When there is a shortage, everything for sale is “luxury”. When chickens died from bird flu, eggs became a luxury good. Things get cheaper when you make more of them. Thing get more expensive when production is blocked, whether it’s by a bird flu or angry NIMBY’s.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-are-developers-only-building-luxury-housing?format=amp

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-are-developers-only-building-luxury-housing?format=amp

I had some classes at RINSC years ago, research reactors used to be super common and a lot of universities used to have them, the facility had tons of scientific equipment from other reactors that shut down. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if brown had one too, a particle accelerator would make more sense as the regulatory approval for those is a lot easier. RI’s nuclear science community is super tiny and full of nerds so I’m sure if you contacted them they’d know more about it.

Highly recommend finding a tour of the place sometime if possible, you can see the tiny reactor glow blue, and the building was made on a WWII gun emplacement so the foundation in the basement is really weird

Love it, what I’ve come to realize is local politics is a lot easier to sway than state or federal politics. Most people don’t realize the power of a single letter or speech at a community meeting. It may be a shitty undemocratic system, but it’s surprisingly easy to change things

Wide multi-lane roads like North Main Street are extremely dangerous and should not be used anywhere you expect there to be pedestrians. The UK has some of the worlds least deadly roads, both per capita and per vehicle miles traveled. Almost nowhere in the entire country (at least as far as I’ve seen) will you find multi-lane roads. Pretty much every road is either a motorway (which are only for motor vehicles) or a narrow local road/street.

Most North American multi-lane roads, especially in RI, were originally widened so there could be a car lane and a streetcar lane, but when we abandoned the streetcars the extra lanes were kept, to be used by cars. This created more traffic, and made the roads unpleasant both for walking and driving. If you expect people to cross a road, making it multiple lanes in each direction pretty much guarantees people will die on it, and traffic engineers know this. These types of roads should not exist

Source? You got any peer-reviewed, published evidence that increased supply somehow increases rents?

And yes! We need cheap housing too and we should absolutely be building that, if private developers are unwilling then the city should work with them or build it themselves.

Per the US census, Rhode Island built 1300 housing units in 2021. That’s the worst in the country by a long shot, both in absolute terms and per capita. Our population is growing, and our housing stock is not. Rents have no where to go but to the moon until we get our shit together and actually build something

Study published in a peer reviewed journal: “The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run. Market-rate supply is likely to improve affordability outside the sub-markets where new construction occurs and to benefit low-income people.” Luxury housing (called market rate in this study) increases the availability of middle and low-income housing. All supply reduces prices, even if it isn’t affordable in itself

‘“For each 100 new, centrally located market-rate units, roughly 60 units are created in the bottom half of neighborhood income distribution through vacancies,” the researchers write. Even more remarkable, 29 vacancies are created in neighborhoods in the bottom quintile of the income distribution’

From a published research paper, Source

You got a source on how new construction raises rents? Everything I can find says the opposite

That’s awesome! If rich people wanna build new houses & pay property taxes, why not? This will stop them buying up everything in poor neighborhoods and gentrifying them. Let’s take property taxes from the rich and pay teachers/firefighters/bus drivers what they deserve.

If Lamborghini produced more cars then they could sell, would that raise the price of a new Civic?

Price = Demand / Supply. In what world is that not true?

Exactly, which is why much more than this is needed. Density needs to be legalized everywhere, we can’t just build one apartment block and expect it to fix anything

Increasing the housing supply is a necessity at this point. Hell, I’d prefer commie blocks to the current hellscape of homelessness and unaffordable rents

Price = demand / supply,

It ain’t rocket science

“There’s a housing shortage and we need more” -builds more housing- “No not like that, it’s UGLY!!!1!”

The recent homelessness crisis was just discussed in this article in The Atlantic. TLDR: high rates of homelessness is caused by the high price of housing. US cities with high rates of poverty, drug use, and mental illness also have the lowest rates of homelessness, so the problem isn’t caused by those. Most homeless people are locals who have been in the area for a long time, so the idea that they moved here because we treat them better is also baseless. Legalizing more types of naturally affordable housing would mostly fix the crisis and help the rest of people struggling with high rent. An apartment block on your street might be an eyesore, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a tent city

That’s awesome, Newport has a massive housing shortage and more people are becoming homeless by the month. Anywhere to find more information on that?

I’m honestly so torn about this, the building is gorgeous and a major state symbol, but I can understand why people wouldn’t want to subsidize a developer. We’re also in a housing shortage though, and any housing / business is better than the nothing currently residing in the building