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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yup. That's a distressingly common belief. Granted part of it is just plain ignorance of how the world actually works. A great many people just kind of assume that there are both infinite jobs and infinite good jobs; as if anybody who can distinguish themselves enough will, because it's how the world works, automatically move up to bigger, better things. They're still living in a world where you could start out in the mail room as a high school dropout and become an executive some day if you worked hard enough. This reminds me of auto journalist/pathological narcissist Jack Baruth, who on The Truth About Cars and his own blog seems entirely aware of the new gilded age and his own slow, inexorable descent from the petit bourgeoisie to the proletariat, but he is so brainwashed and full of himself that he thinks this is an aberration from an '80s golden age where rich people were Horatio Alger types who earned their way into their luxury cars (never mind that Baruth's father was affluent and his first car was a used 7-series) and that illegal immigrants/the welfare state/Obama derailed it rather than the current being capitalism working as designed. I kind of feel bad for him in a way because he's so loving delusional he will never understand...oh what am I saying he used "Mark Cuckerberg" in earnest, gently caress this rear end in a top hat.  I bet he really regrets buying two VW Phaetons now, even though he will never admit it. I hope he gets so poor he has to sell his stupid Porsche 993 that he constantly blows himself over to pay the bills. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 03:34 on May 20, 2016 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:To give you an actual, serious response to this: https://fee.org/articles/whats-wrong-with-right-to-work/ This is incredible, thanks for posting it quote:And eliminate rules that make self-employment riskier by raising the cost of living—like building and zoning codes, and rent control and land-use controls that limit the availability of housing—and that therefore channel people into the predictable, even if less appealing, world of work for wages. What does America need to revitalize our struggling entrepreneurship rates? That's right: unsafe construction! What your landlord saves on fire escapes and sound foundation work, he'll pass on to you for you to invest in the small business that can take you out of your death trap tenement before it kills you and your entire family!
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May 20, 2016 04:15
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Zoning codes really are horseshit though. Environmental, health, and safety regulations already address major concerns like throwing up a factory in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There's really no need for dedicated zoning codes per se—cities are resilient because they can slowly change and adapt over time. I'd like to point out that in the 1700s, Manhattan was almost entirely single-family detaching housing—aka suburbia. Zoning codes would've accomplished nothing beyond calcifying that form. I'll also point out that no new urban centers have cropped up in the U.S. since the 1950s. I'm not even talking about skyscrapers here, I mean swathes of modest two-to-three-story buildings with mixed commercial and residential, which is the historical model for urban evolution before modern building materials. That ossification is largely thanks to every town in America having ferociously strict zoning codes mandating that every neighborhood stay suburbia forever. To go back to New York City again, the five boroughs (you know, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, etc) were originally separate cities that grew into each other. Ask yourself: how often has that happened in America since then? Portland, Oregon is staying urban, and the many suburban communities within a few miles of it are staying suburban, whereas historically the suburban areas would slowly densify, then as they hit the effective height limit of whatever existing technology allows buildings to reach before they get too expensive to build, the densification ripples outwards. A close network of towns like the Portland metro area should, by rights, resemble many clusters of medium-density development all slowly growing into each other, with Portland at the center slowly growing into them. Instead, what you have is URBAN AREA then s e a o f s u b u r b i a. And it's all thanks to building codes, which by their very nature say "You know what the town looks like right now? That, forever and always." gently caress zoning codes. (Sorry for the rant. Urbanism is my big hobbyhorse.)
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May 20, 2016 06:19
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I was talking about the building codes, I don't know anything about zoning
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May 20, 2016 06:37
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Literally The Worst posted:MINIMUM WAGE IS Then why are libertarians railing against it 
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May 20, 2016 10:31
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Edit: This post was horribly tortured in a misguided attempt to make a joke, so I put it out of its misery
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May 20, 2016 11:01
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Curvature of Earth posted:Zoning codes really are horseshit though. Environmental, health, and safety regulations already address major concerns like throwing up a factory in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There's really no need for dedicated zoning codes per se—cities are resilient because they can slowly change and adapt over time. Urbanism is poo poo where you pay 3000 bucks for a lovely 1br and can't have a car so every trip is a tortured mess of standing around waiting on someone to pick you up.
