Some background: DC has one of the most prolific automated traffic camera systems in the world and violations bring in $250M+ annually. The only US city with higher ticket revenue is NYC at $300M+, but the NYC metro has more than 3x the population and traffic of DC.
This is actually how you start a city though, you build a suburb and wait for it to grow into a city. This takes a really really long time so it's better to build near existing cities.
We don't observe this phenomenon occurring often in the modern day only because cities sprawl rapidly and so the evolution of the suburb becomes a borough of the existing city rather than a brand new city. Otherwise Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, etc. would all be considered new cities instead of being referred to as the NYC metro.
Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford
The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons.
"Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate
I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically used.
You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends <= 30% of gross income on housing related costs. This is the definition used by the HUD and the same definition applied in policymaking.
What >you< are referring to and what it is conflated with by progressive policymakers is "low income housing" which imposes an AMI based restriction on the resident's income. This in turn means that 30% of their income is much lower and restricts the sticker price of the home.
In recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'
There is no "progressive" definition, income level is not at all part of the definition. Per the universal legal definition of 'affordable housing,' if a home costs $1B but is occupied by Elon Musk, it would still be affordable because it is less than 30% of his gross income.
When you are dealing with income levels it is universally called 'low income housing,' and the HUD definition is already scaled to local income levels, the 'A' in AMI stands for 'Area.'
You are conflating marketing ('we need more affordable housing!') with policy ('low income housing')
It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.
Its also helpful to know that there is a specific (US) program called "affordable housing" that subsidizes rents for low income people. The economic effect of that program is to increase rents (but not home prices). This especially hits the working poor who make just a bit too much to have subsidized rents.
This is not a program, it is a term used by the HUD and very explicitly does not relate to income levels. That is the point I keep making, when the modern (<5y) left keeps touting “affordable housing” they are misusing the term simply because they don’t want to say “low income housing” even though everybody acknowledges they are actually referring to “low income housing.”
It is very important to distinguish the two because “affordable housing” is a marketing term that could reasonably convince someone that the policy is meant to help 80% of people including themselves, when in actuality it is low income housing which is restricted to <20% of the area population and even fewer voters.
It's not necessarily prices falling here but the profitability of [demand] at [price]. Like if prices fall 10% but demand rises 20%, you would want to build more housing.
This is the beauty of the free market because it guarantees three things:
[1] Real estate is generally a good investment and will hold value or appreciate in the long term, because supply will adjust to demand shocks to rescue values
[2] If people want to live somewhere, houses will be built for them to live there
[3] Real estate developers and construction are solid, safe businesses with great unit economics because building may decrease prices, but may still increase demand
It's when you constrain and restrict a market that players have to adjust and then you get crazy scenarios
If you live in a magical fairy world where supply and demand are fixed, sure. In the real world, prices going down 10% leads to a surge in demand, and so you can fill more of your units. This leads to either equal or increased revenue, for the same construction (flat cost), which actually yields higher margins. This is why developers are usually concerned with occupancy rates, and prices are more a concern for homeowners.
There are only really 3 scenarios where prices are low and demand is low:
[1] There is a dramatic surplus of supply, in which case if a developer is trying to build they've not done research and probably should not get financing
[2] There is some other factor (usually high crime) in which case again, developer should do their research, and the market is operating fine
[3] You are developing super early and operating within incentives offered by the city, usually tax abatements, which drive down the carrying cost and make it a better investment.
Also important to note that in scenario [3] a smart developer will slowly release inventory to restrict supply to meet demand, and as demand grows, release more inventory at the newly raised price, continuing to do so as long as the tax abatements advantage the strategy. This is common in successfully developed areas e.g. Jersey City, and is fine as long as broad scale collusion doesn't occur
> Grocery stores have very small margins, as little as 1%.
Looking at the Kroger 2024 Annual report shows that they have 22.3% gross margin . they pay dividends, had a stock buy back, etc so its entirely possible that they had a very low margin but gross margin seems to be similar to a home builder.
