This recent article by Inga Saffron in the Philadelphia Inquirer is behind a paywall and so I, admittedly, haven't read it. But it seems to cover a common urban dilemma: Center City Philadelphia has too many surface parking lots while simultaneously having a need for more housing. The problem, as the argument goes, is that the city's tax system is under-assessing vacant land, creating an incentive to sit on it, and a disincentive to develop new housing. The solution: tax land more; tax improvements less.
(Forgive me if this isn't entirely accurate with Saffron's position.)
It's a classic "stick versus carrot" approach. Let's beat landowners and developers into building more housing. Now, in some situations, I can see the allure of this line of thinking. If we're talking about someone who has owned a surface parking lot for many decades and it's generating a nice stream of cash, there might be little incentive to develop it or sell the land to someone who will develop it. But as a general rule, I believe that carrots are far more productive than sticks.
I have at least two concerns with trying to tax landowners into compliance. One, you have to be careful not to create a double-edged sword. Taxing based on the "highest and best use" can work to suppress some of the small businesses that make cities great. For example, should a site with a local bookstore in a small heritage building, or a mom-and-pop restaurant in a single-storey building, be forced into higher-density housing? I don't think so.
Two, blaming low taxes for the lack of housing can distract from the more fundamental question: Why aren't more developers building housing if there's a need and an availability of land? When I lived in Philadelphia during grad school, I remember developers telling me the following: "The thing about Philly is that the build-costs are the same as New York (Philly is a strong labour union city), but the rents you can command are obviously nowhere near the same." Sticks don't work if the math doesn't math!
I don't know how the market has evolved since the late 2000s, but I do know that developers want to develop. And they will do so if the economics make sense and the right carrots exist.
As many of you know, I am learning French, again.
One of the small things that I found really interesting in this week's class -- besides, of course, figuring out how the hell to use le subjonctif -- was the expression "en province." In France, this effectively refers to any place in the country that isn't Paris -- the capital city/region. And it turns out that many other countries employ a similar kind of vocabulary.
According to Wikipedia, people in Peru say "en provincias", people in Mexico say "la provincia", people in Poland say "prowincjonalny", and people in Bulgaria say "в провинцията", whatever that means. What is fascinating to me about this is that it implies a very capital and urban-centric mentality. You're either in the capital city or you're, well, in the provinces.
It's also not something that is used in either Canada or the US. In Toronto, you'll hear people say that someone is "up north" and, in Philly, you'll hear people say "down the shore" to indicate that they're headed in the general vicinity of the east coast. But as far as I'm aware, there isn't a specific term that is used to describe any and all lands that exist outside of our capital cities.
Maybe it's because Ottawa isn't our biggest city and so it would be silly to designate everything outside of it as being some sort of provincial non-capital territory. But I wonder if part of it is because we don't have the same urban-centric mentality. Could it be that we just don't value and think about our principal cities in the same way?
Yesterday I watched this three-part series on the accents of English-speaking North America:
The videos are by dialect coach Erik Singer and, I must say, his ability to fluidly move through all of North America's accents is incredibly impressive. As I was watching the videos, I kept thinking to myself, "I don't know what this guy actually sounds like when he's not putting on an accent."
The interesting thing about accents is that they really speak to settlement and migration patterns. In other words, who came in contact with who, and who didn't come in contact with others? Geographic isolation also leads to unique accents.
The other ingredient is time. The reason the UK, for example, has so any regional accents is that it had the time for them to develop. On the other hand, if you look to most of the southwestern United States, there is broadly a kind of generic American accent (with the exception of some California and Utah nuances according to Erik). This is because these settlements are relatively young compared to say the northeastern US.
For Canada, the defining feature is "Canadian raising". It is what leads to the stereotype of us saying things like "aboot" and "hoose". It doesn't sound exactly like this, but there is a way in which we tend to pronounce diphthongs (two adjacent vowel sounds) with open-vowel starting points.
Open-vowels are sounds where our tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of our mouth. If you try saying "about" to yourself out loud right now you'll notice that this is what happens. Your tongue drops. And it is these instances that lead to "Canadian raising".
The other thing that I find fascinating is how quickly language convergence can happen. I lived in Philadelphia for 3 years (for grad school) and when I would come home my parents used to tell me that I sounded fully American. I guess subconsciously we feel a need to assimilate.
If you're also fascinated by accents, I highly recommend you check out Erik's videos.