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https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2018/04/27/rent-declined-in-the-newest-buildings-in-portland-in-2017/ A surprisingly decent Willy Week article explains the situation. It seems like studios in new buildings in new buildings in inner Portland saw decreases (they were overpriced/overbuilt), while most of the rest of the city same increases especially for housing suitable for families. The poorest neighborhoods were hit hardest. So if you are a relatively high-income earner that is single, it is pretty good news, but not really for working people and families. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 16:39
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twodot posted:Obstructing market rate development on the basis you want that development to be publicly owned is nonsense in most areas. Like the Seattle city council recently blocked/delayed a new 442 unit building, and the council definitely didn't follow up with "Also here's our new tax to fund the city building its own 100 million dollar tower". (If they did that would be awesome, but let's not pretend that objecting to market rate development generally leads to public development) The opposition to that tower was overwhelmingly because it was going to replace the Showbox, not specifically because it was private development. The council wouldn't have stopped it if it was just going up on an empty lot.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:45
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SousaphoneColossus posted:The opposition to that tower was overwhelmingly because it was going to replace the Showbox, not specifically because it was private development. The council wouldn't have stopped it if it was just going up on an empty lot.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:38
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I have a real issue with people trying to use planning to regulate away ugly buildings, but it’s also a difficult and hazy line for where “legitimate” concerns about impacts on the public realm begin. I think this is personally maybe the issue I’ve grappled with most when it comes to planning.
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Aug 17, 2018 03:11
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Yeah, public housing is being built in the US regardless of what is happening. That said, there are other reasons to stop private developments, such as considering gentrification itself as a destructive force.
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Aug 17, 2018 10:11
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, public housing is being built in the US regardless of what is happening. That said, there are other reasons to stop private developments, such as considering gentrification itself as a destructive force.
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Aug 17, 2018 13:55
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Cugel the Clever posted:Here's a thought experiment: If a city blocks a private multi-unit development in one neighborhood, where will those people go? What will be the consequences of this? A lot of people were probably either from local wealthy suburbs or from out of town in the first place. It is very possible they stay put.
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Aug 17, 2018 15:01
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Ardennes posted:A lot of people were probably either from local wealthy suburbs or from out of town in the first place. It is very possible they stay put. Having people that live in the suburbs that would like to live in the city but can't seems like the worst urban planning possible. People living in the suburbs creates all sorts of infrastructure needs that ruin everything. Wasting a ton of resources supporting them seems even more terrible when it's for people that would rather not even live there.
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Aug 17, 2018 15:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Having people that live in the suburbs that would like to live in the city but can't seems like the worst urban planning possible. People living in the suburbs creates all sorts of infrastructure needs that ruin everything. Wasting a ton of resources supporting them seems even more terrible when it's for people that would rather not even live there. You're not wrong, but what we see in gentrified cities is not necessarily people moving back to the city and densifying and everything being great, but wealthier people moving back to the city driving up prices and pushing out poor people. Increasingly we're seeing poor people driven to the suburbs, where they still have the same expensive infrastructure needs the previous suburbanites had, but they have fewer resources with which to overcome their lack of services, poorer services than they had when they were further into the city, and less political infuence to force government to cater to them. The end result is the last line of your post anyway. You end up with a bunch of people still living in the suburbs who would rather not live there, with the same taxing needs on infrastructure and services, but now they're poor people so the city doesn't bother wasting the resources to support them, and their lives get worse than they were before while the wealthy gentrified enjoy that sweet downtown lifestyle and all the services they could ever want.
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Aug 17, 2018 15:41
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Cugel the Clever posted:Here's a thought experiment: If a city blocks a private multi-unit development in one neighborhood, where will those people go? What will be the consequences of this? housing serves as an attractor. in the absence of this housing, those people will just stay where they currently are. during the boom cycle of housing construction it is likely that some other development will meet some of this demand Owlofcreamcheese posted:Having people that live in the suburbs that would like to live in the city but can't seems like the worst urban planning possible. People living in the suburbs creates all sorts of infrastructure needs that ruin everything. Wasting a ton of resources supporting them seems even more terrible when it's for people that would rather not even live there. as a social problem it is far better that wealthier people live in the suburbs, where transportation and housing costs can be higher simply because of inefficient infrastructure, than poor people who are less able to handle these costs. when gentrification displaces poor urban residents they are often pushed to decaying first ring suburbs with less access to public transit, government services, jobs, etc. ideally there wouldn't be decaying first ring suburbs to host suburban enclaves of poverty but that is not the world we live in vyelkin posted:You're not wrong, but what we see in gentrified cities is not necessarily people moving back to the city and densifying and everything being great, but wealthier people moving back to the city driving up prices and pushing out poor people. Increasingly we're seeing poor people driven to the suburbs, where they still have the same expensive infrastructure needs the previous suburbanites had, but they have fewer resources with which to overcome their lack of services, poorer services than they had when they were further into the city, and less political infuence to force government to cater to them. exactly this
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Aug 17, 2018 15:43
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"we SOMEONE has to live in the suburbs" doesn't seem like a real rule. Like other than like a literal island or situation like hong kong or something something technically is going to be a suburb of any city but city to city there is a huge range of "percent of people that live in the urban part of the city" vs "people that live in the suburban areas around it" plenty of cities just have some "oh, there is another city right next to it" where everyone rich/poor lives in to feed to the 'real' city instead of endless suburbs. Not every city on earth is remotely built around urban core surrounded by a ring of suburban living forever and ever.
