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I’ve been seeing a decent amount of people touching on urban planning in various threads, the closest thing that we really have to a dedicated urban planning thread is the traffic engineer thread in ask/tell, but that is specifically about roads, and to a lesser extent, some bus and a bit about light rail. What this thread is about is a comprehensive discussion about all things relating to urban planning. From mixed use developments, public transit, private transit (cars, bikes) walking, and taxation, funding, etc. If it relates to how and why your city/town’s infrastructure is organized the way it is, or should be, this is the place for it. To give a bit of an overview of terminology that’ll likely get used in this thread: Rolling Stock – The term used to describe the engines/cars used by metro lines and regional rail. Light Rail – Any number of lightweight (compared to full scale metro lines) rail vehicles. Trams, street cars both fall in this category. Sometimes they have dedicated rights of way, sometimes they share lanes with surface traffic. They generally have the capacity of slightly more than an articulated bus but have dedicated stations built into the side or middle of roads. A few light rail systems also have underground routes (see Boston/Philadelphia). Ones without dedicated rights of way usually suffer worse performance than a standard bus as any traffic or blockage in their path cannot be avoided, and will need to be towed/cleared.  Metro Lines – Above or below ground heavy rail with short headways and reserved rights of way of usually 10 minutes or less. These are typically the most robust (and expensive) part of a city’s transit system capable of carrying the most people. Oftentimes other local transit like buses have routes designed to feed into the stations.  Regional Rail – Heavy rail mass transit for longer range distances. Typically stations are placed significantly further apart and headway is much higher than on metro lines or inner bus lines.  Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) – Systems above ground designed to imitate full scale metro lines or regional rail. They will usually have dedicated roadways or dedicated lanes and when they come into intersections with other private vehicles will often get priority signaling to get them through the intersections first. They can provide a means for a city to transition to a full on metro rail system later, by using existing buses purchased for intracity connections instead of buying new rolling stock.  Transit Pass/Transit Card – NFC or magstripe cards that allow the rider to purchase daily/weekly/monthly passes or load up an electronic wallet to make payment and transfer between transit lines quicker and payment easier.  Transit Orientated Development – Urban development focused around transit hubs. You’ll typically see talk about this relating to development around subway stations, regional rail stations, or bus rapid transit stations. Basically a lot of buildings go up near these stations which allows quick and easy access to mass transit lines, rather than building wherever and trying to bus people into the metro lines, or using park and rides to get people onto the metro system. New Urbanism – The current rage in urban planning circles. This focuses on dense, walkable neighborhoods with mixed-used zoning and midrise buildings with retail first floors and commercial/residential upper floors. Sufficient green spaces are also heavily favored as are access to public transit and bike/bus lanes. Suburbia - A blasted hellscape of cookie cutter mcmansions surrounded by miles and miles of endless highways. NIMBY - An approach landowners take to block nearby developments. Oftentimes used to block the building of affordable housing for lower income people. Some urbanist content creators to follow: Not Just Bikes: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes Armchair Urbanist https://www.youtube.com/@alanthefisher City Nerd https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd Strongtowns https://www.youtube.com/@strongtowns The Aesthetic City https://www.youtube.com/@the_aesthetic_city Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Apr 25, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2018 20:34
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To go into a bit of detail, NIMBYism is dramatically affecting the ability of millenials to purchase homes and drastically driving up rents. Boomers, who have no desire to see any new construction near their old homes, are blocking many projects, and the projects that are going up tend to be "luxury" developments focused on the top 10% or above of earners. https://fundrise.com/education/blog-posts/the-big-misunderstanding-behind-todays-millennial-housing-crisis Today there is nearly no housing stock available for first time home buyers in many major cities or suburbs, and those that do exist have absurd travel times to the jobs in the city thanks to next to no non-car infrastructure investments in the past few decades. The US is pretty much on a crash course in the next decade or two where rents will exceed 50% of monthly income for people all over the country. New york is already at that level.
