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Stickarts posted:Yea that is actually a sincerely interesting topic. this is exactly how suburbs work in europe, asia, and places which never developed a strong use of automobiles for commutes. america, canada, australia, etc. somewhat inverted that pattern by using cars to allow the wealthy to flee the city rather than pushing the poor out to the fringes FCKGW posted:i like the suburbs. whats wrong with the suburbs socal has transcended suburbs to become what is called a polycentric metropolis. los angeles is actually the densest metropolis in america, since it's more penned in by geography - la is half the size of the ginormous nyc metro but the far flung suburbs of nyc mean that la actually has 2/3 the population on 1/2 the land. socal operates a lot like a network of suburbs, in that there's no real center of the la metro but a bunch of competing centers and people move between them, rather than the nyc example where you have manhattan, then the boroughs, then the suburbs in a descending hub hierarchy most of america's major 20th century cities are polycentric - dallas, houston, atlanta, etc. denver is a weird exception because there's not much outside of denver to compete with denver boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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as for what's wrong with suburbs, from a purely objective standpoint they're a lot more expensive to live in - a lot of the costs of suburbs are either hidden (auto deprecation, mortgage interest deductions) or deferred (crumbling infrastructure that keeps getting put off for reparing next year, ever increasing traffic that can't be fixed, mono-use land development patters which choke off growth, etc). you may pay higher rent for equivalent square footage of living space in a city, but other costs can be lower if you like living in suburbs, that's great! they're way less efficient than urban areas and even less efficient than rural areas from a resource use per capita standpoint, which is the problem with them. also, if you're poor in a suburb you're barely better off than being poor in the middle of nowhere Forceholy posted:With the rising tide of minorities and lower income people moving out into the suburbs, I don't see your average middle class WASP family moving next to "those people". suburbs become a patchwork of wealthy and poor jurisdictions. just ban the construction of apartments (refuse to zone multifamily dwellings) and problem solved. this is the single biggest reason for minimum lot requirements in residential zoning, it becomes a defacto poor tax to live in an area. well gee it's not our fault you can't afford a house and property taxes on a half acre lot Submarine Sandpaper posted:once the gentrificators have families they tend to flee back to the subs. this is because a lot of millenials would like to live in cities but until cities start building more housing it's difficult to afford the hipster urban lifestyle once you have kids boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 03:04
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i can verify myself, badger of basra, and stichensis as bona fide urban planning thing knowers to field any questions about how it works please though these threads always become dumb slapfights about how living in cities/suburbs is good/bad and you're cool/stupid for living there/not living there so please none of that idiocy thanks
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Dec 2, 2016 03:10
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Furnaceface posted:I have a question for you: will we (North America) ever come around on the Missing Middle argument? can you elaborate? a quick google just turns up logical fallacies and argumentation style definitions Furnaceface posted:Or is it too late and suburban sprawl is here to stay? by and large it's here to stay. there's this thing called urban morpholgy, sometimes called the fabric or framework of a city. basically this is just the collection of relationships that buildings and land uses have to each other, to the street, to how people navigate the landscape, etc. for a very brief example let's look at london vs. los angeles. london is an old, old city, a lot like most major european (and asian, and to a degree african) cities. like, hundreds if not thousands of years old. the predominant way people navigated these cities was on foot. therefore the streets tend to be narrower, the lots (an individual parcel of land on which a building sits) are smaller, etc. these things are really really hard to change. london completely burned to the ground in 1666 and it was mostly rebuilt as it was before the carnage because after you scrape away all the ash and wreckage, people still own the land underneath with legally defined, surveyable boundaries. by and large, once a pattern of land use is established - a morphology - it stays that way more or less over the long term. so now even though people drive cars in london, oftentimes it's easier to walk los angeles is a very young city. it was kinda sorta settled by spaniards in the late 1500s, it wasn't officialy founded until after or during the revolutionary war, and it was a backwater until the late 1800s when americans started showing up there in droves. it really started booming in the mid 20th century, when the predominant mode of transportation was automobiles. so the streets are wide and straight, the lots are somewhat large, and it's a city more or less designed to be navigated by car. the morphology of los angeles is oriented towards an automotive mode (a mode is a method of travel). the traditional american suburb is even more fixed around the automotive mode, often to the point that an automobile is the only practical way to navigate a mid century automotive suburb, which has a morphology oriented towards that mode. so yeah, suburbs are pretty much here to stay that said, there's a nascent and growing field of suburban retrofitting, and there's a lot that can be shift the morphology of automotive suburbs towards being more friendly to the pedestrian mode. but it's expensive and complicated, and takes decades to fix
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Dec 2, 2016 03:29
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FCKGW posted:Maybe it's just that my perception is screwed. I've lived in orange county most my life, which is just one big suburb. There's no "city core" to speak of. everyone has their own perspectives, and every place is different. orange county is very much a polycentric metropolis that was more suburban 40-60 years ago than it is now, and it's still pretty suburban, but i'd argue that orange county is more or less urban now, just a weird sort of low density urban that you need to drive around it. there's a number of centers in orange county - anaheim, huntington beach, irvine, etc - which are small cities in their own right FCKGW posted:I moved out to the Inland Empire about 5 years ago and maybe that whole region could be considered a suburb of LA or OC. Something like 75% of the residents of the IE drive to LA or OC for work every day, myself included. these areas are possibly in the commuter shed of the los angeles metro, as in most people who live there commute to places in the la metro to work, but it could also function as a metropolitan place in itself. i haven't looked at the numbers, but iirc the lower parts of the inland valley are part of the la metro the important term here is metropolitan area, which means basically "a shitload of cities which all act in economic unison". the la metro is huge, way bigger than the city of los angeles itself. the new york metro includes like most of jersey, nearly all of connecticut, probably parts of massachussets even. the city of atlanta is only 400k people, the atlanta-marietta-sandy springs metropolis covers a third of georgia and contains over half of georgia's population, about 5 out of 9 million people. when talking about a city it's pretty easy to mix up the actual jurisdiction of the city of wherever versus the much larger and more important metropolitan area boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 03:34
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Furnaceface posted:
