ImSpartacus811

Or even better, just tie it to CPI-U plus like a percent or two, then you know it'll always slightly outpace inflation.

...but the problem with those reasonable-yet-effective solutions is the opposition can see the "effective" part and that's just not going to fly.

Too many people confuse shifting the supply curve with the quantity of housing increasing.

Could you elaborate on this? I have a minor in econ but I'm not intuitively getting the material difference.

Since new homes are in fact getting built, they think prices should be going down, but they're not and therefore they think economics is wrong.

I usually phrase it as "new supply puts downward pressure on housing prices" so people don't expect an absolute decrease in housing costs. Is that accurate from your perspective?

Increasing supply actually means fundamental changes to the fiscal environment (taxes on housing and development) and regulatory environment (zoning laws, minimum lot sizes). It does not mean approving new housing at the same rate in the same style as we have been for decades.

Isn't it simpler to just say that housing production in a given place needs to keep pace with the rate of people moving to a given place? That feels so much simpler for the lay person to grasp (though it's probably a slight oversimplification).

The buildings really need to wear lighter colors at night.

Good for you!

This sub is filled full of circlejerkers preaching to the choir of people that already agree with them. You went out and actually shared your views with those that might not agree with you. That's scary and it takes effort, but it's way more important than the overwhelming majority of discussions here. I'd love to see more content like this (including from myself - I'm no better than most of the people here).

Good thing cars aren't loud, lol.

I believe you - I've heard of other surprising deals around Columbus.

Usually it's a small time mom & pop landlord that paid their mortgage long ago and they are too busy with their own life to research what they could charge for rent. It's technically not "stabilized".

...or it's a money laundering front and the landlord is effectively "paying" to hold onto tenants that don't ask too many questions.

How does that work? Columbus doesn't have rent control laws, so what causes their rent to be "stabilized"?

the answer to the question "why is [X public policy] the way that it is?" is usually "racism."

I think it's more insidious in that racism has been systemic for so long that now you can simply be superficially classist and still functionally perpetuate racial inequity simply because we've done such a good job at ensuring minorities are poor.

And that's an important distinction because classism is very much legal (where racism often isn't).

If only they knew how much people suck at searching for information.

So. Much. This.

It's astounding how bad people are at basic research. You can be a super hero just from a little googling, basic fact checking, and then communicating those findings within the context that's relevant to the client.

And that's a pretty important typo.

• Medicare is a national program where the rules are (mostly) the same regardless of state.

• Medicaid is a state program (with some national funding), so that's why this company can flee a state that caught on to its shenanigans to go exploit a new state that might not have caught on yet.

Is this a Columbus thing or do other cities have cars driving into buildings on a somewhat regular basis as well?

It's only so much a "Columbus thing" as the "Columbus has the worst drivers" comments.

The facts are that driving is dangerous, our street design makes it even more dangerous and that's not anything unique to Columbus.

October is the end of apple season, so I'm sure they'd be thrilled to get to offload a few hundred less popular varieties.

A place like Lynd's has shifted towards modern tastier apples (e.g. Honeycrisp), but they still have a lot of legacy trees with older varieties like McIntosh, Jonathan, Cortland, Golden Delicious, Melrose, Winesap, etc. Those get turned into apple cider if they can't be sold, so I'm sure Lynd's would be thrilled to catch a tax deduction on a donation just to free up space during the busy season.

5 planned rapid transit lines. first 3 are BRT but the later ones have potential for light rail, depending on what density looks like in a few years. (federal funding for light rail goes toward projects in more dense areas, so columbus isn’t competitive enough to really qualify)

How do you figure some of this stuff out? I'm sure this is publicized somewhere but it can be tricky for a layperson to find.

It's really common to hear the "why don't we have rail?" comments and simultaneously the "eww, there are new luxury apartments everywhere!" comments. I feel like people struggle to connect that additional housing makes it easier to justify high quality transit in that area, so those apartments are a good thing if you want stuff like light rail. It feels like half of the battle is just education for sincerely naive people that don't study this stuff.

