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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? I'd say a lack of regional planning with teeth -- regional planning exists but is almost entirely subservient to developer interests, with the possible exception of Portland, Oregon. Really the biggest problem is that so many problems in cities are unique to that particular city -- housing policies that make sense in the Bay Area might not make sense in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or somewhere like that. NIMBYism vs. YIMBYism is largely a false dichotomy I think -- problems like gentrification and displacement need to be considered on a human scale as well as on a statistical macroscopic level. I've been kicked out of an affordable apartment so it could be redeveloped into "luxury" student housing cubes. While I suppose that had some kind of regional depressing effect on rents, maybe, it directly resulted in a $200-300 rent bump and an unexpected and expensive move for the 20 people living in the building... And also parking minimums, of course -- but we can't actually practically end parking minimums in most cities since they're still absurdly car-dependent. Mass transit investment needs to occur alongside (if not before!) parking reduction. The oft-repeated mantra of "coaxing people out of their cars" requires something to coax the people into, after all. (And capitalism)
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Aug 3, 2018 22:50
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Don't parking minimums kind of self reinforce? In that you demolish everything to build car parks and now nobody actually lives in the city so you've turned your area into a giant out of town shopping mall except it's in the town, and the lack of local custom means that usage drops and now you don't use any of the car parks you built.
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Aug 3, 2018 23:33
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OwlFancier posted:Don't parking minimums kind of self reinforce? oh no, parking minimums in the us are usually grossly outsized (typically meant to handle PEAK requirements not average, so they're vacant most of the time) and were it not for the common requirement that every business be firmly defended by a thick moat of asphalt then on the upward swing of a development cycle this land would be redeveloped since it is very easy to redevelop, being nothing but a thin coat of paving material over empty land like one of the really positive things for infill commercial redevelopment in the states is that large sites like dead malls are half empty land by area and thus more attractive to redevelop than a similarly sized site that is like 80% covered by a structure which needs to be demolished. heck, you can often just redevelop the parking lot itself with like townhomes or something and just rehab the mall structure like i see what you're going for here with the "parking causes an automotive preference causes parking" feedback loop, but the amount of parking typically mandated in most zoning codes is WAY more than any sort of free market equilibrium would reach because mid 20th century lazy american urban planning is all about separating uses and assuming people will use cars to navigate the otherwise unwalkable landscape like civilized people
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Aug 3, 2018 23:38
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I mean in the sense that do the problems with them not self reinforce leading to a sort of eutrophic collapse of the area? Because yes I know the US overprescribes parking, I've seen the pictures and watched the video.
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Aug 3, 2018 23:40
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OwlFancier posted:I mean in the sense that do the problems with them not self reinforce leading to a sort of eutrophic collapse of the area? in theory it might if parking requirements were more sane but in practice most typical parking requirements are absolutely excessive and thus utterly distort what we might expect to see in a self regulating land use economy
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Aug 3, 2018 23:42
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So are the developments planned to account for the fact that they're steadily obliterating their own customer base with each one added? Do people actually use the massive oceans of businesses where once there were houses? Or do they not just all die out due to lack of use like malls do? I just don't see how you go from building a business in the middle of a busy urban center, then steadily replacing all the urban stuff with more businesses and car parks until you've shoved everyone who would have gone to the first business out of reach of it.