oh, no, this is one of the easiest things to fix in suburbs because you can fix it one building at a time. it's actually pretty organic to take a big old house that nobody can afford to live in and split it into three different units. or knock down some houses and put up duplexes/triplexes/condos/whatever. the big problem here is jurisdictional fragmentation and single use zoning or monozoning jurisdictional fragmentation is a particularly american problem. basically, the police power and the ability to determine land use is only a hundred some odd years old. before then you could build anything wherever unless some local ordinance said you couldn't. around the beginning of the 20th century governments in the western world started realizing it was a cool and useful thing to have a formal process to determine who could build what, where. in the united states this was confirmed in the supreme court decision euclid vs. ambler realty co. which basically said that local governments had a legal right to establish land use zoning. i'm not familiar with the legal history in european nations but it's probably both older and similar. anyway the idea, which the germans came up with, is that you chop up all the land into zones and then you define what can happen in those zones. zoning authority ultimately rests with the local jurisdiction, in the united states either the city or the county. in the united states, the states have the ability to incorporate cities (more or less, there are 50 different ways to do it) as well as the power to establish regional or metropolitan planning bodies. most states have weak or nonexistent regional planning bodies (special exception: oregon, because of a wave of environmentalism in the 1970's). because of the 10th amendment to the us constitution, basically the "keep your nose out of the state's business" clause, the federal government is actually pretty powerless to handle local land use policy, so they don't really matter. the basic chain of land use control in the united states is: states, who can legally create cities and define what cities can do regional/metro planning organizations, if they exist, which can override local control counties, which take over in non-incorporated areas aka. places outside of any city cities, which generally have the bulk of land use control in the usa so one of the basic functions of american cities is to control land use zoning. problem is that it's often fairly easy to incorporate to become a city, and there's a couple good reasons to do so - namely, to gain local control of property tax collection/expenditure and land use zoning. it's a fairly common thing for american metropolitan areas to be split up among dozens if not hundreds of cities, each with its own little fiefdom of land use authority (in the absence of a larger planning organization). you don't see as much of this in european nations because the sensible thing to do is to establish regional planning bodies to coordinate all of these little decision makers. some european nations are so geographically small that it actually makes sense to nationalize planning - england for example has a single national planning authority, with the exception of the london region. but in the usa, you have a thousand thousand little jurisdictions - so we say the jurisdictions are fragmented, and uncoordinated, and largely up to the whims of what kinds of development the local government wants to have this intersects with single-use zoning. a sort of natural, organic way to build cities is to have multiple uses. shops on the ground floor, housing above. housing and shops and businessess and offices all mixed together side by side. you see a lot of this in europe, this is also part of the urban morphology of a city oriented around the pedestrian mode. in america, for various reasons, you tend to see single use zoning - large areas which are just housing, or just offices, or just industry, etc. this is more automotive mode morphology. and one of the things you can do with single use zoning is establish more granular and draconian restrictions on the kinds of things which can be built in that zone. for example, we may define a whole zone as R-1 which means "only single story, single family freestanding structures on lots of no less than .5 acres which cover no more than half the lot" which produces large, relatively expensive, spread out neighborhoods - perfect for keeping out poors. so if you legally bar apartments from being built, you can create that sort of "missing middle" thing you describe. but this is absolutely a legal problem, not a practical or physical problem (to a certain extent - once you start greatly increasing the density of old single family neighborhoods you start running into nasty traffic problems requiring more transportation infrastructure, etc.) i keep saying america but the same is kind of true in canada - canada has one foot on both sides, both there's a ton of land in canada and it's a young country which largely developed in an automotive mode context, but also canadian government has less of a hardon for local autonomy thus there's more weight in regional planning and control, which is an unequivocal good thing when it comes to sane metropolitan areas tldr: Badger of Basra posted:It can be added if your city council is willing. Most aren't. Obama's HUD might have eventually found a way to force them using the Fair Housing Act but rip. this kind of behavior is obviously blatant discrimination, but it hasn't really been hashed out in the courts yet - see the mt. laurel decision for more info boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 03:55
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kunstler is a crazy, crotchety rear end in a top hat but he's completely on point when it comes to the banal soullessness of suburban development his main thesis is that it doesn't have to be this way! we can make suburban areas worth caring about! suburbs aren't inherently bad, they're specifically made that way through low effort laziness this is important because one of the ways of looking at cities is through the psychogeography, or basically the experience of living in a place. everyone has these experiences, even if instead of the piazza del adolescence you and yours hung out in the lot behind the 7/11. the problem here is that if your lived environment sucks and is bland and boring, you start to become decoupled from the very environment you live in and that's not a good thing. like tons of youth rock and roll music is about exactly this concept, how growing up in suburbs is awful and makes you want to smoke weed and break bottles boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 04:08
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Badger of Basra posted:There are a couple interesting counter-examples to this in the U.S. Portland has the Metro Council, which I believe has land use control, and also very strict urban growth boundaries. A big problem in Texas at least is that outside of city limits, developers can sprawl all over the place with the only limit being how much land they can buy. In Oregon (I believe) the areas that can be built up are dictated by the state, and only very very limited growth can happen outside those areas. yeah i mentioned the oregon example - in 1978 oregon passed a statewide measure which empowered very robust metro planning organizations, which is unique in america for a few reasons. and, no matter your thoughts on whether the urban growth boundary is a good or bad thing (i think good on the whole) at least it's against the grain of typical american development patterns
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Dec 2, 2016 04:13
