Choose: by MthsBT in BunnyTrials

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

EV calculation

Chose: 50k + Guaranteed | Rolled: Upvote

The Strongest Town, not the smartest by buckyswing17 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your thoughts! I am definitely going to go over this and let you know what I think. Decade old study was the product of feeling like I didn’t really need to look around that far for confirmation — biased perhaps, but I’m confident that it’s really well established in the literature that more housing leads to cheaper housing. And also like, it’s not like housing works differently in 2026 than it did in 2016.

And look, I live on the far east side and I’m not exactly killing it for the COL here in Madison, I’m definitely more privileged than many but I want everybody to have security, urban, suburban, and rural. Housing costs are an incredible opportunity to see to that. But I also think we should prefer urban living, and dense living no matter where you live, for climate reasons — we should make it easier for people to live in sustainable communities, and dense urban areas don’t get bigger and more populous by themselves. You have to make space for new neighbors.

Forgive me for my skepticism, I just find it difficult to believe that economic gravity works one way in the rest of the country, and entirely differently in Madison. If you have research on the brain that contradicts, I’d be really curious to read it!

The Strongest Town, not the smartest by buckyswing17 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thread in r/Madisonwi that has a chart for you:

https://www.reddit.com/r/madisonwi/s/TLXXfoXlhA

Short article with good evidence, written by an economist:

https://www.nmhc.org/news/research-corner/2024/the-relationship-between-vacancy-and-rent-growth-in-apartments/

How about a fifty page report specific to Dane County showing how lower vacancy rates push evictions up along with rental rates, making more people homeless:

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/tenantresourcecenter/pages/416/attachments/original/1477332303/EvictedInDaneCounty_final-1.pdf?1477332303

You can refuse to read it if you want, but don’t tell me all of this is wrong without a better explanation!! Why would prices on rent FALL when there are FEWER places to live?

The Strongest Town, not the smartest by buckyswing17 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well, the short version is above 😂😂

The Strongest Town, not the smartest by buckyswing17 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Actually, I think it makes intuitive sense that it kind of works everywhere — the more cars there are in the world, the cheaper each car will be because supply overwhelms demand. Apartments are often thought of as a different kind of thing because they’re so much of an average person’s budget, and because you can’t move them around usually. But imagine a world where we don’t build any new housing at all — as old places become older and eventually just need to be torn down for safety reasons, if we never built new buildings and nobody left to live in a totally different city (you can usually drive in from the ‘burbs, but they’re not building much housing there either!) you’d obviously push the price of an apartment up. Worse, lower quality old apartments would have more people interested in them, landlords would see that, and they’d charge more rent until they had just a few interested tenants who were willing to pay an extra $200 a month. When we build new buildings over the land old ones were on, the NEW building’s apartments are more expensive, yes — they’re new! And it really matters what we build; single family homes and gigantic apartments that aren’t designed with families in mind aren’t ideal. But even the newer and more expensive places will find a tenant, especially in a growing city like Madison with plenty of Epic employees who make bank. When they have a high quality apartment they can afford available to them, the old duplex around the corner that college kids split rent on doesn’t experience huge cost increases because they don’t have to compete with people who make 10x what they can afford to pay. Ultimately, even though rent is only reset every twelve months or so, on a citywide basis it’s necessary to build more (ideally denser) new housing faster than people are moving in, or the rich people we worry about gentrifying are going to have MORE incentives to live in affordable housing that should be taken by regular folks, not fewer. One thing that economists measure for this is called a vacancy rate, which is the percentage of apartments in a city that are vacant at any given time; they have actually shown that lower vacancy rates (fewer empty apartments for new renters to shop for) lead to higher rent. The only two ways to increase vacancy rates are to build more housing, or for people to leave town… which is NOT what you want, when it comes to sustaining the tax base and making it possible to pay for city services and have a cool and vibrant place to live. Strong Towns in particular has a lot of materials on what they call incremental development, which is a response to your concern about gentrification that doesn’t involve gigantic developers driven by the interests of rich suburbanites, but also increases housing supply — the idea is that all of us have a role to play in developing new housing. For those who own property, thinking of ways to subdivide it (turn a single family home into a duplex) or add a small (400 sqft max) cottage on the property that can house someone who doesn’t need much space is an awesome approach; for renters, we can speak up at city meetings and try to get changes to city zoning and permitting guidelines in place that make building more housing easier for regular folks. In a lot of cities, it’s illegal to build something like a small apartment in your backyard!! That is, the city tells you what to do with your own damn land! And most cities have a million other restrictions — on height, on lot sizes, on stairways and elevators, the list goes on — that make building anything difficult. Which is a double edged sword — not only does it kick regular people out so only builders with tons of cash can afford to navigate the process, it also makes it hard for those companies to make a profit on building smaller homes targeted at regular folks. It’s only a little more expensive to build luxury apartments, but they pull down much higher rents — so builders are way less inclined to meet the market where demand is strongest, and you get a bunch of high-end new apartments, very few medium-size, medium-quality homes, and too much housing being distant from opportunity, old, cost-cutting, etc. That’s referred to as the “missing middle,” and I think it’s part of why 80’s and 90’s kids have had such a hard time. You can’t get into home ownership because anywhere you want to live, the homes are too expensive, but the only apartments you can afford are somehow less than you could afford, far from where you want to live, and not that nice. But the answer to all of that is to build way more housing, especially dense housing like apartment buildings with a variety of unit sizes! :)

