> The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting.
Yeah.. no. The difference is night and day.
Put on some Nokian Hakkapeliitta tires and prepare to be amazed. The grip on snow is spectacular.
All the years I lived in snow areas I drove a Miata of all things.. RWD, light, no ABS, no TC, 4" clearance. But with Hakkapeliitta tires I never once had any trouble, while people in their trucks and 4x4s were stuck on the side of the road due to all-season tires. A true snow tire is a whole different level.
> Northern California ... chain controls
The whole California chain thing is brain damage. The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.
A car with Hakkapeliittas (Blizzaks are good too) will outhandle a car with chains 100% of the time.
The difference between two-wheel and all-wheel drive is night and day, compared to the difference between winter and summer tires. Even then, it all goes out the door when conditions get icy and the only option is studs or chains, to get any traction.
Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state. Most politicians are from Southern California, and all the state cares about is air condition efficiency and water usage, as though everyone lives in the desert.
> The difference between two-wheel and all-wheel drive is night and day, compared to the difference between winter and summer tires.
No, this is incorrect. Just try it.
Summer tires are hopeless in freezing temperatures (and are not rated by the manufacturer to be used in such cold), as they become rock hard. As much grip as plastic kids big wheel tires.
Ultimately, what you need the most, is grip. You could have an 8-wheel drive vehicle but if the tires have no grip it will just spin in place.
In the snow by far the biggest advantage comes from true snow tires (not M+S or all season) due to how much grip they'll provide.
A 4x4 is an additional advantage, of course. A 4x4 on snow tires will do better than a 2-wheel drive with snow tires. But a 2-wheel drive on snow tires is infinitely better than a 4x4 on summer tires because if there is no grip, there's no grip.
If you are driving on pure ice then yes, chains or better yet, studs, are the way to go. That is a very rare scenario.
> Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state.
OP said "established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots".
It is reasonably likely that people who lived there chose the location because they wanted to have horses, otherwise why buy there?
When dense apartments get built next door, soon enough the city prohibits horses because the thinking goes that horses don't belong in a dense population area.
I'm not familiar with the area OP mentions, but exact same thing happened around here. Some 30 years ago most houses had horses, then a lot of smaller building came around and they prohibited horses.
Doesn't impact me personally but I'm sad for the long time residents who specifically moved here to have horses. Not fair to them. Some have moved of course, but moving isn't always easy if you have job and kids in school in town.
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.
If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)
Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.
I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
An hour to a store is probably hyperbole for most places, but I definitely have friends where it's like 5+ minutes to drive from the middle to the edge of the neighborhood of only single family houses, and then you're just on a street in nearly the middle of nowhere with no shops right outside just other neighborhoods full of houses.
The claim at the top of the thread was "essentials being a 30-45m drive away".
I clicked on each of those links and asked for directions to food shops and in every case google maps gave me a route less than 10 minutes drive.
So I remain unconvinced that suburbs with "essentials being a 30-45m drive away" are somehow a common thing. You need to go pretty far off into the boonies for that to be the case but then it is no longer a suburb.
Ah, 30-45m drive, yeah. A lot of these places will still be within 15min or so to a lot of amenities, probably 20min most to most things. There are still some that are pretty way out there, easily 20+ minutes to most real amenities. A couple I can think of close by:
But a 10 minute walk to most of those amenities is also pretty uncommon. You look up walking directions for most of those places? I'll be amazed if there's a real grocery store within a 10 minute walk.
Two trains of thought; I was reacting to the OP line of "People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away", which I maintain is a nearly impossible scenario.
(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)
The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").
But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.
A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
I agree, I totally missed your comment was related to the 30+min concept.
> But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them
I agree, you can find some housing stock like that in most housing markets. It's less rare than finding a unicorn, I agree. But they're also often not a large chunk of the overall housing market.
It sounds like all those experiences are in Southern California. That's pretty dense compared to a lot of the places I've lived, even though I wouldn't call it extremely dense. It's also a place that while still having a lot of notable NIMBY stuff going on it tends to be way more amenable to pedestrian and bike infrastructure and city design. Weather also leads to more and more people willing to be outside. You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
Look around the rest of North Texas for a good example. You can find pockets where it's decently walkable. Plano and Richardson and some parts of Dallas can be pretty bikeable. But Frisco? Little Elm? Arlington (outside the college campus)? Aledo? You can live at the edge of a large neighborhood and still have it be walkable/bikeable. But then there's still the rest of the neighborhood where it's going to take a while to walk to the edge.