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Badger of Basra posted:This is important to note because there were some very well developed and pleasant suburbs from pre-WWII. Riverside, IL was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the guy who did Central Park, and is one that gets called out a lot as a good example but I'm having a hard time finding decent pictures. Others sprang up around street car lines and are therefore more walkable than you would expect. The lovely suburb we think about today is post-WWII, and is only the way it is because of deliberate decisions and laziness. Some parts of central cities that people love today began as suburbs! yeah, when people talk about suburbs there's a heirarchy ancient suburbs - villas, areas a few miles from the town gates, villages on the other side of the mountain. close enough to be part of the economic activity of a city but physically distinct from a city. typically part of the downtown core nowadays. one notable example is that queen elizabeth 1 decreed for defense and food production purposes that the immediate area outside of the london town gates be kept clear of development, which kinda forced suburbs to exist in early modern london old school greenbelt suburbs - riverside is the main example here. based on ebenezer howard's theory of the garden city. usually for upper middle class people who would commute via old timey steam trains. heydey in the late 1800's. streetcar suburbs - there are lots of these. most of brooklyn, oak park in chicago, hollywood/wilshire in los angeles. you ride on a clang clang streetcar a few miles from the city to your house. all of these nowadays are basically parts of the city, some are still very desirable - such as inman park in atlanta. you tend to see a lot of big old mansions in these neighborhoods, if they've survived. often very walkable and nice places to live. people who live here often don't think of themselves as living in suburbs, they're probably right. typically from 1880-1920 prewar, early 20th century automotive suburbs - most of inner los angeles, the outer reaches of most american cities within the city limits - marked by smaller houses with driveways but no dedicated car storage. you'd drive from your house to the city a few miles away. these places are more notably suburban in character but still usually very expensive today, if they haven't been completely redeveloped, and if they're on the right side of town of course. can also be aggressively lower middle class. the very inner fringe of what are called "inner ring suburbs". from 1920sish and the first big suburban boom / white flight era in america until the late 1950's and the beginnings of the interstate highway system midcentury suburbs - further away, usually outside of the city. levittown, ny (and levittown, pa) are the textbook examples. you can see a marked shift in midcentury domestic architecture here, and a much larger focus on garages as a distinct part of the house. road layouts are sometimes curvilinear, aka confusing, to keep people out. sometimes has a detached garage. tend to be associated with the postwar housing boom. most baby boomers grew up here. mid 1940's-1960's postwar interstate highway suburbs - where you start seeing what most people would call subdivisions. based on the idea of definitely driving a car from your neighborhood on a limited access roadway. garages are a prominent feature of the house. by now we are leaving the inner ring suburbs. lots of split level houses and one of my favorite kitschy domestic architectural styles, cedar modern. definitely part of what's called the "outer ring" suburbs, typically built from the late 60's-mid 90's, but still being built today in many areas exurbs - far flung, full blown suburbs. typically recently built and/or far from the city. very low densities, pretty rural as suburbs go. people who live here often don't think of themselves as suburban. from 1960's till today of course, this is all for white people. people of color in america, especially black people, had a very different experience boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 04:33
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Furnaceface posted:So things can change but its going to be expensive and requires a good chunk of the population to support the moves? And so long as developers make the most money from the bad kind of suburban sprawl this isnt likely to happen I guess. on the one hand, it's within the power of a single individual to knock down an old house and replace it with a duplex. i know a guy who got a HUD loan to build a multifamily dwelling. he took out a $3 million loan, built a 9 unit apartment building, and rents out the 8 units he doesn't live in to pay off the loan. local developers could add even more muscle if the market is there (currently it is, kinda sorta - theres a shitload of luxury condos going up in american cities) on the other hand, this could explicitly be forbidden according to local land use regulations that statutorally prevent multifamily housing in an area so, it's not difficult to slowly add more dense housing to an area... so long as it's legal and the local voters and planning authorities approve Furnaceface posted:OK this might be further from your specialization but how do suburbs handle upgrades to public transit. Stuff like high speed rail seem like super important things we should be working towards but they clash with how things currently operate. Are there ways for the two to work together? high speed rail is totally different from mass transit. completely different. not even nearly the same thing but, it's not impossible to add either bus lines, bus rapid transit, streetcars, or even new metro heavy rail to a suburb. problem here is funding and regional organization. a lot of american cities are taking more steps to add transit to suburban areas - dallas texas is actually hugely progressive in this area with the DART system - but it requires a large amount of local political capital, as well as voters being on board with the idea. traditionally this has been a long shot but in the last 2016 election, even while trump was getting elected, a bunch of american cities voted yes on local transit referendums - there's a specific d&d thread for that, check on page 2. so again the problem is not that it's impossible, it's just so far been improbable. i could do more of an effort post on the topic but right now this little one is all i can manage Badger of Basra posted:This is interesting to me because most Texas cities are still annexing aggressively, so the city limits of Austin are probably 1960s or 1970s development at the absolute earliest. Our prewar suburbs are defined as central city now. yeah texas is in a weird spot because of "cowboy zoning". houston doesn't even do explicit land use zoning! but it's also easier to annex if you don't have to integrate land use plans, and as mentioned dallas is probably the most aggressive developer of mass transit in the last decade. in thirty years texas is going to look very different as the texas triangle grows as a region - iirc houston and dallas-fort worth are like #4 and #6 in america's biggest metros, and the san antonio-austin axis is also getting thicker boner confessor fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 05:02
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Badger of Basra posted:This is a very fun blog if you want to get into suburban architecture: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/ haha this is a great blog, and showcases some of the stupidity of upper middle class suburban housing in terms of just gaudy architecture and unnecessary floorspace my dad made a good amount of money in the 1990's suburban wave in the construction industry. specifically, he hung gutter, and i spent many summers in high school and college working with him nailing drainpipes to houses and lugging sheet metal up ladders and crawling around on roofs. some of our best days were when we worked in middle class subdivisions with very simple houses with non-hipped roofs. those houses were great - two long gutters, front and back, four downspouts one on each corner, you could knock out a whole house in about 90 minutes and do 8-9 houses a day. good money on those days, about $200 a house, half of which was profit some of our worst days were working in fancy rich people subdivisions, usually connected to golf courses. one of these stupid rear end mcmansions would take an entire day to do, just because of all the roof angles and poo poo - like if the roof had 12-15 different hips and angles, that's like 45 minutes per hip to measure and cut the gutter, and measure and cut a downspout, and install the thing, the whole corner of the upstairs master bedroom jut is like 35 feet off the ground, etc. it sucked. it's hell to maintain too, way harder to clean out your gutters when you have like a bunch of little nooks and crannies on your roof. if you have just a 3/2 ranch with non-hipped roof you can just go the gently caress up on your house with a step ladder and clean your gutters out with a simple broom. good luck if the backside of your house needs an extension ladder and a loving pressure washer to get all the built up poo poo out of there another thing we did was gutter cleaning and installing gutter guards, you have