> No one is forcing these other companies to make and sell...
> I'm really struggling to see where the consumer harm is.
Imagine a world where it's illegal to grow crops unless you use a particular brand of seeds. Nobody is forcing you to make cereal, but you're going to have a bad time if you can't get the needed components for it.
It's not that far off base, either. Heard of Monsanto? Google is basically going down the same path.
Google Maps must be the biggest value-add Google has built for their phone ecosystem, full stop. I see no reason they should give that away no strings attached. I am no Google fan but it's one of the few things they have done which positively impacts me almost daily.
> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.
Now it got flipped. I turned off animations on my Android phone, and it's great. And now every time I have to use iOS (for app development), everything seems to be moving in slow motion.
And you can not turn it off! Apple in their infinite wisdom doesn't provide ways for app developers to disable animated transitions.
> The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists
Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.
None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
And that's important. A simple "not enough housing" problem is easily solved with "just build more".
Instead, there is a shortage of housing _near_ _large_ _cities_. And it can't be solved. Simply "building more" housing in dense cities makes it _worse_.
The issue with this is most parts of large cities are substantially less dense than incredibly livible neighborhoods such as the plateau area of Montreal.
It is illegal to build such a neighborhood in 99% of Canada. People love it here, people start families here, tourists visit, it's quite, lots of parks and shops.
And it's 3-4 as dense as most areas of most major cities. But we've made it illegal to build. For zoning, double stairway rules, minimum parking rules, setback rules, strict permitting requirements, and thousands of other things.
Preventing increase in _density_ leads to better outcomes long-term.
It sounds crazy, right? Supply/demand, and all of that.
But it's an example of one of the things in economics where the effects end up being different because of collective actions. As a result, no large growing city within the US within the last 30 years managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density. I checked that using the Census statistics database.
And no, Austin (TX) doesn't count. It decreased prices by decreasing the _population_.
Isn't 80% or some other ridiculous percentage of population of Canada in large cities? If a large portion of your population is living in large cities and large cities are experiencing a housing shortage then it makes sense to me to say there is a housing shortage in Canada.
> Isn't 80% or some other ridiculous percentage of population of Canada in large cities?
Only 59% (and shrinking!) of the population live in places with more than 100,000 people. You are correct that ~80% of the population live in urban areas, but Canada's definition for urban includes places with 1,000 people.
It's important because there's no way to make dense urban housing cheaper. Nobody has managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density (no, Austin in Texas doesn't count, guess why?).
The solution is not to build ever denser communities, but to make it so that people don't _have_ to move into a large city from an ever-shrinking list.
Canada's housing crisis goes well beyond just the large cities. It extends into small towns as far as the Yukon. It may be a somewhat different situation compared with the US.
Smaller town in Canada don't really have skyrocketing prices.
For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.
During that time, Vancouver BC went from $640k ($820k after inflation) to $1300k.
The average square footage also went down in BC, but stayed stable in YK.
> For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.
These are already insanely high prices for such small, remote, and undesirable cities
Whitehorse is not undesirable, it's located in a beautiful valley and has a fairly mild climate. And I specifically took the worst case of price growth in YK. If you look at Watson Lake, the price there has not grown at all.
My point is that smaller cities in Canada are not experiencing runaway price growth.
This should make it clear that it's not a housing shortage problem. Otherwise, it'd be experienced equally across the board.
Vancouver has more houses per capita than Whitehorse does. It is where the houses are, both in relative and overwhelmingly absolute terms.
The only problem is that they are more expensive than people wish they were. But that high price condition comes as a result of people wanting to live there. The way to undo high prices is to see people no longer want to live there (or, at least want to live elsewhere just as much).
New houses generally cost more than used houses. If people already think a used house is more than they can afford, who is going to pay even more to build a new house?
If you truly believe you can build new houses in Vancouver for less than the cost of its used houses, you've found one amazing arbitrage opportunity. You should be asking yourself why investors aren't lined up at your door.
Building new houses reduces the cost of used houses!
Coincidentally, the price of used cars went way up during the pandemic, right when the supply of new cars was bottlenecked by industry shutdowns and a global semiconductor shortage. Even though new cars generally cost more than used cars. Strange but true!
