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Excellent points. His comment about generators also puts the burden on individual people to remedy their own energy-supply / cost crises, instead of addressing the structural causes of those crises. Rhode Island, Texas, and the U.S. as a whole could have already done more and should be doing more now to diversify their energy sources, by generating more within each state from renewable sources that are much less vulnerable to supply disruptions / cost rises. Instead, people are forced to rely on fossil fuels from external sources and are expected to buy generators to keep their lights on and food from spoiling when those volatile energy supplies are disrupted and costs soar ...

>Ooops, you forgot to answer the question I asked! That would look an awful lot like deflection to someone reading your comment.
>
>So let's try again...what do you think would happen if a million new apartments opened up in San Francisco tomorrow?

There'd be an apartment for every man, woman, child, and many pets in San Francisco, given the size of its population. Whether they could afford them is not clear, since adding additional apartments in San Francisco has so far not lowered rents. I've stated that dozens of times, but if you keep asking, maybe the answer will change ...

> I already did what you're requesting.

No, you haven't — you've cited research papers on how zoning regulations affect the number of housing units that get built in certain. What you cannot possibly do is actually state the name of a city where the construction of high-price housing has reduced the cost of lower-price housing.

You can't do it, because there are none. As soon as you cite an actual city, we can discuss what the effects of luxury housing have been there. But since you're certain that your theories on high-price housing are valid, why is it so hard to find even one concrete example ...?

I've offered you examples of cities that actually built a lot of luxury housing, and yet other housing there didn't get cheaper — that's my refutation of your high school textbook theory. What you haven't done is the opposite: Give examples where your theory actually worked as claimed.

The problem isn't in asking specific questions, it's in asking vague deflective questions like, "What's your solution?" or in responding to someone's critique entirely with questions, or with theories of what should happen, while conveniently ignoring what actually has happened and can be substantiated.

If you need further examples of cities that haven't "luxuried" their way out of an affordable housing crisis, I've got plenty of them — including in Providence itself. What you don't have is examples to the contrary.

>”Classic supply and demand”

You mean, classic THEORY — i.e., “Here’s a story we can make up whereby something might happen, under specific abstract conditions that don’t exist, and / or that deliberately ignores the historical record of has actually happened in the real world, rather than a theoretical one”

Your refuge from any challenge is to cite theory. If you’re so certain that those theories are true, point to the actual U.S. cities that you know they have been proven. If building expensive housing lowers all housing prices, you should be able to point to multiple examples of that immutable effect, yet you never do.

The study you cited was self-contradictory, but you shouldn’t need an academic study to prove your claim — it should be empirical and obvious, not hidden or obscure. Housing should be ever-more affordable, belying the thousands of media stories and Reddit posts chronicling soaring housing costs and an absence of affordability …

>Here you go, let me know if you have any questions: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/affordable-housing-debate/

That article offers conflicting “yes” and “no” answers …

The ultimate test or verification of whether building expensive housing makes all housing cheaper is whether places that did the former experienced the latter.

Having lived in multiple cities that did the former — and read about rising housing prices in other ones that did so as well — I have yet to see the latter.

Can you point to a city where predominantly expensive housing was built but housing at all price points got cheaper?

Even expensive housing doesn’t get significantly cheaper when more of it gets built — it only really goes down when there’s a complete market collapse, like the 2008 financial crisis, and even then it doesn’t drop enough to make it affordable, but just to correct the last inflationary increments of the speculative bubble that led to the collapse itself.

If high-priced housing itself doesn’t get that much cheaper due to more high-priced housing being built, how would lower-priced housing get significantly cheaper from more high-priced housing (but no more low-priced housing) being built?

The claims about housing “migration chains” don’t make empirical sense, because the housing that people are supposedly migrating up to is still more expensive than the housing they’re in.

Wealthy people moving into even more expensive housing doesn’t suddenly make their old housing more affordable to people who couldn’t afford it before, because prices don’t actually go down significantly, if at all.

They built a lot of expensive housing in San Francisco in the last 20 years, and lower-priced housing didn’t get cheaper, it went up (until the pandemic).

Even now housing is still too expensive for most people to move there, and consumes too much of the incomes of people who already do — it’s still not affordable, and building more expensive housing won’t change that.

>Solar payback takes too long as it is

Says who? It depends on what you pay for the installation — including any tax breaks or subsidies — and what your energy rates are, and are projected to be in the future.

We don’t know the first number, but we know that both gas and electric prices are high right now, not likely to go down any time soon (if ever), and everything OP doesn’t have to pay RIE for monthly power is money off the cost of his solar installation.