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May 20, 2016 11:12
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Panzeh posted:Urbanism is poo poo where you pay 3000 bucks for a lovely 1br and can't have a car so every trip is a tortured mess of standing around waiting on someone to pick you up. Ah, I remember you from your charmingly ignorant posts in the transit/urbanism thread. Old-school urbanism (not New Urbanism, which is more a distraction than anything else) is a bland description of how cities patterned themselves over thousands of years of history. For gently caress's sake, the city of Damascus has been continuously inhabited for 3,000 years. But feel free to cite a trend that only started in the 1990s as evidence for your flaming turd of an opinion. Anyways, you heard the dip: ain't no poor people in the cities. $3,000 a month penthouses as far as the eye can see. When two-bedroom apartments in Cleveland and Buffalo show up on craigslist for $700 a month, it's a clever ruse to lure in gullible suburbanites, who—true story—were literally homeless before the post-1940s suburbia boom. And the hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants who arrived in New York City in the late 19th/early 20th centuries were totally paying several thousand a month for their apartments. And like Panzeh, they were terrified of walking their corpulent mass a whole quarter-mile down the street without driving. In all seriousness, suburbia is literally not financially sustainable. To cite a specific example (or rather, another one in addition to the half-dozen in that first link), the city of Rockford, Illinois stagnated in terms of population after 1970, and in that same time period it literally doubled in physical size as the suburban explosion reshuffled its population into a low-density pattern. The city now literally cannot pay for its own water mains, and they are starting to physically fall apart. Suburbia is a destructive fantasy that spreads tax bases so thinly across the landscape that local governments literally cannot pay for the infrastructure needed to support it. But ya know, whatever. $400/mo McMansions. FREEDOM CARS.
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May 20, 2016 13:25
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Curvature of Earth posted:
Uh no. They were two cities and dozens to hundreds of small towns and villages, and a whole bunch of just plain farmland. Most of Queens wasn't developed at all until the 1910s-1930s, as part of a deliberate zoning and planning project undertaken by the city of New York which had amalgamated all of modern NYC together in 1898. Pretty much all the outward growth was New York itself (prior to merger) growing on Manhattan and Brooklyn growing on Long Island. This is a map from 1897, just before the boroughs were united as one city:  You can see how much of Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island are empty. Here's the IRT Flushing Line aka the modern day 7 subway line, being constructed in the late teens and early 20s through Queens. Notice how there's very little building yet - that whole area is densely populated today.  Queens spent quite a lot of time as some development in a few towns on the East River and up against Brooklyn, and then a few small towns like Flushing in the interior of the county. It was not a city before amalgamation.
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May 20, 2016 16:06
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fishmech posted:Uh no. They were two cities and dozens to hundreds of small towns and villages, and a whole bunch of just plain farmland. Most of Queens wasn't developed at all until the 1910s-1930s, as part of a deliberate zoning and planning project undertaken by the city of New York which had amalgamated all of modern NYC together in 1898. Pretty much all the outward growth was New York itself (prior to merger) growing on Manhattan and Brooklyn growing on Long Island.
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May 20, 2016 16:17
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Also, isn't NYC a huge pain in the dick to live in? Isn't the main purpose of zoning to say "hey don't operate a business out of this neighborhood because you're going to be inviting undue traffic and noise" Like, when I was campaigning for Sarah Saez in the poorest district in San Diego, I spoke to a resident who lives across the street from businesses about how beat-up the roads and sidewalks were and people legit trip and hurt themselves on some of these cracks (it's an accumulated risk over time if you walk around there every day), plus tire wear. It's a compromise because e.g. living close to the laundromat and barber shop is convenient if you don't own a washer/dryer, but there are health and safety issues involved, and it would be worse if the residences and commercial buildings were full-on interspersed. I'm not familiar with the environmental regulations that purportedly stop a factory or brewery opening up across the street from a school. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 16:54 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 16:46
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Stinky_Pete posted:Also, isn't NYC a huge pain in the dick to live in?