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Aug 1, 2018 20:46
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Nitrousoxide posted:Suburbia - A blasted hellscape of cookie cutter mcmansions surrounded by miles and miles of endless highways. suburbs are not synonymous with sprawl. the way that suburbs are built in heavily automotive environments (ones exclusive to the automotive mode through such bad practices as exclusionary zoning) are certainly much worse than suburbs as they are built elsewhere with less emphasis on requiring a vehicle to navigate. contemporary dutch suburbs with integrated cycling infrastructure are of similar density but vastly different in use than contemporary american infill suburbs top picture: good suburbs! bottom picture: not so good suburbs!   in the american tradition suburbs were originally rooted in the 19th century garden city concept and as late as the 1930s idea suburban developments adhered to this model. but then you had frank lloyd wright and his concept of usonia which turns out was way easier to implement from a policy standpoint and far more attractive to profit seeking developers and, well, this happens  transportation IS land use. land use IS transporation. and in the absence of a robust comprehensive policy to handle both simultaneously at a regional scale, you get scattered incoherent growth Nitrousoxide posted:Boomers, who have no desire to see any new construction near their old homes, are blocking many projects, and the projects that are going up tend to be "luxury" developments focused on the top 10% or above of earners. NIMBYism as an acute phenomenon is in my opinion more of a symptom than a cause. the roots go deeper than this in the united states, gentrification can be seen as a sort of backlash - the other side of the pendulum swing - from the midcentury suburban boom and white flight Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Aug 1, 2018 |
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Aug 1, 2018 20:51
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Urban planning would be a lot easier if we could just get rid of all these obnoxious people who keep ruining everything.
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Aug 1, 2018 22:52
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Urban planning is where Marxists go to die.
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Aug 1, 2018 22:54
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urban planning is anthropogenic global warming on the local scale, the problem is obvious and so are the solutions but lmao at figuring out how to collectively persuade all the actors involved who have an incentive to gently caress everything up to knock it off until well after everything is irreversibly hosed up
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Aug 1, 2018 22:57
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This is a well-timed thread for me! As of today it looks like the Austin City Council is going to shut down the 4-year, $9 million Land Development Code rewrite: https://twitter.com/AKMcGlinchy/status/1024715991144701957 Depending on who you ask, this plan was either rezoning all of Austin to be like Manhattan or a somewhat decent plan that might maybe improve some things at the margins. That gets to the plan's real problem, which is that it wasn't really going to change anything and so the people who should have been excited about it weren't, and the people who were going to scream bloody murder about it did so anyway. The planners made a ton of concessions to anti-density groups and then they came out very strongly against it regardless. At this point I think we'd be better off if the Council just bumped up the floor on every single residential zone so that you could build at least 2 units on every single lot in the city, if you wanted to. It would be a lot simpler and the effects would be much clearer.
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Aug 1, 2018 23:21
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Badger of Basra posted:Depending on who you ask, this plan was either rezoning all of Austin to be like Manhattan or a somewhat decent plan that might maybe improve some things at the margins. That gets to the plan's real problem, which is that it wasn't really going to change anything and so the people who should have been excited about it weren't, and the people who were going to scream bloody murder about it did so anyway. The planners made a ton of concessions to anti-density groups and then they came out very strongly against it regardless. yeah someone put flyers on everyone's front door in my neighborhood talking about how some adjacent parcels could be rezoned as a light industrial use which allows for emissions generating manufacturing, junkyards, or halfway homes!!! yeah i just bet someone's going to open a widget factory in the middle of this residential neighborhood and not like a dog daycare or self storage or something charrettes are a vital part of the local planning process but at the same time: gently caress charrettes entirely, and gently caress public comments too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYNDssdsVnM&t=31s
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Aug 1, 2018 23:35
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What's a charrette? Wikipedia is not very helpful in this context.