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Aug 3, 2018 23:44
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OwlFancier posted:So are the developments planned to account for the fact that they're steadily obliterating their own customer base with each one added? i cant quite parse this, do you have an example either real or theoretical? OwlFancier posted:I just don't see how you go from building a business in the middle of a busy urban center, then steadily replacing all the urban stuff with more businesses and car parks until you've shoved everyone who would have gone to the first business out of reach of it. oh, this isn't quite how it works in the states. in north america moreso than europe, way more development is either an upscaling of density if not straight up virgin site development. so you rarely end up actually adding parking to busy urban centers with two exceptions -independent parking garages or integrated parking with the development itself, like an office tower sitting on a garage -something loving weird is happening like mid 20th century deindustrialization and the price of land in cities is falling, buildings are being abandoned, and the demolished structures are replaced with parking you'll pretty much never see actual useful, productive land being converted from a higher commercial use to parking. parking is just sort of the default state of urban land where someone is trying to generate revenue to at least cover property taxes while speculating that the value of the lot will rise during a development upswing cycle and it can be sold probably the biggest difference between european and american cities is that american cities spent three decades getting depopulated and less expensive in the later 20th century, and this same phenomenon most certainly did not happen in western europe (i can't speak for eastern europe but it is possible something similar happened there) Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 23:45
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luxury handset posted:i cant quite parse this, do you have an example either real or theoretical? In the town I live in there is a small shopping block with supermarkets, it has a car park (much smaller than a US one) and there's a bunch of them like this dotted on the main roads in the suburbs. https://www.google.com/maps/@54.5305755,-1.1985998,245m/data=!3m1!1e3 This as you can see is fairly busy a lot of the time because it's located in a residential area, not high density even, but most of its custom likely stems from the major road it's on, and the nearby houses. But a US city doesn't have a major road, it's all blocks with massive roads between them. I know they have major roads between the blocks but they have lots of them, whereas this is probably one of maybe three or four major roads into the town center and sees almost all the traffic. If you took this development and turned everything nearby into steadily more shops and car parks like you see for block after block in parts of the US, and there was a massive grid of roads to even out the traffic, it would collapse. It's dependent on the local residential custom, most of these shops are designed to cater to the local residents, hence a local pharmacy, probably a bookkeeper, etc, likely a small branch of a nationwide supermarket in the slightly larger ones. How does the US commercial development deal with that destruction of the customer base, especially when demolishing relatively high density areas to create it? luxury handset posted:oh, this isn't quite how it works in the states. in north america moreso than europe, way more development is either an upscaling of density if not straight up virgin site development. so you rarely end up actually adding parking to busy urban centers with two exceptions Wait so they just set out to build these giant oceans of surface car park for miles in every direction and then the rest of the city gets built around that?? Like these are originally at the edge of town and they just keep building more housing outwards? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 23:55
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OwlFancier posted:I just don't see how you go from building a business in the middle of a busy urban center, then steadily replacing all the urban stuff with more businesses and car parks until you've shoved everyone who would have gone to the first business out of reach of it.
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Aug 4, 2018 00:04
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OwlFancier posted:But a US city doesn't have a major road, it's all blocks with massive roads between them. I know they have major roads between the blocks but they have lots of them, whereas this is probably one of maybe three or four major roads into the town center and sees almost all the traffic. i'm not trying to troll you or screw with you here, but do you have an example of this sort of development in mind in the us? i can't really visualize it OwlFancier posted:Wait so they just set out to build these giant oceans of surface car park for miles in every direction and then the rest of the city gets built around that?? i mean, yeah, kinda in a place like england, everywhere is a thousand years old. every bit of land is already a part of some village or borough or lordship or something. you can't expand very far without bumping into your neighboring jurisdiction the oldest parts of the united states are between five and three hundred years old, and it is far more typical to find places that are a hundred years old or less. if you start in a major metro area and drive outwards to the edge of the metro, you can pretty regularly see a pattern of growth like the rings on a tree - downtown commercial, streetcar suburbs, old early automotive strip malls, early automotive suburbs and or railroad suburbs, second wave automotive suburbs, third wave automotive suburbs, exurbs with giant new strip malls, etc. it is a very regular pattern because many american metros just keep growing outwards into sprawl because they haven't yet exhausted the available land that can be built upon. like, england is the size of a single large state, we have massive amounts of land here and so development patterns are entirely different because it is feasible to develop virgin land, aka has never had any permanent structure built on it before only in the last few decades now have american developers even had to consider the merits of redeveloping older commercial areas (think mid 1950s here) into denser urban centers because it has only been in the last few decades that the land supply available in a heavily automotive society started to get somewhat scarce - and only then because people don't like driving for more than 30-45 minutes to get to their job e: sorry, i forgot to answer your question. these areas often don't serve as urban nuclei themselves, but can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 00:05
