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It is absolutely a cost driver, although with current prices infrastructure alone is a small fraction of total costs normally. Developers are still posting obscene profits. Of course, the techical difficulty, time investment and upfront money investment in addition to driving costs also means longer development times, meaning slower development less responsive to demand. Now, add in land use restrictions: farm top soil protection (Norway is a net importer of food, which means we can't afford to develop on any kind of farm land in principle), lots of nature preserves, a general ban on building on or near coastlines (the loving country is coastline), and huge deposits of marine clay absolutely all over, neatly surrounded and/or bisected with mountain. Ever tried to dig a water main through mountain? Yeah. So, cheap land to develop on is scarce. Lowering supply. Development is slow. Lowering supply. Development is technically difficult and costly, high barrier of entry and high minimum price thresholds. Lowering supply. Housing politics dictate a tradition of homeownership. Renting is proportonally more rare than comparable countries. It is culturally expected to at some point purchase a home. Increasing demand. Interest is at rock bottom while wages and home equities are holding and house prices are increasing. Interests on housing loans are tax deductible. Owning a home is a very sound investment on paper. Increasing demand. This isn't the totality of the situation, but you now understand the incredible and mostly unchecked price explosion in the housing market. You've probably also spotted the problem. The factors leading to low supply are fairly constant factors, while the demand drivers are subject to rapid change as political majorites change with society. The wildcard is politically left wing stances such as rent control and public housing projects which are non-existent today. Introduce those, and times inside the realestate bubble are gonna get interesting.
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Jun 23, 2021 13:39
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Nice piece of fish posted:Developers are still posting obscene profits. I want connect these two points. Developers where I live say that they can't make a profit if we don't let them build either cheap or big, that affordable housing is just suuuuuch a burden for them to develop. And I want to correct them and say, you mean you will have LESS of a profit because I don't believe the margins are that slim. These are the same developers in the United States that will develop 1 Acre SFH that are 3200 square foot monstrosities that they are more than happy to develop quickly and with no problem. If I had a magic housing wand where I live I would put a morotorium on square footage above 2200 square feet in a vain attempt to at least keep prices down at the top end.
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Jun 23, 2021 14:57
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I'm pretty sure a blanket moratorium wouldn't stand up to a challenge in court.
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Jun 25, 2021 03:57
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In Norway it might if it was rooted in planning authority on the basis of regional zoning restrictions, but as like a general thing? No that would provably not be accepted, it would regardless be in probable violation of human rights legislation which supercedes all national and regional authority anyway.
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Jun 25, 2021 06:39
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Nice piece of fish posted:
Should probably put this in context, no reason for anyone to be familiar with the hosed housing market in Norway. Prices went up 12% last year. No, this was not a correction but in line with trend. Yes, this was the national average.
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Jun 25, 2021 06:43
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The US context is a little different from most other european countries because in the US managing the subsidy layering necessary to develop affordable housing is a huge barrier. It's not just about the costs - many non-profit developers can meet the brick and mortar costs. It's managing the conflicting insanity of federal regulations around Low-income housing tax credits, federal direct grant money, state grant money, local bond funds, and the petty demands of a random rich philanthropist - all focused in on a single parcel.
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Jun 25, 2021 07:09
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Mooseontheloose posted:These are the same developers in the United States that will develop 1 Acre SFH that are 3200 square foot monstrosities that they are more than happy to develop quickly and with no problem. If I had a magic housing wand where I live I would put a morotorium on square footage above 2200 square feet in a vain attempt to at least keep prices down at the top end. In the extreme case, if knocking out a new building in SF takes four or five years because of their process, then yes, on paper is has to be crazy profitable otherwise you could've literally just dumped that money into a index fund and sat on it and come out better.
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Jun 25, 2021 08:08
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Nice piece of fish posted:Should probably put this in context, no reason for anyone to be familiar with the hosed housing market in Norway. Isn’t this the case in most western & wealthy nations just now? UK rose by over 10% on average too.
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Jun 25, 2021 08:19
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wooger posted:Isn’t this the case in most western & wealthy nations just now? Which is odd considering the Brexit fiasco, although I obviously can't speak to national conditions I wonder how spread that average is or if the cities (London) are doing the heavy lifting. 12% is insane but it's held close to that level for a while now, so prices are effectively doubling by the decade. It vastly outstrips wage increase and things are looking dangerous from a burden of loans perspective. https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Norway/Price-History We're at third worst in OECD countries for loans, and a solid 100% increase in house prices per decade since 2000. Here's the rub: the government may claim it's not a situation artificially inflated by oil industry wages but the traditional oil cities (such as Stavanger) took a massive housing prices bath during the recent oil bust. And Norway is doing loving terribly for exports, among the worst in Europe, and that's counting oil. This means that if Norway gets a systemic oil shock, this supposed not-bubble in realestate is gonna burst hard. It's pretty interesting. And insane.
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Jun 25, 2021 08:33
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Cicero posted:I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that the time value of money plays a part here. If you can knock out a big SFH (or pile of them) in < 6 months, versus a big apartment complex taking over a year (or even multiple years), the nominal profit margin on the latter has to be higher for it to actually be 'equally profitable'. fair point. I do wish cities would do more to reasonably speed up construction.
