Understanding rent control

We need housing to be affordable, but how best to do it? If you're thinking about this, you might be interested in this. Bottom-line: Build more housing, ignore rent control. How do you build more housing though?

Besides avoiding rent control, and using public money to build housing, how else can you build more housing? Bring down permitting/planning costs. Encourage density. Remove parking requirements. Work together to ensure public transit and other infrastructure.

This post inspired by reading... Seattle City Council Insight

Comments

Commit to Long Term Testing

Expanding testing is very important now. It's also clearly an area we were unprepared. We should commit to having testing capacity long term, to both provide more certainty to anyone expanding testing capacity today, and to be prepared in the future. I had some thoughts about how this testing would be best structured. It's not possible to test for an contagious disease you're not aware of, but much of the infrastructure for doing so can already be in place, ready to be adapted. That infrastructure would roughly boil down to a) sample collection b) sample handling c) sample preparation d) sample analysis e) materials: reagents, etc. Scaling these up from scratch is quite a bit more work than adapting to a new contagion. A commitment to having that infrastructure would have helped a lot with the current crisis. Right now, the focus is rightfully on health care workers, suspected cases and essential workers. In terms of preparation though, in the early stages

Office Plans

I was inspired to do some research on what types of office plans were most popular among workers. So I dived in and started looking and stumbled across an interesting failure in this area. When a particular office plan was presented, it never included images of monitors. This seems a somewhat shocking error considering that the average office worker will spend a fair amount of their time in front of screen. Consider this as an example: https://officesnapshots.com/articles/the-top-25-most-popular-offices-of-2018/ . In all 25 examples, the initial shot is of a common space. I understand that a bit, it's easier to make these distinctive, the creativity of the designer is more unbounded. But lets be honest, while these areas are useful to collaborative working, without a large screen and space for a keyboard and mouse, the personal ergonomics of them are not adequate for a lot of work. Dig a little deeper and many of the deeper reviews don't feature a single shot of a pe

How to make housing affordable

Housing costs in many areas across the States have been rising quickly. One of the major causes is restrictive zoning that keeps housing in short supply, allowing demand to push prices higher. Two weeks ago Oregon passed a bill with similarities to the failed California SB50 . This bill takes a statewide response to zoning, upzoning many single family areas to automatically allow higher density housing (quadplexes). It's a fairly amazing development that other states (and cities) should pay close attention to. Localizing zoning is a fine idea when the concerns are truly local, but when it comes to housing costs, the effects are much more regional. Left to business as usual, zoning changes at a pace that does not accommodate demand. Worse yet, when zoning changes it's often only can occur via a backroom deal, which privileges developers with access, ability, and willingness to manipulate the systems. When a developer spends 1 year planning a project, prices go up. Pa

Search This Blog