Whenever people where I now live ask what America is like I explain that you can't even purchase food without first owning a car (with a few exceptions).
It's a factor of whether the city was built before the industrial revolution. Humans will always default to the easy path.
I think it's the exact same paradigm for software bloat. By having higher powered computers, we build websites without needing to optimize, so now you need a high powered computer to run them.
Building a city without cars is like developing a video game 30 years ago, much more deliberate use of limited resources.
I think part of it was just a cultural preference, perhaps due to the communal nature of Japanese society. Another part of it was to avoid having to import oil, and to not waste wealth on cars. Gas, and vehicles, were taxed heavily, and still are.
- the US allows overnight street parking in many places. In Japan overnight street parking is banned.
- the US mandates a minimum level of parking in pretty much all construction that in practice is very excessive; most developers build the minimum and nothing more, because they don't feel they need the parking (and often the lots are rarely full). Japan has some parking minimums but they are small. And there is no pressure to increase parking minimums to lessen demand for street parking, because overnight street parking is banned.
- when buying a vehicle, Japan requires "proof-of-parking" in a space that is either owned or leased by the buyer. No such mandate exists in the US, so you can buy a car without having provided a place to park it.
The above and other policies basically combine so that Japan has free-market parking with specific properties and buildings provided by the market as demand warrants. Whereas the US builds seas of parking without evidence of demand, so every property is surrounded with a sea of parking that pushes properties further from each other and causes driving to increase in a vicious cycle.
https://www.reinventingparking.org/2019/12/learn-from-japan....
good point. seems a little different in the US since lots of towns were settled after the industrial rev. Japan being an island I would imagine most land was already accounted for.
It might be that instead of constrained by travel, they are constrained by real estate value.
Especially now with everyone using post pandemic delivery, it will get even easier to not have to own a vehicle.
As an example: the neighborhood I've lived in for a decade used to be a relatively low-income neighborhood. Rents were low in the old buildings, most folks walked to their jobs in the medical area, and there was a cheap Shaws grocery store for food, as well as several fast food places and family-run storefronts. Public transit (light rail, buses, and commuter rail) was accessible close by.
Then a development company bought nearly all of the parcels along the main road and built a wall of mid-to-high-rises. Accordingly, all rent in the area went way up, forcing most of the lower-income folks out of even the older, shittier tenement buildings. A Target went in, and the Shaws rebranded as the more expensive Star Market (and will soon close so they can build a new Whole-Foods-type expensive megastore). All of the small storefronts closed, and now the area is nearly entirely high-end shopping outlets and expensive gastro-restaurants. They shut down the bus lines running through the neighborhood because all the rich people who moved in have cars (Porsches and Lambos now rev through the neighborhood at all hours) and bus ridership was down.
Where did all of the folks -- and their families -- previously able to afford the area go? To areas of Boston where the rent is still cheap. Many of these places are nowhere near good public transit (e.g. if someone moved from this area of Boston to Dorchester, then took transit to their same job, it would require 3-4 transfers on packed buses and trains). So now these people are forced to get a car as well.
The worst part of all of this is: who wins here? Not the people forced to leave their neighborhood, not the people who suddenly need to buy a car, not the people who can no longer afford to run a restaurant in the area... not even the rich people living in the expensive high-rises (or not living in -- many are vacant "investments" from overseas). The developers win. They pumped as much money as they could out of the neighborhood, and then moved on to their next target, leaving a less livable city in their wake.
So even if you're a middle-class/upper-middle-class tech worker who wants to live in the city:
1.) Many of the tech jobs are in the suburbs and you mostly need a car to get to them. (There are today more jobs in the city again but many aren't.)
2.) Many of your friends probably live in transit unfriendly suburbs so you'll probably find it hard to get together with them unless they come in to meet you.
Of course, people adapt to what is easier for them and just behave accordingly.
Why don't these people win?
Still, I generally agree that the permitting process in many places is ridiculous, especially in big cities. But many people do want to live in a house with a yard; it’s not like the government is forcing people to do so.
Almost every inch of the US and Canada has a litany of rules saying that buildings have to be 20’ or more set back from the street and have to leave 5-10’ on each side clear on the sides and rear. Usually they are limited to two stories and in some cases only one.