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Aug 2, 2018 02:07
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Spacewolf posted:What's a charrette? Wikipedia is not very helpful in this context. It's a thing people in a neighborhood or community will do to lay out how they would like their community to develop. It's usually roundtable and facilitated and completely useless because the wonderful ideas that emerge will either be: A) ignored by local city councils B) ignored by developers C) ignored by the wealthy homeowners who didn't participate in the Charette but will screech and wail and scream whenever someone proposes adding a granny suite to their basement
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Aug 2, 2018 02:19
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Spacewolf posted:What's a charrette? Wikipedia is not very helpful in this context. It's a public input activity, usually for a specific area/project (like if you're building a new park, or redeveloping a brownfield site, or something like that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette The ideal is that people who are affected by the project show up, say what they would like to see in the project, and then whoever is designing it (the City, an architecture firm, etc.) takes that into account and works on the design. This usually runs into two problems (in my opinion): 1) You only get a subset of people - often, the people who show up already hate [thing] and don't want it to happen, period. You can try to appease them but you just end up watering down the benefits of your project chasing these people who were never going to like it anyway. 2) You don't get input from the people who will actually be living in/working in/visiting the project in the future when it's done. This can lead to design elements that the people around the project like, but the people within the project do not. (2) is also a problem with planning more generally that is hard to solve. In participatory planning, the voices of the people who already live in a place are the only ones that are heard. Which is fine I guess, but it can perpetuate exclusion - of course the rich people who live in an exclusive neighborhood are going to give input that leads to the neighborhood staying exclusive.
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Aug 2, 2018 02:20
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Badger of Basra posted:At this point I think we'd be better off if the Council just bumped up the floor on every single residential zone so that you could build at least 2 units on every single lot in the city, if you wanted to. It would be a lot simpler and the effects would be much clearer. https://www.whereyoulivetn.com/2017/05/16/nashville-hprs-what-should-i-know/ Everyone mocks and hates on the tall skinnies but IMO they're one of the best things going for Nashville right now, at least in terms of allowing densification of core neighborhoods. However, I'm betting the thousands of mini-HOAs are going to lead to a lot of nasty legal fights, they should really just mass-subdivide those lots.
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Aug 2, 2018 02:40
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One thing that must be said about the YIMBY movement in its current form is that it is predominately leftist at its core, not libertarian. By empowering both public and private interests to construct more new homes where they're most needed, the housing crisis is diminished. By empowering renters against scummy landlords and taxing vacant homes at a higher rate, the housing crisis is diminished. Both construction and protection are necessary. Urban NIMBYs (almost always home owning Boomers and GenXers who self-label as liberal or progressive) appropriate the language of affordability to rail against profit seeking developers, but never seem to get around to fight for affordability in their neighborhood once the latest multifamily menace is defeated and quickly shift into racial dog whistles ("just think of the neighborhood character!") if confronted on it. An old guard of genuine leftists also embrace NIMBYism on the maximalist premise that no new housing must be built that isn't affordable and I'm not sure how to get through to them that we can walk and chew gum at the same time... To be fair to the older generations, I suspect many currently comfortable, "non-political" Millennials are going to exhibit the same status quo bias as they age. Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 03:19
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Thufir posted:legally each owner only owns the structure, and all of the yard etc is owned in common by an HOA of 2. haha christ that sounds like hell Cugel the Clever posted:One thing that must be said about the YIMBY movement in its current form is that it is predominately leftist at its core, not libertarian. to add to this, a lot of community organization and local landowner politics in urban areas (cough white yuppies cough) came out of freeway revolt movements in the 1960s-1980s. a lot of the same people who were organizing to fight freeway expansion, "slum clearance" and to protect their big old rickety victorian homes are now - or their children - the same people protesting what they see as unsustainable encroachment into their territory NIMBYs definitely have the property value argument to back them up. but also, there are very valid concerns related to community resources like water and traffic which would be stressed by additional residents. and also not a small bit of racism. which, too bad, because the population is only growing and so are cities, and many american cities need to be denser. but in my opinion it's often too simple to reduce boomer NIMBY protests to sheer concern for property values or low key exclusionary turf wars Cugel the Clever posted:To be fair to the older generations, I suspect many currently comfortable, "non-political" Millennials are going to exhibit the same status quo bias as they age. absolutely they will. you're going to see people complaining about how this used to be a quaint neighborhood of three story condo blocks before these ten story assholes started showing up
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Aug 2, 2018 04:22
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Cugel the Clever posted:One thing that must be said about the YIMBY movement in its current form is that it is predominately leftist at its core, not libertarian. By empowering both public and private interests to construct more new homes where they're most needed, the housing crisis is diminished. By empowering renters against scummy landlords and taxing vacant homes at a higher rate, the housing crisis is diminished. Both construction and protection are necessary. While I agree fundamentally I think you are underestimating the leftist support for harmful NIMBY policy. No poo poo when you demolish somebody's old rent controlled building to put it new higher density housing stock, those people are going to have a hard time finding an equivalent place to live. Especially when new construction is being blocked by everybody else too. In a lot of ways its just as fygm as the single-family home owner who is terrified of declining property values wiping out his wealth. Almost everybody acknowledges you have to build more IN THEORY. It's just that everybody wants it to happen someone else. It's really hard to wrap our minds around the complex fundamental causes of things like housing shortages and rising rents. Really easy to just blame it on the Chinese and other nebulous foes.