The net margin of around 1.5% seems more relevant: the gross margin is just the revenue minus the cost of good sold plus cost of transportation. The net margin is the money you have left after paying things like Rent, employee wages, electricity, taxes, interest on debt.
Grocery stores don't require millions to billions of dollars of capital to execute each new transaction.
So it's not the margin itself but actually the spread between the margin and what investors could get by investing in alternatives. Real estate investment opportunities are often measured by their advantage (measured in fractions of a percentage, .2% advantage being considered solid) over 10 Year Treasuries or S&P 500 returns.
Real estate developers do often actually lose money, but the more salient boundary condition is whether they can get financing for a project, where they have to clear a bar well above the "just make >$0" bar.
> Grocery stores don't require millions to billions of dollars of capital to execute each new transaction.
Neither do homebuilders, because homes don't cost millions to billions to build (high end custom homes can cost millions, but that's not what we're talking about here).
> So it's not the margin itself but actually the spread between the margin and what investors could get by investing in alternatives. Real estate investment opportunities are often measured by their advantage (measured in fractions of a percentage, .2% advantage being considered solid) over 10 Year Treasuries or S&P 500 returns.
Okay? So they have an advantage over alternatives, which means higher profits. And a .2% advantage is not considered solid, or meaningful in any way without a lot of missing context.
> Real estate developers do often actually lose money, but the more salient boundary condition is whether they can get financing for a project, where they have to clear a bar well above the "just make >$0" bar.
Many companies often lose money, due to incompetence or bad luck. The industry as a whole has very healthy margins.
Even a small (~10 home) development, of which we need hundreds of thousands, will require millions in financing. And as the development gets smaller and requires less financing, the economics get a bit worse due to ~fixed cost of land acquisition, development, and infrastructure/utilities.
> Many companies often lose money, due to incompetence or bad luck
One of those signs of incompetence or bad luck is building a bunch of new supply into a market with falling prices, in which case you will find yourself not among those with healthy margins ;)
> [1] Real estate is generally a good investment and will hold value or appreciate in the long term, because supply will adjust to demand shocks to rescue values
Real estate is NOT supposed to be a good "investment" and only became so because the government started propping it up with bank bankstops, zoning, NIMBY, redlining, etc. If your pricing is working correctly, real-estate should be close to zero-sum.
Austin, in particular, had several nasty bust cycles where real estate prices tanked after overbuilding which is precisely what kept the cost of living under control. Alas, that is a thing of the past after 2008 when everybody realized that the federal government will backstop the banks "Real estate number must always go up! Brrrrr!"
For nearly every homebuyer, a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth. It needs to be a good long term investment that at least reasonably paces with inflation, otherwise you are losing money by buying a home and everyone has to rent and then you have feudalism with extra steps.
The good news is this is totally fine with keeping cost of living under control and overbuilding, because prices will go back up over time. Most people aren't going to own their home until the 30 year mark so it really is a much, much longer term investment than anything like overbuilding or other factors can reasonably affect.
The problem is really that people started seeing 2x-10x returns on homes and started treating that like the norm. That is not a 'good investment' that is a 'money printer,' and in most cases the government does not want to safeguard that behavior, but it's hard not to when those same people panic like crazy if their home only goes up 2% in value in a year or, god forbid, decreases in value for a year.
There is really no good solution to that mentality, if there really was one then Wall Street would have uncovered it ages ago to get more people into long term ETFs.
> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
That's bad and a central part of the problem.
I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.
The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.
> > a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
> That's bad and a central part of the problem.
Why? Or to ask in a different way, how could it not be?
For nearly all regular working people, there is nothing they will ever buy that costs more in labor and materials than a home. So of course it will be the most expensive purchase most people ever make. How could it not be?
No, it needs to be roughly zero sum but only over very long timescales. Anything else is a disaster.
If housing is a "good investment", it attracts rampant speculation and concentration of ownership to the capital class. You need regular wipeouts to force the speculators out of the market (doubly so if they are buying on leverage).
If housing is a "bad investment", people abandon the real estate and you get blight which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle downward.