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Aug 17, 2018 16:08
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:"we SOMEONE has to live in the suburbs" doesn't seem like a real rule. Like other than like a literal island or situation like hong kong or something something technically is going to be a suburb of any city but city to city there is a huge range of "percent of people that live in the urban part of the city" vs "people that live in the suburban areas around it" plenty of cities just have some "oh, there is another city right next to it" where everyone rich/poor lives in to feed to the 'real' city instead of endless suburbs. Not every city on earth is remotely built around urban core surrounded by a ring of suburban living forever and ever. oocc you're doing that thing you do where you're getting mad at reality for failing to live up to your expectations in the united states, in the year 2018, a large percentage of the built human environment is suburban in nature and this cannot be willed away with a monkey's curse
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Aug 17, 2018 16:10
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luxury handset posted:oocc you're doing that thing you do where you're getting mad at reality for failing to live up to your expectations Like, if 6 buildings worth of people are forced to move it's totally possible to just build six buildings they would want to live in somewhere else instead of accepting the one and only thing that could happen to them is they must now become suburbanites. Like tons of what gets posted in urban planning threads relies on a magic wand bulldozer tool from simcity. But the idea displaced people could live in another building slightly further out but as big instead of building a thousand miles of poor people suburbs seems a lot less magical thinking than most of the claims here. You don't have to have suburbs like we have on some cities. Not even every american city is as suburb focused.
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Aug 17, 2018 16:23
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itt we publicly grapple with is/ought
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Aug 17, 2018 16:45
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luxury handset posted:itt we publicly grapple with is/ought I don't think you can just say "welp, that is the way it is and always must be" when even in the United states every single city doesn't have the same suburbanization pattern. If you want to claim nothing can even ever change and the patterns now are how they will be forever then it's not even a concern that people would even need to move, since their neighborhoods will just stay the same forever and they can just live there.
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Aug 17, 2018 17:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't think you can just say "welp, that is the way it is and always must be" i didn't say the bolded part, you added that because this is your habit when your first pass assumption of how things work crashes headlong into what actually happens in real life. and i'm not really interested in playing pretend with you regarding possible alternate realities where suburbs dont exist in reality, when gentrification happens, people of low wealth and income who get displaced tend to get displaced to first ring suburbs, which are typically the cheapest places to live in american metro areas in our contemporary timeline
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Aug 17, 2018 17:12
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luxury handset posted:in reality, when gentrification happens, people of low wealth and income who get displaced tend to get displaced to first ring suburbs, which are typically the cheapest places to live in american metro areas in our contemporary timeline Thats not even correct for even just american cities. There is plenty of cities where if you are poor and someone builds where you are the place you move is even more into the city. Inner cities is a concept for a reason. Likewise plenty of cities have large numbers of people simply living in a nearby smaller city area that is not a "suburb" meaningfully. Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 17:57
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i dont even know what you're trying to argue anymore oocc except you're just displaying your inability to accept, even internally, that you may have said something that is incorrectOwlofcreamcheese posted:Inner cities is a concept for a reason. hey get this, things change over time and the ejection of poorer people from inner cities is called gentrification
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Aug 17, 2018 18:13
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luxury handset posted:i dont even know what you're trying to argue anymore If you are a poor single mom and a rich guy comes and buys your building and neighborhood to make an artisanal cheese and vape shop where you are likely to end up next depends entirely on the city, the answer isn't the same if you live in san fransicio vs detroit
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Aug 17, 2018 19:05
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Ardennes posted:A lot of people were probably either from local wealthy suburbs or from out of town in the first place. It is very possible they stay put. vyelkin posted:You're not wrong, but what we see in gentrified cities is not necessarily people moving back to the city and densifying and everything being great, but wealthier people moving back to the city driving up prices and pushing out poor people. Edit: I'm just at a loss for where you all are coming from. You cite consequences to poor residents that are unfolding today, where our cities make it prohibitively difficult to build multi-family units where people most want to live, leaving some of the people would would take those homes and apartments to instead either gentrify poorer neighborhoods or move to the sticks. And then throw up your hands and say "Better off doing nothing"? By building more homes in smarter spots, we partially alleviate the forces of displacement, benefit the environment, and, if we fight like hell for it, mandate some measure of affordability in new buildings. Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Aug 18, 2018 00:39