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Jun 25, 2021 14:18
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Cicero posted:I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that the time value of money plays a part here. If you can knock out a big SFH (or pile of them) in < 6 months, versus a big apartment complex taking over a year (or even multiple years), the nominal profit margin on the latter has to be higher for it to actually be 'equally profitable'. It's not simply time, either. Like during the time you may see a bunch of boards, neighborhood associations, city council, etc. demand a bunch of changes, which probably means paying architects money. Then someone may file a lawsuit, and, well, if you want affordable housing lawyer trial costs are probably not what you want to be part of the equation. Then the end result may end up scaled down a bunch so the revenue is down and expenses are up? Putting up some exurban McMansions is gonna be way less risky.
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Jun 25, 2021 15:27
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Nice piece of fish posted:Which is odd considering the Brexit fiasco, although I obviously can't speak to national conditions I wonder how spread that average is or if the cities (London) are doing the heavy lifting. Same in the UK again on all counts. In the last year London was actually the worst performing area and only rose 3.x Something percent. The big rise was partly helped by the stamp duty (property sales tax) being suspended for a long period during COVID, but a huge part was down to working from home during lockdown and many, many people having a chance to re-locate from London to somewhere they can afford to buy, or could afford a bunch more space than they had. To a Londoner, prices in the North or West of the country look cheap, so they overpaid.
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Jun 25, 2021 17:38
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wooger posted:Same in the UK again on all counts. I am not knowledge about UK Geography but you should look at the case of Barnsby, London which was one of first places considered to be gentrified and actually coined super gentrification: https://faculty.fiu.edu/~revellk/pad3800/Butler.pdf
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Jun 25, 2021 17:45
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OddObserver posted:It's not simply time, either. Like during the time you may see a bunch of boards, neighborhood associations, city council, etc. demand a bunch of changes, which probably means paying architects money. Then someone may file a lawsuit, and, well, if you want affordable housing lawyer trial costs are probably not what you want to be part of the equation. Then the end result may end up scaled down a bunch so the revenue is down and expenses are up? Putting up some exurban McMansions is gonna be way less risky. There should be national action, but at the federal level nobody seems to really give a poo poo, not even progressives or socialists. It's only technocratic nerdy urbanists and YIMBY's that nobody listens to.
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Jun 25, 2021 21:05
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there's very little that can be done at the federal level. like constitutionally, local land use control is a power devolved entirely to the states, who then hand out home rule provisions to the localities (counties, cities, villages, townships, whatever) as they are defined by state law. therefore, all effective land use activism in america takes place at the local, regional, and state level. the federal level is only useful for things like setting environmental law, or trying to get congress to fund grants for local housing and transportation
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Jun 25, 2021 21:13
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:there's very little that can be done at the federal level. like constitutionally, local land use control is a power devolved entirely to the states, who then hand out home rule provisions to the localities (counties, cities, villages, townships, whatever) as they are defined by state law. therefore, all effective land use activism in america takes place at the local, regional, and state level. the federal level is only useful for things like setting environmental law, or trying to get congress to fund grants for local housing and transportation Yah of federal government levers for housing is carrots and really don't have any sticks.
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Jun 25, 2021 21:34
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:The federal level is only useful for things like setting environmental law, or trying to get congress to fund grants for local housing and transportation
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Jun 26, 2021 10:01
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it would be quickly challenged and possibly thrown out in court. federal funding for highways is given directly to the states. a similar thing happened with the national drinking age act, which reduced (not eliminated) highway funding to states that didn't raise the age to purchase alcohol to 21. it was a small reduction over a similarly small request - even with all the political kickback, it was only an increase in the age to purchase alcohol, not consume alcohol this was found constitutional by the supreme court, but there was some clarity around the constitutionality of such laws. namely, the law has to be unambiguous - it would be more difficult, but not impossible, to craft a definition of "allow multi-use housing" which is clearly defined in law, versus rules around who can buy hooch. like, are we going to flat ban R-1 through R-100 zoning? does every city need to have a certain amount of area zoned multi-family? how multi-family is multi-family, do quadplexes count? a lot of rural areas that ban apartment buildings allow duplexes and triplexes, this is the most common housing form in small town public housing (which is surprisingly robust since its a lot cheaper and easier to provide subsidized housing in low COL areas) the law would also have to be directly linked to federal authority in national projects - the feds have fed roads on which people drive drunk, and the feds also have a clear precedent of setting alcohol rules given that prohibition was started and ended by constitutional amendment. neither of these are true when it comes to land use decisions. states also have the ability to set alcohol rules fairly easily, it would be much more of an uphill battle for states to override local autonomy in land use decisions. is it impossible? far from it. does anyone have the political capital to pick this fight against such odds? definitely not. like in the immediate and short terms, imagine if the biden admin pulled something like this - it would immediately validate all of the right wing screaming about leftist totalitarianism and societal engineering, because it would mostly target areas where right wing voters live and hit them directly in their racist feels about poor folks swarming in to take over main street on the state level, you'd also see purple and light blue states joining in with the red states to challenge this law in court, because it is a BIG ask on the state level to get states to start imposing locally unpopular land use interventions on local areas. state authorities would have to decide which is the easier fight, a group lawsuit against the feds or comply with fed demands and deal with the internal political challenge from now pissed off right wing voters and local pols Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 26, 2021 |
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Jun 26, 2021 18:52
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Here's a blog post showing an example of the thing Strong Towns is always harping on, about the US suburban style of development being financially unsustainable: https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money
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Jan 16, 2022 12:42
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Cicero posted:Here's a blog post showing an example of the thing Strong Towns is always harping on, about the US suburban style of development being financially unsustainable: https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money *chuckles morbidly in suburban-hell-sprawl-Floridian*
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Jan 16, 2022 13:36
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Cicero posted:Here's a blog post showing an example of the thing Strong Towns is always harping on, about the US suburban style of development being financially unsustainable: https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money Great read. I live in a medium sized (over 20,000 people) town in Massachusetts and the constant complaints about building APARTMENT buildings in OUR SMALL TOWN constantly grate on me. The usual suspects of they cost the city more money because of ALL the PEOPLE they bring. And I've had to constantly remind people that the apartments bring way more revenue to our town then a 4000 square foot 3BR SFH home monstrosity. So, I am glad someone actually put pen to paper on the math.