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May 20, 2016 16:49
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Like most things it serves some purpose but becomes an avenue of exploitation by interested parties and NIMBY types.
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May 20, 2016 16:54
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the trump tutelage posted:In my anecdotal experience, the main purpose of zoning is to give suburban developers as much money as possible to build a sea of cookie cutter suburban shitboxes. Oh okay, I was thinking of zoning the way I use it in Cities: Skylines
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May 20, 2016 16:56
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the trump tutelage posted:Is the substance of Curvature's point correct, though, that looser or non-existent zoning laws allowed the city to densify in a way that's impossible in most municipalities today? No. New York City took a whole bunch of pains to build in a systematic way. Starting with the 1811 Commissioners' Plan for defining a street grid for all of Manhattan above the point where development already existed govern Manhattan development to this day, including specific provisions that some streets be wider than others to form the prime cross-island corridors. The vast majority of Queens was developed on the basis of city-led planning to best use the open areas. The current basic zoning laws in NYC date back to 1961, earlier ones were in place before the amalgamation of the five boroughs in 1898. New York City experience the lion's share of its growth and dense building during the 20th century, under zoning laws. From 3.3 million or so shortly after the amalgamation to 7.8 million 50 years later - and 8.5 million today. Frankly I have no idea where the idea that no zoning laws means denser building comes from. Much of the density in current New York City comes from the fact that elevators and metallurgy made very tall buildings practical and radically raise the possible density. Perhaps some people think zoning only means the most simple variant, rather than not even modern, like dating from the 19th century, mixed zoning laws? Stinky_Pete posted:Also, isn't NYC a huge pain in the dick to live in? Uh, no? Unless you really love driving fast, in which case you'd hate it. Or if you're the kind of person who insists on living miles away from any neighbors, you'd also hate it then. fishmech fucked around with this message at 17:18 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 17:09
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Stinky_Pete posted:Oh okay, I was thinking of zoning the way I use it in Cities: Skylines You can't cut rci! You will regret this!
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May 20, 2016 17:21
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the trump tutelage posted:Is the substance of Curvature's point correct, though, that looser or non-existent zoning laws allowed the city to densify in a way that's impossible in most municipalities today? The growth of dense urban centers through 1950 followed by population transfer to decentralized suburbs is a complex historical phenomenon that can't accurately be assigned to a single obvious cause like zoning laws. He's correct that zoning is often misused in a way that causes socially problematic distortions of the housing market, but it isn't a totalizing explanation for why "no new urban centers have cropped up in the U.S. since the 1950s".
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May 20, 2016 17:36
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Literally The Worst posted:they have a quarterly mag called the Freeman for gently caress's sake I got suckered into one of their summer "economic education" camps because my grandma got me a "scholarship" from some Randian financial analyst she knew or some poo poo (I was 16 and didn't question it, I was told it was an exciting opportunity to attend a "conference" and that it would look great on my resume) and it was extraordinarily cult-like. The only game you were allowed to play was Chess (they threatened to 'expel' me after I got caught playing a Gameboy Advance I brought for the plane ride), and the bulk of your time was spent on why climate change was a lie, why Communism is eminently fallible, and why the gold standard is really what we should be returning to don'tchaknow. This all took place at an old mansion in upstate New York. We went into NYC exactly once, and it was to visit "the oldest bar in the country" (99% sure it wasn't the oldest, was home to a 'history' museum that held a conference room swaddled in a massive American flag) which we stood outside of in the sweltering heat for an hour before being let in; the other place we visited was the Federal Reserve (after listening to speeches the whole way down about how it was an evil institution) because part of the tour involved seeing all the gold bars they had in the vault, and they were all obsessed with touching the gold, touching the "real" money. They would reach their fingers through the bars and lovingly stroke the ingots with frighteningly sexual delight. Also only like 10 people could be in a tour group at once, so the rest of the time was spent in a plaza across the street (which we were under no circumstances allowed to leave) being hassled to buy t-shirts. There was a gyro truck there though, it was pretty tasty.
