Every week we read more than we can write about on the blog. To avoid letting good commentary and research fall by the wayside, we’re going to publish weekly excerpts from what we’ve been reading.
From the London Review of Books, by John Lanchester: The Robots Are Coming. If you read nothing else this week, read this.
Gordon’s analysis is in line with a longstanding vein of thinking concerning ‘technological unemployment’. The term was coined by Keynes to describe ‘our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour’. It’s a form of progress which makes jobs go away through the sheer speed of its impact…..
It’s a good question. What if that’s where we are, and – to use the shorthand phrase relished by economists and futurists – ‘robots are going to eat all the jobs’? A thorough, considered and disconcerting study of that possibility was undertaken by two Oxford economists, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, in a paper from 2013 called ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’4 They came up with some new mathematical and statistical techniques to calculate the likely impact of technological change on a sweeping range of 702 occupations, from podiatrists to tour guides, animal trainers to personal finance advisers and floor sanders. It ranks them, from 1 (you’ll be fine) to 702 (best start shining up the CV). In case you’re wondering, here are the top five occupations:
……
Robin Harding, “Tokyo’s children could find their voice if noise ban is reformed“, Financial Times [paywalled]:
By law they should be seen and not heard, but Tokyo children may soon find their voices as the city rethinks rules demanding library-like hush in residential areas.
For years, Tokyo’s residential suburbs have had a strict 45-decibel noise limit — roughly the level allowed in a library — without any trouble.
But despite a rapid decline in the number of children, there has been a surge in complaints about noise from parks and kindergartens, forcing the city to consider a change in the law….
“Children’s voices should certainly be covered by noise regulations,” says one respondent. “Nearby people suffer . . . it’s a big problem. Land values fall so it’s a violation of property rights.”
“Carefree play does not mean children should be allowed to make noise without thinking,” says another. “Children should be taught to speak and sing at an appropriate volume, and age four is old enough to understand that.”
Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government wants to raise Japan’s fertility rate, which at 1.4 births per woman is among the lowest in the world.
Angie Schmitt, “Sprawl costs the public more than twice as much as compact development”, Streetsblog. Streetsblog picked up on this useful infographic from Halifax, Nova Scotia which seems consistent with other “costs of sprawl studies”.
Bernard Hickey: “The Renting Generation”, The New Zealand Herald.
The Generation Rent Party would remove the shackles on development of higher density housing in Auckland’s fringe “heritage” suburbs around the CBD, which would free up supply in areas close enough to the centre to use cheaper and less time-consuming public transport.
Removing restrictions on apartment heights, view shafts, parking requirements and balcony and backyard sizes is not as outlandish as the Nimby Boomer opponents would make out.
Filtering: A Word We Need to Understand as We Discuss Affordable Housing
http://streetsblog.net/2015/02/17/high-rises-dont-cause-traffic-parking-lots-do/
Alan Davies, “Is lack of investment in trains why the inner city is so expensive?”, The Urbanist. An interesting discussion on why the inner city property prices have risen much faster than the fringe.
One theory is that under-investment in rail connecting the suburbs to the CBD is the culprit…One reason is the journey time by rail from the suburbs to the centres of Australia’s capital cities hasn’t in general gotten significantly worse or better over the last 30 years. In fact in Melbourne, it hasn’t changed appreciably over the last 72 years or, I suspect, since suburban services were electrified (see Have trains gotten faster?).
I think there are other possible explanations that are more convincing than the historical level of investment in radial rail. One is that the ratio of dwelling supply to demand has deteriorated much faster in the inner city over the period than it has in the suburbs. That’s in large part because existing residents in established suburbs tend to object to redevelopment.
Robert Steuteville asks the seemingly oxymoronic: Are you getting the change you want from the status quo? He is writing about towns, but what he asks is even more pertinent in cities. All life is nothing but change and cities being a concentration of life accelerate that process, so even the status quo doesn’t stand still. But is it changing in the best direction? As Auckland is changing very very fast at the moment. These are urgent questions.
Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute has a wonderful TED talk that explains the vital importance of aesthetics and uniqueness to a community’s economy. “In a world where capital is footloose, if you can’t differentiate [your town] from any other, you have no competitive advantage,” he says.
Communities that leave their land-use regulations on autopilot, especially those that create undifferentiated sprawl, are losing their competitive advantage, McMahon says.
The future of cities and towns is being written by land-use regulations. If we want to intentionally author our future, we had better consider the options. The status quo is one option—and the status quo is delivering change. It may not be the change you or I want. It may not be a change that is worthy of our children.