Things need to be kept balanced in housing so that people can use it to be a place to live. We are currently in the middle of seeing the dysfunction that happens when being "shelter" is overshadowed by being an "investment".
It seems to me that the market will select for urban sprawl though which is a negative for society but has the highest margin. E.g. Houston suburbs, miles and miles of cheap to fab single family homes that turn it into a suburban hell scape where you have to drive everywhere.
I don't think the free market is giving the promises you say it is - supply isn't elastic for real estate if nobody's building because there's no margins. Demand can be anywhere really.
I like to look to Tokyo for an example. Small lots, extremely predictable regulations (that are still strict enough to ensure a safe living situation), fast approvals, mean it's much faster and easier to throw up an 8-10 story apartment than say downtown Austin, and so even today they keep doing it despite land in Tokyo being very expensive. And, no sprawl.
They can throw up 8-10 story apartments in Tokyo despite land being very expensive because they tear them down and rebuild them after 20-30 years. Also, Tokyo outside of a few areas isn't that tall, it is definitely dense, but 3-4 story tall building dense (those homes are also torn down and built anew ever 20-30 years, so construction buzzes in Tokyo).
It would be better if you considered new actual living capacity in Tokyo rather than just new constructions.
I believe the market in the US selects for urban sprawl because it's usually subsidized by the dense urban core. Suburban areas often don't generate enough tax revenue to support their own infrastructure and services.
I've lived in Tokyo and Houston. Tokyo is infinitely more livable and the housing is still relatively affordable. In Houston even if you can get a new place it'll be clapboard garbage that's a one and a half hour drive from work.
Average home price in Tokyo is 1.5x that of Houston. Average wage in Houston is 1.5x that of Tokyo. So the data doesn't support your post unless you really really love sushi and arcades.
Think it's very important to criticize FedRAMP. The FedRAMP board is extremely slow moving and continuously disregards industry feedback. As a result, FedRAMP is essentially a Palantir tax, where nearly every startup hoping to sell to government (including larger ones like Anthropic, xAI, Cognition AND OpenAI) is forced to pay Palantir to deploy in their FedRAMP enclave. This has a sticker price of 200-500k/y before we get into compute premiums.
Going through FedRAMP yourself requires a staff who is willing to put in a dedicated effort on the compliance paperwork (not the controls, which you could knock out in ~1mo easily, just the paperwork) for 6-8mo before getting into a line to hopefully get a 3PAO audit and then remediations followed by another audit which is followed by needing to get agency sponsorship for a FedRAMP board review. This costs $2-3M minimum including the amount of security software needed for evidencing and policy, which rules out nearly every small business. This process also can easily take 2-3 years of waiting, which forces out enterprise. So anyone entering the ecosystem is essentially forced to pay Palantir (or 2F which is a distant 2nd) a tax that is entirely enforced by government regulation.
They are not any kind of 'Federal Cyber Experts' either as that work is primarily outsourced to Schellman etc.
> FedRAMP is essentially a Palantir tax, where nearly every startup hoping to sell to government (including larger ones like Anthropic, xAI, Cognition AND OpenAI) is forced to pay Palantir to deploy in their FedRAMP enclave
Having been through FedRAMP twice, I can this is absolute fiction. What does Palantir have to do with anything?
Palantir FedStart is a new program, and a quick look at the FedRAMP marketplace will show you there are literally 0 tech startups listed that are there without jumping on Palantir’s ATO. I find it difficult to believe you have been through FedRAMP twice but would declare something as ‘absolute fiction’ when it can be easily proven
I am, CMMC 2.0 requires and is essentially satisfied by FedRAMP Moderate, and NIST 800-171 is a subset of FedRAMP. Notably both CMMC and FedRAMP were met with immense criticism from industry which was mostly ignored.
It would be better to compare this to commercial, like SOC 2, which is achievable even for small startups without much effort and on much more affordable budgets.
Notably SOC 2 full service is $20k including tooling (Vanta + Workstreet + audits), NIST is $20-30k (Vanta + partners), while FedRAMP is $500k-1M (Coalfire) just for implementation before getting into tooling and audits.