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Aug 2, 2018 06:08
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Squalid posted:While I agree fundamentally I think you are underestimating the leftist support for harmful NIMBY policy. It seems like the general concept of not in my backyard would not follow any particular politics. Anyone would object to things being near them that they expected to be dangerous or harmful or noxious or financially harmful or change the character of their area in a way they object to. What hits which of those criteria would change a ton depending on political outlook or philosophy.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:43
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luxury handset posted:haha christ that sounds like hell NIMBY, and the house as the primary savings vehicle, is in large part why only "Luxury" housing is going up all over the country and the only way to get an affordable house is to get one that is 50+ years old and falling apart. Any updates to the neighborhood have to bring up the home value or everyone's major investment for retirement looses value. To a certain extent I don't begrudge people protesting stuff that lowers their property values, because many (and maybe even most millennials) are totally unable to do any proper retirement savings. But it just creates a continuous upward pressure for prices which drives a higher percentage of the population out of owning and into renting. That, of course, also drives up renting prices which makes even renting unaffordable for people. Personally, I think Japan takes a better approach to housing (aside from bullshit "key money") where houses are not seen as investments, and in fact deprecate almost completely after ~30-40 years. There's no vested interests in constant upward pressure to the housing prices in that environment because you house is not a savings vehicle, but a way to pay less than you would to rent in exchange for making moving harder. It also allows for major updates to happen to the buildings every half century rather than trying to renovate extremely old buildings.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It seems like the general concept of not in my backyard would not follow any particular politics. Anyone would object to things being near them that they expected to be dangerous or harmful or noxious or financially harmful or change the character of their area in a way they object to. yeah. no matter what your political leanings are, people get real stubborn when it comes to changes where they personally live Nitrousoxide posted:NIMBY, and the house as the primary savings vehicle, is in large part why only "Luxury" housing is going up all over the country and the only way to get an affordable house is to get one that is 50+ years old and falling apart. the problem with this argument is that it assumes people are looking to cash out their homes eventually and downsize. a ton of old people want to die in their homes and keep the homes within the family - this makes the whole "property value" aspect of NIMBYism fall apart. this argument is also in opposition to the gentrification of homeowners - wouldn't people like to be displaced by a mechanism that causes their equity to balloon in value? also when you look at mechanisms like prop 13 in california (an extremely bad idea) it torpedoes the incentive people have to sell their homes, making californian homeowners more agnostic to the value of their home as compared to the immediate environmental conditions around their homes (traffic, crowds, air quality, view etc.) i'm not saying that no NIMBYs ever cared about their property values, of course they do. but it's more complicated than that also when it comes to why our for profit housing development system preferences luxury housing - you get far more return on your investment if you're selling new homes to people of means than people without. our system has frankly sucked rear end always at providing housing to the poor, and starter homes have pretty much always been shoeboxes on the fringe of development (in the modern context). if you're a millennial who wants to buy a starter home and you're unwilling to budge on a walkable neighborhood, of course you are going to get an old well worn house. that's what i did, my house is older than my parents. but i had the option of moving far off to the exurbs and paying less for a brand new, larger house, and this is an option that millennials are taking just as often as not
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Aug 2, 2018 15:19