Maybe he can tell us what his payback period is, and which way his roof is oriented. My guess is it’s about 7–8 years. And don’t forget that he can recoup most if not all the money he spent on the installation when he sells his house as solar-powered …

>now 1/3 of the year has little return

Again, what’s “little return”? It may not be the same as during the summer, but it’s still significant, and could be an even larger percentage of his total need if he can lower their household consumption a bit.

>Who can know they will be in the same home for 10+ years?

A lot of people, but even those who don’t know can usually derive a fair return from solar over the short (2–3 years) or medium (3–5 years) term, on aggregate …

So you expect people who can’t afford to pay a monthly utility bill to be able to pony up $1,000 for a generator (not counting the gas to run it)? That seems an unlikely “solution” …

What does a worthwhile generator cost?

That sounds pretty big for a residential system. How many square feet is your house? Isn’t the average residential solar installation about half that size …?

>people won’t be able to afford this long term. They will start leaving the state by the handfuls.

There’s always Texas — they have no power problems down there. Oh, wait …

Wrong message received …

Please point to all of the comments (or even one) in which people said, "let's prevent housing developers from building any housing at all" — we’ll wait.

>How much money does a developer have to spend to have to build new places in RI renting for $500-1200? Figure that out and then ask "well if it costs that much why would they do it?”

You mean you don’t actually know, but you’re sure it’s too much to do. Why haven’t you figured it out? It would make your argument more compelling if it were actually substantiated, instead of just being whatever Tucker Carlson says.

>this guy is ready to spend money to build a building. There are no/few others that are willing.

We don’t need the building he wants to build for his own personal profit — does that part matter at all?

What if he wanted to build a 300-story building, do we have to allow that because he’s “ready to spend money”?

How much did the replacement plate cover you put on later that day cost …?

>” having lived in Boston and watched all the towers go up and housing costs continue to rise, it’s simply not factual.”

You’re not allowed to cite empirical evidence — such as actual Boston / San Francisco / Seattle / Austin / etc housing prices amidst the luxury apartment booms in those cities — when discussing housing on this sub, because doing so interferes with an absolute requirement that the high-school level economic analysis be based entirely on orthodox economic theory, rather than real-world outcomes that don’t substantiate that dogma.

None of these clowns ever references the actual outcomes of their theories in major U.S. cities, just a bunch of textbook boilerplate about what should happen, based on a faith-based belief system that is routinely disproven by actual housing prices in actual places. The Catholic Church has nothing on the canon of orthodox economics …

When pressed, their answer to why the things that they say must inevitably happen (but never actually do) due to more expensive condos being built is, “Well, prices would have been even higher otherwise” — but they never explain why prices didn’t actually decrease, as they haughtily claimed must happen as more high-end apartments are constructed.

This myopic insistence on deliberately ignoring actual housing prices while expounding on the theoretical results of building more luxury condos — as if it hadn’t already been disproven in the decade leading up to the global financial crisis, and again more recently prior to the pandemic — is so cartoonish that it would be funny if it weren’t denialism of Trumpian proportions …

TLDon’tR: “When rich people move into even more expensive apartments than they live in now, people who couldn’t afford their old apartments somehow immediately become richer and are magically able to replace those rich people in their old apartments”

Otherwise known as “high-school economics theory masquerading as actual analysis, while ignoring cities in which lots of luxury housing was built but where housing never got any cheaper” …

>”I'm getting tired of driving to Massachusetts to make a decent wage”

So move there …

Now apply that logic to crime or pollution …

That might be OK with your sleeping neighbors out in Burrillville, but not in the city. And when you grow up and are deaf, you might re-think the whole “loud is cool” thing …

>“to prevent reflections entering the vehicle”

Um, like thoughts about past events …?

Do you really need or expect privacy in a car while driving from one place to another?

>”Front tinted windows block the sun.”

And sides and back? Please. The desire for tinting precedes any factual necessity, just like insecure men whose loud motorcycles make them feel less pathetic claiming, “It’s for safety!” (It’s not.)

It’s also notable that far sunnier places in the world than RI don’t seem to have embraced the supposed “necessity” of window tinting. It’s mostly done by young men who are otherwise utterly unconcerned with the need to “block the sun” …

You're entitled to your view of entitlement, and I'm entitled to mine ...

If you mean the libertarian sense of entitlement — that people can do whatever they want, and nobody else should say anything about it, then yes — and the comments on this sub regularly express / defend that perspective. It’s particularly intense in Providence, but hardly limited to the city …