Happier New Year

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  1. Nancy

     /  January 3, 2018

    Interesting piece about the balance between encouraging people to invest in the community (which drives towns to invest in schools, transportation, recreation & other quality-of-life issues) and protecting property owners’ ability to maximize their profit.

  2. Interesting call to save NYC subway also https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/magazine/subway-new-york-city-public-transportation-wealth-inequality.html

    Interesting that the citizens built-out a network that developers profited from – and that those enriched developers will fund further improvements (or defray the original taxpayer investments).

    Sound familiar? #DOLRT

    “If the story of the subway is the story of density, it is also the story of land — and more to the point, the story of land value. Before the first tracks had even been laid, real estate speculators were gobbling up farmland and empty lots along the proposed route and then quickly flipping their parcels at huge premiums to builders. When the subway recovered from its last major crisis, it again began throwing off enormous returns for the owners of the land above it. From 1993 to 2013, the average price for a co-op or condo in TriBeCa rose from $182 per square foot to $1,569. In the process, prime real estate in Manhattan was transformed from a place where people lived and built businesses into a high-yield investment in which absentee owners parked their money and watched it grow.”

  3. I meant to say – the developers will NOT be funding additional transit from their taxpayer provided windfalls.

  4. plurimus

     /  January 5, 2018

    Chapel Hill and Manhattan Island share a kind of odd relationship in that Manhattan is physically an island with hard geographic borders. Chapel Hill is an artificially created island contained by logical borders in the form of a “rural” buffer (really a buffer of expensive subdivision sprawl interspersed with few actual farms).

    I think it’s still lost on people that the advantage Chapel Hill enjoys in this comparison is that a logical constraint could be made flexible (in certain areas) without sacrificing the “rural” character. Also with the appropriate effort the buffer could be improved upon making available advances that bring the advantages of rural living into the 21st century without mcMansions.