.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > Stop arguing for this about cost, or "family friendliness",
| or preschool availability, or anything else, because you are
| immediately missing the actual reasons. NIMBYs are racist. It's
| that simple. Zoning and land use is designed to keep minorities
| away from "pure" suburbs.
|
| Counterargument: The same/equivalent zoning, land use and NIMBY
| problems happen in countries that are racially homogeneous.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Can you give a few examples?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The Maldives are the most monoethnic nation-state in the
| world [1]. They have strict land use regulations [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity
|
| [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-
| political-s...
| nick__m wrote:
| I live in a city in Quebec that is, according to 2018
| census, 94.2% white. And the land use, parking and
| "neighborhood's character" policies are present. The divide
| is among the socioeconomic status.
| zajio1am wrote:
| e.g. Czechia. Racially homogenous and have one of least
| affordable properties in Europe.
|
| https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/prague-is-the-
| third...
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| The parent is only slightly off the mark.
|
| The core underlying thing that is driving exclusionary zoning
| is not racism, but classism. But racial exclusion is the
| bonus on top because race and class are often related.
|
| When zoning was beginning to be broadly implemented in the
| 1930s the core goal was to limit apartments. Apartments were
| filled of relatively low income, working class renters. They
| were often also racial minorities too. Two core reasons why
| wealthy single family home owners wanted to push them far
| away.
| extr wrote:
| You are making the exact same reductivist mistake but in the
| other direction.
|
| > I'm talking about people concerned about the "riff raff" that
| more permissive land use will bring.
|
| The fact that you are making the huge logical jump from "I
| don't want crime in my neighborhood" to "You must hate black
| people!" says more about your assumptions and biases than it
| does people who simply don't want crime - regardless of the
| type of person who is committing it.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is bananas. You are chastising people you disagree with
| for not recognizing the nuance of the situation, and that they
| ought to recognize others don't hold the same views as
| themselves. Fair point.
|
| Then you forget you just said that and say the real reason is
| that everybody that doesn't agree, for the most part, is
| racist. This is an insane and hateful point.
|
| The sort of belief that if held sincerely can hurt people.
| Where do you get the confidence or the merge to claim something
| like this? You're the one that seems to be comfortable
| ascribing beliefs to people you don't even know.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This is the "not a racist bone" defense, implying that you
| need privileged insight into someone's intent, motivations,
| and personal beliefs to call them racist. Which of course we
| rarely ever have.
|
| Another choice is to look at outcomes. Racial exclusion is a
| predictable result of these policies. It does not need to be
| the intent. People who consistently support policies with
| racist outcomes can be called racist. It's a useful
| shorthand, not a conviction of their soul.
|
| Racism doesn't need to be a matter of personal malevolence.
| Taking self-interested action with known & predictable unjust
| outcomes is sufficient.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _implying that you need privileged insight into someone
| 's intent, motivations, and personal beliefs to call them
| racist. Which of course we rarely ever have._
|
| Which is why loosening the definition has backfired so
| spectacularly. Some ascribe racism statistically, to the
| point that in some circles it's done a full circle to all
| white people being inherently racist. Most, however,
| perceive it as a moral judgement. If you loosen the
| definition to remove intent, it's no longer a moral
| judgement.
|
| > _Taking self-interested action with known & predictable
| unjust outcomes is sufficient_
|
| But it's not racism by most peoples' definition. It is by
| the neo-academic revisionist one. But that loosening gave
| cover for the _actual_ racists to come out and become
| accepted again. (If everyone who wants a parking lot is
| called a racist, it takes the bite out of the guy waving a
| Confederate flag. And if you 're called a racist despite
| knowing you had no racist intent, it makes the other people
| being called racist more sympathetic.)