I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.
My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?
The MBAs work in the interests of the C-suite. It's their stat-padding that's made Daniel Ek a billionnaire despite running losses for 99% of the time he's led the company.
The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.
For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.
With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.
Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."
I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.
The Spotify hate is so forced. Everyone's complaints boil down to "the UX doesn't work exactly like I want". I find these changes mildly annoying like anyone else, but Spotify is miles ahead of everyone else in terms of discovery and it's not even close. It's not perfect but no service is.
It's really not. The UX changes are like coming home every day and finding your cupboards have been totally rearranged, the fridge is now outside, and the dishwasher is in the bedroom. The next day, the dishwasher is in the garden, and your cups are in the bin.
I left years ago when their "discoverability" started forcing random Nordic music into my Spotify Weekly. Support basically told me to accept it or go away, so I did, and never looked back.
This appears to only work for songs, this action does not work for podcasts or playlists. Wow! What bad engineering culture, likely only caring about what's in the ticket and not the feature overall. I guess this is what happens to a product after spending a decade only hiring people who can do leetcode.
I mean Spotify sucks but Electron is a desktop framework, not what their iPhone app is built with, and you can queue by swiping right on their official app.
Wow, this only works for songs (and it's left) but not podcast episodes (my main use case). I had no idea you could do this! If I have to blame someone, I blame snapchat for making "unknown UX controls as something for users to discover" as the main pusher of the UI trend.
Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.
Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.
I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players), anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune until the desktop software was unable to connect to it, loved that device.
I click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue.
Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?
Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?
I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.
Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.
The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.
I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level)
I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.
It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.
So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)
Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.
What has Spotify done towards innovation for the end users? They definitely innovated by rat fucking musicians to earn more money, but that seems like a trait that hurts society and not uplifts it.
Some years ago I, an American citizen and resident, studied abroad briefly and was asked by the House of Lords to speak to them about what GDPR (a UK law!) was, how it worked, and the impact it could have.
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
Did they _need_ you or were they seeking the perspective of someone they considered well informed or valued for some other reason? What's the context here?
They wanted someone knowledgeable about GDPR to explain it to them as they didn't understand it. I was a freshman in undergrad who had no knowledge of it other than some stuff I saw on LinkedIn, just had a bunch of LinkedIn connections I guess, so I turned it down.
You don’t think it’s a strength that they have the courage to seek views from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, including from outside the UK?
I, a developer, have never heard of Proton. Googling Proton, I only find Protonmail, and googling "Linux Proton," Valve's Proton is not even the first result. If you are not terminally online keeping up with Linux distro discourse, it's also difficult to even recognize any of the newer names and players.
Linux is not even remotely considerable as an option for the average consumer, which is fine and fully intentional with the audience and goals Linux distros serve.
You could even consider this a strong positive, because a Linux distro geared towards average consumers would probably be an analog to Samsung's take on Android. What makes your experience with Linux good is that it isn't catering towards a wider audience.
Personally, I've actually had noticeably better compatibility on Linux with older games, compared to Windows. And every single one I've been interested in for the past several years works flawlessly on it. (I don't enjoy most AAA games, so my sample is definitely skewed, but it's a fairly common result)
All games I've installed on Steam Deck, with our without official compatibility, have worked well. Steam Deck runs a Linux. It all works thanks to Proton. And I'd go as far as saying, it just works.
This is explicitly not what they have done, not how government contractors ever interpret this designation, nor something they could do even if they wanted to do.
It is also common corporate doctrine to use a subsidiary for government contracting to avoid having to evidence that a commercial vendor is utilized for government, so this won't even be 'annoying' for contractors.
ITAR and compliance frameworks (e.g. FedRAMP and CMMC) already mandate this for any non-US company, yet AWS commercial still has offerings in other countries and from non-US vendors, Palantir still has an IG business, etc.
Whoever fulfilled this contract gets a stop work order for gross incompetence and the CORs/COs should be terminated immediately
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