#asymmetric-effects

[jakke]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post: asymmetric-effects replied to your pos...

But also they cropped 3-7 crops per acre per year, so this was quite impressive.

Okay wow so they're pulling down half a million per year growing fancy organic veggies? Oh my goodness what are we doing in grad school. 

[jakke]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post:optimistic-red-velvet-walrus replied to your post:...

Holy shit I just got back from an (uncertified) organic farm that claimed $100000/crop acre!

That's around $25 per square metre. For very speciality products that people consume in small quantities (e.g. fancy hot peppers) I don't think that sounds wholly unreasonable.

[jakke]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post:mikerickson replied to your post:thewomanofkleenex...

One ancestor was the first pilgrim born after the mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. Another one is a sister of a witch in The Crucible.

Oh wow that's a mighty bourgeois pedigree eh?

[roxygen]

asymmetric-effects said:Depending on what anon is looking for, I might have suggestions.

I had you in mind for when they responded, actually.

[jakke]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post: hey so like last year I'll be posting ...

Micro dev?

You got it. There should be a couple micro dev papers in there. 

[jakke]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post:faucet replied to your quote:Here’s the plan,...

Wait was part of the Hopkins thing making failing easier? Maybe impostor syndrome plus upward biased expectations about current degree worth?

Unfortunately not! That would be awesome - I'd love to see graduate programs taking tons of students, including students from a wide range of undergraduate backgrounds, and then winnowing them out in the first year or so based on performance. The prevalent system (trying to do all the selection on initial admissions) hugely biases things towards students who attended fancy schools for their undergrads.

[mathochism]

asymmetric-effects replied to your post “I cannot figure out this problem for the life of me. So fuck it, he’s...”

If I took this class I would probably simulate everything

Ahh I wish I could that would be so great. Spend a couple hours on a problem, get no where. Spend 20 minutes writing Python on my laptop and 10 minutes of computation time later I have an approximation and a confidence interval on that approximation. So my answer to this problem is: "sorry, I don't know how to find the closed form solution, but here's my best guess and its probably within about .1% of that." 

I do want to know what the actual solution is though...

[jakke]

hey so all the replies about housing markets in one big post

turnabout replied to your link “Vancouver sets maximum initial rents for rent-only buildings”

I hope whatever subsidy the builders got for that was super shitty, because that's the dumbest attempt at affordable housing policy ever.

They got around $10 million in waived fees from the city for building apartments and promising not to rent them out for any more than the market value. Probably the worst imaginable way to spend $10 million on housing.

rouxfully replied to your post “I mean I'm not even super convinced that building new apartments lowers rent in the first place”

It definitely has not lowered rent even a tiny bit here, including the "affordable" units which aren't actually affordable at all.

I think this kind of arrangement lowers rent in the top tiers of rental housing? Like, doing everything you can to get developers to build big new towers with nice apartments on the edges of downtown probably lowers rent for the top 10% or 20% of renters, because you're supplying exactly the kind of housing they consume. But that doesn't do anything for housing affordability.

theoneandonlyjarrett replied to your link “Vancouver sets maximum initial rents for rent-only buildings”

Slash NYC mentality aside, what does the Vancouver real estate/rental market look like?

Not as expensive as NYC, of course. But nowhere is as expensive as NYC. Like, the median rent in NYC is more expensive than the median rent in any other city in the US, and the 99th percentile rent in NYC is more expensive than any other 99th percentile rent, and the 10th percentile, and every other point in the distribution. 

Vancouver is in a situation where demand is high and constant and supply is relatively constrained (partially by geography and partially by policy) and the desirability of different neighbourhoods varies really sharply. Accordingly, in recent years rent has risen sharply. The policy response has mostly been greater density, which is cool but it does mean you're swapping out old three-story walkups for shiny new five-story townhomes and those cost a lot more to provide. Moreover, the city has seen a couple substantial waves of gentrification of neighbourhoods that historically were preferred by low-income new immigrants. So that's driven demand for affordable housing.

To me affordable housing falls into a couple categories: housing for destitute people who have basically zero income, and housing for low-income people who could afford to pay rent but are having to spend an unreasonable amount of their income on rent under current conditions. The former group you basically need to build housing for, and in BC that's currently funded by the provincial government. The latter group is larger and way trickier to deal with, and the municipal government here has responded by defining the category to include the majority of the city's population and then promoting housing that only the well-off can afford as affordable.

asymmetric-effects replied to your post “I mean I'm not even super convinced that building new apartments lowers rent in the first place”

You don't like Matt Yglesias? If so, what reason? I don't really know much about him or urban policy.

Oh he's one of my favourite urban policy pundit types. But one of his big priorities is this concept that building tons more housing lowers rent across the board. And this doesn't necessarily follow, because (while it does boost supply) new housing is more expensive to provide than old housing and also it provides terrible incentives for existing landlords to keep operating rental housing. Housing is tricky, in that it's sooo heterogeneous and also so many units are held as investment assets. 

cjros replied to your post “I mean I'm not even super convinced that building new apartments lowers rent in the first place”

What kind of measures do you think will lower rent? Let's assume the city is growing and people actually want to move to and live there. Have you spoken about this before?

End the requirement that buildings provide parking stalls. Make it easier for people who live in houses to legally rent out suites within their houses. More duplexes and four-plexes in currently single-family neighbourhoods (which create density without driving up the cost of supplying). Better rapid transit to close-in suburbs (which lowers the difference in desirability between high-rent and low-rent neighbourhoods). Tax disincentives on rapid-fire housing resales to mitigate speculation. 

I mean below some income level you absolutely need to directly provide the housing, because some people won't be able to afford any reasonable rent. And we definitely need more of this directly-provided housing. But that's a pretty small proportion of the population.