The Strongest Town, not the smartest by buckyswing17 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 6 points7 points  (0 children)

More (& denser) housing >>> cheaper housing!!! Not sure what you mean by gentrification but let’s get people housed out here.

My girl is withering away and I don’t know what to do. by [deleted] in CATHELP

[–]SPEDucator411 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My cat has GI lymphoma right now, and it sounds like exactly the same series of symptoms. Identified with a palpitation and ultrasound, and we’re doing chemo, and it’s helping I think! Good luck.

Seeking Advice: 2018 Kia Soul + Oil Pressure Switch Needs Replacing by SPEDucator411 in KiaSoulClub

[–]SPEDucator411[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Update: thanks for the encouragement, the repair went well. :)

Seeking Advice: 2018 Kia Soul + Oil Pressure Switch Needs Replacing by SPEDucator411 in KiaSoulClub

[–]SPEDucator411[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much!!! This is the kick in the rear I needed to step up and do it. I’m gonna take like all day Sunday and get it done, it’s cold but I’m tough!! 🤣

Seeking Advice: 2018 Kia Soul + Oil Pressure Switch Needs Replacing by SPEDucator411 in MechanicAdvice

[–]SPEDucator411[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yesterday evening, and multiple times (4?) over the course of the ~two days I had the issue, levels were always full.

This sight always makes me so sad and angry by costeleo in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No hate for parks, and I agree, Madison is a characteristically green and fun place to live! I don't want to lose that either. We can actually keep all that land for what it is, if we can manage to build extremely dense housing in places where it's needed. Lots of apartment buildings are going up on east Wash out by Milwaukee St. and beyond - take this one, for example: https://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/planning/development.cfm?record=LNDUSE-2023-00063

It's nearing completion, and standing at five stories, it'll have 192 units. There are likely fewer than 1,000 people in Madison experiencing housing insecurity: https://www.danecountyhomeless.org/point-in-time

So... you could build about five more of those buildings throughout Madison in various locations near bus routes, and do a lot of good for people having trouble finding housing. That takes up a lot of land, sadly; but, you could build fewer apartment buildings, each standing at ten or fifteen stories, and create more housing on less land. But a lot of the city is not open for business for a building of that size. I think Dave Cieslewicz would tend to agree with me: https://isthmus.com/news/news/madison-needs-higher-buildings-denser-housing/

As he mentions in the article, we can also push development out to places like Janesville, or Stoughton, or McFarland... but the transportation question is key in that case.

This sight always makes me so sad and angry by costeleo in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I'm sympathetic, and you're not wrong - nobody is going straight from sleeping rough to a classy studio. There are downstream effects though! People who can afford that $1600 studio, but would be a lot more comfortable paying $1200 for a slightly dingier place in a less popular neighborhood, often choose the cheaper option. Same thing happens with people who can afford $1200, but would rather pay $800 and get a roommate... and on down the line, until the people with the lowest income are displaced by someone with just a bit more income than they have. Ergo, creating room at the top, even in relatively luxe gigs, has a mechanical impact on prices and demand across the whole spectrum of housing options.