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that some of the most problematic
| zoning regulations were indeed enacted due to racism. Huge
| minimum lot sizes with large setbacks, for example, made
| housing very expensive -- combined with redlining and making
| it extremely difficult/impossible for PoC to get loans <-
| Very racist.
| francisofascii wrote:
| NIMBYs are self interested. It is that simple. Establishing a
| community and keeping outsiders out is nothing new. Is it
| morally wrong? Probably. Relaxing land policy required people
| to share and give some of what they have. Sharing is hard.
| pishpash wrote:
| It's morally wrong to take somebody else's land, too. That's
| not sharing.
| azemetre wrote:
| Where in the US is this happening? We're talking about
| developers developing land for landowners while other
| people are able to stop them for "reasons."
| ipqk wrote:
| Is it morally wrong to take somebody's money for taxes? You
| never have an absolute right to your land. e.g there's
| eminent domain, or talk to the Texans that have oil rigs
| next to their McMansions drinking their milkshake.
| francisofascii wrote:
| The brutal truth is we are all living on land that has been
| "stolen" at some point in history.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I get it, but this person is comparing apples-to-oranges. Austin,
| TX is not Brooklyn, NYC.
|
| Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators
| because it was entirely reasonable and not onerous to do so.
| Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
|
| > By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right
| in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to
| reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and
| expensive to open new childcare centers.
|
| Again, Austin, TX is not NYC.
| alexb_ wrote:
| > Austin relaxed their zoning rules for child-care operators
| because it was entirely reasonable, and not onerous to do so.
| Brookyln, NYC does not have that luxury.
|
| What makes it onerous? Why does Brooklyn not have that luxury?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Because Austin, TX has a very small and quaint downtown
| district with big, wide sidewalks and lots of extra concrete
| space in the roadways and ample gaps between storefronts and
| pedestrian walkways. Downtown BK has none of that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| You do realise that for most of New York's history, when
| its construction was most productive, we had no real urban
| planning? If anything, the abundance and diversity of
| spaces in Brooklyn should make it easier to deregulate
| where childcare can be provided.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Starting a sentence with "You do realise that..." is the
| most condescending (and stupid) way to make a point. Re-
| phrase your comment and then I'll answer it.
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| "Ample gaps" means walking and cycling FURTHER (often
| across paved, dangerous, parking lots) to get to your
| destination. American cities are built for cars, not for
| people.
| Detrytus wrote:
| In my country you can find child care located directly in
| apartment buildings. Seriously, some people simply buy an
| apartment on the ground floor and turn it into daycare
| facility. I guess it could be done in Brooklyn as well, if
| only zoning rules allowed it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Bizarrely content-free comment. Lots of text to say that a
| place x that is not y is not y. Yes, obviously these are two
| different places.
| pempem wrote:
| and to further you point, AUS and Brooklyn definitely have
| something in common: - childcare that is too expensive
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Austin, TX is not NYC.
|
| Correct. Parking mandates are even less sensible as a policy in
| NYC than in Austin, TX.
| occz wrote:
| If you're going to point out that place X is not place Y, you
| are required to spell out the difference that makes it actually
| relevant in this context. Anything else is just noise.
| pydry wrote:
| Childcare affordability is yet another reason why we need to kill
| land hoarding with a land value tax.
| voat wrote:
| How is that different than property taxes?
| loeg wrote:
| Property taxes are assessed on land value + "improvements"
| (i.e., structures) value. A land value tax doesn't tax the
| imps. This generally encourages doing more productive things
| with the same parcel of land.
| Detrytus wrote:
| I think it's a bit different: property tax taxes the actual
| property that is located on the piece of land, i.e. single
| family home, for its current value. Land value tax works
| differently: tax authorities ask themselves a question:
| "what is the most profitable thing one could possibly build
| on that land?", and they tax you based on that. Which means
| that if you build a single family home in the neighborhood
| of 7-stories apartment buildings you will be taxed as if
| you owned an apartment building. And the only way for you
| to be able to afford those taxes is to actually build
| 7-stories apartment building there.
|
| EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws
| might not be worded the way I described it, but the net
| effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential
| resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on
| "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?"
| question.
| loeg wrote:
| No, you've completely invented a system that is not how
| land value taxes work.
| firejake308 wrote:
| The problem is that it could work that way, or it might
| not. It depends on what tax rate the government sets,
| which could change depending on the time, the economy,
| and the current administration. If the government guesses
| the magic rate that discourages speculation without
| discouraging other relatively low-value businesses that
| society still needs to function, then yes, that's a great
| system. However, I'd the government overshoots or
| undershoots, then the land value tax doesn actually fix
| anything.
| pishpash wrote:
| Property tax = you do not own the land, the government
| does and leases it to you. Setting the rate to the
| highest rate is stupid because it means the government
| confiscates all the land and leases it only to e.g.
| casinos and you get nothing but casinos.