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Jan 16, 2022 15:00
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Behold my unqualified opinion. I often think about these things, as I liked living in the US, and I love the poo poo out of several cities in the US. However, I always felt there are things that could be done better at like no cost. They talk about bringing people downtown. From what I have seen in the US, many downtowns are places where you drive your car, expect to park in front of the thing, cross a tiny sidewalk and then leave when done. Of course people want to live in a big house with a big lot, somewhere else. Heck, even downtowns of big cities are usually not very good, although you will find nice places elsewhere. In my opinion, there's two major deficiency in US cities. First, the car focus. Second, the lack of public life. This is what a US downtown looks like to me  By contrast, some "regular", small town downtowns in Europe   Of course, there are bad ones, especially in areas rebuilt after the war (common trope: parking spot at the center of the city) e.g.,  but there's a limit to what is acceptable even in this case, and nowadays most of these spaces become markets etc, which they were originally  I am not gonna post beautifully preserved and historic inner cities on purpose. However, there are also nice places that are new. For example, all of this is reconstructed in the last years  So obviously, a lot of it is: do not give 90% of the space to cars. Sure. Netherlands, for instance, does this really well However, I believe another issue is arund the somewhat murky concept of "public life". I am struggling to put into words why I felt more comfortable living in some European cities compared to NY or Chicago, even given a similar population, density, crowdedness etc. For me, US cities, especially smaller ones, often lack "public life". Not sure how to make this argument coherently. Google Chicago or New York - the first pictures gonna center in on the big parks, where people can actually exist. And while both NY and Chicago have nice spots, if you walk around in the city, most of it is gonna be this  You can walk there, but you gotta go somewhere. You can't "be" there. When I was there, in this spot, I really only wanted to walk somewhere fast. Like, in a shop. I am not saying it's designed that way, but for me this is how it worked. Don't get me wrong, that's not everywhere in Chicago. But it is a lot. Manhatten is the same. Or, if you look at Williamsburg around Bedford etc - it's full of tourist and people and still, 90% of the space is for cars and the rest is for "walking briskly somewhere". There's no reason for cars to exist in these areas of town. People come there to walk around, and yet, only 10% of the space is allocated to people existing. On the positive side, any space at rivers/lakes/water seems to somehow defy that impression. If a US city has a river, public planners suddenly and magically become competent and you come across areas which are pretty good  why does this only exist if there's a river? I guess it is difficult to articulate, but cities have a "feel". And one thing that bugged me immensely about cities in the US is that most activities involve going somewhere, going "inside something" and spending money. Like, sitting down in a restaurant or bar. Instead, I feel like the default should be to meet in a public space, have picnic/apero/drinks there, and then go somewhere maybe. I don't know if some of the issue is that drinking anything in public is verboten in the US. Not that every meeting outside involves having a drink. For young people it may be a factor, though. Also, this is also not to say everyone should always chill in public spaces to meet people, especially if one is older. But it is my experience that in Europe, people meet other people in public spaces, exist there, walk around, sit down etc. before they decide to go "inside something" (if at all). In the US, we always met at a restaurant or bar or somewhere outside of the public life. This may only be my impression so maybe it's wrong. However, I think it impacts how a city feels. Gonna stay with the river theme here for comparison    Even if you are not a person who enjoys sitting down somewhere outside, I feel these kind of scenes are essential to make a city feel "alive". Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 10:57
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Haramstufe Rot posted:Behold my unqualified opinion. I often think about these things, as I liked living in the US, and I love the poo poo out of several cities in the US. However, I always felt there are things that could be done better at like no cost. As you say, there are some places where the US has done this, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Though it is 150 years old. I agree it is very nice, when it does happen. I think car focus and lack of public life are interwoven. Without density or parking, no one will use a park a city builds and it becomes a boondoggle. So getting rid of roads to make room for public spaces looks like political suicide. Also, the park near me has a homeless camp in it, so the park is empty once the weekend AYSO games end. To fix all this would require: 1) Changing zoning laws 2) Building public transportation 3) Housing homeless people Successful movement on any one of the three would result ouster from office. What usually happens is someone who wants to make a change gets in office, implements policy changes that take 4 year review periods on a 2 year term, opposition groups rally and vote the person out and the review committees are squashed and the policy changed back. This is just my impression from news, I have no hard data and would be glad to be wrong.