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I was kind of operating under the assumption that the US car park blocks were redevelopments because unless you live in, gently caress I dunno, milton keynes the only place you see blocks like that in the UK is in heavily redeveloped town and city CBDs, where they knocked down the old terraced housing set up during the industrial revolution for paup storage and built a bunch of other sutff, because nothing else is on a grid. Even modern suburbs aren't built on a grid, the only time anyone built on the a grid in the UK is industrial era terraces which are incredibly distinctive (especially from the back with them all having a concrete yard+wall backing onto a non-car-navigable alleyway) Otherwise all the developments are a bit more self contained I guess, not just "add another block, keep going". OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 00:12
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OwlFancier posted:I was kind of operating under the assumption that the US car park blocks were redevelopments because unless you live in, gently caress I dunno, milton keynes the only place you see blocks like that is in heavily redeveloped town and city CBDs, where they knocked down the old terraced housing set up during the industrial revolution for paup storage and built a bunch of other sutff, because nothing else is on a grid. oh no, a lot of the fundamental assumptions about how cities are planned and built in england are completely inapplicable in america basically if you see a large mall or something in the states there may have been houses there but they would have been low density at best. malls are located where you can get 1) cheap land 2) close to multiple large roadways and having to buy a bunch of productive land and demolish the structures on them makes it not cheap like just pulling a number out of thin air here but i'd say 2/3 of them were built on forest or agricultural land
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Aug 4, 2018 00:16
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I guess agricultural land is cheap in the US too. Cos we've got shitloads of it here but it tends to stay that way, I can't imagine it getting bought up at that rate other than if the government did it to put, well, milton keynes on top of it in 1967. Also the entire US city structure is just loving weird to me, it just keeps going. I've never been to London but even that seems a lot more structured on the map, where it's taken over smaller towns and villages as the greater london area blew out. My town was made from joining several together during the boom years in the 1800s and it still keeps that root and branch structure too. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 00:20
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Literally every city in the US (other than a handful of colonial-era city centers) is "Basically Milton Keynes"
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Aug 4, 2018 00:22
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I guess I can't imagine that in the UK, if you handed over a US city, that they wouldn't immediately bulldoze the poo poo out of most of those car park+business places and then turn it into overpriced housing. If everywhere else is two storey then obviously there's money to be made turning a car park into houses. Though I suppose not before they ran out of dilapidated 19th century warehouses to subdivide into barely legal people storage. I also guess this is where the parking min + lack of central planning comes in. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 00:24
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Yeah, in the US, it's not usually the bulldozing of high-density residential to build parking lots, it's the bulldozing of trees and fields and single family homes on acreage to build apartment complexes with 3 parking spots per unit and developments of single family houses on small lots and retail establishments with giant parking lots. When one area reaches capacity, they just go a little further out and turn some more forests and cornfields into strip malls and tract houses. Until eventually the only place a regular working stiff can afford to live is a hundred loving miles from anywhere with anything other than lovely retail service jobs. 1998  2005  2017 
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Aug 4, 2018 01:03
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hailthefish posted:1998 this is an excellent visual aid. notice how in the 2017 picture there are still large pockets of undeveloped land. two particularly interesting things in these photos: -in the 2017 photo, you can see a new factory top left of center. i'm assuming it is some kind of manufacturing or assembly plant because of the amount of parking (all full!) where a warehouse or distribution center would have far more trucks and less employee parking. it is clearly an industrial use because it is a large, boxy building that is located immediately adjacent to a highway onramp. so, that's indicative of the level of infill you often see as growth around an american metro continues to expand - there is plenty of space to put brand new factories and the like -in the 2005 and 2017 photos you can see the development of a "ghost subdivision" in the top right corner of the photo, to the left of the existing subdivision, which was just forest in 1998. 2005 is in the leadup to the housing crash, there were a ton of housing projects which began the initial phases (clearing land, putting down roads and utilities) which then stalled out completely in the recession, and were often abandonded. note that in the 2017 photo, 12 years later, only a quarter of the whole development has been built out, with another quarter or so under construction also note the clearly defined large square lots - looks like a PLSS area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
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Aug 4, 2018 01:44
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Hi checking in from Victoria, Australia where our state government has just made the bold move of making sure that all documents which were referenced by and relied upon by planning codes are actually available online. This was not previously the case 
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Aug 4, 2018 02:08
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Quote is not edit.