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in fact i think it is important to distinguish which american cities one has in mind when talking about housing prices, gentrification and so on. even among the ten largest american metros these problems are different in scale - san francisco, new york, and los angeles are red hot glowing they are so over heated (and san francisco isn't even in the top ten for population!), where on a lower tier of gentrification and pop growth are cities like miami and DC, and on an even lower tier still, dallas and atlanta. denver is probably facing more acute gentrification and housing pressure than houston despite being a third of the size. and, god help you in portland, oregon. and then there are perfectly fine, smaller, less prestigious metros that have little in common with the problems facing the biggest metros - think minneapolis, charlotte, omaha, etc. there are plenty of snow belt cities that would love to be inundated by millenials none of this is a minimization of the problems facing medium or low income residents of los angeles or new york. but because of the large size of these cities and their outsized cultural influence, they cast shadows in which the problems of smaller cities are obscured. which means it can be easy to overlook the structurally similar but acutely different problems of growth in the 21st century metro as those problems may present in cities like phoenix, tampa, or columbus, ohio. or cities with a more unique set of problems, like detroit
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Aug 2, 2018 15:53
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Badger of Basra posted:At this point I think we'd be better off if the Council just bumped up the floor on every single residential zone so that you could build at least 2 units on every single lot in the city, if you wanted to. It would be a lot simpler and the effects would be much clearer. Without a broader plan in place though, you end up with something like some of the neighborhoods in San Diego, where you can tell that single family houses were just subdivided and additional structures built on the lot behind them, etc., until you have like 5 units on what used to be a small residential lot, and all the parking issues that come with that because no one bothered to consider transit issues that increased density brings. Austin has a housing problem, for sure, but that will sort itself out if it would bother to properly address its transportation issues.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:23
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To those wanting something a bit more visual, there is a guy on youtube by name of donoteat1 (who is apparently also a goon!) using Cities: Skylines to explain various urban planning concepts. So far he has done a video about the problems of free parking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk) and why urban freeways destroy communities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU).
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Aug 2, 2018 18:51
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Nitrousoxide posted:
Mah Home Values!!  is the free space of NIMBY bingo. It's just an excuse for not liking something people have already decided they don't like and it's almost certainly an unverifiable claim. IMO it's mostly bullshit since people wanting to build new stuff in your neighborhood is likely a good sign for property values, unless it's a highway bypass or garbage dump or something.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:02
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OscarDiggs posted:To those wanting something a bit more visual, there is a guy on youtube by name of donoteat1 (who is apparently also a goon!) using Cities: Skylines to explain various urban planning concepts. So far he has done a video about the problems of free parking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk) and why urban freeways destroy communities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU). hello i made this AMA
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Aug 2, 2018 21:36
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We seriously need to take big money and financial gimmick poo poo out of housing or everyone is gonna die eventually.
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Aug 2, 2018 21:37
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ReidRansom posted:Without a broader plan in place though, you end up with something like some of the neighborhoods in San Diego, where you can tell that single family houses were just subdivided and additional structures built on the lot behind them, etc., until you have like 5 units on what used to be a small residential lot, and all the parking issues that come with that because no one bothered to consider transit issues that increased density brings. Austin has a housing problem, for sure, but that will sort itself out if it would bother to properly address its transportation issues. This is really a chicken/egg issue. No matter how amazing your transit system is, it’s still not going to have good ridership if no one is allowed to live near the lines. But if you upzone to allow that, people say the infrastructure can’t handle it. Unfortunately because of how cheap governments are nowadays new transit infrastructure is especially hard to come by. Getting more funding to improve existing operations is, surprisingly, even more difficult. Cap Metro, Austin’s regional public transit agency, basically cannot raise any more money for basic operations unless state law changes or they convince another city to join, and who knows whether the new revenue that brings in would outweigh the costs of having to provide service to that new city. As far as I know, Texas state law says member cities of a transit agency can give 1% of their sales tax revenue to the agency, max. Period. The agencies cannot raise taxes above that, so they depend entirely on continued sales tax growth if they want to expand.