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Jan 18, 2022 16:24
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Boot and Rally posted:Successful movement on any one of the three would result ouster from office. What usually happens is someone who wants to make a change gets in office, implements policy changes that take 4 year review periods on a 2 year term, opposition groups rally and vote the person out and the review committees are squashed and the policy changed back. This is just my impression from news, I have no hard data and would be glad to be wrong. I think this is correct, only in many cases you need several smaller communities working together to accomplish these sorts of goals. Once you dislodge one person from the gang, things fall apart.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:56
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US cities also developed at a different time than the European cities shown above. The purpose and need for public spaces has changed over time--particularly with the shift to industrial modes of production. However, prior to the pandemic, some cities were experimenting with closing off streets to traffic and giving them over to pedestrians. Initial business and public apprehension usually quickly subsided and both business and people liked it. This was done in several prominent locations in NYC, for example. With the pandemic, the trend has accelerated. Especially with the need for outdoor dining spaces. The slow reclamation of streets for pedestrian uses has been difficult to claw back. There are plenty of examples for me, locally, where this is still the case and businesses aren't going to give back the parking spaces they've reclaimed without a fight.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:08
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there's an undercurrent of people thinking that american cities were deliberately designed poorly. i think this results from terms of linguistic convenience, "they did it this way", which implies some level of agency on the part of some vague government agency which is in charge of these kinds of things really, most cities in human history are largely unplanned and grow in a so-called 'organic' fashion, based on individual decisions rooted in ownership of the underlying land. this is especially true once we get to the industrial era, where transformative technologies come thick and fast which allow for ever more expansive ways of developing land. once those decisions are made, they are hard to undo - imagine if i had a plot of farmland which i split into pieces to build houses on, and to mark the edge of each new lot i build a sturdy stone wall of fieldstone. this wall isn't just a marker for the legal property boundary, if these lots are to be consolidated in the future and this land returned to agricultural use, someone's going to have to deal with all these rocks i've put around the place. if i split my land in half to give to my two children, and to make it easier to get to their homes a road is built between the lots, and later the government comes along and expands this road for use as a public thoroughfare, that road pretty much is there forever and seals the division of this land this matters because the relationships of buildings, transportation networks, and public uses to each other are laid down and then rarely changed, because it is very difficult to change them. you have to basically scrape the land clean and refactor the underlying property ownership, which is why descriptors such as "post-war" sometimes come into play, nothing incentivizes massive redevelopment like a massive amount of destruction. otherwise, winding cow paths become footpaths become pilgrim's roads become highways become high streets over the years. clusters of shops attract more shops because i'm going to build my shop where customers are, at highly traveled points like crossroads or river crossings, and over time this leads to an aggregation of complementary uses like shops, houses, all adjacent to each other. within a city, we can think of this mix of uses (which also doesn't change much over time) as a land use collection. how people travel is also important. travel was mostly unchanged for millennia and moved at a human foot pace. goods could be transport by animal, sometimes people rode animals or in vehicles dragged by them, but people generally didn't travel over land very quickly or very long distances on a daily basis. in transportation the term used for how one travels is mode, and the decision on which way to travel is modal choice. there was not much modal choice for land travel before the industrial era, your mode was pretty much just pedestrianism or pedestrian-adjacent. a predominantly pedestrian mode leads to cities which are best traveled on foot, because they are built at human scale due to these centuries of land use decisions made in the context of a predominantly pedestrian mode - shops meant to be entered by foot, streets navigated by foot, public squares not too far from each other for resting one's feet and so on, all of which is establishing a land use collection informed by the predominant mode american cities tend to be built in the context of a predominantly automotive mode. starting in the early 1900s, mass production enabled the production of relatively cheap automobiles, and rising american middle class prosperity fueled an absolutely huge rise in automobile ownership. america was the country of cheap cars, and this was the most significant transformative technology in terms of urban development. what we think of as suburbs today arguably began in the middle 19th century with railroad suburbs, then in the 1880s the development of efficient electric motors created the streetcar, followed by streetcar suburbs. however, railroads and streetcars are still vaguely pedestrian-adjacent modes, as once you get off the train you have to finish your journey on foot. the automotive mode enables mostly point-to-point travel, and this changes the relationship of land uses to each other in some profound ways regarding the difference between pedestrian and automotive modal choice as it impact land use, the effects are visibly evident. car-focused streets are wider, straighter, and less interesting. land uses can be spaced farther apart, and there are advantages to surrounding each structure with parking for vehicles. socially, most people you see are sitting inside vehicles, so it makes the place feel emptier. i feel like i'm stating the obvious here but its important to point out that this impacts the way the land use collection is internally organized. for example, instead of shops being adjoined or immediately adjacent to each other for easier access by pedestrian modal shoppers, now the shops are separated from each other and difficult to walk between on foot, because of parking meant to accommodate automotive modal shoppers so why are american cities like this? the simplest reason is that these cities are younger, and many of them have only experienced sustained population growth and development within the context of a predominantly automotive modal choice. the most pedestrian friendly cities are also those which are older, have had time to develop pedestrian-oriented land use collections, and as land use collections are difficult to change over time, they have a historical inertia which perpetuates itself. cities like boston, new york, and philadelphia were thriving urban centers long before cars were invented, and thus maintain a pedestrian-oriented land use collection. younger cities lack this historical advantage, and are more subject to external pressure to accommodate the automotive mode another reason is jurisdictional fragmentation. in the united states, land use decisions are typically devolved to the local level of government. to briefly describe the american system of government, you have in descending order: -federal government, in