| pishpash wrote:
| Where does the tax money go? If it's redistributed back
| to everyone including those who rent then that's just
| land redistribution.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Also, the idea is to make it heavy enough to neutralize the
| incentive to just hold the land, which is clearly not
| productive yet still lucratively "compensated." It's a
| highly regressive tax. The _original_ highly regressive
| tax, as can be seen in some of the terminology (land _lord_
| ) even if the details have drifted since.
|
| I think there's far too much wiggle room in the analysis of
| land-value vs improvement and would strongly prefer a
| solution that moves away from perpetual ownership and
| towards revolving leases instead. The way to do this non-
| coercively would be to gate the enormous tax benefits we
| bestow to real estate windfalls (1031 exchanges, the $500k
| exclusion, the 15% and 20% capital gains rates) behind
| conversion to a 99 year lease. We won't see the shade
| beneath those trees but our grandkids will.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the idea is to make it heavy enough to neutralize the
| incentive to just hold the land_
|
| This isn't really a problem in downtown Brooklyn or
| Austin, though.
| kaibee wrote:
| Anytime you see a plot that is just a parking lot with an
| attendant in a dense city, that is just a land
| speculation play. That parcel is still extremely
| underused, but putting a parking lot on it lets the owner
| extract some rent in the mean time. A land value tax
| would ideally be high enough that the owner of that plot
| would be losing significant amounts of money even with
| that parking lot there, and would be incentivized to sell
| it to someone who wants to actually develop it
| immediately.
| brewdad wrote:
| The suburban version of this phenomenon is the self-
| storage place. Build cheap steel structure(s) that can
| generate a little income now while holding land that will
| presumably be more valuable in the future.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Isn't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge
| vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a
| decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a
| vacancy? It's the same problem, just with different
| clothes: a blighted building in the middle of an
| expensive city rather than a vacant field in the middle
| of an expensive suburb.
|
| I can't speak to Austin, but I would expect to see the
| same thing in the form of low-value land use. It happens
| whenever appreciation competes with or outstrips
| productive activity. Which is extremely common.
|
| Investors should pay the collective for exclusive use of
| a scarce resource, they should not _get_ paid for holding
| exclusive access to a scarce resource. That 's bad and
| backwards. Unless you're an investor, of course ;)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Isn 't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge
| vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a
| decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a
| vacancy?_
|
| Yes, but that's due to financing restrictions. Unless one
| is planning on putting a tax burden on every piece of
| real estate analogous to full leverage, the cost of
| financing an empty unit providing unsufficient motivation
| to fill it seems to imply a similarly-scaled LVT wouldn't
| either.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| Article's recommendation is just another meaningless tug in the
| tug-of-war over parking. Conspicuously unmentioned is the public
| pressure to deal with "you have to drive everywhere and there's
| no parking when you get there."
|
| If parking requirements are crowding out useful land-use _and_
| there 's simultaneously too little parking then the root problem
| is car-oriented urban planning, and too little public transit.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live
| and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside
| schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."
| awkward wrote:
| How would parking requirements solve that? Would parents
| drive to the school and then leave the car with their
| preschoolers?
| mwkaufma wrote:
| In the burbs where I grew up, there were huge school lots
| so cars waiting for pickup didn't overflow onto the road.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| That seems like a huge waste of space for the 99% of time
| it's not being used?
| taeric wrote:
| In a very real sense, you just described housing, as
| well. And, really, many functional specs for anything.
| Your car, for example, has a ton of money and engineering
| put into it solely for the case of a crash. Heck, if you
| own a car, period, you spend far more time out of it than
| you do in.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > In a very real sense, you just described housing, as
| well.
|
| But as a result of land use regulations.
|
| Historically it has been common for a family-owned
| business to have a shop on the first floor and living
| space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't
| have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things
| like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then
| we prohibit this through land use and make everything
| worse.
| taeric wrote:
| I wasn't intending my comment as anti-housing. More
| pointing out that "unused for most of the time" is a
| somewhat useless metric.
|
| Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels
| like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I
| am curious on how common it truly was?
|
| Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I
| agree with that. I am less open to believing that large
| percentages of families lived the way you are describing.
| Do you have numbers on it?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Numbers only mean something in a context. Doing that _is_
| more efficient, but at the cost that if you change jobs
| you also have to move. So it tends not to happen unless
| either real estate costs are high (i.e. towns /cities) or
| employees are pressured into it for the efficiency
| benefit of a large employer (company towns).
