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CalRobert • today at 5:07 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"


Replies

vintermann • today at 7:01 AM

It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.

I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.

There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.

Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.

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codedokode • today at 9:52 AM

Because without planning there would be only houses and no daycare. Apartment complexes are the most profitable type of building (everybody needs an apartment to live), at least in my country, and daycares and schools are other infrastructure are not profitable and not worth investing if investor had a choice. They are a burden. So they make investor have no choice and carry a burden.

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ErroneousBosh • today at 11:12 AM

But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.

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gspr • today at 5:21 AM

It's not out of the realm of possibility for a real estate development company to partner with someone who runs daycares, surely? I'm sure the company that builds the homes already partner with a lot of different companies for specialized tasks?

Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.

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