no idea how often you'd find so much built up leaves and poo poo in a gutter such that there would often be saplings growing on people's roofs, spreading roots and causing roof damage and poo poo from water overflow. it was kind of easy money, just scooping out decomposing leaves and pinestraw with a gardening trowel so long as you didn't mind you were a few feet away from a break your neck fall. once we spent three days putting copper (!) gutter on this dude's huge mansion with an absurd roofline and he paid us like twelve grand for the privilige - i bought a gaming computer that lasted me from 2001 to 2006 on my cut of that house alone anyway yeah a lot of these houses are nice to look at but they're a son of a bitch to maintain (they're not maintained properly in like nearly all cases) and if you really want to show off how much wealth you have leading to bad decisions, there's lots of far flung suburban houses which will meet that bill. a number of them were visibly crumbling due to poor workmanship, poor design, poor maintenance after not even 10 years - i remember a house whose entire brick porch had separated and was slowly sliding downhill - and this is just an allegory for suburban infrastructure in general, and to be honest was probably a formative experience for me in terms of being curious as to the economics of urban development boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 07:55
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super sweet best pal posted:Companies should experiment with arcological design. Employees could live, dine and be entertained in the same building where they work, cutting down on traffic and shrinking the suburbs. they already do not a single building, but give it time boner confessor fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 09:15
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OneEightHundred posted:Automated carpooling is probably a more practical solution for suburbs where things are very scattered. practical, yes, but unsatisfactory. on the one hand, dispersed automotive centric development patterns should (where they can) be densified for the benifit of people who can't drive like children, the elderly, the disabled, etc. on the other hand, to do so would require dismantling the regulatory enshrinement of local government control and automotive cetric modal transportation across america. currently american cities are slowly pushing out and densifying to be more useful but not fast enough to keep up with demand, meaning as american urban density grows in the suburbs it's snapped up by the youngish middle class etc. just moving the needy further out into forgotten burbs merry exmarx posted:Or, perhaps, buses unfortunately much of american (and other nations) metropolitan development patterns is locked into this dumb suburban bullshit that makes buses largely impractical in a short term timeframe boner confessor fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Dec 12, 2016 |
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Dec 12, 2016 10:08
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Squalid posted:However I think a lot of people here are trying to say that there's nothing inherent about suburbs that makes their schools better, exclusionary zoning which forbids people of a low SES from living in a certain district and driving up the amount of funding per student Rekinom posted:Sure there are private schools in city cores, but now that means paying a premium to educate your kids on top of a premium to live downtown. Far easier/cheaper to just suck it up and commute absurdly long distances. a good number of american cities still have good public schools, or at least good districts. the problem is that these districts may be highly sought after for housing and thus too expensive if you have more than one kid and aren't upper middle class. i live just outside of decatur, ga, heaven on earth for white liberal yuppies, which has an incredible independent city run public school system. as soon as you cross the city line headed south into atlanta housing prices sink rapidly as you pass into the not so good southern atlanta public school districts. headed north and east out of decatur you end up in the dekalb county school districts which are better in the northern part of the county. west of decatur is the best atlanta public school district, with housing prices that range from high to absurdly high boner confessor fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Dec 12, 2016 |
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Dec 12, 2016 17:31
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the other solutions i've heard proposed is that they drive around aimlessly all of the time, or that you rent your privately owned vehicle to the cloud so on the off chance someone needs a ride your car will go take care of that person. or all cars are owned by fleets and during rush hour your wait time for a ride scales with your membership level - uber platinum bumps you to the top of the queue, uber bronze plus might get you home in a couple hours. uber platinum cars are dispatched from the garage, uber bronze plus riders get the older backup cars that smell like stale cigs and have been sitting in a dusty lot miles from town
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Dec 12, 2016 18:49
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Zachack posted:Ideally this would create more pressure on homebuyers to buy closer to hubs, but I think guessing at secondary effects is dangerous on something so far out. the main things which influence home buying are price per size and school district. transportation is much less important once you pass the sanity test of "would my expected commute be reasonable", same as amenities Zachack posted:On parking in cities/land use, while I admit ignorance on permitting & design for multi-story garages, ideally you'd be able to shove more cars into less space and there may be considerations in garages that are made for human needs that wouldn't be present if the only people visiting subfloor 12 are maintenance/troubleshooters and morlocks. the main problem with garages is that they're expensive as gently caress because of the extra building mass you need to hold up a ton of cars
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Dec 13, 2016 00:08
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:know if that was any different back when more people expected to be working in the same place longterm? Like, back in the day company towns/employee housing seem like they were much more of a thing and if you were gonna have the same commute for 30 years half an hour vs. an hour would seem pretty compelling to me, but gently caress letting a job that'll last maybe five years tops affect your thirty-year mortgage. it depends on how far back you want to go but before even 70 years ago the idea of staying in one home for a long time was a very upper middle class thing or something you did if you were tied to some specific plot of land like a sharecropper or homesteader. poorer people would follow work and even the middle class with stable jobs would rent forever. to get a mortgage you needed like 40% down and even then the repayment period was anywhere between 3! and 12 years from private lenders. the 30 year mortgage started out in 1933 with the home owner's loan corporation, a government lending program that was part of the new deal which introduced the then atypical 15 year mortgage likewise there's a lot of variance in the term company town but if you go for sort of a typical company town your housing would be rented to you by your employer, so if you lost your job you'd be expected to basically leave town this is one of the big reasons people are constantly moving to metropolitan areas . if you live in the burbs of wherever you're materially the same off as if you lived in some nice small town somewhere. except you have access to a much larger labor market, so if you lose your job it's much easier to find another one within driving distance without uprooting your family
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Dec 13, 2016 00:26