Look at Kansas City, KS [0]. You'll find tons of neighborhoods like this. Not exactly walkable, like much of the metro area. Once again, sure, pick a house at the edge of this neighborhood and it's okay, but that's not the majority of the housing stock. Once again, sure, you'll find some neighborhood around that is relatively bikeable, but percentage of hosing stock it's pretty rare. Not unicorn rare, but still pretty limiting on the housing market. Can you find houses that are walkable? Sure. Is it in your budget? Does it meet your other needs? Is it close to your work? Are the schools still pretty OK?
Can you find some place walkable and bikeable in practically any decently sized metro area in the US? Sure. It's it even a quarter of the overall suburban housing stock in that metro? Probably not!
> You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)
I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.
The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.
Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.
Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
Pittsburgh (especially the actual city proper) is well above average in walkabiliy compared to the rest of the country. Also a good bit of New England, especially the older towns.
> Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
I mean yeah, that goes along with what I'm saying. If you just ignore 85+% of the housing stock in a lot of metros it's all walkable! Just limit yourself to just the most walkable places in the country and you'll only find it walkable. Look up the walk scores of the areas I'm talking about.
You even acknowledged a lot of the areas I shared earlier would be a 10 minute drive to get to a grocery store. How fast do you walk? 40+mph?
It shouldn't be so hard to find affordable homes without massive tradeoffs that are walkable/bikeable. And by find I don't mean see it on Google Maps, I mean actually afford it and have it be available when you're ready to move and not have other massive tradeoffs.
If you actually want walkable, big metro areas are overrated. Look for small towns, that's where walkability rules. The town is small, so everything is near.
Where I live now, most of the town is in a 1 mile radius. And the bulk of it is in a 0.3 mile radius. When everything is small and near, everything is walkable.
As I mentioned, in a 10 minute walk I can reach two supermarkets, one big box store, countless restaurants, several pharmacies, a few bars, stores of all kinds (hardware, clothing, etc), post office, library, theater, movie theater, soccer, tennis and basketball courts and plenty more.
I say if you live in a place where you can't walk anywhere, that's by choice. Tons of walkable places exist all over the US.
Where in suburbs are you a 10 minute walk of all that? Even living in a major metro city center it's a push to get to all that in 10 minutes. A 10 minute walk is like 1/3 mile at most. An hour drive is unlikely but 20-30 minutes is no exaggeration with traffic. 90% of suburbs in Atlanta are like this, with zero traffic it could be a 5-10 minute drive to the closest shopping center.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
The LVT focus on profit above all else is why it is an unsatisfactory solution.
If the most important goal for every plot of land is to maximize its economic activity & tax revenue, that's going to be a miserable place to live.
All of the space uses that make a town nice to live in, are also underutilizing the land if the sole goal is to maximize economic activity.
Open space with native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, sports fields of all kinds like soccer fields, community pools, hiking trails.. all of that is wasted land if viewed through the lens of LVT maximization. All that space should be crammed full of high rise offices and apartments.
LVTs focus is on maximizing land value, not profit. It just so happens that when a landowner maximizes the value a piece of their land provides, higher profits are almost guaranteed.
It's also a bit of a mistake to view LVT solely through an economic lense. Sure, we quantify it through a dollar amount or a difference in profits, but the value in LVT comes from how individuals value the land as a whole. So you are absolutely correct that a place without native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, etc. is going to be valued less than a place with those amenities by a lot of people. But only if people value greenspace and amenities more than pure economic output, which is mostly the case when it comes to residential spaces.
If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace. Instead of would (likely) be to densify housing, or convert existing buildings to mixed-use spaces.
> If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace.
This is where I believe LVT breaks down when faced with greedy reality.
In a perfect world, I totally agree with the above. That would be pretty awesome.
Could that ever happen in the real world of greedy corrupt politicians who never look further in time than the next election?