charge of the whole country -state government, in charge of the largest sub-national jurisdictions -county government, in charge of local but not the smallest local decisions -city government, in charge of the most local decisions the 10th amendment to the constitution basically says "anything not listed here as a power granted to the federal government, is granted to state governments". urban planning didn't really exist as we know it in 1780, so the constitution says nothing about urban planning or the internal organization of states. thus, the ability to define what a county or a city is, or what their powers are, rests at the state level. there is some diversity between the states in terms of these definitions - for example, new york state has a whole bunch of little definitions for terms like town, village, and so on, and in louisiana state counties are called parishes. generally speaking though, states usually define their internal jurisdictions as counties and have some definition for what constitutes a city (or town, or village, or municipality, or whatever you call it). further, most states leave land use decisions up to the city, or to the county if there is no city. there are something like 3,000+ counties and close to 20k cities in the united states, each one of which can make its own land use decisions. rarely do states force these local entities to coordinate their planning with all of that in mind, it is far easier to permit and plan for development which caters to an automotive mode. if i own some farmland on the edge of town and i decide to sell it to a developer, that developer is not going to build anything oriented to the pedestrian mode on my distant farmland, because there is nobody nearby to walk to my land. before automobiles, that land would pretty much stay farmland unless we were very near to an existing city. with automobiles, the land is much more accessible and thus more valuable for redevelopment if i am making a comprehensive land use plan for a small city on the edge of a metro area, i am mostly concerned with land uses in my jurisdiction, and not adjoining jurisdictions. i could put down a bunch of onerous regulations on what exactly needs to get built where, banning low density residential and encouraging pedestrianism in our tiny historic downtown, and i can sit and watch as developers pass my jurisdiction by and build whatever they want in friendlier neighboring jurisdictions, until i am fired and my comprehensive land use plan is discarded for stifling economic development a third reason, and this is very important, is that urban planners do not have very much power. contemporary urban planning as a civic responsibility is young, emerging in the form we understand it in germany in the late 19th century. the idea is basically to leverage the police power of the state (the ability to control what people do in public) to prevent dissonant adjoining land uses. the classic example is telling people they can't build a hog slaughterhouse next to a school for young children. this idea of urban planning, regulating land uses within a jurisdiction, spread across the united states as part of the progressive era of civic reforms in which local governments tried to clean house of corruption and step up to manage the increasing responsibilities of physical and managerial infrastructure in an industrializing world. in other words, as cities began to regard things like water management, transportation, utilities, cops, schools, and so on as mandatory responsibilities, local governments grew in power. one of these powers was policing land uses in an increasingly rationalized way however, planners can't really compel certain uses to be constructed. instead, zoning as it is most typically employed acts as a restraint on growth, not a mandate. i can zone land in the middle of nowhere as being appropriate for tall apartment buildings, but that is not a guarantee it will be built. if i say "the only thing you can build here is a ten story apartment, in the middle of nowhere" then that land will go undeveloped until i am sued by the property owner for being a dick and imposing an unlawful taking of property value by putting weird rules on the land. planners can't really say what should go where, they mostly just act as referees on the free market to ensure nobody's building anything that will cause more problems for other people down the road. in fact, many urban planners eventually leave public service to work for private architecture firms where they CAN make nice fancy site plans dictating exactly what goes where - to be built by a private developer to cut off my idiot rambling here, i want to recap three important reasons american cities are bad. first, american cities are young and heavily influenced by automobiles throughout their periods of growth in a way that the historic cities of europe are not. second, there are thousands and thousands of different agencies in charge of land use decisions acting in a mostly independent, uncoordinated, and uninspired fashion. third, urban planners are generally reactive and not proactive in terms of dictating growth essentially, there is nobody in charge that we can blame for why things are this way. in internet theorycrafting land we can say satisfying things like "i would simply grant myself the appropriate powers and authority to fix zoning, build public housing and mass transit, and ban cars". but there is no space at any point of american government where the authority intersects with access to resources necessary to pull this off. the simpler bing bong solution would be to build a time machine and shoot baby henry ford a better approach to fixing this mess instead of saying slogans about upzoning would be: -advocate for coordinated regional planning as a state-level agency. really boring but necessary, cars enable metropolitan areas to grow beyond the scope of what a single city or county planning department can address, so there needs to be a metro-scale planning department to enforce conformity in regional land use planning -advocate for federal subsidy to states for public housing and transportation. a real long shot but a necessary component, local governments simply do not have the financial resources to meaningfully handle these functions independently -suburban redevelopment and densification, generally focused on rehabbing dead malls and shopping centers. one of the best ways to establish a new pedestrian-focused land use collection is to rebuild a large existing site. parking lots are a great candidate for this, they're easy and cheap to tear up. here's a giant lecture by Ellen Dunham-Jones on the subject, she's an authority in suburban redevelopment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mepoajVfQ8
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Jan 18, 2022 18:10
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The fundamental problem of the US's car-centric urban development, which Haramstufe Rot's post hits on the head, is that US cities build spaces to move through rather than spaces to be. They treat the city as a place people traverse to get to a destination rather than a place where people live and exist. As a result, places they think people want to go are built as destinations, i.e., places where you leave your house with a target in mind and go directly there: shops and restaurants need parking because everyone is expected to go there as a defined trip starting and ending at their home; even parks need parking lots because you aren't expected to pass through them on your way somewhere else, you're expected to go there because you decided you wanted to go do a park-related thing so you drive there from your house, walk around the park, and then drive home again. As a result, US cities are constructed by treating homes, workplaces, and third locations as a network of origin points and destinations. The links between the nodes in that network are then treated as transportation routes rather than public spaces, because when you're traversing the network you're moving from an origin to a destination, or vice versa. The in-between space, whether it's a road or a sidewalk or a highway, is treated as a space that you want to just get through as quickly as possible so you can reach your defined destination, and since they expect you'll be moving through that space in a car they don't worry about the quality of the space because what the majority of people will be experiencing is the inside of their car rather than the public space they're moving through. This leads to the construction of public spaces that aren't worth the name, destinations that are horrible to visit, and homes that lack any sense of social solidarity. It is a bad way to build cities, it builds cities that are bad places to live and that cannot support themselves financially, and it is the foundation of virtually all North American urban development since the 1940s.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:13