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May 20, 2016 20:28
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This got posted a while back on Facebook by one of my fellow high school alumni:quote:I would not want my own child to have to work to help feed the family, but I understand that it is not my place to tell a starving child that they cannot work for an income that will help them to help them and their families to survive. The poverty that children in third world countries live in is difficult for people in developed countries to understand, so just like minimum wage, how is it helping anyone if we tell them from our comfortable homes they cannot work at a decent job that is the best alternative for them, would we rather force them into more dangerous and less desirable jobs? I love how his defense basically comes down to "don't feel bad, it won't be our children suffering!" I remember several years ago talking with a friend's brother who argued that elementary school children should help pay for their education by working in hamburger assembly lines for fast food restaurants. How niche is it for libertarians to sincerely argue against child labor laws? Is it relatively fringe, is it something that most libertarians don't spend much time thinking about, or is it pretty common for libertarians to think we ought to be putting children to work?
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May 20, 2016 20:36
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I remember several years ago talking with a friend's brother who argued that elementary school children should help pay for their education by working in hamburger assembly lines for fast food restaurants.
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May 20, 2016 21:02
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I'd say most libertarians are probably against child labor laws in principle, if not in practice; they probably think child labor is a bad thing, but that there shouldn't be a law against it. Here are the various positions I can think of for a libertarian to have on this: * Because children do not have the capacity to enter into employment contracts anyway, child labor laws are unnecessary. * Children are slaves for parents to get their freedom jollies from, and the state can never interfere, as it always causes more pain than it fixes. * Blanket child labor laws interfere with simple things like getting a child to help in a restaurant, or on the farm, in a safe fashion. * Child labor laws discriminate against particularly hardy or mature children who haven't aged into legal labor. * "I worked as a kid and I turned out fine, kids these days are lazy" * Child labor laws didn't stop child labor, the economy improving naturally made it unprofitable. Child labor laws just came along after it was going away and claimed responsibility for fixing it. (See also: slavery, polio, and the FCC regulating airwaves) * Any law limiting labor encourages a black market of it, fostering unsafe conditions.
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May 20, 2016 21:10
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Google posted:Your search - mugatu site:mises.org - did not match any documents. Google posted:Your search - zoolander site:mises.org - did not match any documents. Buuuut https://mises.org/library/trouble-child-labor-laws posted:Let's say you want your computer fixed or your software explained. You can shell out big bucks to the Geek Squad, or you can ask — but you can't hire — a typical teenager, or even a preteen. Their experience with computers and the online world is vastly superior to that of most people over the age of 30. From the point of view of online technology, it is the young who rule. And yet they are professionally powerless: they are forbidden by law from earning wages from their expertise.
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May 20, 2016 21:16
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I'm pretty sure child labor laws don't mean you can't give Skyler across the street twenty bucks to fix your computer, just like you could give him twenty bucks to mow your lawn.
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May 20, 2016 21:33
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The State will surely stifle you somehow. I mean "preventing interactions with children" is probably many libertarians' most memorable encounter with agents of the government.
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May 20, 2016 21:38
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Do you know what was great about the gilded age? Employing 8 year olds for pennies and keeping them quiet with thimblefulls of gin. That seems like something a healthy society does right? I'm sure those kids ended up in a good place when they turned 16 and got replaced by someone younger.