hailthefish fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 03:45
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luxury handset posted:-in the 2017 photo, you can see a new factory top left of center. i'm assuming it is some kind of manufacturing or assembly plant because of the amount of parking (all full!) where a warehouse or distribution center would have far more trucks and less employee parking. it is clearly an industrial use because it is a large, boxy building that is located immediately adjacent to a highway onramp. so, that's indicative of the level of infill you often see as growth around an american metro continues to expand - there is plenty of space to put brand new factories and the like Actually, it's a Costco! The one across the road that gets built first is a Fred Meyer. There's an outsized demand for retail due to proximity to the Canadian-US border. https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7894999,-122.5076121,16.22z quote:also note the clearly defined large square lots - looks like a PLSS area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System Yep.
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Aug 4, 2018 03:51
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hailthefish posted:Actually, it's a Costco! The one across the road that gets built first is a Fred Meyer. lol i hadnt thought of that, i've always seen them with retail islands in the parking lot
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Aug 4, 2018 06:06
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luxury handset posted:oh no, parking minimums in the us are usually grossly outsized (typically meant to handle PEAK requirements not average, so they're vacant most of the time) and were it not for the common requirement that every business be firmly defended by a thick moat of asphalt then on the upward swing of a development cycle this land would be redeveloped since it is very easy to redevelop, being nothing but a thin coat of paving material over empty land The issue though with reducing or eliminating parking mediums (as shown in Portland Oregon) it becomes a mess when you but little infrastructure development to back it up. Ideally, you would have both working in tandem. Basically, the Portland Metro is pretty good at pro-scribing certain aspects of sprawl and utterly laughable at actually fixing any subsequent issue because it would actually cost money.
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Aug 4, 2018 11:38
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Solemn Sloth posted:Hi checking in from Victoria, Australia where our state government has just made the bold move of making sure that all documents which were referenced by and relied upon by planning codes are actually available online. This was not previously the case It was a while ago when I visited Melbourne but driving to my then-gf's family's home I was astonished by the urban sprawl. I think it was in the North Melbourne suburbs. Guessing it is a situation very similar to the USA where there is just a shitload of available land and people understandably want a house to themselves for their family or whatever, but it seems to remove any possibility of any local community. This is coming from London where there is the opposite problem, pretty high density population and good local amenities pretty much everywhere, but the buildings are almost all >100 years old and built without luxuries like foundations or any insulation, then partitioned up so a family home is now 5 flats containing 10+ people. UK builders and developers are also total bastards and having lived temporarily in a brand new terrible house in Oxfordshire I would be extremely reluctant to get anything new I didn't build myself.
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Aug 4, 2018 13:04
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knox_harrington posted:It was a while ago when I visited Melbourne but driving to my then-gf's family's home I was astonished by the urban sprawl. I think it was in the North Melbourne suburbs. Guessing it is a situation very similar to the USA where there is just a shitload of available land and people understandably want a house to themselves for their family or whatever, but it seems to remove any possibility of any local community. Melbourne is cursed by a lack of constraining geography. There’s some mountainous bits to the east but other than that there’s very little to act as a forced barrier on sprawl. The growth areas are seriously horrendous in terms of the quality of communities being put up. Under serviced by community infrastructure, non-existent public transport, and massive houses on medium sized lots so you get serious urban heat island and stormwater management problems. The sprawl is I’m sure similar to many US cities. We have instituted an urban growth boundary through the planning system, but in the first few years of operation it had numerous expansions, and now everyone in the development industry believes they just have to bribe hard enough to get their tract included and turn a farm purchase into a $30M residential estate. This has the follow on effect of inflating land values around the boundary due to speculation, meaning farmers face skyrocketing land taxes without their income going up and having to abandon the most fertile land (of the stuff we haven’t paved over yet) I’m really envious of Portland and some of the Canadian cities because they seem to have growth boundaries pretty well sorted with a fairly transparent and predictable system that people have confidence in. One of our two major political parties portrays the problem of housing affordability as purely one of growth area land supply, so there is no confidence in the bi-partisanship of the growth boundary.
