Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

How to create a resilient Oil & Gas industry

Use Less As part of the current crisis, oil usage is down, and storage around the world is filling up, to the point that oil has traded at negative prices.  As a reaction, many Republican lawmakers want to bailout the oil industry, by providing free access to storage or no-collateral loans.  While it would make sense to ensure oil doesn't get dumped in the ocean, the right way to do that is by producing less oil. These proposals from the Republicans undermine the motivation for the industry to do so.  Workers are important, but they have the same access to unemployment as the other 25 million Americans who are out of work. What this crisis should illustrate is something that has been illustrated many times before, the oil industry is a fragile thing.  In the past this fragility has been demonstrated by massive spikes in prices and fears of shortage, in this case it's the inverse.  Why the fragility?  The simplest explanation is, we use too much.   In a world where oi

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