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vyelkin posted:The fundamental problem of the US's car-centric urban development, which Haramstufe Rot's post hits on the head, is that US cities build spaces to move through rather than spaces to be. They treat the city as a place people traverse to get to a destination rather than a place where people live and exist. As a result, places they think people want to go are built as destinations, i.e., places where you leave your house with a target in mind and go directly there: shops and restaurants need parking because everyone is expected to go there as a defined trip starting and ending at their home; even parks need parking lots because you aren't expected to pass through them on your way somewhere else, you're expected to go there because you decided you wanted to go do a park-related thing so you drive there from your house, walk around the park, and then drive home again. the problem with this argument is that it assumes there is some agency you can appeal to, an agency which is making bad decisions, and which simply needs to be persuaded to make good decisions instead if you've read my brick of a post then first, i apologize for making it, but second, i try to argue that planning in the united states is largely uncoordinated and that car-centric planning is not as much an outcome of deliberate policy decisions, but instead an outcome of policy decisions constrained by resource and managerial limitations. in other words, sprawl is a natural outcome because the united states enshrines local autonomy and property rights, meaning that planning agencies cannot meaningfully prevent sprawl from being constructed your point about "places to pass through" seems ill defined. you're basically just describing origin/destination and transportation network analysis, then labeling it as bad and accusing planners of doing this bad thing? this argument is equally applicable to public transit, is a train station not simply a place to pass through? i think what you're reaching for here is that pedestrian-oriented modes encourage a more vibrant street life, which is absolutely true and well argued over. otherwise this argument strikes me as a mostly aesthetic criticism in the manner of James Kunstler the great and irrefutable advantage of the automotive mode from a land development standpoint is that, if i am building a new thing, i do not have to go to a lot of effort to connect my thing to the existing transportation network. i can just connect to the road system and bang, i'm connected to everything else. if i want my new thing to be visited mostly on foot then i'll need to find a location which is both accessible and affordable, as places you can get to on foot where there are also people to visit you are scarce, thus expensive. i could also build my thing or plan to build it somewhere without transit then try to get a transit extension, but that is pretty risky Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 18:24
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I think a lot about the general cultural consensus that you only leave your house to engage in consumerism, and if you go to a public place, such as an open-plan mall (and there are few non-park public places that foster gathering that aren't malls), and you do not engage in consumerism, you are now loitering.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:30
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:the problem with this argument is that it assumes there is some agency you can appeal to, an agency which is making bad decisions, and which simply needs to be persuaded to make good decisions instead You and I have had this discussion before and I still disagree that the modern American city happened because of fragmented decision making. I can't make a longer post now, but the fragmentation didn't stop federal policy incentives in the post-war years.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:33
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I think a lot about the general cultural consensus that you only leave your house to engage in consumerism, and if you go to a public place, such as an open-plan mall (and there are few non-park public places that foster gathering that aren't malls), and you do not engage in consumerism, you are now loitering. There's also truth to this. There's some good critique out there of things like CBDs because of how they lock down public space for consumerism only.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:34
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Note that you can find photos of what US cities looked like before the car/suburb era, and they are often much livelier. Also there are often a bunch of nice buildings that in modern time got demolished for parking lots or garages. I think I once stumbled on a twitter account doing comparison shots like that, but I don't have it handy. Here is a bit in he other direction, though: https://twitter.com/ProvPlanning/status/1482330242945585158 Like that's way more walkable without the highway bridge.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:39
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Minenfeld! posted:You and I have had this discussion before and I still disagree that the modern American city happened because of fragmented decision making. I can't make a longer post now, but the fragmentation didn't stop federal policy incentives in the post-war years. if anything it's the other way around, housing subsidies and the construction of the interstates just expanded the number of jurisdictions whose decisions mattered
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Jan 18, 2022 18:45
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:the problem with this argument is that it assumes there is some agency you can appeal to, an agency which is making bad decisions, and which simply needs to be persuaded to make good decisions instead I don't think you're wrong that a big part of the problem is the decentralization of decision-making and the enormous influence developers have over governmental bodies. Certainly you're right that there is no single agency that is responsible for this and that could simply be persuaded to make good decisions instead of bad ones and therefore fix all the problems of North American urban design. But there's more to it than that. First of all, there have been deliberate policy decisions to create the urban spaces we have today. The construction of the interstate network, the decision to run highways through dense urban areas, incentives and subsidies for the postwar construction of (whites-only) suburbs at the city, state, and federal level, policy decisions to zone massive swathes of residential construction as single-family homes, "urban renewal" projects that contribute to sprawl instead of densification, underinvestment in public transit that encourages