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Aug 4, 2018 15:53
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Solemn Sloth posted:Melbourne is cursed by a lack of constraining geography. There’s some mountainous bits to the east but other than that there’s very little to act as a forced barrier on sprawl. The growth areas are seriously horrendous in terms of the quality of communities being put up. Under serviced by community infrastructure, non-existent public transport, and massive houses on medium sized lots so you get serious urban heat island and stormwater management problems. So is the sprawl still a part of Melbourne proper? One of the problems in US is that sprawl is often totally separate municipalities.
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Aug 4, 2018 17:14
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Here thread, I'll feed you. Like most of government, the specialization and discussions, are largely opaque to the public, because most citizens just angrily email the local planner that the private property next door just bulldozed all the trees they liked. https://www.strongtowns.org http://www.governing.com http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-flood-zone-floodplain-development-homes-zoning.html quote:Everyone knows it's a a bad idea to build new development on flood-prone land, so why do we keep doing it? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/11/immutable-laws-of-affordable-housing quote:1.Developers don’t pay the costs of construction; tenants and buyers do. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme quote:Most American cities find themselves caught in the Growth Ponzi Scheme.
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Aug 4, 2018 18:00
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I mean generally I think you build on floodplains because there's already a major settlement there, owing to access to the water source and good farmland that generally comes with floodplains.
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Aug 4, 2018 18:03
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OwlFancier posted:I mean generally I think you build on floodplains because there's already a major settlement there, owing to access to the water source and good farmland that generally comes with floodplains. Lol. At least pretend to read it before you comment, owl.
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Aug 4, 2018 18:10
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The reason it's being built on would seem to be "because it's next to a large city" and the reason the city is there is because coastal and river sites are where settlements originate. Settlements are generally next to water, on flood plains, which is probably why so many people live on flood plains, and why unless you move entire cities away from water, you're still going to be "putting people on floodplains". Like sure water management measures are necessary but complaining about the concept of building on floodplains is daft because the reason things are built at all is because of proximity to population centers which until recently could only be built where they are. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 18:15
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Here's another interesting story on flooding and urban sprawl/development, using Houston as a particularly bad example: https://houston.texastribune.org/boomtown-floodtown/ Also I'm not sure why "we've always done it this way" is supposed to be a good reason to keep doing it.
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Aug 4, 2018 19:43
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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.) IMO NIMBYism from Single Family Homeowners is less about valuations and potential income and much more related to the fact that in many places a fee simple detached property is the aspirational end goal of the property ladder and once people reach that status they're at the top and any sort of change to the neighbourhood doesn't seem to be beneficial (even though it may actually be). For example Vancouver recently allowed laneway/coach homes in all SFH zoned districts, which in effect upzoned the entire city. From a valuation point of view this was a fantastic boon to SFH owners, since they could now build more on their land and rent out another unit for extra income. In reality there was still substantial criticism and pushback from SFH owners because many SFH owners value unquantifiable things like privacy and gardens to higher valuations and income generating potential. The fact that downsizing has not become a trend is indicative of how strongly people value SFHs as a lifestyle choice. When you've reached your aspirational goal in life why detach yourself from your existing neighbourhoods social networks, give up the amenities of a SFH and downsize to an apartment if you don't badly have to? I think this points to a big failure of cities in not creating a scale of housing options in every neighbourhood. Ironically NIMBYism by single family homeowners has made the notion of downsizing extra punishing. Due to the fact that NIMBYs have kept out all new development, a potential downsizer will often have to switch neighbourhoods to find a different, smaller form of housing. If cities had been able to build every form of housing in every neighbourhood, then an elderly detached house owner could easily shift to a townhouse or apartment while not having to disconnect themselves from their neighbourhood social networks.