How do we assign monetary value to pleasant and beautiful things that provide quality of life? Like the parks and playgrounds and sports fields, etc etc. I'm sure there are studies, but the numbers are not as clear-cut and not as immediate as tax revenue this quarter, so they get ignored.
Each individual lot gets evaluated in isolation and the most profitable choice, individually, is to maximize revenue on that lot, so every lot ends up being a high rise concrete box, either offices or apartments. It would take a very brave politician to say let's look at the big picture long term, sacrifice some tax revenue today and build for a better quality of life because long term that will raise values more.
LVT is uncommon so a lot of it is argued in theory, but I suggest looking at a somewhat similar decision process happening in cities today, which relates to the homeless.
How are cities reacting to homeless? They fence off all the open green space and parks, rip out benches and bus stop roofs, eliminate all public bathrooms and so on. Making the area miserabe for everyone, destroying quality of life. Oh but it is difficult to measure quality of life, so they don't.
It would be much wiser for society as a whole to attend to the homeless and let us all have the open parks and benches and bathrooms, city life would be far more pleasant and long term also more profitable if cities can thrive instead of decay.
But that's not how politicians think or act, so I'm fairly sure it would be the same with LVT.
Well I can't speak to the notion of corrupt politicians, but it's worth noting that if it's in the interests of the landowners, then they'd likely fight to keep anything that they feel would keep their value high. And especially if they started developing/investing in their land to maximize the potential return of the land. Anecdotally, I've seen individual homeowners stir up enough support in my major Canadian city to stop city councils from starting somewhat major development projects, so I don't think that it'd be as inevitable as you're making it out to be.
It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax. You absolutely factor in the surrounding community and external factors when valuing a piece of land. Land in a downtown area is going to be inherently worth more than land on the periphery of a city due to the activity and potential of the land to generate economic activity.
To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity? I think most people would as well, therefore the apartment building with the park in proximity would have a higher value (which would extend to all land in proximity of the park), and thus the local government would be able to collect a higher tax dollar amount because of the park being there. Whereas maybe they could get a similar total amount by building another building, but why would a local government purposefully lower the amount of tax they'd collect on each plot of land? It's in the interest of the local government to maximize the value of the land within their jurisdiction to collect the highest amount of tax possible. Just like it's in the landowners interest to develop and invest in their land to get the highest return on their investment possible.
Re: homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing. Which LVT does. It would also encourage public spaces to be as ammenible as possible, so that the park is as appealing as possible in order to maximize the value for surrounding lots of land. At this point though we're talking second or even third order effects of LVT, which like you mentioned aren't super clear or even assured because LVT mostly remains in the theoretical. But if we have a sound theory, at this point why not try it and see what happens? Our current systems are very clearly failing us, so if we have ideas with sound reasoning, can things really get so much worse than they already are?
> It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax.
Sorry, my sentence may have been confusingly worded. I don't mean for tax computation (which certainly uses neighborhood comparables), but I mean that every lot owner will evaluate the maximum profit for their own pocket only, without any regard to greater good of the town. So every lot owner will sell to the developer who'll make a highrise building. Let "someone else" sell a lot to build a library or a tennis court! But there is no "someone else", everyone will seek to maximize personal profit which means no nice places will exist, only tightly packed concrete highrises.
> To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity?
Absolutely! But to actually sacrifice short-term tax revenue for longer-term benefit would require forward-thinking politicians. You mention being in Canada so those might exist there, but here in the US, there are none.
> homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing
I hesitated to mention homeless because my comment has nothing to do with the homeless issue per se. Only using it as a very real example where we can see that town governments are completely willing to ruin quality of life for everyone (fencing off parks, etc) just to save a few dollars short term. Even though it would be immensely better to spend a bit more upfront, to raise the quality of life for the whole town, which will bring in more prosperity and more property value and more tax later on.
> Open space with native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, sports fields of all kinds like soccer fields, community pools, hiking trails.. all of that is wasted land if viewed through the lens of LVT maximization.
No, because all of that would be open to the community. The waste is only if it was locked up for use by certain people.
That's what I did and living on the California coast is much better.
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