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Aug 3, 2018 02:44
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luxury handset posted:the problem with this argument is that it assumes people are looking to cash out their homes eventually and downsize. a ton of old people want to die in their homes and keep the homes within the family - this makes the whole "property value" aspect of NIMBYism fall apart. this argument is also in opposition to the gentrification of homeowners - wouldn't people like to be displaced by a mechanism that causes their equity to balloon in value? also when you look at mechanisms like prop 13 in california (an extremely bad idea) it torpedoes the incentive people have to sell their homes, making californian homeowners more agnostic to the value of their home as compared to the immediate environmental conditions around their homes (traffic, crowds, air quality, view etc.) I don't think the argument assumes people are planning to downsize necessarily. Just having the option to sell is a big source of security for a lot of people, even if they don't plan on doing so. Anyway, I think the prevalence of articles like this on the subject of downsizing in retirement is evidence enough that a lot of people serious consider it. Not to mention younger people like yourself who hope to earn a profit after moving out of their starter home. Your point about opposing mechanisms that might increase equity is fair, however people tend to be risk averse, weighting the risk of losing assets one already has higher than the risk of forgoing the opportunity to profit. Also, I think it is wrong to conflate the motivations of the subburban homeowner NIMBY and the anti-gentrification activists. While I don't have hard evidence, in my experience, every anti-gentrification push I've seen has been driven by renters who don't profit from increased property values. Very frequently they involve people living in rent controlled housing as well, and if they are removed from them it may be impossible to find equivalent housing at the same price. Prop 13 and ancillary laws regarding the transfer of tax benefits to family screw with the incentives of selling property but don't reduce the absolute value of property. quote:i'm not saying that no NIMBYs ever cared about their property values, of course they do. but it's more complicated than that There's a reason inexpensive starter homes have "always" been on the fringe of development -- It's because building inexpensive dense infill is practically illegal in much of the United States. American sprawl is not natural, its just bad planning. Squalid fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 02:47
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Badger of Basra posted:This is really a chicken/egg issue. No matter how amazing your transit system is, it’s still not going to have good ridership if no one is allowed to live near the lines. But if you upzone to allow that, people say the infrastructure can’t handle it. Also while I won't speak to San Diego's particular situation, many places in the US routinely overbuild road and parking capacity pretty much for no reason. Nevertheless talk about putting in a dedicated bus or bike lane in and local businesses will get up in arms about theoretical declines in traffic due to traffic or loss of parking, even though these infrastructure improvements are almost always good for local business. It's just hard to convince people of that.
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Aug 3, 2018 02:57
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As an example, there was a recent study about parking in NYC, Seattle, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and Jackson, WY and it found that every one besides NYC had more than 3 parking spaces per household: http://mynorthwest.com/1053061/study-plenty-seattle-parking/ As an additional stat, there was about $111k worth of parking per person who lives in Seattle.
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Aug 3, 2018 03:03
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Squalid posted:Also while I won't speak to San Diego's particular situation, many places in the US routinely overbuild road and parking capacity pretty much for no reason. http://www.shoupdogg.com/parking-links/
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Aug 3, 2018 03:08
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donoteat posted:hello i made this AMA Your videos are good dogg.
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Aug 3, 2018 03:23
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donoteat posted:hello i made this AMA What do you think is the biggest problem with urban planning in the US currently? I'm guessing the highway?