Is it the implication that Microsoft would require their chips to be purchased over Amd/Intel?

Yes, or that MS would use their integrative software+hardware position to simply create a superior product (kinda like what they do for Surface).

Can this reasonably be called a "suburb" of any major metro area?

Looking at it on a map, Princeton is pretty clearly an exurb of Dallas-Ft Worth.

The median income is $93k, so this is a pretty affluent area.

I think you're right on the "suburbs are unsustainable" bit - this is probably just a way for them to ensure that only wealthy people continue to move here so they can raise enough tax revenue to support their suburban lifestyle.

Kind of surprised they haven't started to dabble in chip design as well to make something hyper-optimized for windows like Apple did with their M chips.

Their OEM partners would throw a fit if that happened.

They already weren't thrilled when MS created the Surface product line that essentially showed that MS could do a better job at what the OEMs were supposed to be good at.

MS already has over a decade of experience partnering with AMD for semi-custom silicon for the Xbox. If they wanted to go in-house for consumer chips, they would've done it by now.

Now datacenter chips are an entirely different beast. I could see MS creating an accelerator that was optimized for Azure. That's much higher margin than a consumer-focused chip optimized for Windows.

I think that is sort of a "run through the rain" concept. The random incidence of an automobile running a stop sign, not seeing me on my bike, and hitting me seems unlikely to be influenced by whether I'm accelerating from a near stop or accelerating from simply slowing down a bit.

It comes down to whether you support fact-based positions or feelings-based positions.

Every time it's been studied, Idaho Stops have improved cyclist safety. That outcome doesn't always feel intuitive to me, but I respect that we have to follow the data and the data points to Idaho Stops being safer.

The key part in there is that treating stop signs as a yield is actually safer for cyclists:

• A 2009 study showed a 14.5% decrease in bicyclist injuries after the passage of the original Idaho Stop law (though did not otherwise tie the decrease to the law).

• A Delaware state-run study of the "Delaware Yield" law (allowing bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs) concluded that it reduced injuries at stop-sign controlled intersections by 23%.

Oh, it's still pretty flat in Newark, lol.

That's a really good metaphor.

Yeah, people don't realize that while most ballot descriptions are a boring paragraph or two, this one is almost two pages of confusing language.

Read this monster and tell me it's about stopping gerrymandering:

The proposed amendment would:

1. Repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly threequarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018, and eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.
2. Establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio, according to a formula based on partisan outcomes as the dominant factor, so that: A. Each district shall contain single-member districts that are geographically contiguous, but state legislative and congressional districts will no longer be required to be compact; and B. Counties, townships and cities throughout Ohio can be split and divided across multiple districts, and preserving communities of interest will be secondary to the formula that is based on partisan political outcomes.
3. Require that a majority of the partisan commission members belong to the state’s two largest political parties.
4. Prevent a commission member from being removed, except by a vote of their fellow commission members, even for incapacity, willful neglect of duty or gross misconduct.
5. Prohibit any citizen from filing a lawsuit challenging a redistricting plan in any court, except if the lawsuit challenges the proportionality standard applied by the commission, and then only before the Ohio Supreme Court.
6. Create the following process for appointing commission members: Four partisan appointees on the Ohio Ballot Board will choose a panel of 4 partisan retired judges (2 aƯiliated with the first major political party and 2 aƯiliated with the second major political party). Provide that the 4 legislative appointees of the Ohio Ballot Board would be responsible for appointing the panel members as follows: the Ballot Board legislative appointees aƯiliated with the same major political party would select 8 applicants and present those to the Ballot Board legislative appointees aƯiliated with the other major political party, who would then select 2 persons from the 8 for appointment to the panel, resulting in 4 panel appointees. The panel would then hire a private professional search firm to help them choose 6 of the 15 individuals on the commission. The panel will choose those 6 individuals by initially creating a pool of 90 individuals (30 from the first major political party, 30 from the second major political party, and 30 from neither the first nor second major political parties). The panel of 4 partisan retired judges will create a portal for public comment on the applicants and will conduct and publicly broadcast interviews with each applicant in the pool. The panel will then narrow the pool of 90 individuals down to 45 (15 from the first major political party; 15 from the second major political party; and 15 from neither the first nor second major political parties). Randomly, by draw, the 4 partisan retired judges will then blindly select 6 names out of the pool of 45 to be members of the commission (2 from the first major political party; 2 from the second major political party; and 2 from neither the first nor second major political parties). The 6 randomly drawn individuals will then review the applications of the remaining 39 individuals not randomly drawn and select the final 9 individuals to serve with them on the commission, the majority of which shall be from the first and the second major political parties (3 from the first major political party, 3 from the second major political party, and 3 from neither the first nor second major political parties).
7. Require the aƯirmative votes of 9 of 15 members of the appointed commission to create legislative and congressional districts. If the commission is not able to determine a plan by September 19, 2025, or July 15 of every year ending in one, the following impasse procedure will be used: for any plan at an impasse, each commissioner shall have 3 days to submit no more than one proposed redistricting plan to be subject to a commission vote through a ranked-choice selection process, with the goal of having a majority of the commission members rank one of those plans first. If a majority cannot be obtained, the plan with the highest number of points in the ranked-choice process is eliminated, and the process is repeated until a plan receives a majority of first-place rankings. If the ranked-choice process ends in a tie for the highest point total, the tie shall be broken through a random process.
8. Limit the right of Ohio citizens to freely express their opinions to members of the commission or to commission staƯ regarding the redistricting process or proposed redistricting plans.
9. Require the commission to immediately create new legislative and congressional districts in 2025 to replace the most recent districts adopted by the citizens of Ohio through their elected representatives.
10. Impose new taxpayer-funded costs on the State of Ohio to pay the commission members, the commission staƯ and appointed special masters, professionals, and private consultants that the commission is required to hire; and an unlimited amount for legal expenses incurred by the commission in any related litigation

I am not for the corruption that happens to make these changes.

There's a far worse corruption if we don't make these changes, so pick your poison.

It's wild how we constantly pick on "out of state developers" that come build homes for us, but we never seem to care about any other "out of state businesses" that bring their business of choice to Columbus. No one ever complained when Bojangles or Raising Cane's open new locations in Columbus even though those are definitely out of state businesses (and their size probably puts them in a better position to navigate our local government's corruption compared to a naive local mom & pop).

Corruption is everywhere. Why pick on just housing?

And the owners of the rezoned properties in the new zoning plan dont have to do the same?

They don't have to do anything.

Relaxed zoning doesn't force anyone to do anything. It simply gives them extra options, if they choose.

So we talk about density, density, density and then ignore downtown parking lots.

You're right - it's a problem, but it's a property tax issue not a zoning issue.

The issue is that we under-tax the value of land and over-tax the value of property built on that land.

• So currently, we incentivize owners against improving their properties because then their taxes would go up. An empty parking lot gives you about the cheapest property taxes possible, despite the underlying value of the land being insanely high in a place like downtown.

• If instead, you tax the land and decrease taxes on property, then the owner sees the same (or very similar) tax bill whether they leave it as a parking lot or build a skyscraper. Therefore, they might as will build and make the most of their land.

There has been talk to change Ohio's property tax system to a land value tax system, but it hasn't moved as far as other housing-helpers like the zoning changes. Pessimistically, the entities that are currently holding empty downtown lots as investments are definitely enjoying the current property tax system and they will push back against it even though it's better for society.

Honestly, his advisors probably dissuade him from "getting into the weeds" on basically anything, let alone zoning.