> Building new houses reduces the cost of used houses!
You're not wrong if you live in a house inside a vacuum, but, again, in the real world, if people are already struggling with the used price, who is going to pay even more to build new?
As surprising as it may be, houses won't magically materialize on the back of hopes and dreams. They require intense amounts of real labour to build and labour isn't going to show up if you aren't throwing copious amounts of money constantly in their face. If nobody wants to pay that labour the unfathomable amounts of money they require, a house is not getting built.
> Strange but true!
Not particularly strange, but cars are now stuck in the same situation, with the price of new cars having become prohibitively expensive and used cars are failing to come back down even as supply chains are no longer bottlenecked. In fact, the assembly plant near me just closed citing weak demand, so it seems there is even excess capacity. Much like houses, cars don't magically materialize either. They need willing buyers. But if you have no willing buyers...
> Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.
> None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
Interesting. 零 means zero. But my (non-native!) instinct says that it's impossible to use it this way. I feel like you'd need 没有.
Classical Chinese has a negative universal quantifier 莫 (though in a technical sense it's an adverb and doesn't modify or stand in for nouns), but I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in modern Mandarin. I feel like I'd have to use a positive quantifier and a negative claim.
It's not. It's the right design idea. But it's just missing one factor that will make it far superior to ANY other urban model: self-driving vehicles.
Imagine children being able to just get a self-driving taxi and ride to school by themselves. Or to other locations. All while having plenty of space at home, a yard to play, etc.
I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
> I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
I believe that robotaxis will enable totally new behaviors. For example, if you don't live immediately near a park, you won't often go there. It's just too tiresome to use public transit to visit a park just for a short walk/run/play. And personal cars are not available for children.
With robocars, you'll be able to text your friend: "hi, meet you at the park corner in 10", jump into a car, and arrive there. This will have zero friction, so it's far more likely to become a habitual behavior.
> Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
Ha. One line of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. Urban construction is EXPENSIVE.
I understand from your question you struggle to comprehend that this is possible. I assure you it really is. People who have money take the train. People who own cars take the train. The modal split for Vienna generally is about 25% by car. I would guess more than 50% for public transport for journeys to nearby nature. The trains in Austria are excellent: safe, clean and very punctual. If you get in a train to nature you will be surrounded by people with overpriced hiking gear.
> The US has a housing shortage [1] (~3M-8M units)
It doesn't. It really, really doesn't. The per-capita housing units are close to the historical highs. And per-household stats are _even_ _better_: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
What the US has is the density-despair spiral going. It's creating denser and denser pits of despair in the urban centers via economic forces.
After all, what use is housing in Iowa if you _have_ to live in New York? Because there are no jobs for you in Iowa. And housing in New York will NEVER be cheap.
I unironically agree with this. 100 years ago, Skid Row and Bunker Hill in Los Angeles were full of SROs, boarding houses and long-term hotels. The people who lived there didn't disappear, they're just all sleeping in the street now.
I guess you never had the misfortune of sleeping in a flophouse to say something like that.
One time I had this project in Switzerland and my co-worker, who also travelled there, figured he'd save money if he rented a bunk bed in illegal (due to density) quarters.
Terrible experience, which got him fired eventually because he quickly lost steam due to having to share a tiny room with three other people.
I on the other hand moistened every Swiss Frank banknote with tears, but splurged thrice the amount on a proper room and survived until the end of my involvement in that project.
As an aside you can see why it is hard/impossible for a homeless person to pull bootstraps when a successful person can't keep their job living not-even-homeless.
The current American urbanism is from the past! The assumption that other urbanisms somehow represent a blast from the past, while 70 year old American car-centric urbanism embodies the eternal modern 'now,' simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There are numerous contemporary urbanisms, and newer approaches increasingly tend to be far less car-centric.
The thing is, the 70-era anti-urbanism made the US the leading country.
The "modern" urbanism (flophouses, shoebox-sized apartments, 15-minute don-you-dare-to-walk-out neighborhoods) is leading only to decay of the country. Evidence: it absolutely helped to elect Trump.
> If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
You can just refuse to accept the item, and it'll be returned to the sender or destroyed.
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