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Aug 3, 2018 03:24
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Squalid posted:Not to mention younger people like yourself who hope to earn a profit after moving out of their starter home. haha nope, my hope here is to keep this property in good repair until my child is done with public education. based on location alone i'm guaranteed to at least break even if i reenter the housing market in the 2030s there are many reasons for homeownership. expecting your property to accumulate in value may be a common belief (or is perceived to be a common belief) but it is a spectacularly unreliable source of returns. we could face white flight 2.0 in a few decades. or if someone invents teleportation my property value will evaporate. for this reason i think "my property values " is as frequently a polemic thrown at boomer suburbanites than a useful description of people's behavior. which, it is a very useful polemic at times, but not as an explanatory toolSqualid posted:in my experience, every anti-gentrification push I've seen has been driven by renters who don't profit from increased property values. this would be a natural experience to have if most of your peer group is renters, or if you live in a city without a lot of older single family housing. in many cities though a large and important component of the gentrified are older homeowners on fixed incomes Squalid posted:There's a reason inexpensive starter homes have "always" been on the fringe of development -- It's because building inexpensive dense infill is practically illegal in much of the United States. American sprawl is not natural, its just bad planning. mmm i dunno, exclusionary zoning is only a few decades old - pretty midcentury in terms of widespread adoption along with the jurisdictional fragmentation necessary to make it really entrenched - where i think what you're articulating here is blaming housing shortages on excessive regulation. accepting that may be true, it's only been true for a while, and it's something planning boards are frequently aware of if one way or another - loosening regulations, or tightening them if the goal is to keep poors out i dont necessarily disagree with the components of your argument here, i just think you're linking exurban growth and exclusionary zoning in a way that doesn't account for more natural explanations like virgin site development, the massive expansion of the commuter shed as a result of limited access highways, america's ridiculous hardon for stratifying social classes through vehicle ownership, all kinds of goofy poo poo we like to do Nitrousoxide posted:What do you think is the biggest problem with urban planning in the US currently? I'm guessing the highway? imo if you dig down deep enough the problem is that planning in the US is often executed on the most local level possible which causes inefficiency and precludes regional coordination. it also vastly enables small time developers to get buddy buddy with local governments to write plans which are amenable for business and land developers, not for the people who live in those communities. worst case scenario is a sort of slow burn economic collapse of suburban areas as infrastructure increasingly reaches the end of its lifespan without a viable method to pay for repairs or enhancements. some of these areas will be attractive to redevelopment, those which are not will turn into pockets of class (aka ethnic) based poverty which will be even more miserable than inner city poverty. imagine detroit but on a much smaller scale, in localized areas just a few miles from wealthier suburbs Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 07:32
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Nitrousoxide posted:What do you think is the biggest problem with urban planning in the US currently? I'm guessing the highway? Snipe here, but local control of zoning is the largest problem in the US. If we had the same zoning policy as Japan we would have no where near the problems we have now, mostly by removing the local veto. KingFisher fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 07:50
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luxury handset posted:haha nope, my hope here is to keep this property in good repair until my child is done with public education. based on location alone i'm guaranteed to at least break even if i reenter the housing market in the 2030s Your home doesn't have to appreciate for it to be a major store of value. For many Americans who have no other savings it may be their own store of equity. The effect of homes as equity on the political behavior of populations has been well studied in the economic literature, for example in the 2005 book The Homevoter Hypothesis, by William A. Fischel. The unreliability of real estate as an asset may contribute to risk averse. Protecting the value of real estimate is specifically cited as a reason to enforce zoning regulations by many activists. To quote from a paper on the effects of land use controls in Houston: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/Kiarie_nonzoning_Houston_1996.pdf [quote] Mixon [ed: A local pro-zoning proponent] told me that "zoning is 95% for providing protection for residents in residential neighborhoods" (Interview with John Mixon, December 12, 1995). Zoning protects worthwhile current investments. A zoning ordinance should protect existing viable and valuable single-family neighborhoods inside the city from inappropriate and destructive adjacent uses. Mixon says that "zoning stabilizes value and protects investments; it does not increase price." He believes that zoned land in Houston commands a higher price because protected land is scarce and in demand. [quote] This quote is provided to highlight the importance placed on the value of property and how it effects people's decision making in local politics. The reason I think the motivations of NIMBYs is worth considering is because bad regulations are not accidents. They are generally enacted for logical, if often selfish and shortsighted, reasons. The real reasons are often not those most loudly trumpeted. That means fixing the problem requires changing the underlying incentives driving bad decision making, rather than constantly trying to tack against overwhelming headwinds. I'm not personally involved with any anti-gentrification folks now but most of my experience and media I see on the subject comes from urban California and big eastern cities, though that may just be a product of media coverage bias. edit: apathetic poster? Is that you? You're not going to start posting about Atlanta now are you 