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Aug 4, 2018 21:25
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OddObserver posted:So is the sprawl still a part of Melbourne proper? One of the problems in US is that sprawl is often totally separate municipalities. Same here. Victoria has 79 local government areas, 31 of those are located within the greater metropolitan Melbourne area. The State Government in many political respects functions as a Metropolitan Government as 4.9M of the states 5.8M residents live in the metro area, and in terms of planning the state planning minister has the ultimate power over the planning codes of each council, but this is generally left devolved to councils in most circumstances. Things like the growth boundary are implemented by the State, and the State may call in decisions if there is particular importance or political interest (effectively when to override the local authority is entirely at the discretion of the Minister) It’s further complicated by the fact that by default planning decisions are the remit of the elected councillors, who may choose to delegate to council officers. This means that if anything gets political it compromises the actual planning component of decision making. We also have a really strong third party appeal system, so even if an interest group didn’t succeed in saying the council opinion, they can have another crack at the appeals tribunal, and its quite a low barrier to be heard there so lots of things get delayed through pretty spurious appeals.
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Aug 4, 2018 22:59
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I'll talk about the housing situation in NYC a little, as it's the one I'm the most familiar with. I'm not going to talk about transit for now, as NJ Transit makes me want to punch a wall.
If you ask YIMBYs to diagnose the situation, fundamentally there's a housing shortage, and the only way to solve that is more market rate development. YIMBYs aren't against public housing, nor are they against inclusionary zoning when it's reasonable, just they see both of those as putting bandaids on the problem, when what you really need is WW2-style mobilization, assembly line type solutions. That dovetails with the notion of displacement. What tends to happen in NYC politics is those afore-mentioned rich, white areas have a lot of political power, so no one's touching their single family zoning. (Jane Jacobs infamously fought against upzoning GV to allow for more modest, 5-story apartment complexes.) Therefore, the only places that actually get rezoned are former industrial places who don't really have much in the way of advocates - see part of Flushing in 1998, which has turned into a massive success for the Chinese community. Or Williamsburg over the past 20 years, or Long Island City now. With both of those examples, they were these former industrial areas that had really good access via the subway to Manhattan. Not many people are going to advocate for empty warehouses that have long since decamped for the suburbs. What happened in Williamsburg after though is all the yuppies moving in started bleeding east, into other neighborhoods like East Williamsburg and Bushwick, that were largely poor and minority, and that's exacerbated displacement. Due to this political power dynamic, most of the neighborhoods on the table for rezoning [url]https://citylimits.org/2018/08/01/bushwick-plans-unveiling-nears-among-some-tension-over-possible-rezoning]tend to be on the poorer, darker side.[/url] This explains the dynamic in practice where YIMBYism tends to be a very diverse, less affluent movement, with a very vocal minority *ahem* of white, affluent men as its most vocal cheerleaders. But there's wide agreement though that the rezonings need to start in NY's richest, most privileged neighborhoods. You really think that crunchy couple wants to rehab a brownstone in Bushwick or Bed-Stuy if they could find a cheaper place in Park Slope with other members of their tribe?