A lot of places take this further with rules on how much of your house has to be brick, or what color the roof can be etc. And since that’s still not enough to please some people’s desire for perfect conformity, most modern homes layer on top of this special HOA rules, for example restricting what kind of window shades are acceptable and how tall and green your grass most be. These rules are enforced by the local municipality and backed by the force of the police.
I have no doubt that there are many people who like single family housing and would buy designs like the common cookie cutter standard if it was part of a truly free market menu, but how much genuine demand exists we will never know, because virtually nothing else is legal and it hasn’t been for two generations now! People generally don’t “want” things they’ve never experienced and have no access to.
Just to drive this point home, imagine we passed a law saying that people were only allowed to eat seafood of certain dimensions and without tentacles. Fish, shrimp, and lobster between 1-7 lbs are OK. No squid or octopus. You can cook them however you want, except no grilled salmon is allowed in Vermont. Any other food requires years of community hearings to acquire one-off conditional approvals on a meal by meal basis.
Would you find plenty of people who liked seafood and defended this system? Yes. Would you know anything about people’s true preferences if they were allowed to be omnivores? No.
That’s what our world has been reduced to, and it’s the product of an almost unfathomably deep and Byzantine regulatory complex by which the government micromanages the built environment around us.
Also, I suspect that there are more towns out there that are dense and walkable than you realize, and more HOAs that are useful and reasonable (and that therefore never make the news) than there are terrible ones. The one my parents are in seems to have been run entirely without drama for decades; it just cleans the community pool and mows the median of the central avenue and replaces the sign at the front of the neighborhood every so often. A few years back a contractor replacing a culvert caused a flood and damaged a street and some houses; I’m not sure if the HOA hired them or the city did. Either way, the road was repaired and the pond refilled, and this is the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened in the area.
1. We don't know whether or not consumers actually like having touchscreens in their cars as the primary means of control, because the "free" market lacks any other choice.
2. We don't know whether or not consumers actually like having TVs with built-in "smarts" (as opposed to, say, a box or stick that one can upgrade/replace at any time without having to replace the entire TV), because the "free" market lacks any other choice.
In order for a free market to exist, it has to be, you know, actually free. That means having some actual choices, and without coercive pressure toward a particular choice.
What makes the housing market even worse, however, is that said lack of choice is almost always through government fiat - making it even more impossible for a competitor to offer choices different from the ones currently in vogue.
At some point, we the people need to stand up for ourselves and tell NIMBYs and such to go pound sand instead of actively making our lives as difficult as possible simply because they can.
I don’t own a television myself, but surely there must be _some_ dumb tvs still available. If not, then just buy a computer monitor instead.
I think that these two examples are probably overreaching.
However, I agree that zoning and building codes can be overly restrictive. If you want to get away from them, move out of the city. The county rules are often less restrictive.
They seem to be ubiquitous among all but the most budget of models. There might have some buttons, sure, but the vast majority of interaction is through a touchscreen. And this predates the brand you're likely thinking off, too. When I rent a car, regardless of make or model, there's a touchscreen (with a handful of exceptions, and those exceptions are pretty far on the low end of rentals).
And usually it ain't even a good touchscreen; the overwhelmingly vast majority of them over the last decade have been clumsy imprecise resistive ones - which is probably "reasonable" for those wearing gloves, but that problem would be avoided entirely by, you know, not pushing for touchscreens as the primary means of input.
> Maybe some have smaller screens, for a navigation system that you can pay extra for?
The screens themselves are becoming increasingly standard, even without the navigation system. None of the cars I've rented in the last 5 years have had a navigation system, yet the vast majority of them had touchscreens, and those touchscreens were mandatory for anything beyond the most trivial of operations.
> I don’t own a television myself, but surely there must be _some_ dumb tvs still available.
If you want 4K, Sceptre is literally the only option of which I'm aware. That is, accordingly, the only brand of TV I've bought in the last 5 years.
> If not, then just buy a computer monitor instead.
Monitors of sizes suitable for watching something in a living room from a couch are vastly more expensive than even the highest-end "smart" TVs. And that's assuming you can even buy them; such monitors are intended for things like digital signage, meaning that businesses - not consumers - are the intended customer.
> Monitors of sizes suitable for watching something in a living room from a couch are vastly more expensive than even the highest-end "smart" TVs. And that's assuming you can even buy them; such monitors are intended for things like digital signage, meaning that businesses - not consumers - are the intended customer.