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Aug 3, 2018 16:26
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luxury handset posted:urban planning is anthropogenic global warming on the local scale, the problem is obvious and so are the solutions but lmao at figuring out how to collectively persuade all the actors involved who have an incentive to gently caress everything up to knock it off until well after everything is irreversibly hosed up There is actually extremely low consensus among experts on how to deal with GCC beyond extremely high level things. Lots of groups are going in totally opposite directions in fact. It's a good analogy for this thread really, it's easy to say what should be done given a clean slate, incredibly hard to figure out what must be done given existing reality. A great example of this would be the Phoenix metro: given the enormous sprawl an efficient public transpiration system is almost nearly impossible outside of the city core. So what do you do in situations like that-- the """"obvious""" solution would be to burn it all to the ground and replace it with an ideally planned city with integrated blah blah blah but guess what buttercup that aint happening.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:28
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This is precisely why WWII ended up being great for europe on the planning front, they could basically start from scratch using more modern methods and analysis whereas a lot of the US was built in the late 1800s early 1900s. Also the US is so loving big it made a lot of sense to not build super dense. luxury handset posted:
The increases in COL are easily offset by the rise in home prices, this makes literally no sense hth. Like drat your avacodo toast now costs a dollar more, what will i ever do ???? *house is worth 2x and it's easy to pull money out of it* TROIKA CURES GREEK fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 17:30
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Squalid posted:Your home doesn't have to appreciate for it to be a major store of value. For many Americans who have no other savings it may be their own store of equity. i'm not sure what you think i'm trying to argue but it definitely is not "people don't care about their property values". certainly some do, but not enough for it to be a button you can push to explain NIMBYism Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 18:33
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:This is precisely why WWII ended up being great for europe on the planning front, they could basically start from scratch using more modern methods and analysis whereas a lot of the US was built in the late 1800s early 1900s. Btw most European cities were rebuilt as they were and tram/metro systems were generally repaired, some buildings were replaced but most of the street structure stayed the same. The US if anything took more of a revolutionary approach by nearly turning its back on transit completely in exchange for mass demolition of urban areas to build freeways. Eh the former Soviet Union was even bigger and less dense, and it had a completely different design for its cities (and that includes cities that weren't demolished by the Second World War). However, the Soviets promoted tram/trolleybus transit to highly dense suburbs instead of sprawl, we made a choice (and most Soviet cities were still designed old historic centers as well). It wasn't just situational, we made a specific choice to design things this way. BRT/Light Rail is probably the best you are going to do with a city like Pheonix, but it isn't too late to also prioritized dense affordable housing. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 19:02
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luxury handset posted:i'm not sure what you think i'm trying to argue but it definitely is not "people don't care about their property values". certainly some do, but not enough for it to be a button you can push to explain NIMBYism Specifically I am saying this quote:this makes the whole "property value" aspect of NIMBYism fall apart. Is false and you are not correctly analyzing the incentives that explain much of NIMBY behavior. It obviously doesn’t explain all policy but it explains a lot.
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Aug 3, 2018 19:37
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Squalid posted:Is false and you are not correctly analyzing the incentives that explain much of NIMBY behavior. It obviously doesn’t explain all policy but it explains a lot. it's only false if you're leaving out the prior context quote:a ton of old people want to die in their homes and keep the homes within the family you're kind of violently agreeing with me here, except we're placing different emphasis on how people may behave in different stages of life or in different housing markets. if, as you say, homes are a store of value, then wouldn't it be just as good to keep that home and pass it on as an asset to children than to cash it out? like if i can spin up different examples of when people might not preference property values over local environmental conditions as a basis on which to oppose new growth then imo that defangs the property values argument a bit. all i'm saying is that it's more complicated than commonly presented, and i think you agree with me Squalid posted:It obviously doesn’t explain all policy but it explains a lot. where we just aren't agreeing on the quantity of "a lot" and this gets back to my earlier post, it's easy to focus on conversations around large coastal cities because there are inherently cultural biases that talk about the problems of san francisco (11th largest metro in the us, slightly larger than phoenix) as if this exemplary market is indicative of the problems facing the 20th-100th largest metros in the us Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 19:46
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