denser development, and so on. Those are all conscious decisions that were made easier by decentralized government and by mass automobile ownership, but they were still conscious policy decisions that encourage sprawl and could have been done differently. Second, if you look beyond the US you see that this is not a purely American problem, nor does it have a purely American origin. Canada, for instance, has much more centralized decision-making at the provincial and municipal levels, and yet has chosen to build cities in the exact same way as the United States, partly because this is the model that is cheapest for developers and both provincial and municipal decision-makers have generally been more interested in pleasing developers than in constructing cities that are viable and good to live in over the long term. Other countries, like the Netherlands, have made the conscious choice to refocus urban development away from cars and urban sprawl and are now reaping the rewards. You can obviously point to similarities between these contexts: for instance, both Canada and the US have built cities in the age of the automobile and have built cities in places where land is abundant and cheap, meaning they had both the incentive and the means to let cities sprawl because it was cheaper and easier than the alternative. Fragmented decision-making isn't a commonality, though, unless you count developers, cities, and provinces as enough for decision-making to be fragmented, and if that's enough then every country has fragmented decision-making. As for my argument about public spaces, I'm not basing this on any deep discussion of transit planning theory or anything of the like. I'm thinking of how people living in North American cities conceive of the places where they live, based on both reading urban history and just plain growing up in and knowing a lot of people who live in North American cities. They are basically seen not as a textured landscape, but as a network of nodes including home, workplaces, shops where one likes to go, and so on. Because of car ownership, these nodes can be as far apart as you like, as long as you can tolerate driving that far, and what's in between those nodes doesn't matter except insofar as you want to be able to get from node to node as quickly as possible, because the actual environment you're experiencing in between those two places isn't the roads on which you're driving, it's the inside of your car. This is the same mode of thought that led to things like building highways from suburbs to workplaces, cutting straight through (and in the process destroying) denser inner-city neighbourhoods, because the most important thing was allowing suburbanites to travel from home to work as expeditiously as possible - again, a conscious policy decision to destroy more vibrant urban spaces because they were in the way of creating the sterile network model of the city. This isn't just a historical legacy, you still see this kind of motivation for urban development decisions because the suburbs are now a highly influential voting bloc: in my adopted hometown of Toronto, for example, suburbs keep voting for the maintenance and expansion of highways running into downtown and against the expansion of public transit, because what they value most is being able to get from their home to downtown as quickly as possible in their car, and highways that literally cut them off from the texture of the city are their preferred way to do that. It's not a purely aesthetic argument, though yes, aesthetics do matter - I don't like walking under an elevated highway and crossing an eight-lane road to get to the Toronto waterfront, even though it's the same walking distance as it would be if they tore down the highway and redirected the road. It's fundamentally an argument about how you view the city as you're moving through it. Urban streets can be viewed as public spaces where you can linger (or loiter) and spend time, or they can be viewed as transportation zones that you want to move through to get to a different destination. Building public spaces that encourage lingering (by valuing walking, biking, using public transit, slowing down cars, etc.) and slow movement also pushes people to look around, enjoy their city, visit shops and restaurants they didn't previously know existed, and so on. Building public spaces that encourage moving through (by getting rid of sidewalks and public transit, building highways, relocating development to the edges of the city, etc.) quickly also encourages people to rocket through the city to get to Wal-Mart because they can do all their shopping in one stop there. And yes, to be clear, these are decisions that planners can make and have made, even if their decisions are only one part of the larger problem. Zoning requirements, minimum parking rules, street width and frontage regulations, which development proposals do and don't get approved, these are the kinds of things that urban planners, municipalities, states, provinces, can and should change, because they encourage the wrong kind of development. You say that the great advantage of building something new hooked into a car grid is that it doesn't take much effort by the developer, but the great disadvantage of doing that for everyone else is that it creates a single-use space that is very hard to repurpose but is a drain on the city's resources forever. A hundred-year-old commercial building in an urban downtown will have many owners and tenants over the course of the century. Shops come and go, new tenants move in and out, and they don't have to do anything when they come and go because the infrastructure is already there. The roads already exist, the sewer pipes already exist, the customers already exist, the land is already serviced by public services and utilities, the space is malleable. Building a Wal-Mart on the edge of town, you create a space that is extremely hard to repurpose when Wal-Mart decides to close and move on in 15 years, but which will be an enormous drain on city resources forever because the city has to maintain the roads to get there, the pipes and services to pay for this massive new development on the edge of town, the fire department that stops the abandoned Wal-Mart from burning down 20 years from now, and so on, and so on, even while the existence of the Wal-Mart erodes the parts of the town that are good to live in and that generate far more revenue for the city. Fragmented decision-making can only take part of the blame for this, and much of it has in fact resulted from conscious choices to encourage car-focused development at the expense of other forms of urban growth. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 19:19
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vyelkin posted:Building a Wal-Mart on the edge of town, you create a space that is extremely hard to repurpose when Wal-Mart decides to close and move on in 15 years, but which will be an enormous drain on city resources forever because the city has to maintain the roads to get there, absolutely not? here's a shorter Dunham-Jones lecture https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_dunham_jones_retrofitting_suburbia?language=en whether a traditional small downtown is abandonded or the walmart is abandoned, either is due to lack of economic vitality as part of a larger pressure resulting from post-industrial population decline etc, but the walmart is going to be easier to redevelop if necessary. you're certainly wrong about them being difficult to repurpose, there are many real world examples of rehabbed big boxes and dead malls, whether you reuse the structures or demolish them and redevelop the site again you're using language - "building a walmart creates a space" - which ascribes false agency to actors so you can blame them for not knowing better. who is going to stop the walmart from going in at the edge of town? if we enact an ordinance preventing retail above a certain