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Comment by djakjxnanjak | Hacker News Reader

Our public policy often chooses to subsidize free parking by making large chunks of land available for free use by automobiles.

Modern technology allows permanent structures to be much more space-efficient for housing by building many stories high. However, the use of such technology is often banned and structures are limited to one or two stories. Also, even for one-story structures, rules often require eg. 6000 sqft of land to be used for a 1500 sqft house. These rules all result in significant surplus land wealth being required (or expensively rented) for people to obtain permanent housing.

Is it any wonder that, faced with these constraints, people are choosing to live in one-story homes on free land? Government policy is practically begging for it.

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Indeed, this is a predictable effect of subsidizing on-street parking. Banning free street parking would unwarp the economics.

The down side is that retail stores suffer because customers are less likely to visit when they have to pay for parking. It's one more factor driving consumers away from brick-and-mortar stores to online ordering.

Retail stores are free to provide free parking on their own land of course. Street parking in retail districts tends to be metered anyway...

I've seen this argument used against turning roads into pedestrian only and it's been the complete opposite effect. The moment you remove cars foot traffic increases by huge amounts.

Struggling to see how a car space that can be taken with no charge results in more customers either, surely it increases the amount of time used by individual cars instead and reduces potential customers.

Very few retail stores charge by the hour. Getting people in and out as quickly as possible is the ideal.

Where do all of those trafficking come from if nobody can get there?

I think you pretty well nailed it. Though in many cases it's not so much a choice as necessity (the other option being to move elsewhere completely).

And this "technology" is banned for the right reasons.

It is demonstrably harmful to the enviroment, physical and mind health and the society in general.

I'm all for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtSf69vjrVM

Do you have a source for that? Not disagreeing, but I'd be very interested in reading up on how a high-rise might negatively impact my health seeing as I live in one right now.

Source? Hah. My life.

I lived most of it in the high-rises, and not slums at all. "Respectable neighbourhoods".

I'm not talking about slums.

I pity the people who choose to live in those anthills.

I hate people who advocate to force other people to live in those.

I'm talking about overcrowding. Not enough private space, not enough public space, not enough transport. And it's a death trap if something goes just slightly wrong with the infrastructure. Have you witnessed shit fountains out of you r toilet? I did. Have you seen what a gas explosion does to those? A section or three just collapses, top to bottom, and everyone there is dead. What if water mains gets cut off because the electricity cut off and so there are no lifts? What if it's 15F outsite and the heaters die?

This is no way to live.

Nobody is trying to force someone to live in a high-rise. If more people are in high-rises, that leaves more room for everyone else who doesn’t live in one.

Brotherman, if you had all of those problems you didn't live anywhere respectable. I've lived twenty years worth in high and mid rises in three continents across a variety of incomes and not only never faced that but none of my neighbours did and none of us even expected it to happen. We'd have been outraged.

Listen, I'm not going to disrespect you for growing up in the projects or whatever. Those things are usually out of our control. But you got to let other people live the way they want to live, man.

> It is demonstrably harmful to the enviroment, physical and mind health and the society in general.

I'm having trouble understanding how single-family housing is less harmful to the environment, relying on this statement and my back-of-the-envelope calculations alone. Likewise, what are the effects on physical and mental well-being for people who have to live in the street, because affordable housing is "banned", and they can't afford a suburban house?

Slums constructed to hide the poor are not the same thing developers trying to sell units would choose to build. Initially developers would target the high-end (this is what they do now with supply limits in place), then when demand in the high-end is exhausted they would build for the middle class. When the middle class upgrades into newer units, older homes they leave behind will become available to those lower on the ladder.

This can be supplemented to benefit the poor sooner by eg. requiring a subset of units in high-end developments to be subsidized for people with lower incomes.

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