|
| But the problem we have right now _is_ that real estate
| costs are high, so many people would be willing to take
| the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would
| help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who
| don 't, by reducing duplication and effectively
| increasing supply.
|
| "Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's
| possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is
| foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the
| cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't
| mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a
| trade off against something else. And even then there is
| no justification to _prohibit it_ , because there is no
| need to prohibit someone from doing something they
| wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| Why are you DRIVING your children to school?
|
| If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to
| the neighborhood childcare/school.
|
| I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his
| elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was
| consistently the highlight of my day!
| mwkaufma wrote:
| If you live somewhere hostile to walking, like Los Angeles,
| that's not an option. You're describing living somewhere
| that's already solved the car-oriented urban-hellscape
| problem a priori.
| antiframe wrote:
| > If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk
| to the neighborhood childcare/school.
|
| I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood,
| we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in
| every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads
| of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to
| school, understandably so.
| testudovictoria wrote:
| I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk
| to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes
| earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the
| bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car.
| Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning,
| taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
| brewdad wrote:
| I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from
| school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus
| route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading
| done.
|
| Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
| Jach wrote:
| It might be amusing every once in a while but walking
| anything over a mile in below freezing weather gets old
| fast even if bundled up.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| That seems better to me than paving a big parking lot just
| for the short time kids are dropped off.
|
| Plus this way we don't subsidize those who drive at the
| expense of those who don't.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| The schools are not located in places that have walking
| access, so that's a "subsidy" unavailable to anyone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _schools are not located in places that have walking
| access_
|
| Busses.
| taeric wrote:
| And just don't ever have events at the school for
| families to go to? Or are we talking not just "school
| busses" at this point? I'm all for public transit. Is a
| heavy lift for a lot of urban locations, though. And
| certainly not in the budget control of most schools.
| brewdad wrote:
| My kid's middle school had a small lot for staff and
| about a dozen additional spaces. Overflow parking was on
| the street. Zero need for a giant parking lot. If grandma
| can't walk the two blocks, then drop her off closer.
| Everyone else is less than 5 minutes from the school the
| handful of times a year there was a schoolwide event.
|
| The high school had a giant parking lot but it was
| completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist
| for permits.
| taeric wrote:
| The schools I remember from denser city living would have
| had you parking far more than 2 blocks away. Sadly, there
| was also a fair bit of crime not far away, either. :(
|
| Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that
| would get swamped with people parking all over the
| street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with
| it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common.
|
| Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no
| legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody
| cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note,
| I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets
| into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the
| street like crazy.
| dublinben wrote:
| This wasn't a problem when students rode school busses
| instead of being individually chauffeured.
|
| Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the
| nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to
| school.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| The busses aren't running because our spendthrift
| government "cut spending" to enable property tax cuts. This
| is a big unspoken part of the charter-school transition.
| Jach wrote:
| How far back are you going? It was a problem in the 90s and
| early 2000s, even with multiple buses. It doesn't take very
| many parents to pick up or drop off at once to create a
| traffic jam. What amazed me was how many parents just
| accepted the jam instead of dropping off or picking up
| about a block away.
| occz wrote:
| Pickup hour is a concept that does not exist in countries
| with reasonable urban planning. It's self-inflicted harm.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| No disagreement here, but the question is how to escape the
| world we're in, not just dismiss it as someone-
| else's-problem.
| davidw wrote:
| By eliminating parking requirements. You can't make
| meaningful progress on other things while continuing to
| force one mode of transportation on everyone.
| badwolf wrote:
| Schoolbusses are one option to mitigate this specific
| issue...
| seszett wrote:
| In my place (a large city in Europe) there is no parking for
| schools and only a handful of parents sometimes come with
| cars, presumably because they drive on to their workplace
| afterwards. Most people by far come on foot, the rest with
| bicycles (in my case, for some reasons we didn't pick the
| school closest to us so it's about 5 minutes away by bike, 15
| minutes by foot).
|
| In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe)
| many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop
| off and pickup hours.
|
| I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger
| schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school.
| It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's
| better for the children.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| In our region of the US, charter schools have come in and
| fucked up the whole process so we can't even make those
| kinds of reasonable municipal policy choices.