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the "american dream" as in a stable family life contained within a single family dwelling was far less attainable in american history than people think - because of the relative good times in the long mid-20th century economic boom lots of people were able to afford tract housing when that kind of stability and housing supply hadn't really existed before. the poor and lower middle class of a hundred years ago are subject to a sort of historical invisibility for many reasons, such that americans often have a very skewed perspective on their own social history and grossly overestimate how many people lived in detached single family dwellings really the only thing most people would be aware of are dumbbell tenements of new york because those places became part of family lore as grandpa from the old country worked 18 hour days to feed his 18 kids blah blah. but in most american cities you'd move your family into basically triplexes/lovely townhomes which were cramped and tiny, or even worse you lived with your kids in a boarding house or something. nearly all of this has been torn down because it's rickety and ugly but single family houses for the upper middle class from 100-150 years ago are still really nice and people want to live in them so they still exist and kind of overrepresent what living standards were like at that time
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Dec 13, 2016 00:35
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Lead out in cuffs posted:My impression of housing in North America is also that wood frame was kind of a good idea back when there were still old-growth hardwood forests to cut down (leaving aside the environmental externalities), while modern wood houses basically follow the same construction plans, but with lovely lumber grown in short cycles on plantations. The consequence is that while 100-year-old+ middle-class housing is still good today, the houses built post-WW2 are largely being torn down. no, there's nothing wrong with ballon frame construction or using wood. the problem is cut rate developers who use shoddy materials and cheap labor. this is actually more of a problem for houses built in the 1970's or later, as any house that badly constructed from the 1950's would probably be torn down by now. im not sure where you got the idea that houses are largely being torn down because that's absolutely not true - seems to be rooted in the european cultural preference for masonry in home construction Doctor Butts posted:I think the problems with low income/dense/inner city schools are baked in at this point because it takes a lot more money and resources to make those schools decent compared to their suburban counterparts- and either people can't afford that cost or no one will vote to pay for it. the problem is that a lot of our governmental land use policy, from transportation to zoning to local tax allocation and collection, is intended to put up price barriers to keep the "wrong people" out of certain areas which serves to concentrate poverty into places where it can be easily ignored. it's not a huge coincidence that there's nothing wrong with inner city schools which serve a district full of well-off white people. however, as soon as a district gets to be 'good' housing prices start climbing. this is one of the things busing is intended to counter, defacto segregation by economic means along school district lines boner confessor fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 17:20
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and if you want to talk about sturdy houses, let's talk about one of my fav midcentury modern curios, the lustron house! here's a list of survivors maybe you're thinking these houses look familiar somehow...  all steel panel prefab construction, about 2500 of these bad boys were built in the us before the lustron corporation folded. most of them are still standing, and those that arent were torn down for redevelopment mostly - these things are pretty small by contemporary american standards boner confessor fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 20:00
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suburban virgin posted:It was built to be rotten, and due to the iron grip of petty politicians and rent-seeking overlords there's no way to make it good again. They won't let you. Want to start a dance studio for local kids? Denied. This is a residential area. Convert an empty plot to a garden grow-op? Denied. Agriculture is forbidden within city limits. Want to refurbish your own home? Denied. Can't get the planning permission. lmao that you have some foggy idea of physical determination of urban morphology on life outcomes but you focus on use permits and not, you know, transportation and housing prices leading to concentrations of poverty suburban virgin posted:My point is though that there's no (or I don't believe there is any) switch for INCOME > $Xk = STUPID in human children. It is more than possible for a family with a low income to raise good students. In fact I'm pretty sure another of those predictors of student success is simply whether or not the parents read to the child growing up. So it's not being poor that makes bad schools, exactly. It's living in the sort of lovely neighborhoods that being poor necessitates that makes bad students that makes bad schools. you don't get it. poverty doesn't make kids stupid, poverty in aggregate makes it much harder to give kids the sort of supportive, nurturing environment that helps them do well in life. rich parents can be lovely parents too but it's easier to overcome those obstacles imposed by having lovely parents if you throw money at them. on the converse, poor parents who are excellent and devoted to their children could still have problems because mom works two jobs and is hardly ever around to make sure her kids get help with homework and go to bed at a reasonable hour, or the kids go to a falling apart school with checked out teachers and old books because that's the district they can afford to live in, or a college bound kid gets derailed because he got profiled one night and spent a crucial interview weekend in jail before dad could borrow the money to bail him out, etc. so on
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Dec 14, 2016 17:26
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Assuming a fleet of cars that is usable by the general public, the big changes in my mind would be: 1) not really, because this assumes there's an even demand for car trips during the day. most car demand is unevenly distributed, so way more cars will be in use from 8-11 am on a workday than 3-5 am and those cars will need to be stored somewhere when not in use 2) car ownership won't be banned for a long time if it ever is, there are plenty of places where manually operated vehicles will still be commonplace if not necessary (rural areas, off-road driving, work and service vehicles) and car culture is still huge in america. there's going to be a lot of gearheads and other car guys who might own a self-driver for trips to the grocery store but will cherish their antique muscle cars. poor and old people who own 20+ year old vehicles will be holdouts, etc. privacy advocates who will argue against renting out the basic right of transportation to for-profit companies, etc. and your membership to the self driving car fleet will absolutely be tiered based on a subscription package - take a look at how airlines operate. there's first class, business, coach, and some airlines even let you spend extra to join the group that gets on the plane first. there will be uber platinum with luxury cars and guaranteed five minute wait times even during rush hour, uber gold with complimentary snack and priority in the wait queue, uber silver that's the standard package where you might call your car before you eat breakfast so it arrives by the time you're done, and uber bronze which is lol if you expect to get anywhere on time during peak demand, also you get the oldest cars and there's an extra fee to put anything in the trunk 3) is probably the most immediate and real tangible good of self driving vehicles, because most people can't drive for poo poo
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Dec 14, 2016 23:44
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) personal car ownership will have all sorts of positive externalities. No longer will folks have the albatross of a questionable car hanging over them, wondering if today's the day they'll be fired because the car didn't start. People will have less exposure to salesmen convincing them they can totally afford (nonsensically priced luxury car with terrible loan terms).
