> But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
Not sure why you make that assumption. In fact, I live in NYC and that's exactly where I see the abundance vs dem-soc tensions. This includes friends who were early canvassers for Zohran. It includes Zohran's loudest public supporters such as Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Piker. I have listened to hours of long-form interviews by Zohran. I am admittedly a sceptic, but I have earned my right to this skepticism.
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
______
For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.
I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like:
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
None of what you're mentioning applies to uBlock interacting with YouTube, I suspect you're talking about Twitch, which bakes the ad breaks into the stream so you still get the stream interrupted even you manage to block the ads, making people resort to hacky things like using the homepage player when an ad would be played.
Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.
This comparison has never made sense to me. If I get a free beer, I can do whatever I want with it. Drink it, dump it, whatever. Same thing with pretzels. Am I missing something?
Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the world in walkable communities predating the car. Perhaps people in these communities are on average more mobile into old age because they frequently walked?
They were (mostly) taken care of by extended multi-generational households. They obviously died and/or suffered to the extent that medical and QoL technology was insufficient. The whole status quo of pensioners migrating to Florida-style retirement community necropolis with a F-150 and a rubber stamped driver license is a modern US-centric phenomenon.
You are naming disparate & absurd things as the reason that European like walkable communities are bad for old people, like the difficulties of 1930's cities (or perhaps pre-industrial, you aren't very clear), the difference in landmass between the US and Europe (?) and the fact that there is a small range of disabilities that allow someone to drive and shop to Costco but not to go to a cornershop.
The reality is that being old sucks ass, but being old and sedentary (when you can avoid it) sucks worse. I've taken care of multiple senior family members & friends, the ones that were active, i.e walking everywhere, not avoiding stairs completely, have lived longer and happier. Sure, even active people gradually lose the ability to do day-to-day stuff and cars or microcars[1] can help them and other people with mobility concerns, but that's not an argument against walkable places.
Making streets non-hostile to pedestrians, having necessities closer to residences and prioritizing public transport makes people stop preferring cars as medium of transport if they don't need it (youngsters). This actually helps with traffic and in turn helps the people that need cars like someone with a rolling walker and arthritis or a delivery van.
Implying that people advocating for walkability are heartless youngins that don't care about old people just because you are losing arguments left and right, is actually really unempathetic.
Bell Labs in Holmdel (ala Severance HQ) is now "Bell Works", a combination of offices, restaurants, stores, and community space, including the public library. It's free to get in and you don't need to spend money to use the amenities. Walking around is pretty pleasant, the architecture is stunning and they did a good job of keeping the soul of the space. It's a bit of a rarity in suburban NJ.
According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year [0], and that's just for one car. So New Yorkers can put that extra $1000 per month towards housing. As a New Yorker, $4000 is pretty high. You'd typically see that in hot areas for 1br's with in-unit w/d. Most people, including myself, do not pay that much.
Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
> According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year
You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.
> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.
(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".