Is a skinny homeless methhead with a great BMI healthy? Or the blue collar dude who has terrible blood pressure from chain smoking and pounding energy drinks on his way to the job site?
How many Americans who are not obese are on their way to becoming obese?
There are lots of paths to unhealthiness and overeating / eating poorly is only one of them
Maybe in passing.
People aren't born obese. They get that way through mistreating their body for a long period of time, and it is quite possible for them to die before they become obese to other maladies related to that mistreatment.
Impossibly unrealistic to get rid of enormous sugar production subsidies that make it insanely cheap?
Impossibly unrealistic to simply tax added sugar?
Those zoning issues are the same reason for any number of other problems, including housing prices that are supposedly the #1 concern for a huge number of voters, and yet voters in many cities have only doubled down over time on making it harder and harder to build in efficient and high-density ways. "Impossible" seems like a fair way to put it.
I haven't done the statistics on it, but I'll bet cities full of people who want zoning reform are more likely to reform than cities full of people who do not want it.
This change ultimately allowed something like 10% more units in the city on a 100 year horizon.
This is what I'm calling out - these changes sound big but they are nearly meaningless. Cities need periods of explosive growth to remain affordable (see Jane Jacobs, 1961 and 1970).
You can read the text change. It allows duplexes and ~doubled the allowed density on almost every residential zoning type.
You can refer to the text changes. They doubled the zoned density in nearly every residential zoning type in the city. It is a huge change, though I suppose you can claim that's not "reform" if you want. It is sufficiently reformative for my purposes of increasing urban density over time.
Changes will take time to kick in, and obviously they should take time to kick in because simply clicking a button and doubling actual built density would crater the economy. It makes no sense. The zoning change removes an artificial restriction on the natural supply/demand curve, so now supply can grow as-needed in the forms desired.
In general, when new construction occurs, it's taking low density and replacing it with more like 10X density. A very tiny amount of land gets developed at once, so you need each new development opportunity to generate as much supply as possible.
What this did was make people think gosh, that means a lot of housing! But in actuality, very few of these ever get built. Only very old housing stock ever makes sense to replace with only a doubling.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but what I said was actually true. This won't have much impact. I can give you drips and drabs of information this way to help you understand how development works, but I can't give you an entire primer, unless you'd like to get on the Zoom and talk about it for a couple hours.
Can you show me land that is now much more valuable than before? I suspect the places you're thinking of aren't really changing on value or buildability the way you expect.
Naively, you're talking about converting a one story building into a ten story building. That == a tower.
You're skeptical that higher density zoning increases land values?
> Now, let's talk about the multi-family sector. If you thought single-family homes were hot, wait till you hear about this. Land suitable for apartment development in downtown Raleigh and Durham has seen price increases of 50-100% in the last five years alone.
> And it's not just apartments. The demand for townhomes and condos has sent land values for these types of projects through the roof, with increases of 30-40% in prime locations.
https://www.timmclarke.com/resources/are-land-values-increas...
Of course we can quibble about what amount of that appreciation is caused by zoning changes, but from first principles it is obviously the case that given the same exact plot of land, the expected value of developing 10 houses on it is much higher than the expected value of developing 1 house on it, ergo a lot that allows 10 will have a higher price than that same exact lot constrained to 1 home.
All 3 seem to be going swimmingly so far!
There is no material difference between impossible and challenging if the thing doesn’t actually happen.
It’s like Kramer saying he could have levels in his apartment it’s just that he doesn’t want them.
What’s the difference between, “It was hard and we didn’t solve it” and “It was impossible”?
You are aware you can’t tell a hard unsolved problem from an impossible unsolved problem, right?
Zoning changes happen all the time. Tax changes happen all the time. Subsidy changes happen all the time.
The other issue is your personal situation. If you're living in a country with intense conflict or in a war zone, you can’t just try to survive for 40 years while “waiting” for the country to make progress. You move, and that’s it.
Plus, given that people’s freedom is constantly increasing, and they have more and more options available, expecting that everyone will autonomously choose a healthy lifestyle is like waiting for Santa Claus—unless you plan to take that freedom away from them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_Kingdo...
I find that saying that health initiatives don't work by vaguely gesturing at a country, is not a structurally sound argument. Its like the sentiment here is: "is the fact that we include Pizza as a vegetable in American schools part of the problem? Nooooo, that can't be it. it must be a moral issue!" and thats just one example.
The obesity problem in the US is tied directly to our relationship with highly processed (and CHEAP) food. Along with the stranglehold those companies have over state and federal institutions that allow them to directly sell these foods in schools and institutions, and heavily skirt FDA regulations via lobbying.
The US is uniquely bad when we have a ton of chemicals and ingredients in our foods that are banned in most other countries. It is largely a systemic problem and a problem that can easily be solved. Poorer people tend to eat cheap food, cheap processed food isn't well regulated and is directly tied obesity and a whole host of health problems.
"The UK has seen its obesity rates increase faster than the US. In the UK, obesity has risen sharply since 1990, when it affected only 14% of adults. The UK is also considered one of the most overweight countries in Western Europe."
In addition, since the introduction of Change4Life, the obesity rate has simply continued to climb in the uk (see https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03..., for example).
So yes, other countries (just like the US), have introduced programs to try to encourage healthier behaviors, and have seen similar outcomes from them.
It's like well duh of course you'd prefer the impossibly unrealistic miracle.