Do you like the change you are getting from the status quo? If not, you can do something about it.
The National Party in government seem to have fully jumped the shark with their politicisation of their use of our transport funds in the lead up to the Northland Bye Election, explains Andrew Geddis on Pundit.
But there’s a point at which such politicking crosses over from the necessary and desirable into something a whole lot more troubling. It’s not an easy point to define – it may well be more one of gut-feeling than logical rationalisation. But for me it was reached by the sight of National’s candidate, Mark Osborne, fronting a government announcement that an additional $32-$69 million (or maybe more, or maybe less, because who really knows?) will be spent on building ten new bridges in the electorate he’s seeking election in. An election that is now only 19 days away.
Research featured on ScienceDaily shows that:
The number of people commuting by bike has increased by 60% over the past decade, but until now, the increase has not been closely tied to a supportive city infrastructure. Researchers evaluated how the development of the Minneapolis Greenway affected the commute of residents over a ten-year period. The research found that bike-friendly infrastructure changes were tied to increases in “active commuting” by bike-riding residents, which can promote healthy weight and reduce cardiac risk.
(via CAA)
One vastly expensive and destructive urban motorway has been sensibly killed off in Melbourne but Sydney still has its fully cray equivalent in the A$15billion WestConnex. The Sydney Morning Herald here summarises those for and against:
“You should spend money on roads, no question about that,” says a former director of the Roads and Traffic Authority, Ken Dobinson, who opposes most elements of the WestConnex project. “But spend it on the right things for the right reasons – that’s common sense to me.”
Dobinson’s opposition to WestConnex reflects a common stance of city planners that “good” motorways run around the circumference of congested areas. Bad motorways radiate into and out of them – such as the proposed new M4 East and M5 East tunnels.
“For access into Sydney’s CBD and other dense centres, road-building solutions – whether road widenings or new roads – are destined to fail, because these dense centres, by their very nature, simply do not have room for everyone’s car,” was how The Sydney Morning Herald’s transport inquiry of 2009 and 2010 framed the issue.
“Any major new road investments in Sydney, beyond maintenance, should only be in the form of circumferential rather than radial connections, enabling travel between lower density areas,” said that inquiry, chaired by former NSW roads and rail chief Ron Christie.
The pointlessness of increasing capacity on or building new urban motorways nicely summarised here on Twitter, precisely aimed at WestConnex, but also relevant to a proposed Auckland project, suggests a certain Tweeter:
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Auckland needs more apartments and attached/semi-attached houses. One of the issues that seems to crop up however is greedy developers selling these for about the same price as a lot of houses. Take the new Albany development for example, 2 bedroom apartments there only cost about $100k less than a larger 3 bedroom house on 400m2 section nearby. Sure it has good location and is brand new but it also comes with body corporate fees.
“Greedy” developers sell them at what they will get. If they price them at a level nobody wants to pay then they won’t sell. If they can’t cover their costs and make a profit then they won’t build them at all.
The good news is that if people are prepared to pay a premium for new apartments then it will encourage more of them to be built.
Except they don’t cost as much to build and they only use a fraction of the land of a standalone house so I think developers are more than “covering their costs and making a profit” they’re making a fat profit.
I think Simon’s inferred point is that if lots of them are built, the increase supply will lead to reduced margins and lower prices?
If you have accurately estimated the development costs, and are confident that you would be able to make supernormal profits (for the amount of risk) there is nothing stopping you from starting a development company. Remember there are plenty of developments in Auckland that have gone bad (for example my favourite building in the city Metropolis lost a lot of money) so there is a lot of risk. More developers will mean more competition and therefore narrowing profit margins.
There is another way to look at this. Is the obsession with continually increasing Auckland’s population healthy or wise? Do populations have to always be on the increase? Why? Surely survival of the human race and the planet dictates managed populations?
Ricardo population changes are not a function of policy in Auckland they are a function of the free movement of people and the reproductive desires of residents [minus deaths]. In other words neither rises or falls are controlled. It is also worth noting that it is very hard to get people to come to your city or for them to have more babies if they don’t want to, almost as hard as it is to stop people from dying so much. Similarly it is pretty hard to stop a successful place form growing and attracting returnees or new residents from around the country or the world. Or stop mating successfully…. Well not without all sorts of limits to freedoms that we generally don’t welcome.
Listening to the National programme this morning and someone is rambling on about how important Auckland is to the well being of the whole country and …..ZZZZZZZZ. Later on in the day I spotted this
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11417071
That is actually insane. Will you be the first to volunteer to be “managed”?
Thanks, Peter. Better than a Sunday paper.
