You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.
A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.
Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.
There is nobody in Chicago who would describe Oak Park and Evanston as anything other than "suburbs". You'd get laughed at if you called them "the city".
Right. I'm not at all sure why some people on here think "suburb" is only meant to refer to a very specific type of housing development, rather than a description of a location's spatial and cultural relationship to "the city".
> This emphasis on single-family homes in their data sources affects the generalizability of their conclusions about the impact of supply constraints across different types of housing markets, especially in dense urban areas where multi-family units and rentals are more prevalent.
People generally seem to struggle with the fact that it's the land, not the house that's on top of it, that's valuable in desirable metro areas, but this reality suggests something really quite lucky, which is that eliminating land-use restrictions probably won't tank single-family housing prices, even as it lowers rents.
Incumbents get richer, because looser zoning rules mean the land is more valuable. Renters and those who otherwise couldn't afford to be incumbents get cheaper rent. It's a fortuitous win-win.
yeah but one of the reasons why land value for single family homes is even higher is due to the zoning constraints which cause what I like to call "land value spillover" effects. Land value in suburbs an hour from a city center is higher than it naturally would be because zoning constraints closer to the city center cause housing demand to spread out across a larger geographic area. To give an example in the bay area, the cities of Livermore and Concord primarily exist in the form and population they do today because more homes could not be built closer to the core of the bay area, not to mention places like Antioch, Brentwood, and Tracy.
> Got any evidence for that? Is Google in the habit of paying out giant HR-related settlements for something other than protecting good ol' boys like Andy Rubin?
The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.
Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.
So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.
It's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that individual managers at Google had discriminatory promotion practices. Google picks up the legal tab for their alleged malfeasance, because they empower managers to make those decisions.
If it is so easy to squeeze some cash out of a major company, I'd imagine Google, Apple and many others in California would be cutting checks left and right to dodge lawsuits alleging violations of the state's Equal Pay Act, which saw its last major update in 2018, enacted into law in Jan 2019.[1]
Also NAL but I don't think you're correct about this.
First: the standard isn't relevant to a nuisance suit, since by definition you don't expect to win a nuisance suit anyway.
But setting that aside, disparate impact requires a significant difference in outcome and can be defended against by showing that the standards are relevant to job performance ("business necessity"). That's true for both the federal Civil Rights Act and the California Equal Pay Act (which is what this suit was brought under). So a "single variable analysis" isn't the end of the story, and employers can (and often do) provide statistical arguments that their policies satisfy business necessity.
I'd suggest looking up the case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that established the disparate impact standard in the first place. TLDR, a company that had explicitly discriminatory Jim Crow-era policies banning black employees from certain departments adopted new requirements on the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect. Those requirements hadn't been in place before, Duke Power could not show any actual connection with job performance, and white employees were two to ten times more likely to satisfy them. A unanimous court (which, as a fun trivia fact, included an open former member of the Klan!) said nope, can't do that.
What I think is hard for a lot of tech people to understand is that people don't care about privacy in the abstract. "Your data is being read and stored" isn't interesting to most people unless they know what it's being used for. And, often, to the surprise of the kind of person reading this, they are totally fine with how their data is being used. They don't care that the government is listening in for anti-terror activities. They don't care that corporations are aggregating their data to sell ads. They don't think it's a big deal.
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
The way we increase the chances that everybody reading this will behave appropriately if they're ever in this situation is by strongly condemning those who did not.
Birth rates fall when societies get richer, not when they get poorer. Additionally, rates are falling all the same in the states with the most generous welfare policies.
Birth rates fall when infant mortality falls, which tends to coincide with societies getting richer.
At the same time, countries tend to get richer when their birth rates fall, as people are spending their time working to produce economic value instead of having kids.
Compare say France, with a fertility rate of 1.82 and a GDP per capita of $43k to South Korea with a fertility rate of 0.88 and a GDP per capita of $42k.
Do not mistake correlation with causation. And do not mistake society getting richer with the individuals in a society having more access to the time and space necessary for raising a family.
Rents are "unearned" in the same way all appreciation is unearned. You spend your money on something, anybody else could also have spent that money on it, but the person who does spend the money on it enjoys the appreciation, if any, because they pay the opportunity cost.
> because land value always goes up
Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years. Their land didn't just go down in value; it went to less than zero. You'd literally have to pay somebody to take it and it's a huge burden on those municipalities.
The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
So someone who buys and empty piece of land, and holds it while everyone else around them invests money in the neighbourhood, deserves the gain they realize. That's an interesting worldview.
>Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years.
Tell them that I was speaking in general? If the value of your home can explode or crater for reasons outside your control, perhaps it would be wiser for housing to not be so expensive so that families need to have everything invested in their home.
>The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
That isn't really an argument that the fixed supply of land doesn't matter, you're just asserting that it doesn't. It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead, so what are you contributing here?
> It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead
We should just simply allow a free market in housing and housing construction. That's the obvious solution on the table and the one we should try before we bother revisiting eccentric tax schemes from the 19th Century.
> Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.