size, who's to say they dont just build it in the next town over? i feel like you've read a lot of Strong Towns posts and thats good but there's a definite framing where if we simply identify why things are bad, we can find the bad-decisions maker and get that guy to knock it off. maybe we can persuade him to stop being so lazy and greedy as well quote:for instance, both Canada and the US have built cities in the age of the automobile and have built cities in places where land is abundant and cheap, meaning they had both the incentive and the means to let cities sprawl because it was cheaper and easier than the alternative. but this assumes that an alternative, a good-decisions maker, was available but denied. think of it more like, the growth of urban areas in an automotive mode context involved a tidal wave of development and growth directing decisions which made sense at the time, with negative ramifications to be determined later. development of cheap, airy homes across the countryside was seen as a good thing when these decisions were made, to alleviate housing pressure in crowded early 20th c cities. likewise, a walmart on the edge of town is a psychic vortex but the alternative is more often "nothing" instead of "a locally owned and thriving pedestrian focused retail cluster" vyelkin posted:
check out Lynch's The Image Of The City vyelkin posted:This is the same mode of thought that led to things like building highways from suburbs to workplaces, cutting straight through (and in the process destroying) denser inner-city neighbourhoods, because the most important thing was allowing suburbanites to travel from home to work as expeditiously as possible - again, a conscious policy decision to destroy more vibrant urban spaces because they were in the way of creating the sterile network model of the city. This isn't just a historical legacy, you still see this kind of motivation for urban development decisions because the suburbs are now a highly influential voting bloc: in my adopted hometown of Toronto, for example,  i think this is the point where your analysis goes off the rails. you seem to be more interested in finding who to blame, and why, than understanding what happened. this isn't to criticize your motivations, but to point out that your search for knowledge ends when you discover the Bastard Who Is Responsible For All This Mess. how people mentally conceive of and navigate spaces is not why highways cut through inner city neighborhoods - it is because traffic in that era was terrible, large roadways were seen as the solution, and displacing poor people is a lot cheaper and politically acceptable than displacing wealthy people. the main purpose this "sterile network model of the city" seems to have in your argument is as a vehicle which lets you cast blame retroactively for people simply being too greedy and racist to make good decisions, and then you can make a genetic argument that those same racist, greedy people are blocking Utopia today. this is a fine way to argue for pointing at all the Bastards who stop good things from happening but its a less effective way to understand how events occurred and why people made the decisions they made
Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 19:51
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:
When you read the biography of Henry Ford, it's not far off. What gets me is at this point urban planning that is carcentric vs not is understood and still built that way. I use Des Moines, IA as an example In the past 25 years, there has been a huge amount of development in the small town to the west and north of Des Moines, to the point that Waukee, which was once a small town in the country, is now a forest of cookie-cutter houses and box stores. It's very fractal in the way that the city has continued to sprawl outwards and there has been no gestures towards making the cities walkable or bikeable, other than some bike paths that are designed for recreation and not transportation. I've had to travel to Denver annually since 2016 and have seen the same thing. The city keeps getting bigger towards the east, but it's not getting better. Just more sprawl.
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Jan 18, 2022 21:37
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Someone said it upthread but it keeps happening that way because a lot of people, including people who are not The Billionaires, want it to. Like if the mayor of Des Moines unilaterally upzoned the city and narrowed the streets and put in a bunch of bike lanes he’d probably lose the next election
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Jan 18, 2022 21:53
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:whether a traditional small downtown is abandonded or the walmart is abandoned, either is due to lack of economic vitality Aren't abandoned Walmarts and dead malls mostly a consequence of tax laws that allow you to write off the building so quickly, new commercial buildings are effectively exempt from taxes?
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Jan 18, 2022 21:58
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the mayor of Des Moines also has no ability at all to stop suburban development in Waukee, or (checking wiki) Clive, or any of the 75 other cities or 6 counties which make up the Des Moines metro. as a fairly isolated metro surrounded by open rural land, it is still far more cheap to build on undeveloped land and let people in fifty years figure out the bill this is why im suspicious of upzoning proposals. why would we trust the free market to build affordable housing when what the free market currently builds as affordable housing are cheap cookie cutter suburbs marching out towards exurbia? ah, but better kinds of housing are illegal, surely if we legalize it the market will choose the more expensive, less popular option, for reasons Jasper Tin Neck posted:Aren't abandoned Walmarts and dead malls mostly a consequence of tax laws that allow you to write off the building so quickly, new commercial buildings are effectively exempt from taxes? its a tax-wonky hypothesis for sure but im suspicious of just-so stories like this. it reads more like the journalist saying "check out this weird thing i just learned about called real estate depreciation!" and turned it into an article i think the popularity of malls are explained by it being an automotive mode adapation to building commercial spaces in suburban areas, and dead/abandoned malls are because these spaces gradually reached a saturation point and became overbuilt, at a time when more retailing shifted to online delivery and not in person sales. dead malls, dead big boxes, dead downtowns, all of which are essentially because of a decline in commercial traffic for one reason or another Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 22:01
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Badger of Basra posted:Someone said it upthread but it keeps happening that way because a lot of people, including people who are not The Billionaires, want it to. Like if the mayor of Des Moines unilaterally upzoned the city and narrowed the streets and put in a bunch of bike lanes he’d probably lose the next election Yah, I think part of this is to (at least where I live) is also the lack of mass transit interconnection. I live in Massachusetts but buses outside of 128 are practically non-existent and DO NOT connect to the surrounding communities. I live 5 minutes from a commuter rail, 20 mins from another but there is no bus route connecting these two points which could connect three towns. Even MBTA busses in the Boston area start to really slow down after 7:00 so you are waiting 45 minutes sometimes to get to your apartment. People like the quietness of the suburbs and trees but also want to be able to access everything to your point.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:06
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