With the suburban vs urban annual costs per household, it is based on suburban at 16 people per acre and 92 people per acre in urban areas. What’s Auckland’s population density?
Now, with the lack of investment in trains in Melbourne, I actually cannot see how train services are going to get quicker apart from increasing the spacing between train stations and building Melbourne Metro, which would only benefit a couple of train lines for $11 billion. The inner city is getting more expensive due to height restrictions in the inner suburbs such as Brunswick and Carlton due to NIMBY’s, however I believe that car-parking does not increase the price of a unit substantially, and also the fact that people don’t want to commute for ages. For example, in Brunswick, there is an eco apartment with no car-parking and that costs $410,000 for a one bedroom unit. There is a very similar apartment close to it which has bundled car-parking for $400,000.
With higher density units, I don’t think that it would make inner city living for families affordable at all. It will be slightly cheaper than a standalone house in the same area, but it defintely isn’t affordable. In Melbourne CBD, even with its lack of minimum carparking and height restrictions, units are ridiculously expensive. For example, if you want a two bedroom unit in town that has a small balcony, it would cost at least 600k for a new build. Higher density units are getting built quite quickly in the middle suburbs too due to the ‘ripple effect’, however they aren’t affordable either…
As for “Removing restrictions on apartment heights, view shafts, parking requirements and balcony and backyard sizes.” I think that AC are making the restrictions too arbitrary. A blanket ban on building units under 40m2 is ridiculous. Instead, the regulations should be more specific. For example, it could be that studios must have a minimum of 18m2, 1 bedroom units should be bigger than 40m2 with a balcony bigger than 5m2, and two bedroom units should be bigger than 60m2 with a balcony larger than 7m2 etc
As we’re a modern country, we use the metric system, so terms like “population per Acre” are (a) totally obsolete and (b) illegal for official statistics in NZ since 1974.
We like the most of rest of the world, outside of the former and wannabe empires respectively of the UK and US, use the Metric (SI) system of measurement.
We count and report population density per km2. To convert the US numbers to a meaningful base multiply the per acre number of people by 247 to get density per km2.
As of the last census (2013), from this document on Auckland Regional Public Health document on Population Health Statistics (http://www.arphs.govt.nz/Portals/0/Documents/Census%202013%20Report%20-%20Demographic%20Profile.pdf):
The following was given from the Census figures blocked into Local Board areas (see page 10), of population per km2, the usually resident population ranged from a low of 3 per km2 (Gt Barrier LB) to the highest of 3975 (Waitemata LB).
Which means the most dense local board area of Auckland is about 16 per acre “average”.
However as the local board density figure is at a very abstract level, its obvious that many parts of Auckland would have much, much higher densities at the local Mesh Block or Census Area Unit level that the census uses than at the Local board level.
This post shows the population density distribution of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch at the meshblock level. In Auckland the median is about 4,500/km2 (i.e. half of our neighbourhoods are at higher densities, half at lower).
http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2014/10/28/why-demographia-is-fundamentally-wrong/
From my understanding, Melbourne Metro will divert a couple of lines away from the City Loop bottleneck and increase the capacity of the other lines as a result. That coupled with the removal of level crossings and (in the future) a brand-new signalling system should mean it’s possible to run all lines at higher frequencies.
Sprawl costs more than twice as much as compact development is kind of like saying “Champagne costs more than twice as much as beer” or “it is cheaper to ride a bike than go on a cruise.” If compact development and suburbs were perfect substitutes cost might be the only relevant matter, but they are not even close.
Quite right; suburbia is hell. Just jokes. But there’s a truth in that is there not? For some that is indeed the case. The point of the comparison is highly relevant when discussing socialised costs, don’t you agree? Preferences are a separate issue.
Some people like the suburbs, some like the cities. Considering some people like cities and its cheaper for society to provide them with city living rather than suburbs, doesnt it make sense to support them? No one (other than people like Ricardo who want managed populations) are planning on coming in and kicking you out of your home and destroying your suburbs and forcing you to live in a city.
Right mfwic. So what we need to do is charge for municipal services on the basis of area and then let people chose. Actually that is what we used to do – it was called rating on unimproved value and as well as better reflecting the cost of providing council services, it also discouraged land banking and encouraged higher density building. Instead councils have been moving to rating on capital value because that is supposed to reflect ability to pay. Councils should be in the service provider industry not the income redistribution industry. Charging rates that reflect costs and then letting people chose would be a far better way of addressing the problem than imposing urban growth limits. Urban growth limits restrict the supply of building plots and are the primary cause of unaffordable housing.