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May 20, 2016 22:00
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:This got posted a while back on Facebook by one of my fellow high school alumni: My Facebook friend was head of the College Republicans when we were in college, and he was just arguing in favor of this child labor today, but his justification was that the alternative is prostitution, and it is literally "impossible" for the factory to make a profit if it improves working conditions and wages, or if it does, then those jobs will magically be taken by friends of government elites, whom he reports have very cushy jobs right now, and the poor will still be hosed or worse off than they were passing out from heat exhaustion. He also said I have a "very western idea of childhood," as if brown people are loving house elves who live to serve. Well, more like field elves in this case. He basically tried to use the Vietnam government to hold the children hostage somehow. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 22:43 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 22:29
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fishmech posted:Uh no. They were two cities and dozens to hundreds of small towns and villages, and a whole bunch of just plain farmland. Most of Queens wasn't developed at all until the 1910s-1930s, as part of a deliberate zoning and planning project undertaken by the city of New York which had amalgamated all of modern NYC together in 1898. Pretty much all the outward growth was New York itself (prior to merger) growing on Manhattan and Brooklyn growing on Long Island.  That post was admittedly a synthesis of my brother's half-assed description of NYC when I visited him there, plus various posts about pre-1940s American urban patterns, financial constraints on tall buildings, and an explicit claim that there've been no new urban areas in America since the mid-twentieth century.(My technique of learning by saying dumb things is unstoppable!)
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May 20, 2016 22:29
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Stinky_Pete posted:it is literally "impossible" for the factory to make a profit if it improves working conditions and wages Wages are high or low relative to your living expenses so I'd look at that first before drawing conclusions. A couple bucks a day goes a long way in some places. You're probably "Western" for thinking it must be a big ripoff because people make multiple dollars per hour here. DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 23:12 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 23:10
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Golbez posted:* Any law limiting labor encourages a black market of it, fostering unsafe conditions. I would tend to think libertarians would oppose most labor laws/regulations anyway, favoring instead the "hand of the market" where employers who impose unsafe work practices suddenly find that nobody is willing to work for them, so obviously if people were willing to work under those conditions it must be okay!
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May 20, 2016 23:29
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DeusExMachinima posted:Wages are high or low relative to your living expenses so I'd look at that first before drawing conclusions. A couple bucks a day goes a long way in some places. You're probably "Western" for thinking it must be a big ripoff because people make multiple dollars per hour here. This assumes that any employment is good employment. This isn't necessarily the case. The consequent health effects of being murdered for organizing unions, pregnant and forced to work to the point of miscarriage, repeatedly suffering from heat exhaustion, or dying in a collapsing factory might, possibly, outweigh the benefits of subsistence wages And these conditions are not "better than nothing". "Nothing" is a red herring. Needless death and suffering should not be a prerequisite for being allowed to survive. Even if we accept that workers' alternative is starving to death in the streets, then that just obligates us to improve their labor conditions, rather than shrugging our shoulders and going "thems the breaks, you privileged westerners".
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May 20, 2016 23:47
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I would tend to think libertarians would oppose most labor laws/regulations anyway, favoring instead the "hand of the market" where employers who impose unsafe work practices suddenly find that nobody is willing to work for them, so obviously if people were willing to work under those conditions it must be okay! Any law limiting murder would cause a black market in it, fostering unsafe conditions.
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May 21, 2016 00:30
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Curvature of Earth posted:And these conditions are not "better than nothing". "Nothing" is a red herring. Needless death and suffering should not be a prerequisite for being allowed to survive. Even if we accept that workers' alternative is starving to death in the streets, then that just obligates us to improve their labor conditions, rather than shrugging our shoulders and going "thems the breaks, you privileged westerners". And let's not forget that we, The Industrialized Imperial West, have such great privilege because our colonies and wars and so forth took their land, suppressed their value, and left them with nothing from which to scrape themselves up. I'd call that a debt, but there are no account books for it and we have bigger guns subsidized by them and we haven't been so inclined to pay it willingly. It's easy to say "oh well they should be grateful that the factory gives them work at all" when we forget that the factory is built on top of their ancestors' farmland. We forced our way in, so the only just thing to do is at least leave them alone unless we're offering a lifestyle that is comparably as good as when we loving showed up. Pay the full cost of our economic demands. (not directing that at anyone in particular, I just need the practice articulating this stuff)
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May 21, 2016 00:36
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Panzeh posted:Any law limiting murder would cause a black market in it, fostering unsafe conditions. 