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:are employers also going to collectively agree to like stagger work hours or something because like 80% of that driving all happens at the same time, when people actually need their own car, and before and after that there's not like this huge pool of potential commuters who are obliged to get around on foot because all the cars are ensconced in their parking lots driverless. The automation contributes absolutely nothing here. even traditional work hours being loosened won't cut it, humans are diurnal animals and we structure our behavior according to day/night cycles. there will never be an even distribution of trip demand between 2am and 2pm. most mass transit systems shut down for a while at night
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Dec 14, 2016 23:56
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah, you still need enough to meet peak use, but that's less than 100%. Not to mention that, while they still have to be stored, they don't have to be stored in residential or commercial areas, freeing up the more valuable downtown space used for parking. Not sure at what point the additional travel time to the city offsets this, would definitely have to figure it out city by city. I'm not purporting this as a substitute for transit at all, it's certainly not. storing cars far away and short wait times for cars seems like opposed concepts. this is one reason people store their privately owned vehicles inside of their houses, when possible, rather than in a communal lot. cars would also still definitely be stored downtown because you want to have a supply of vehicles as close as possible to where demand is highest, or else you'd get a weird pre-rush hour around 3.30-4 as all the cars start flooding out of their hives in the industrial district or wherever and start filling up downtown streets. not to mention that self driving cars further perpetuates the polycentric distributed metropolis which by its very nature makes downtown less valuable as economic activity doesn't need to be concentrated in any one spot in particular, which is a holdover from the era of predominantly pedestrian modes (like your posts, lmao) Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Obviously I have no proposal for how to structure this fleet service, that's a big project that warrants a lot of thought. I can tell you my vision is not "like airlines", but I'm short on concrete proposals. Seeing as how everyone needs to move around and thus would benefit from economies of scale, it seems like a shoe-in for a government service much like transit is, not that that'll ever happen. That doesn't even rule out the luxury service, but an agent trying to do the most good instead of making the most profit could offer luxury service when it's not busy and restrict the amount of them available when the opportunity cost of a fast luxury car holding 1 would outweigh the added revenue that could be applied to improving the experience for everyone. my only proof here is that the profit motive corrupts everything it touches. i mean you can think of all kinds of products which are somewhat arbitrarily differentiated into tiers based on consumer want rather than need - health insurance, hotels/motels, clothing, even breakfast cereal. fleets as a public service is a plausible idea though boner confessor fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 00:43
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah, you would have a time when all the cars file over to downtown before rush hour starts and away after it ends. Not the worst thing imaginable and it seems a lot better than leaving the cars in the middle of downtown. To me one of the major goals is reclaiming our shared space, and a huge portion of that right now is wasted on huge parking lots. it's wasted on huge parking lots specifically because of development patterns that rely on long distance automobile travel to work. the idea that we can all commute via auto but then the cars just sort of disappear into a pocket dimension is like some kind of diet fad as related to urban planning. the best and most reliable way to reduce parking lots and land devoted to roadways is to reduce the use of automobiles to navigate a space Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't think any system that still uses cars at all or even attempts to retrofit "far" suburbs is going to avoid promoting that same polycentric metropolis. Obviously we can get rid of zoning laws that prevent corner stores on residential streets and whatnot, but that doesn't matter if there aren't enough people with easy enough access to make such a store viable. easy access to stores involves increasing density. any system which makes it easier to travel by auto is by its nature antithetical to increasing density, specifically because of the amount of space cars take up in motion and standing still Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Your conditions are too stringent. One guy going to work at 8 and another at 9:30 both contribute to rush hour traffic, but might have their needs fulfilled by the same car, which now does not need to be stored in any of the valuable space close to either workplace. The point is that the commuters don't own the cars, there's storage somewhere of a single pool of cars that is the size of the number of concurrent drivers, not the total number of drivers as it is now. The "self-driving" part doesn't really matter here, it's the same advantage a fleet of taxis has over individual car ownership. land isn't all that valuable in the polycentric metropolis - right now i work in a low rise office building surrounded by half empty parking lots. there are so many low rise offices in the modern american metropolis and clustered around edge cities that often they sit vacant for long periods of time. the idea of everyone driving everywhere and why that's so revolutionary to 20th century urban development is that by making transportation extremely cheap (comparatively to prior modes) it makes land equally cheap by increasing the amount of land a person can reasonably access. this assumption that land in the metropolis is valuable simply doesn't hold true. to that end it's a lot more convenient for people to have exclusive access to a car a short walk away in a parking lot rather than wait in line for a car to show up anywhere in the next 5-45 minutes Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yes, a big part of the goal to me is to reclaim space currently used for car storage and turn it into worthwhile places that people might visit on purpose. It's a lot more than parking garages, but huge multi-acre parking lots which I'd like to replace. since you mentioned kunstler i think you're placing too much emphasis on one of his pet ideas, the placelessness of nowhere. which is a problem for sure, but it's more of an architectural problem than an economic problem. parking lots are ugly and horrible but they serve a useful economic function, which is supporting mass automotive mode infrastructure and travel. like there's really no way to divorce local storage ofsingle-occupant vehicles from widespread use of single-occupant vehicles. i appreciate you're taking a much more prosocial angle when advocating for the self-driving fleet by thinking of the impact on urban morphology! but the price of land, the rent, is determined by its highest and best use. the reason you see ugly lots or garages on valuable downtown land is because they themselves provide a valuable service, and 'storing automobiles' is actually a pretty profitable and economically useful activity. i dont see this fundamental use changing that much if we assume a self driving fleet - it's more plausible to me that cheaper bulk lots on the periphery would be used for overnight and low-priority storage, but you'd definitely see garages downtown and in wealthy areas to cater specifically to the uber platinum class users who don't want to wait more than five minutes, because they can afford to just own a car
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Dec 15, 2016 01:25