Yes and you can choose to move from one to the other if your perceived needs change and can work out a way to afford it!
So the government thinks that it is prudent to throw up to $69 million at enlarging a number of Northland bridges. “Campbell Live” suggested that one of these bridges has a car pass over it about every twelve minutes. Does what seems like an appallingly bad investment decision bring into question the validity of the whole of National’s transport policy?
Is it appropriate to call the minister, Minister silly Bridges and roads?
5 cars per hour? That bridge should definitely be closed due to lack of patronage. Just like they closed Wellington’s Kaiwharawhara Station where the old footbridge needed a safety upgrade, and “only 14 people used it during the morning peak” (very suss data but that’s the line we were fed!).
So if Minister of Transport (Bridges) really has $millions to throw at, er . . bridges, then let’s have a new footbridge at Kaiwharawhara Station please.
A harbour crossing the can’t be closed by high winds might be quite helpful tonight, for all modes.
If we are building infrastructure to stay open in the biggest ever storm to hit the country then we are wasting a lot of money
That last tweet/diagram from Sydney should be on every billboard next to an Auckland motorway! (especially before an election).
Quite right Camryn! It wouldn’t make any economic sense whatsoever, but it would be helpful (for the very few who will need to use it during the eye of the storm).
You’re right that the bridge is only impacted by severe weather sometimes, but it is impacted by regular weather quite a lot… causing speed restrictions, crashes, etc. All of that would be fine if it wasn’t a single point of failure. One day, it will need replacing and a tunnel would be a lot more reliable. If that doesn’t stack up, at least a flatter bridge.
In a more general sense, I would probably use PT about twice as much as I do if it wasn’t for weather. I don’t like getting rained on and using PT means getting wet. Only San Francisco or New York level density provides for frequent PT on every street. Auckland will always lag on PT because it rains a lot and most of us live “severe soaking distance” or more from a useful stop.
Whoever conducted the Halifax cost comparison should do one for Auckland. I suspect the conclusion will be the polar opposite!
I suspect you’d be wrong. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some local studies done – although not to the level of each individual service – that showed the same result.
I bought a raincoat and leggings and it means my “severe soaking distance” is about 21 kms.
Yep, a swandri will keep you dry too. And you can always get one from Barkers if you don’t want to look like a farmer heading into town.
Auckland’s biggest problem when considering sprawl and density must be immigration. Whilst we might require more workers in some industries many bring a large unproductive family with them. When we immigrated to NZ in the 1950’s the preference was for earners with children who would grow into earners and therefore support themselves and families through life. Many were encouraged to settle in centres other than Auckland but today most like to stay in AK and be near the airport etc.
Perhaps industry could be encouraged to other centres rather than join the flow to Auckland.?
We can’t control births and deaths, nor should we but immigration can be managed and this would help reduce the pressure on the housing market
Well not so fast now. A lot of the migration to Auckland is from the rest of the country, then there are NZers returning from overseas, and of course people turning up from countries that we like to have unfettered access to too, like Australia….. so what’s your plan again?
Well a simple solution would be to introduce a location restriction on immigran visas like many countries have (eg Canada). These either restrict immigrants to residing in one state/province or ban them from residing in a particular state/province. In a NZ example you could make the restriction no residing within 150km of Auckland CBD. Once they become a citizen then this restriction is removed of course. Also if they have a particular skill which is why they got the visa in the first place then their wouldn’t be that restriction. But if someone is moving here just to ‘make up the numbers’ by having a bit of money to buy a house etc then this restriction could definitely help with Auckland’s growth problems and the problems of low growth elsewhere.
Except in Canada each state is significantly larger, more populous and more varied than all of NZ. They certainly don’t restrict you from living near the largest employment centres in the country.
I can picture certain NZ party’s policies 10 years after that…
Richard immigration is a red herring and any attempt to manage it is likely to result in unintended consequences. We already have enough unintended consequences from attempts by planners to influence decisions that should be left to individuals. Why do we have a problem in the first place? Because the supply of land is artificially constrained by the urban growth limit. Why have an urban growth limit? because planners think that sprawl is bad. But what contributes to sprawl? Motorways that reduce the cost of driving to work, public transport subsidies that reduce the cost of bus or train to work. I have a better idea – 1) charge rates based on land area. That would better reflect the cost of providing council services and it would also discourage land banking and encourage higher densities 2) charge people for using motorways at peak times. That would better reflect the cost of providing key facilities, would encourage more compact living and make public transport and cycling more attractive 3) get rid of land zoning and urban limits that artificially restrict the supply of land and drive up prices and 4) let new Zealanders and immigrants live where they like.