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May 21, 2016 01:04
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Nope if you live in a third world country then your only choices should be either work in a death trap for subsistence wages or become a subsistence farmer, there can be nothing else, and since we're paying them subsistence wages that means it's a completely fair wage
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May 21, 2016 01:30
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DeusExMachinima posted:Wages are high or low relative to your living expenses so I'd look at that first before drawing conclusions. A couple bucks a day goes a long way in some places. You're probably "Western" for thinking it must be a big ripoff because people make multiple dollars per hour here. The cost of living in rural SEA is much lower, and these people are piss-poor anyways, so it's totally okay to pay them pennies a day in human-rights abusing sweat shops where they might lose a limb or two or even their lives due to outright ignoring worker safety in the name of profit! "Cost of living" isn't the end all be all and shouldn't be the basis of determining wage compensation, or if basic worker protection is worth it. When you don't have electricity, running water, shoes, and a whole bunch of other basic necessities we take for granted, no poo poo your "cost of living" is dirt cheap. Do you not see how exploitative it is to say "your options are work for piss wages or die"? Do you not see the problem with working someone literally to death? To grind your employees into the ground and then fine them for the pleasure of yawning? Workers have to buy loving diapers because they're not allowed to take bathroom breaks, and if they do, the get loving humiliated and abused by their managers, and the "facilities" are ill kept literal poo poo holes. And this is acceptable to you because "low cost of living a couple of bucks goes a long way, don't draw conclusions, lol"? Do you not understand the issue? Of course you don't, because it doesn't affect your life. Let the free markets loose. Go get hosed you ignorant piece of poo poo.
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May 21, 2016 01:42
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U mad dawg?Curvature of Earth posted:This assumes that any employment is good employment. This isn't necessarily the case. The consequent health effects of being murdered for organizing unions, pregnant and forced to work to the point of miscarriage, repeatedly suffering from heat exhaustion, or dying in a collapsing factory might, possibly, outweigh the benefits of subsistence wages If you have a suggestion to get past this another country's corrupt laws without us occupying their country and doing a magically perfect job of nation building for once, I'm all ears. Better than child prostitution is a pretty low bar to clear.
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May 21, 2016 03:24
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There are, like, at least two steps between "unrestricted free trade" and "outright conquest," foreign-policy-wise, we could try one of those.
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May 21, 2016 03:39
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OK, what'd you have in mind? How will you enforce your idea in someone else's country and how will you guarantee any resulting punishment or embargo won't primarily fall on the average Joe over there? I mean, if only we had a policy that was already taking names. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim Like I said, if you can lay out some hard proof your idea will work better, faster, that'd be interesting. A billion is a lot of people.
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May 21, 2016 03:57
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DeusExMachinima posted:U mad dawg? There are people smarter than either of us who've put thought into this, so I'm terribly unimpressed with "lol, you wanna bomb them?" I know it's hard for you to believe this as a libertarian, but there are means of coercion outside of violence. Labor historian Erik Loomis has an entire book about international labor and environmental rights problems and specific policies to address them. His main solution is pretty straightforward: require all corporations that operate in the United States to obey certain health and safety regulations and respect the labor rights of all their workers, down their entire supply chains. If companies want access to 324 million potential customers with the highest per capita GDP in the world, they can play ball or get out. Yes, it'd be a huge political struggle to make it happen, but it's a goal worth fighting for, and there's nothing unfeasible about actually applying such regulations. It's not that hard and we've seen international regulations work well in practice when they're actually enforced.
