1. Thanks, I’ve had much better experiences with my landlord, but your experience might be more typical. Lack of adequate insulation is a clear problem, and one that’s potentially worsened by the current system in which landlords pay for installing insulation but tenants generally pay for electricity. It’s also the kind of issue that wouldn’t become known to the tenants until after they’ve already moved in. So it makes sense to me that this would require legislation.
The process you propose for maintaining quality sounds reasonable enough. It might even be less susceptible to abuse than the current system of requiring security deposits, which the landlord can decide whether or not to refund. I’ve never experienced abuse of that type, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s relatively common.
2. I agree there’s a lot more design work to do here. But before diving into that, I’m not entirely convinced by this point:
If you use [the amount that people actually spend] as your optimization metric, as our cities currently do, you get overpriced services.
When I think about which services are overpriced, the first ones that come to mind are college tuition and healthcare. But the primary cost drivers there are not rent, so I don’t think your proposal would affect them very much.
If we limit our discussion to services that are overpriced due to high rent costs, the only one I can think of is restaurants. I’ve never seen an actual restaurant’s budget, but I’ve heard that their costs are generally split evenly into rent, salaries, and the cost of the food itself. And it makes sense that rent would be a major cost, since table space at restaurants is clearly inefficient—even in the pre-pandemic world, restaurants often operated at capacity for only a few hours each weekend. So I’ll grant that there’s likely room for improvement there.
2. This turns out to be interesting I think. I do think almost everything in the city is obviously overpriced, but it becomes devilishly hard to identify it as overpriced because it has incorporated its high prices into its defining functionality.
Luxury clothes stores say “it’s a good thing that we charge six or seven times the cost of production because it makes us a positional good”, cafes say “It’s a good thing we charge so much because it keeps people from loitering”, nightclubs say “it keeps out the riff-raff”.
There’s a sense in which, the thing that they are is “supposed to be that way”, they truly couldn’t be better priced and so it’s hard to call them overpriced. We end up with services like that because that’s all that survives.
A solution here wouldn’t look like cheaper versions of these things, because those things wouldn’t work if they were cheaper. A really livable megacity would mostly have different things instead of them, things that only start to become economical at the lower price ranges. Instead of assorting by class, social clubs would select on more targeted personal characteristics. Instead of luxury there would be genuine finery included under the craft designation, to an extent that couldn’t have been funded before. Instead of cafes there would be mostly unstaffed bookable spaces where you could meet people, that are quiet enough to have conversations in, because lingering is the point of them. They all earn little money but increase the total value of the city far beyond their opportunity cost.
Related observation: Nothing can be said to be overpriced if you submit deeply to the necessity of the overhead. Gold-plated audio cables can’t be called overpriced if you believe that you need them to be gold-plated. They’re only overpriced if you can accept the possibility of having audio cables that don’t need to be gold-plated. So, a lot of people will say things like, “bitcoin’s proof of work mechanisms aren’t wasteful because they’re necessary to making bitcoin work”, whether you accept that depends on whether you think there’s an alternative to proof of work (many projects do). And some people who weren’t in the mood to entertain the possibility of an alternative to rent would say this about rent, that it’s not overhead because it’s an irreplaceable part of the mechanism.
1. Thanks, I’ve had much better experiences with my landlord, but your experience might be more typical. Lack of adequate insulation is a clear problem, and one that’s potentially worsened by the current system in which landlords pay for installing insulation but tenants generally pay for electricity. It’s also the kind of issue that wouldn’t become known to the tenants until after they’ve already moved in. So it makes sense to me that this would require legislation.
The process you propose for maintaining quality sounds reasonable enough. It might even be less susceptible to abuse than the current system of requiring security deposits, which the landlord can decide whether or not to refund. I’ve never experienced abuse of that type, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s relatively common.
2. I agree there’s a lot more design work to do here. But before diving into that, I’m not entirely convinced by this point:
When I think about which services are overpriced, the first ones that come to mind are college tuition and healthcare. But the primary cost drivers there are not rent, so I don’t think your proposal would affect them very much.
If we limit our discussion to services that are overpriced due to high rent costs, the only one I can think of is restaurants. I’ve never seen an actual restaurant’s budget, but I’ve heard that their costs are generally split evenly into rent, salaries, and the cost of the food itself. And it makes sense that rent would be a major cost, since table space at restaurants is clearly inefficient—even in the pre-pandemic world, restaurants often operated at capacity for only a few hours each weekend. So I’ll grant that there’s likely room for improvement there.
Is there something else I’m missing?
2. This turns out to be interesting I think. I do think almost everything in the city is obviously overpriced, but it becomes devilishly hard to identify it as overpriced because it has incorporated its high prices into its defining functionality.
Luxury clothes stores say “it’s a good thing that we charge six or seven times the cost of production because it makes us a positional good”, cafes say “It’s a good thing we charge so much because it keeps people from loitering”, nightclubs say “it keeps out the riff-raff”.
There’s a sense in which, the thing that they are is “supposed to be that way”, they truly couldn’t be better priced and so it’s hard to call them overpriced. We end up with services like that because that’s all that survives.
A solution here wouldn’t look like cheaper versions of these things, because those things wouldn’t work if they were cheaper. A really livable megacity would mostly have different things instead of them, things that only start to become economical at the lower price ranges. Instead of assorting by class, social clubs would select on more targeted personal characteristics. Instead of luxury there would be genuine finery included under the craft designation, to an extent that couldn’t have been funded before. Instead of cafes there would be mostly unstaffed bookable spaces where you could meet people, that are quiet enough to have conversations in, because lingering is the point of them. They all earn little money but increase the total value of the city far beyond their opportunity cost.
Related observation: Nothing can be said to be overpriced if you submit deeply to the necessity of the overhead. Gold-plated audio cables can’t be called overpriced if you believe that you need them to be gold-plated. They’re only overpriced if you can accept the possibility of having audio cables that don’t need to be gold-plated. So, a lot of people will say things like, “bitcoin’s proof of work mechanisms aren’t wasteful because they’re necessary to making bitcoin work”, whether you accept that depends on whether you think there’s an alternative to proof of work (many projects do).
And some people who weren’t in the mood to entertain the possibility of an alternative to rent would say this about rent, that it’s not overhead because it’s an irreplaceable part of the mechanism.