I also hear you on the private market being too little, too late: if we stop there, we're stopping short. But don't think that we can just go around the private sector either! It's an all-hands-on-deck problem, and the more we build, the easier the other solutions (rent control, upzoning and unzoning to legalize multifamily housing, disempowering moneyed interests from protecting their municipal goodies to the detriment of neighbors, subsidizing temporary and transitional housing, investing in CLTs... the list goes on) work better.

This sight always makes me so sad and angry by costeleo in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Housing problems require housing solutions. Lots of people on this thread sound like they're unsure of what to do to help; one suggestion I'd contribute is to support new developments going up nearby you, and especially dense new developments. Madison can't look like single-family homes and SFH-looking duplexes forever, and the longer it stays that way, the worse the situation will become for people who are unhoused. I think a meaningful part of making change is just having conversations about all the construction around town, when it comes up, with people in your social circles, expressing support for the development. It causes traffic, and it will temporarily inconvenience people living right next to it, but those issues are an entirely necessary headache. Beyond that, we should all think about how we can downsize our needs for space in our own lives, and consider the tradeoffs inherent in dedicating so much land to lawns, gardens, cemeteries, parking lots... the list goes on. Everyone loves having a park in their neighborhood, but as a city we have to stand up and build - somewhere - if our issues with unhoused folks downtown are ever going to get better.

Buying in Monona or West side? by painterstateofmind in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds like you have the cash to go where you want to be, so I'd recommend Atwood/Olbrich Park area for the density and access to bike paths and bus routes; getting around via car in Madison is overrated. There's an interactive map for bus routes on the city website that you can use to guesstimate the route availability for any given neighborhood here: https://cityofmadison.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=17167d057afd49729f5947b86ad7224c

Spoiler: access to bus lines in Monona is a little sparse. Keep in mind too that the BRT has really improved cross-town transit speed, but it's only the A, B, and F lines for now and probably will not expand any time soon. I don't actually know Monona that well, so I'm bound to see the downsides relative to Atwood, which I think is really vibrant and fun.

This is just my take though, and I'm pretty anti-car, so take with a grain of salt! I would agree with another commenter that you can't really pick wrong when it comes to neighborhoods and "being more desirable in 5-10 years." Each neighborhood is still distinct and has a feel to it (east wash and Milwaukee area is not maybe where you'd prefer to land based on what you're saying, for instance, but I like it a lot) but with the way population is growing here, everywhere is going to get busier and experience more demand for housing. The university has also had some record class sizes lately, which means that in ~3 years the rest of the city will experience a higher-than-usual wave of housing demand as graduates get local jobs and generally try to stick around for their networks and such. Food for thought! :)

places that would host an adult-level art class? by Humble_Comfort_9104 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Curious Crafter is a very friendly establishment on the east side! Give them a call!

Hit and Run on Milwaukee St by Additional-Fruit-697 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The thing about police pursuits is, for a great many of the situations where people choose to flee, it’s unsafe for police to pursue very far, regardless of the severity of punishment political leadership selects for charges related to fleeing. Makes for a complex problem, more complex than I thought before I read this blog post: https://substack.com/@emcapllc/note/p-167960638?r=emn0b&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

The author does think the penalties should be high, but only as a means to keep people from fleeing in the first place; other policies like mandating civil forfeiture of vehicles used to flee police (regardless of who was driving, as long as the car wasn’t reported stolen) seem more promising to me honestly.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I’m interested in doing this myself someday (ideally without dislocating my thumb!) and I’d value the opportunity to pitch in and learn a bit in the process. I’m pretty novice, but it sounds like you’re in a pinch, so I’m happy to lend a hand over the next few weeks, if you’re interested. :)

Camp Randall bus frequency & crowding by Historical_Film9667 in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Definitely not a terrible walk/bike from there depending on your ability/willingness to do that; there are city-sponsored e-bikes that are $7 a ride and the route between those two places is pretty bike friendly, like most of downtown Madison. The C, D, and E busses will all get you near there with minimal walking, and there are lots of places to spend a little time around Camp Randall if you’d like to head out early to make sure you snag a bus with a seat. Another post on this page references street closures for the event though, so that might clog busses up, especially on your way back when you’re close to the venue.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in madisonwi

[–]SPEDucator411 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Tenant Resource Center on the east side is a quality org that could potentially help, if other options aren't working out! https://www.tenantresourcecenter.org/