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Popular Thug Drink posted:Gentrification is a good thing for society, but a bad thing for individuals. It is indeed important to keep in mind that most gentrification takes the form of the children, grandchildren, and depending on the area the great-grandchildren of the people who were originally living in the place coming back. The people living there pre-gentrification tended to be people who were forced into living there due to some manner of the neighborhood becoming unfashionable or even destroyed, and thus ending up cheaper. It's also common that the area being gentrified had gone on for quite a while with many abandoned or perpetually low-occupancy buildings, since there weren't that many other people available to fill the void once the first population left. This in itself makes the area prone to having people start buying in at dirt cheap prices and often knock down the old buildings. Many of the new "up and coming" neighborhoods in Philadelphia are like that, the current population quite small compared to what the population was in say 1950 or so. And if the existing empty housing was refurbished, there'd be plenty of available housing for the city. Many cities have that issue, with private developers refusing to refurbish or rebuild existing but vacant housing while there's a shortage of current housing. OwlBot 2000 posted:I mean something more drastic, full ecosystem recovery with the planting of trees, native grasses and reintroducing megafauna. Er, you don't need to do that. And a lot of it isn't exactly suitable for trees. Lots of the rest spent several hundred to a few thousand years being kept mostly clear by native populations applying controlled burns.
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Oct 19, 2014 21:29
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OwlBot 2000 posted:I know. I mentioned native grasses to acknowledge that, in fact, much of the continental United States was a prairie ecosystem. I mean that even replanting the trees intentionally in the areas that had trees and deliberately putting out large animals is pointless and unnecessary. It would be a reasonable thing to do if we needed to come up with a make work project if we ever ran out of other things that needed doing like infrastructure ongoing repair, upgrade, and maintenence; but little worth beyond that.
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Oct 19, 2014 21:36
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OwlBot 2000 posted:There are positive environmental impacts (even on a global scale) to be gained by reforestation and wetlands restoration. The former has significant effects for climate change mitigation, the latter has a role to play in reducing the damage done by hurricanes, and ecosystem restoration in New York allowed the state to save $6-8 billion dollars in water filtration. You are also assuming there is a) no inherent value in nature, which is another discussion; b) no psychosocial value to the humans who get to experience wilderness. It is better, generally, to allow natural ecosystem evolution here than to try to immediately step in with an ideal that may not match conditions. Especially when we're talking about covering vast areas and where we truly don't know what the "real" native vegetation was, since we had a century plus of "us" changing what was there, and before that the natives were doing their own management of the environment - and often a gap in between from local native populations dying out or greatly diminishing so they couldn't keep up management and thus having their choices run wild for a bit. Wilderness doesn't need you to exist.
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Oct 19, 2014 23:28
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When you're willing to build multiple 80 story apartment buildings, you can very quickly run out new people ready to move in, dude. Let's say you build an 80 story tower in the style of the mid-century NYC middle class co-ops, like Penn South - you can fairly easy get yourself 27 bedrooms across multiple size apartments per floor, which assuming you're housing married couples per each master bedroom and a kid per each other bedroom, should leave you with about 50 people per floor in a third-manhattan-block building with plenty surrounding open space and a shared play area with the building next to it on the block. Subtract a floor maintenence/skylobby stuff halfway up and use the ground floor for retail/light offices, each of these towers holds 4000 people or so, more if you're willing to build them out a bit more, have higher bedroom counts and lose a little green space at the ground level. A large city might be able to drop in 100 if buildings like these, there's your room for 400,000 people, larger than the population of the city proper of all cities below Minneapolis. You're not going to get so many more people moving to whatever cities to fill them all up and still lack housing in the rest of the city.
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Oct 21, 2014 05:35
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The point is that you can build plenty of housing on small amounts of land and it doesn't need to look like poo poo or be maintained like poo poo. Additionally private developers are tearing poo poo down for high end housing all the time.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:45
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