Funny how the size of monitor that is considered “suitable for a living room” has changed over the years.
I think what you’re saying is that we don’t have a free market because the products advertised to consumers are more narrowly tailored than they appear. I disagree. I think that consumers have more information available to them than ever before at any point in history. If they have strong preferences, then there is nothing stopping them from getting exactly what they want. If they just want a nice looking flat–panel TV, and don’t want to spend a lot of time researching TVs, then they don’t have to bother. We should not even want them to have to bother, in that case, because that wouldn’t satisfy their values.
The old adage “The Customer is Always Right” applies here, in its original meaning. Whatever product sells the best is by definition the one that is most fit for the market, and we can't complain that it’s ugly, or not as well–built as it ought to be, or that it’s not fit for our particular purposes. If it sold well, then it wasn’t ugly to the people who purchased it, it was built well enough for the people who purchased it, and it fit their purposes well enough that they spent their hard–earned cash on it. It’s no good looking down our noses at them; they just don’t have the same tastes or preferences at us.
Maybe there’s a hypothetical product that could have sold better than whatever is selling the best right now, but there are often good reasons why those aren’t available yet. iPhones, for example, sell well primarily because they are trendy and hip. There are plenty of Android phones that are just as good, or even better, but they don’t satisfy people’s need to be trendy and hip. Maybe once iPhones lose their cachet, then the Android phones with the best features and technology will sell better. Or maybe by then Symbian will turn the market on its ear and become the big new thing. Or maybe brain implants that give us telepathy will make phones obsolete.
I think the market _is_ free, in spite of trendy things like iPhones and smart TVs. Certainly in some areas, like architecture, the government puts its thumb on the scales pretty heavily and distorts the market. Houses and apartments can’t be too small, because that wouldn’t be good for the people living in them, and other paternalistic rules of that type do distort the market. They do make it less free, by artificially limiting the available choices ahead of time.
A lien just means that the house cannot be sold without paying the lien holder. Liens are actually quite common; any house bought with a mortgage also has a lien put on it for the balance of the loan. This forces you to pay off the loan if you sell the house.
If the house is put up for auction due to a foreclosure, I think a lien holder could recover their money from the sale price, or even gain ownership of the property. At that point the police might be involved in order to evict the former owner. But the HOA’s lien cannot cause a foreclosure, I think. That requires either defaulting on your mortgage, or a tax lien put on it by a municipality, state, etc.
Honestly, a town or city could make ridiculous rules about the length of your grass as well, and you would have just as much trouble or more. There are certainly enough horror stories told about HOAs to make a person wary of them. If all they do is manage property owned in common by the residents, then they’re usually fine. When properly run they are the most boring type of government ever invented. All they have to do is clean the pool regularly, mow the grass from time to time, or save up enough to buy a new roof for the building every couple of decades.
Meanwhile the city you live in probably sold hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds to buy a new football stadium, which earns hundreds of millions in yearly revenue. Naturally, they gave the owner of the stadium all that money and a tax break to boot, just to attract them to the area. Sales taxes went up a bit because of the increased tourism, but not enough to cover the bond payments, so your property taxes probably went up too. The mayor’s cousin’s construction company made a pretty penny building parts of the stadium, and his wife earned a bundle as a motivational speaker giving talks at conventions funded by the company that sells the concessions. Which is worse?
Certainly you always need to keep on top of what your HOA is doing, but you can’t ignore what your town is doing either.
>they're revitalizing as lifestyle areas that are very expensive to live in.
Perhaps in the 50's you could say "well there are plenty of pre-car places you can still live and work," but first we spent the 60's bulldozing those places to put in freeways and parking lots, then most of them hollowed out as the jobs moved to the suburbs, and now, strangely enough, they're revitalizing as lifestyle areas that are very expensive to live in.
This, more than anything, has cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. We're not going to fix any of the major societal issues in the US until we fix our suburban development pattern. We need to quit spreading dense splatters of suburban homes butter thin between massive gaps of poorly utilized land (aka "leapfrog development" made possible only because subdivisions get to externalize their infrastructure and public service costs), stop hyper regulating development so that it takes years of professional work to get a simple building permit, and design for safe pedestrian access as a first priority, so that car ownership becomes optional rather than mandatory.
When it comes to housing and development we live in a state planned economy and it's failing us just as surely as all the others.