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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

I would counter that modern America sucks for supporting communities.

Our policies are mostly geared around creating never-ending strip malls, endless suburban neighborhoods, and omnipresent traffic issues. Because these things most efficiently create tax revenue, happy "what my parents had" families, and income segregated areas.

Similar to college, fixing America starts with deciding that everyone doesn't need a single family home in a popular metro.

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As unpopular as this might be to say, and as environmentally unfriendly as it is, I've known my neighbors in every house I lived in; even when my friends and I rented a house in college, and after I was done with college, and I've rented houses with friends. They weren't always thrilled to see renters move in, but when we mowed the grass or were grilling, etc. you're forced to look over the fence and say "hey". Apartments offer a sense of odd anonymity, where very few know each other unless they already do, for some reason, especially in more urban areas. I was never more anonymous than when I lived in a city proper, living in an apartment building. The only people who knew my name were my coworkers.

EDIT... atrocious grammar

One thing I've been confused about, from the time I've visited friends and (briefly) lived in big box condo / apartment buildings... why aren't there more community spaces?

And no, I don't mean "the pool" or "the weight room." I mean actual lounge areas. Social areas. Hell, even Marriott's Residence Inns do a better job than your average building.

Agreed. I'd love to see more apartment buildings have bakeries, cafes, or other public spaces on the ground floor. Then you can get to know not only your neighbours in your own apartment building, but in shared spaces for the surrounding areas too.

My apartment (in Germany, not USA) has that. I hope it reopens after the pandemic.

That's unfortunately only true for old (100+ years) buildings, most newer developments don't have commercial space in the ground floor.

What are needed are more community spaces.

Parks, YMCAs, basketball courts, cafes, etc.

Anecdotally it feels like it should be more complex than that, as two of the three whose construction I’ve watched to completion since I moved here have ground floor commercial space.

I thought about mixed use (commercial on first, residential above) when I wrote my previous, and left it out, because it seems like a nuanced subject.

In that "Community spaces" is a subset of "businesses an owner leasing commercial space would rent to."

I don't think we're talking about a Subway sandwich shop on the ground floor being helpful.

I read in Dublin they built these sorts of appartments but then they got banned.

That’s something I find odd, but I grew up as an only child. I actively avoid speaking to my neighbors for the most part and always have. Their business is none of mine.

That’s not to say I don’t have a few close friends, but certainly not my next-door neighbors.

Would people actually hang out there?

You mean like a bar?

I doubt close friends are geographically close after school.

The lack of close friendships is probably driven more by a lack of community activities than not knowing your neighbors.

The problem isn’t that people are wanting too much. It’s that getting on the property ladder at all, even a small condo in a metro where there are jobs, is becoming far, far more difficult than for previous generations.

And of course, if people need to work longer and harder to achieve what would've been considered fairly modest goals by (recent) previous generations in terms of housing, then they have less time and energy to devote to friendship and community.

My personal read is that a huge amount of that in the last decade or so has been a consequence of basement central bank rates.

When vast sums of institutional money are freed and chasing yield, eventually some of it leaks into residential property.

And when a market that was precariously balanced with only retail buyers (due to density opposition and building economics) now has equal or more investors pile in? Well, prices do what they've done.

If we lower them we have no homes, if we raise them we have no jobs.

The fact of the matter is conventional central banking is a failure, as is widespread private homeownership in metropolitan areas.

Well, conventional central banking usually has the goals of "prevent another Great Depression" and "keep inflation under control."

In that respect, they've been fairly successful.

The side effects are... less good. But worse than a national depression? Eh.

https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-jacobin-the-fed-doesnt-work...

well start with those side effects: inflation is kept in check by beating back workers whenever they get to powerful. Then take into account how lousy growth has been since the 1970s when they started doing that.

If we could have had depressions but more amortized growth, and not "jobless recoveries" and anemic amortized growth, would that have been worse or better?

That's why they changed the inflation target. If your goal is 2% then you have to raise rates before you even hit 2% nipping full employment in the bud. If you target an average rate of 2% then having a year with 5% and four with less than 2% lets you balance things out.

Edit:

I read the article and it basically boils down to rich people benefiting from low inflation because it doesn't erode their deposits and makes stocks/housing go up without increasing wages. It's pretty much true but it is also so obvious to be boring. Money from the past is power from the past.

Maintaining the value of money earned 60 years ago is the same as maintaining power obtained 60 years ago. Holding onto money doesn't help workers be more productive so if they spent their 60 year old money it would get eroded by inflation. You therefore need to add some slack in the labor supply that is not used up by anyone, meaning nobody is going to miss that labor if it is paid by 60 year old dollars that would otherwise result in inflation if there were full employment.

http://jwmason.org/slackwire/alternative-visions-of-inflatio... this one is fresh off the presses and gets deeper into the issues.

I don't see how it is a failure. Our money is a failure because of the asymmetry between deposits and loans. You must pay your loan on time but you don't have to spend your deposits on time. The obvious answer is always extend the deadline or take away the deposit.

> My personal read is that a huge amount of that in the last decade or so has been a consequence of basement central bank rates.

The central bank doesn't decide the interest rate, rather it is closer to an autonomous organization whose goal is to let interest rates follow the economy.

Low interest rates are the result of the preference to hold deposits and the preference to not take on debt. If you want higher interest rates you'll have to raise the government debt ceiling or kill deposits with inflation/negative interest rates on deposits. Considering the demand for perpetual savings it only makes sense that governments would issue perpetual bonds.

The reason why perpetual bonds are interesting is that they only have to be paid back when they have to be paid back.

I doubt that they are most efficient at generating tax revenue, especially when considering density and infrastructure maintenance.

They are definitely significantly worse at generating tax revenue.

Mixed housing along with ground level commercial spaces even in the poorest of downtown districts generate more tax revenue.

The problem is when crime and other forms of blight lead to people not living or working in those places anymore.

It's a tricky argument to say they're better at generating tax revenue, if only people changed their habits and preferences... ;)

Yes that is true. They are worse on all counts in the medium-long term but we do it anyways.

>Because these things most efficiently create tax revenue,

You mean tax revenue because there are subsidies for new developments? Car based suburban sprawl is a money pit for tax revenue. You need a lot of road per house.

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