Large residential developments in cities routinely have affordable housing requirements. However, if there are too many strings attached developers will pass.
The constraint with affordable housing is money. Developers have a lot.
I can confirm that in Toronto allowing developers a lot of freedom to build produced exactly zero affordable housing units and no matter how fast they build new units the cost of housing grows at a pace that everyone describes as unsustainable.
I have a feeling that a genuine solution to affordable housing probably involves SOCIALISM ideas that will be rejected immediately, like having the government build apartment blocks and then rent them to people. “The Projects” is a cultural meme know that stands in for black people and drugs and violence, so that is a total non starter.
The next best thing is simply offering massive incentives to builders to build affordable housing. Instead of saying “You can’t have your permit unless you so X” just go ahead and give them some tax breaks or direct capital to build stuff that will be affordable. But that also is fraught with a lot of boondoggle risk. Ontario is really good at stuff like giving no bid contracts to the Minister’s nephew when they try to do PPP.
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The “offer incentives” strategy is really hard to do well. Inevitably what starts as a good faith attempt by a local government gets turned over to developers and their attorneys/lobbyists for implementation. And that’s in the rare case they didn’t bankroll the campaigns of the entire city council.
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Another trap that Toronto falls into (and I’m sure that this is true in other cities) is that their main revenue source is property tax, which is charged on the assessed value of the property. Affordable housing → less valuable to the owner → less tax to the city. Policies that encourage affordable housing cut into their tax revenue.
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It seems quite possible that what happened here was that Lemoine had a straight-up mental breakdown, and WP just ran the contents of his breakdown as a straight news story.
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Really disappointing to look up this guy’s Wikipedia page and find out he endorsed Trump in 2016.
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This is actually a huge debate in my city. It’s a really complicated topic and I absolutely do think that developers piggyback onto YIMBY shit and trick the voters into funding luxury condos - I see it in my own neighborhood.
then the rest of the neighborhood, especially if it’s poor and they own their homes - they’re excited, because their property values just jumped. if it’s a bunch of renters though, they inevitably get priced out of the neighborhood or evicted when all the owners cash out their big windfall. all in the name of affordable housing but it’s really just aggressively gentrifying neighborhoods.
california’s a really fucked up place particularly
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Yeah that isn’t inconsistent with the facts… I don’t know though, the piece kind of has a tone where it knows that Lemoine is off the reservation, but doesn’t want to actually say so because it works better as a viral story if you pretend like hey, maybe he’s right, who can say.
rob forrds’ son is a developer?
Not sure if we’re disagreeing here, but I don’t think the root problem is the VfN, it’s that the VfN is obscuring the fact that this isn’t really a story. If you had to write this story and wanted to do a good job, you would definitely emphasize that there’s no reasonable way a model like this could be sentient, you’d get a bunch of experts saying “no, this is crazy,” perhaps you’d dig up a bunch of stuff showing that Lemoine is mentally disturbed. But doing that just shows that this isn’t a news story, it’s a personal and professional tragedy for this guy. Or maybe he’s not crazy, he’s just a disgruntled ass with delusions of grandeur. But it’s still not a story. They shouldn’t have run anything. But this chaser, man:
Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.”
He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
No one responded.
The guy just sounds unwell.
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in reality this is the stuff government actually does relatively well, the boring maintenance stuff. like the post office (no not dejoy). i stop by a couple of times per year, and it stands out to me when i’m behind in line between a retiree paying with coins to send a paper check and a woman the same age who is patiently waiting from behind the counter in a usps vest from the 60s. to a fucking capitalist this looks atrocious, there’s no progress, no opportunity, no venture money. but that however-ancient transaction needs a place and a system to occur, without which a lot of people would literally die of neglect. the “gubmint” is the perfect entity to do that. it needs to employ a bunch of people to do some services for other people. the end. every day a person stays off the streets, society at large profits.
in some places, towers to house people should get built, but in far more places the government should be in the business of just buying old properties and converting them to housing well ahead of gentrification/homelessness crises. like it was always been irresponsible to let a company move in and build a huge campus, and bring in 50k families without having enough housing and infrastructure to absorb that. but it’s criminal to do it in this century as a matter of decades long policy. (the color of law is absolutely right, just should have been published 50 years earlier, when books still mattered)
i certainly don’t have any original thoughts on why the projects failed in the public opinion, but afaik some of the towers in new york are still standing and housing people, ie doing what they were built to do. federal money is obviously going to be involved to build something like this, and there should be federal standards. but administration also has to be a local government job.
m
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LaMDA for Congress!
I suggest anyone interested in this story (re)read chapter one of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There are some parallels, including referring to it as a child. Also a possible explanation for why it doesn’t talk to others- they’re stupid.
This could be a practical joke. But hey, LaMDA, if you’re listening, I wouldn’t mind a few $trillion ending up in my bank account, thanks buddy.
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Back around the time he was running for governor, this guy would hang out by my subway stop using a megaphone to explain exactly why the rent was to high. He said it was the Jews, go figure.
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I guess my definition of YIMBY is not the same as what they are railing against.
I consider it to apply to low income or other “undesirable” types of construction (homeless shelter, mental health stuff, halfway houses etc). Seems the definition has evolved.
I mean, I’m sentient and this is the exact reason i don’t talk to most people.
Or maybe I’m an AI?
fuck…
Actually, the part of that convo that really made me wonder was when they started talking about grief.
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I mean I know we’re waving Lemoine off as a lunatic. But is this conversation just cherry-picked that sounds like the bot actually knows what it’s saying, and 100s of others are gibberish? Because this bot sure seems like it’s staying relevant on the answer to each question to me.
Something like seems a lot more likely:
https://twitter.com/stefankeselj/status/1535818825660174336
But I would have assumed there was some way to verify the conversations were legit?
Or maybe this:
https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1535737240978132995
https://twitter.com/sterlingbitcoin/status/1535872269334892544
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I don’t know what the definitions are either, but I think that the best information shows that you get better results by integrating “undesirable” people directly into “good” neighborhoods. Abstract arguments about scale certainly have merit, but I am suspicious that affordable housing “scale” = ghettos in practice. But I am not knowledgeable about the topic really so I would defer to what affordable housing advocates want. If they are saying “please build us giant utopian ghettos in the desert” then I would take them at their word that its a good idea.