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Aug 6, 2018 00:39
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To me the motto of YIMBY is not " let's build more affordable/subsidized housing" within an unaffordable market rate housing environment. But rather imagine that through upzones and public investments that there was so much housing that it was affordable simply because of the excess of supply. In this environment the public or a social services provider owns a large % ( say 40%) of a cities housing stock. The city would have a duty to keep building new housing so that rents do not go up relative to inflation. In terms of implementation I would radically upzone every major city in the country. Use this to trigger a massive wave of private investment in new market rate housing with a 10% affordable requirement. Then once the private investors have built all the housing that cancel pencil out via private financing. This is roughly the top of the market down to 80% of AMI. The government would then keep building large housing developments to push down the average rent to where a 1br would be 30% of what a person working 40 hrs a week at the local minimum wage. The city would then be required to build new units every year to keep up with population growth so rents stay pegged to minimum wage Wlearner affordablity. Those unable to work would be housed in the mixed income multi-family developments owned by the city or similar non profit. In Seattle with a $15 per hour minimum wage this would fix rent at $780 per month for a 1br. KingFisher fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 04:16
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as someone who lives in a city with seemingly none of this problem, the whole "YIMBYs are loving white scum, PHIMBY is the real poo poo" attitude from the Left (the "YIMBY" ep of Chapo, District Sentinel, coastal DSA chapters etc) is, to put it lightly, confusing. can someone pls explain
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Aug 6, 2018 16:33
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Troy Queef posted:as someone who lives in a city with seemingly none of this problem, the whole "YIMBYs are loving white scum, PHIMBY is the real poo poo" attitude from the Left (the "YIMBY" ep of Chapo, District Sentinel, coastal DSA chapters etc) is, to put it lightly, confusing. can someone pls explain phimby = "public housing in my backyard" because we have to shoehorn it into a dumb acronym i guess the idea is that pro-development advocates are in fact craven neoliberals because that is the current tone of left politics in america, and also a statement that we will not achieve affordable housing through market incentives like quotas and tax incentives. which is a completely correct statement, public housing is essential, but i could go a step further and say that phimbys are themselves decadent liberals because they do not advocate a unified housing/transportation policy, which is essential because you cant effectively utilize socialized housing to the benefit of the people within a hybrid social/capital transportation framework of private automobile ownership, abolish the private vehicle for private use on public roads etc. so on. basically saying the right things about solutions to society but from a perspective of ideological purity and status preening about being the wokest
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Aug 6, 2018 16:55
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This is just my opinion as someone who’s pro-density, but many PHIMBY people also tend to put forward public housing as the only solution, and oppose any privately developed project at any size because it involves people making money. This is usually summarized (uncharitably, to be clear) as “we shouldn’t do X because it doesn’t decommodify housing.” California DSA chapters seem to be worst about this for some reason. If you’re interested in a sort of synthesis of the viewpoints, Seattle DSA put out an interesting document on a socialist pro-density perspective (which I can’t find right now). If you want the opposite you can check LA, SF, or East Bay DSAs. I would bet most DSA chapters are internally divided. I think something that they also miss out on is that density is way better than what we’ve got for the environment too. If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, that has to involve putting more people in a smaller space (ideally, closer to their jobs and other frequent destinations). e: to give PHIMBY people credit, I think a lot of the time YIMBY people focus solely on zoning and don’t talk about tenant protections and rent control enough. I think both of those things are important parts of the solution. I just think densification is too. Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 17:56
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yeah the big problem with public housing is that it is expensive as poo poo, local governments typically can't pay for it in the scale necessary to be useful, and federal matching funds haven't been reliable since the dismantling of the welfare state in the early 90s. so you end up with unworkable public-private partnerships like section 8 or local developer incentives for workforce housing we all want to live in a world where the government is robust and benevolent enough to provide public housing for all, but we live in a world where providing food stamps is politically fraught because of racism. so, yeah. as usual it's people advocating effective solutions which are impractical to implement vs. bad, market based solutions which actually have a snowball's chance of becoming policy
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Aug 6, 2018 18:11
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Yeah I forgot to mention resource constraints. I don’t usually mention “how will you pay for this” or “is this feasible” since there’s lot of stuff I want to do that people would respond in the same way to. There are probably less than five cities in the US that are large and rich enough to do public housing out of their own budgets (NYC, LA, Boston?, Houston?, Chicago?) and I think of those only NYC actually has one (NYCHA) and it’s pretty badly run. E: separate issue but also, most US transit agencies are also very badly managed and instead of asking agencies from Europe or Asia for technical assistance they just keep doing weird “innovation” stuff that never works Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 18:18
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 04:50 |
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Would semi-public housing cooperatives work in the US?
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Aug 7, 2018 09:39
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