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i want to talk a second to address the bid rent curve, which is where we get the idea of "valuable downtown land" basically back in the day cities were mostly but not all the time monocentric, as in has a downtown AKA the central business district. this cbd, in theory, is centered on the import/export node - the place where business happens in abstract. the docks, which merchants want to be near, or the train station, or the bridge across the river, what have you. there can be more than one node. point is that there is a spot where everyone wants to be, and then locations of increasing distance from that spot bid rent theory states that people will bid for access to that spot. wall street in manhattan was and is an important cbd, so you see ever higher buildings going up around the stock exchange to house all the wealthy bankers and stockbrokers who need to be able to get to the stock exchange. then close to that are the wealthy people's houses so they dont have to commute far to work, then the middle class people, then so on etc. the link explains all this. you end up with the classic idea of a city skyline, that is the highest buildings in the center then tapering out in a curve (ignoring geography etc. this is a perfectly spherical economy in a vacuum ok) what mass automobile use did was introduce the polycentric metropolis, which means you can just set up a node wherever. usually these develop around important transportation hubs like interchanges. then you end up with the edge city, which is like a whole new city that pops up with offices and poo poo out in the burbs somewhere. now people aren't driving from the fringes to the core, they're driving from somewhere in the metro to an edge city and back. this really flattens out the bid rent curve and creates varying areas where it's higher, lower, gradually tapering off as you go to the suburbs to the exurbs. this is why downtown land isn't so valuable nowadays in most places, because downtown has to compete with a ton of other little downtowns the most classically monocentric cities in america are either old (boston, nyc, chicago) or constrained by geography (san fran, nyc) and so they exhibit polycentric behavior, but not too much. on the contrary more contemporary american cities, very car based cities, are polycentric as hell - los angeles, dallas-fort worth (two cities in one!), atlanta, houston etc. where each of these cities has an anemic downtown and then a ton of other little edge cities which collectively have far more economic activity then downtown
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Dec 15, 2016 01:33
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next this guy is gonna accuse people of white knighting unworthy children e: newt gingrich alt spotted
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Dec 15, 2016 05:43
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wow, dispersing poverty and championing minority achievement? what a horrible dystopia
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Dec 15, 2016 08:00
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Doctor Butts posted:boner touched upon something that I think dovetails into the zoning arguments: I personally believe that metropolitan areas should be made more monocentric. This is a big reason why cars are relied upon so much and why mass transit kind of sucks. well in the us it's not possible because there's generally no robust regional planning bodies in place who can coordinate economic, land use, and transportation policy across hundreds of independent jurisdictions on a multiple decade time span while also counteracting the effects of federal policies which generally favor the automotive mode and single family detached structure housing this seems a little counterintuitive because we haven't seen a model of it yet in the states but polycentric metropoli can very well be robust urban centers with good mass transit. look at tokyo - where is "downtown" tokyo? polycentrism arose due to mass automobile use in the states in the mid 20th century but you can knit it all together with better transit, if sufficient political will can be dredged up. happily this is the direction a lot of american cities are going - dallas and los angeles are both pursuing transit expansion with success. edge cities in DC are usually clustered around a transit stop too, which is an example of value capture boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:kinda chancy this'll continue with the Metro nigh-unusable for anyone who needs a reasonable expectation of getting to work on time though lol it's amazing how hosed DC is with its not-state weird limbo status and the fact that two states and loving congress have a say in WMATA funding. god drat like as bad as atlanta is (two now three counties and scattered cities providing most of the funding, a hostile state government that refuses meaningful funding and allows non-paying counties to have voting reps on the MARTA board for some idiot reason) at least nothing goes above the state level
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Dec 15, 2016 19:55
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Badger of Basra posted:???????? haha no, but they get to vote on budget issues for a system which only marginally runs in their counties if at all (like special commuter routes that cross county lines and aren't part of GRTA for some reason) wouldn't be suprising otherwise tho considering how utterly hostile the state government is to the city of atlanta and everything to do with it
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Dec 15, 2016 20:03
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Doctor Butts posted:You don't really get walkable or bikeable areas with how a lot of the polycentric metro areas are coming into play: they're designed with automobiles in mind as the primary form of transit: because that's how most people will have to get to their jobs. 'designed' is a strong word, places built upon the mass use of the automotive mode sort of just flop out of organic, chaotic outgrowth polycentrism isn't necessarily dependent on automobiles though - cities as we know them were able to disperse because of the advantages of automotive travel and develop polycentrically (in a modern western context, there's a lot of weird development patterns out there in different cultures across history) but polycentric metropoli aren't necessarily locked exclusively to the automotive mode. a lot can be done to make them more pedestrian friendly in patches and loose networks - think of major transportation routes across the metropolis as like a spider's web, where if you live in the gap between strands you'll probably need a car. but this is more of a function of political will and available resources to build expensive transit and redevelopment projects, so la~
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Dec 15, 2016 20:59
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here's an example of what i'm talking about. let's say you're an alien who has never heard of new york city or tokyo. someone hands you a transit map of new york city and asks where the center of the city is well, it's probably that area in the lower left where all of the lines converge and mix together. there's a decently strong hub-and-spoke system here, and a couple of identifiable central areas that are very important. here's the tokyo map  i mean the center of this map is clearly more important than the edges but, which part is most important? where is the most central spot? it's all kind of mixed in there like spaghetti, and there's a lot of cross connections on the outside too tokyo is a unique example of dense polycentrism because it developed as a network of collected villages from hundreds of years ago, then 70 years ago the whole area was totally wiped clean and brand new rebuilding could take place. the redevelopment of tokyo was largely executed by firms that dealt in both building transit lines and developing land - they would buy a bunch of land, build trains along that land, then develop the now more valuable land around the train station. the same thing was done on a smaller scale in america with streetcar suburbs. turns out you make a shitload of money doing this, and it also produces extremely dense and walkable urban areas - and since there were so many firms doing this in tokyo, there were lots of different lines which all kind of connect together running from historical place A (now under rubble) to historical place B (mostly destroyed) and so on, reproducing and then further propogating that regional polycentrism a lot of world cities that are giant and experienced much of their growth in the 20th century - beijing, mexico city, seoul - have this same sort of thing going on, if not as strong, because really the development of polycentric cities in america, canada, to a lesser extent austrialia, came about at the same time that automobiles came about, and so these car nations went off and did their own thing, because it's easier to develop low density polycentrism with mass auto use but you can get dense polycentrism with sufficient investment in mass transit from public or private sources (or you just end up with huge traffic problems - mexico city, beijing, etc. i'd put moscow on this list because it has awful traffic but i'd argue it doesn't fit the criteria of 20th century polycentric)
