tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110014885778996459.post1806314138736778636..comments2024-03-29T04:50:03.060-07:00Comments on Idiosyncratic Whisk: Housing: Part 120 - We are the austerity counterfactualKevin Erdmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431566729667544886noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110014885778996459.post-71703280202917935202016-02-23T18:04:40.131-07:002016-02-23T18:04:40.131-07:00Yes an old-fashioned footnoted paper--probably act...Yes an old-fashioned footnoted paper--probably actually printed on paper at the time published.<br /><br />Though the paper is dated, given the American zeal for zoning I assume the barriers against manufactured housing are worse than ever.<br /><br />It is interesting to ponder what American residential architecture would look like in an era of no zoning. You might get the walled compound look. The better off would live inside a courtyard with a house behind ivy-brick walls so they would not look at the "crappy" housing and street vendors outside.<br /><br />It is interesting to note that of your limited access cities, not one has proposed a 10-year moratorium on zoning.<br /><br />In this particular case, the states and municipalities are not laboratories of democracy.<br /><br /><br />Benjamin Colehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14001038338873263877noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110014885778996459.post-84842685024082849392016-02-23T11:20:42.525-07:002016-02-23T11:20:42.525-07:00The only things longer than that URL are the footn...The only things longer than that URL are the footnotes on every page of that paper!<br /><br />It's interesting, isn't it, that at their base, concerns about manufactured homes or predatory lenders are based in pragmatic reality, yet there is something unavoidably elitist about them, too. Debt is, after all, aspirational above all else, and being "protected" from it means being held back from that.<br /><br />I was thinking about some of this while driving through an aesthetically unpleasant part of town today. There is a sort of uncanny valley effect with class. The infrastructure in very poor places seems quaint and noble because it is distant enough from us, culturally, to move from Robin Hanson's near mode to far mode, where we view it more idealistically. But, the infrastructure in poor areas more near to us suffer aesthetically because they are near enough to us to share some of our aspirations, but not so near that they have succeeded. So, even though those neighborhoods are much better off than the extremely poor communities of, say, a developing country, they seem tacky to us.<br /><br />Peasants are like Pixar characters to us while less-well-off residents in our cities are like the characters in Polar Express. And, this effect causes people who see themselves as empathetic to block things like affordable manufactured homes or access to credit that reflects the risk profile of a life not quite as comfortable as their own, because of aesthetics.Kevin Erdmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07431566729667544886noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110014885778996459.post-44938956512673078112016-02-23T07:10:32.791-07:002016-02-23T07:10:32.791-07:00http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c...http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1255&context=law_urbanlaw&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.th%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den-TH%26source%3Dhp%26biw%3D%26bih%3D%26q%3Dzoning%2Bagainst%2Bmanufactured%2Bhousing%26gbv%3D2%26oq%3Dzoning%2Bagainst%2Bmanufactured%2Bhousing%26gs_l%3Dheirloom-hp.3...1351670.1364366.0.1364877.37.17.1.17.0.0.904.2691.0j2j5j1j6-1.9.0....0...1ac.1.34.heirloom-hp..28.9.2452.JUqU20Fz2Do#search=%22zoning%20against%20manufactured%20housing%22<br /><br />Pardon the gibberish, but it a link to a paper on manufactured housing Benjamin Colehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14001038338873263877noreply@blogger.com