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May 21, 2016 03:57
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Curvature of Earth posted:
For starters it's important to keep in mind that NYC is composed of five boroughs, which were once 5 independent counties and are now counties subordinated to the city. Only New York (on the lower two thirds of Manhattan, but in charge of the whole thing) and Brooklyn (most of Kings at the time outside the very east) were real cities prior to amalgamation. The Bronx is a chunk of Westchester that was annexed when it was still mostly farms, and mostly became urban in the 20th century, Staten Island which is Richmond County was a scattering of towns and villages, mostly along the coasts for a while and frankly has only moved towards a few town centers spread inside a continuous band of suburbia. And Queens as mentioned had some reasonably dense waterfront development that quickly gave way to farmland and open fields with scattered towns/villages - Queens County being formed as it is today by the lopping off of modern-day Nassau County after the amalgamation of the city in 1897-1899. (To this day if you're sending mail to Queens, the postal city to use is usually connected to the closest old time village or town). Original New York City/Manhattan had long had extensive planning permissions starting from the early 19th century, when all of the city was quite below modern 14th Street (there were people above there, but they were living in essentially independent villages and farms), With the initial street grid plan of 1811 and later modifications (mostly, for carving out Central Park, but also for deciding to incorporate some existing streets of villages), there was a fairly steady growth up the island. Preferences that the City took very seriously generally determined the tone of a given block - whether it would be all residential, residential with some shops, or heavily commercial/industrial. These precise mandates would change over time, especially as better transport methods and building methods were developed that made it possible to have the truly dense city of today. When the lower chunk of Westchester County on the mainland was annexed, first as part of New York County and then as its own Bronx County, it was initially all farms with some small towns, but got added into further New York City plans, even though they didn't really get going til after 1898. Brooklyn had a bit less planning - as you can see if you've ever driven there, what with the multiple clashing street grids. But nevertheless they tried to rein in haphazard development and build out the rest of the county/city in an orderly manner after the civil war when the place really started growing. So they too had a lot of planning and what we'd call zoning going on, especially with the really big buildups made possible as the various transit systems entered the scene. Then you have 1897-1898 when all these get mashed together into one new city, including Staten Island and Queens, Queens is targeted for an organized development plan first because it's easily accessible from the rest of the city by bridges and short ferries (Staten Island required a ferry to get to anywhere else until 1889, and didn't get a bridge connection to the rest of NYC until 1964). This included the aforementioned opening of development deep into Queens with the Flushing line at first, and then other subways over time. In 1900, 2 years after being added to the city, the population of all of Queens was just 152,999. By 1930 it was 1,079,129 and by 1960 it was 1,809,578. These days it stands at 2,339,150 and still growing as a bunch of older single family homes and duplexes are torn down and replaced with multistory apartment buildings and condos, as part of city planning. Queens may end up becoming bigger than Brooklyn (currently the most populous borough with 2.6 million on about 3/4 the land) by the latter part of this century. And as mentioned, Staten Island has long lagged because frankly it's a pain to get to. Most people either need to take the 20 minute ferry to lower Manhattan or take long rush hour bus rides over the Verranzano bridge if they want to go directly to Brooklyn. It's the only borough without a direct subway link, although subway cars do run on the south and eastern side of the island as part of what was originally a steam commuter line. There's never been much of an aggressive city plan for Staten Island and as such it remains low population and rather low density. Honestly I think where you got the idea that zoning is bad for density comes from the fact that a lot of places are just lovely at zoning. Braindead planning where some place out with lots of land plops down this huge area of land is only for housing, this other one is only for stores, and this other one is for offices and industry? Yeah that'll get you an awful place to live that's not very dense. But zoning doesn't have to be that way - good cities usually employ hybrid forms of zoning such that, for example, a lot in the existing central business district or some place they want to turn into a new CBD may be zoned for street level retail/restaurants with the above floors being for either residences, a hotel, offices, or a combination of multiple of those. And the outlying residnetial areas nevertheless have many points on a block where you can either go all residential or residential + ground level retail/doctor's office/etc.
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May 21, 2016 04:55
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