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Dec 15, 2016 21:25
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Tokyo is more distributed than NYC yes but uh one of those is a proportional map of the land with the subways overlaid and one is a transit line map where all lines run perfectly straight at 45 degree angles and all stops are spaced equidistantly for maximum readability; it bears only the faintest relation to the actual layout of Tokyo (and is an extremely poorly designed attempt at what the DC metro map does IMO) good point and my bad, i was just hastily grabbing images, but really what i was getting at is the lack of a defined, singular center. any point along that inner ring could credibly be the cbd new york, being one of america's oldest cities and tokyo being (structurally) much younger, there's a different sort of development pattern that took hold as they were built up over different periods in history, leading to a more easily defined center. this is not to say one is better than the other, just pointing out differences
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Dec 15, 2016 22:18
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:I'm not actually aware of any cities that have multiple discrete downtown areas with heavily developed infrastructure and high-rises and all; atlanta is one off the top of my head  far left is buckhead, center right is midtown, far right is downtown, the pair of buildings between them including the brown pointy building are on north ave. which is the traditional dividing line between midtown and downtown. all of atlanta is on bedrock so there's no geological reason for this clustering unlike downtown/midtown in nyc. there's only like a half hour walk between midtown and downtown so you may count those as one district but buckhead is definitely a discrete business district with high rise office and residential. headed north from there you hit sandy springs, an edge city, sometimes hilariously referred to as "perimeter center"  until recently that pair of towers were the tallest towers in america outside of an incorporated place (they were annexed a few years ago)
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Dec 15, 2016 22:31
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Honestly, NYC does kind of have multiple centers, at the very least midtown vs downtown is pretty distinct and both are filled with commuters during the day. Brooklyn's is smaller but it has one as well. All of them have pretty dense train clusters on that map. there's no binary betwen mono/polycentric and it's a spectrum, but nyc is very heavily mono just because arguably you can walk from midtown to downtown to brooklyn if you really had to. beacsuse of the rapid nature of urban growth in the modern era all cities are developing multiple centers in a way that they historically did not (again, talking about the western world here) but if there was a scale of major american metros going from monocentric to polycentric i'd say (looking at the top 11 to include the bay area) nyc > dc / boston > philly > chicago > miami > san fran> la > dfw / atlanta / houston
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Dec 15, 2016 22:38
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Badger of Basra posted:I have no idea how that is supposed to work the idea, i think, is that people will otherwise buy older homes and tear them down for infill/renovation. so by preventing anything of the sort from happening at least you're slowing down the pace of growth. i get it, gentrification is a real and ugly thing which has so far encouraged limited response except for people tut tutting and exclaiming how much gentrification sucks and is sad and all. so some folks are trying to use historic building codes and preservation to try to prevent gentrification, which is a bad and inappropriate strategy but also their hearts are in the right place and this is the kind of thing a grassroots group would resort to in the absence of local political support. like it's largely ineffective but it's something Badger of Basra posted:But a neighborhood with single family houses close to downtown in a growing city seems like a perfect recipe for rising land/home values regardless of what you can build there because more people are going to want to live in those houses. yeah. gentrification is sort of a horrible birthing process, it sucks and it's painful but it's necessary in a weird way that's going to cause a lot of distress. i started typing up an effort post but i can't possibly do it justice right now for the thread so in a one sentence summary: gentrification is the inevitable consequence of white flight and as much as it sucks and should be mitigated via local policy, ultimately it is an economic inevitability and all white millenials - yes, even you reading this - are gentrifiers. unless you live in the burbs. and then, in a weird way, good for you?
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Dec 16, 2016 08:40
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah it does, because you no longer have to pay a shitload of unionized public sector employees to have a bus service. I'm about to blow everyone's mind: self-driving is good for public transit because it plays on transit's strengths (professionally maintained and regularly replaced fleet vehicles that do a ton of miles) while nearly eliminating public transit's biggest problem (you need a lot of expensive operators). Eliminating those labor costs (and the pension liabilities of future drivers) makes public transit expansion something you can do much faster, cheaper, and without the threat that the entire system will collapse in a recession. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8QRExBfQhs the biggest movers of mass transit are trains, which have been automatable since the 70's. the problem here is convincing people to give up the automotive mode or personal car use for getting onto a bus onto a train to take them near where they want to go just to get onto another bus, etc. which gets at the idea of transit just being something that dense, walkable areas can do well, which means that you already have options for transportation versus always choosing a car, etc. like you're right that putting bus drivers out of work could lower the cost of a mass transit via bus trip, but price isn't the biggest concern here versus just the time spent waiting and using the system, and unless we could flood the streets with robobuses that collect people onto trains (plausible) this is more likely to have some marginal input into a transit system's budget rather than the likelihood of attracting comparative new users and thus reducing relative congestion
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Dec 16, 2016 09:17
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The Oldest Man posted:Inflexible expensive labor forces become a bottleneck during budget squeezes. The two things are intrinsically connected. the bigger problem is the budget squeeze
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Dec 19, 2016 02:11
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Doctor Butts posted:I am not certain your brand new suburb had streets as straight as that, as narrow of a lot, and a detached (if any) garage. as a note, 'gridlike' or 'grid based' streets do not have to be straight. that's more appropriately a 'gridiron'. gridlike streets have a lot of interconnectivity and small blocks, as opposed to superblocks with dendritic streets different kinds of street layouts (this is not inclusive just the first thing i googled)  grid on the left, more dendritic large block 'grid' on the right 
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Dec 19, 2016 21:10
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