| seszett wrote:
| I think here in Belgium private schools are just a bit
| more common than public schools (56% private from a quick
| Google search) but I don't think they are very different.
| (although in my opinion the very existence of private
| schools is weird, as they're not that common where I come
| from).
|
| Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I
| think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart
| and larger than public schools, but not by a very much.
| They are not totally independent though (no schools are,
| even the _really_ private ones that don 't receive any
| subsidies, like the French school around here, they still
| have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
| smeej wrote:
| How does parking fix this, though? The same number of cars
| need to arrive and leave at approximately the same time. Each
| car takes up the same amount of space. And it's not like
| children can all just run around the parking lot looking for
| their own parent's car, which is almost certainly in a
| different place than it was at drop-off, never mind the
| danger of having a parking lot full of lost children
| wandering around.
| taeric wrote:
| Since you aren't expecting that many cars to be parked,
| necessarily, you can take advantage of the parking lot to
| provide a queuing area for the cars that are showing up.
| Yes, you probably want it done in such a way that cars can,
| in fact, also park during events. But it doesn't have to be
| a fixed configuration lot.
| r00fus wrote:
| Schools can stagger end times for various grades or
| subpopulations. My high school kid has this going on.
| Pickup is a non-issue.
| guestbest wrote:
| Just put the children in a pod and send them home through a
| pneumatic tube
| smeej wrote:
| It looks like you're getting downvotes, but most kids would
| think this was an awesome way to get to school!
| mlavrent wrote:
| There's a difference between parking mandates versus parking
| built at the developer's discretion. Parking mandates (what the
| article talks about) are onerous because they force the
| developer to build more parking they potentially would have
| otherwise (based on a rational assessment of the opportunity
| cost of the space parking uses vs. the benefit to their
| business).
|
| I think few people would argue against allowing developers to
| build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be
| surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't
| generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the
| zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't
| arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than
| the cost of it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as
| much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements
|
| if you stop right there, your statement is far more credible
| para_parolu wrote:
| Remember living in 110 app building with zero parking. Wasn't
| fun.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Remember living in 110 app building with zero parking.
| Wasn't fun._
|
| Isn't the clear implication you shouldn't own a car?
| davidw wrote:
| So why did you live there instead of a place with a parking
| spot?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Isn't that point of having car parking requirements is equal to
| car-oriented urban planning?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or overpopulated cities. Cities can be too large.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Or overpopulated cities. Cities can be too large._
|
| There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to
| this point. We're still on the beneficial end of
| densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes
| on practically every metric.
| pishpash wrote:
| What evidence do you need? NYC and Boston smelling like
| sewer in the summer is enough for me.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What evidence do you need? NYC and Boston smelling
| like sewer in the summer is enough for me_
|
| Case in point: the densest parts of Manhattan _don 't_
| smell. (Minus trash days.) Neither do Paris, Tokyo or
| Seoul.
| brewdad wrote:
| Good thing that farm near my subdivision growing up never
| smelled. That would have been awful.
|
| Hint: It did smell. Every spring and a few other times
| each summer.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Zero evidence noise pollution affects health?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Zero evidence noise pollution affects health?_
|
| Zero evidence noise pollution is an unavoidable
| consequence of density. Plenty of New York apartments
| have better acoustic isolation than the average suburban
| dwelling. (If anything, as buildings get higher the
| problem gets simpler.)
| pishpash wrote:
| Stupid title, land use policies make everything that uses land
| expensive. I can assure you childcare being expensive is not
| bottlenecked by land, but by caretaker's wage levels driven by
| the fact that they need to rent in the same expensive location.
| It's equally expensive to hire someone into your home without
| the need of any extra land, but much less expensive if they
| live in.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Which is still land use regulations making childcare more
| expensive. Otherwise the daycare solves the problem by
| providing an on-site apartment for its employees.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Isn't it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare is
| much more a function of Baumol's cost disease than parking
| minimums or land use requirements? It's hard to bring any kind of
| desirable productivity revolution to childcare - it's inherently
| a pretty one-to-few proposition at the end of the day, and I'm
| not sure how you get away from the labor intensivity of it all.
|
| Absent subsidies (whether provided by a government, employer,
| religious order or other specific community), I'm honestly not
| sure how a safe, sensible, desirable product can be delivered at
| what anyone would consider a reasonable cost.
|
| I grant that there is probably some room in there for in-home
| child care that probably more closely resembles a hobby business
| than a true commercial endeavor - I can see zoning type issues
| being completely determinative on whether child care at this
| scale is feasible or not. But I also don't think those are the
| types of arrangements that the author of TFA was really
| describing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Isn't it more likely that the exorbitant cost of childcare
| is much more a function of Baumol's cost disease than parking
| minimums or land use requirements?_
|
| If labour were the principle cost component of childcare, yes.
| That does not appear to be the case. (EDIT: Never mind, labour
| is the principle cost [1].)
|
| Consider, for example, how the problem would be solved if
| people could (legally) run childcare out of their apartments.
|
| [1] https://raisingnewyork.org/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/2019/1...
| taeric wrote:
| This intrigues me, what is the principal cost?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly open to the argument that
| land use policies are a problem. And I am no fan of minimum
| parking rules. At the same time, I also know that parking
| doesn't cease to be a problem just because you don't want to
| build it. I've had the joy of going to a doctor's office
| where I couldn't figure out where to park within a 5 block
| radius of it. What was a convenient doctor when I lived
| within that 5 block radius turned into a miserable experience
| when I moved a bit further away. Same experience when
| dropping the kids off for a birthday party in some denser
| part of town. (At least there I can gripe to the kids saying
| they need to bike the 10 miles next time. Isn't that far, all
| told. :D)
|
| Back to the question, labor strikes me as a thing that would
| be rather expensive for child care. Specifically, child care
| that isn't staffed by teenagers and has adequate staffing for
| the number of kids being cared for.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I thought it was real estate, but I was incorrect. Comment
| edited.
| taeric wrote:
| Fascinating paper that I'll have to dive on later. I
| don't know that I understand it well enough to consider
| the "out of their own apartments" claim. What page
| supports that? I saw the 70+% of cost is labor. I confess
| I was surprised not to see liability insurance in there.
|
| Edit: Realizing I may be reading the original comment
| wrong. I don't remember the apartment claim on my first
| read, so I thought you added it with your edit. I'm
| guessing it was there and I just didn't remember it?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| If you think about it, the "productivity revolution" is only
| needed because of how expensive it is to run a childcare
| facility in a place where there are lots of children. If you
| lower the intensity with which a facility in a city needs to
| produce income to carry the cost of parking minimums and
| housing for its employees, then that would eliminate the
| problem too.
|
| In-home childcare that resembles a hobby is called "parenting"
| and in the absence of a commercial option one half of a couple
| often ends up spending all of their time doing this until the
| child is of age to be placed in school. I think a lot of the
| problems our society has come from not valuing this or
| denigrating it as "hobby" work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a lot of the problems our society has come from not
| valuing this or denigrating it as "hobby" work_
|
| Some people enjoy that work, but a lot of people don't. The
| empirical result of forcing it is people have fewer children.
| michaelt wrote:
| By "in-home child care hobby business" I assume what nocoiner
| means is: If San Francisco childcare costs are $25/hour why
| is anyone pouring coffees or flipping burgers if looking
| after three kids brings in $75/hour?
|
| Obviously some people don't have the space - but many do.
| Surely it's lucrative enough that there shouldn't be a
| shortage of supply?
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| SF childcare costs are usually around ~20 an hour per child
| in 1:2 (under the table, where folks who can afford it get
| an indirect subsidy from the government via Medi-cal and
| dodging fica) nanny shares where the nanny goes in your
| home. It's a vaguely healthy market from what my friends
| tell me.
|
| Doesn't work in the suburbs where you won't find a family 3
| blocks from your house with a similar age child. You would
| think it would be more common though given how much useless
| sqft folks in the suburbs have.
| bombcar wrote:
| "in-home child care hobby business" means stay-at-home
| parent.
|
| But in the non-urban areas around here there are in-home
| childcare setups, that have to follow specific laws. I
| assume something could be done similar in urban areas, but
| the size of house that is amenable to it may be limited in
| number.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I mean, we subsidize stay at home parents in the US today: you
| pay your daycare with after tax money, their employees pay
| taxes, the business pay taxes, health insurance. Stay at home
| parents get a huge tax break in the form of the doubling of tax
| brackets, it's pretty scandalous.
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