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Cugel the Clever posted:Edit: I'm just at a loss for where you all are coming from. You cite consequences to poor residents that are unfolding today, where our cities make it prohibitively difficult to build multi-family units where people most want to live, leaving some of the people would would take those homes and apartments to instead either gentrify poorer neighborhoods or move to the sticks. And then throw up your hands and say "Better off doing nothing"? your confusion is because you are removing this discussion from its context. the person you are quoting is making the observation that denser, new development is not a substitute for public housing. housing units are not replaced on a one to one basis, the new houses are often larger and definitely more expensive than the ones they replaced. you're looking at this from the perspective of "isn't more urban housing a good thing for society" when the person you are responding to is saying that new urban housing comes at a cost, in that it is definitely not for the poorer people who lived there before Cugel the Clever posted:By building more homes in smarter spots, we partially alleviate the forces of displacement, benefit the environment, and, if we fight like hell for it, mandate some measure of affordability in new buildings. absolutely not. building more homes is itself the force of displacement, because new housing in this country is almost always done on a speculative, for-profit basis, catering to people of means. local governments have to twist arms and put up incentives to create "affordable" or "workforce" housing - google those terms if you want to read up on it. building more housing and expecting some of it to be available to poorer people is absolutely not what happens, because all of this housing is built to maximize profit - thus be sold to people who can afford to live elsewhere. in a capitalist society, all privately constructed housing is for people who can afford it, which then trickles down to people with lower wealth once that housing is no longer desirable. this is the exact process which caused concentrated urban poverty to begin with, the en masse abandonment of inner cities for suburban housing in the mid 20th century commonly called white flight if you want affordable housing widely available, it must be constructed by the government. and given trends in the last thirty years, local governments are either unwilling or incapable of taking on this burden to the extent which is necessary to actually provide sufficient housing, and the federal government is unwilling to pick up the tab Cugel the Clever posted:So some of those fortunate enough to have purchasing power have realized that urban areas offer more fulfilling living than the suburbs, but you're saying we should preserve the status quo rather than fighting for a future that works better for all? again, is/ought etc. pointing out that gentrification is driven by market forces is not a defense of the status quo. jeez Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Aug 18, 2018 03:05
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something that is important to understand about american cities is that they operate as metro areas - large conglomerate systems of transportation, economics, social connections etc. that spread across multiple jurisdictions. and this jurisdictional fragmentation is important because planning is inherently local, as in carried out on a scale typically much smaller than the entire metro typically the transportation network is most unified. you'll see large federal roadways maintained by vast, external funding structures. then state roadways, with potential friction from multiple state departments of transportation if a metro extends beyond state borders, then county and local roads, etc. and all commerce and daily life takes place on this transportation network. if you're lucky, there will be a unified or consolidated patchwork of transit networks supplementing these roads. all of this creates a city as a whole metro area but, the land use and development decisions made in this metro are left up to often dozens if not hundreds of smaller jurisdictions, more often than not with little/no regional oversight. for example, here is a map of all cities in st. louis county, representing a large chunk of the st. louis metro area  there's almost 90 of these loving things. and some of them are really stupid. bask in the glory of the city of Country Life Acres, MO https://www.google.com/maps/place/Country+Life+Acres,+MO+63131/@38.6229763,-90.458768,16z population, 74 residents. loving why? this is 100% because of racism and racial panic during the era of suburban growth, incorporation as a measure to control housing. st. louis is not alone in having a piss spray of little pointless cities that do nothing but enforce housing segregation along race/class lines. each of these municipalities, on paper, has absolute authority within its borders to determine local zoning and land use decisions. this is, to use technical language, a clusterfuck st louis has a regional planning body. you can see the regional plan as adopted in 2013 here http://www.onestl.org/media/site/documents/reports/onestl_plan/OneSTL_FinalPlan-web.pdf i've read through this thing and, to use technical language, it is anemic and featherweight. it details nothing except a wish list of goals. it is the consolation prize of consolidated regional plans. ctrl-f for "land use" and be amazed what is the point of this? well, when talking about "if we build housing, wont there be more housing for rich AND poor?" faces a roadblock in that this sort of fragmented structure exists largely because of, and to enforce, housing segregation. it's not the entire reason (laziness, greed) but it's a huge factor. cities and metros don't conform to mental models of spherical housing markets in a frictionless void, the amount of land where gentrification happens is relatively small. you need cheaper land (because poor people live there) with above average access to amenities which, for an odd period between 80-30 years ago, was grossly undervalued because of poor people cooties. and said poor people, when they are pushed out via rising rents, property tax assessments, and other costs of living, don't often stay in the same area. they get pushed somewhere else, somewhere cheaper, which often means (because we've decided being able to walk places is good again) someplace where you can't really walk places, but not a nice place where you can't walk places because richer people live there too i started ranting about fragmentation and ended ranting about polycentrism almost, but basically just throwing handfuls of housing into this pot doesn't produce a simple supply/demand curve i guess is the takeaway here - especially because there's not a fixed number of residents in this scenario, and new housing starts are often barely keeping up with the demand from raw population growth
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Aug 18, 2018 05:05
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This is so drat true. Re fragmentation, in New Jersey we even have a word for the phenomenon: Boroughitis. One other thing to note is that consolidating all of these municipalities will never, ever happen even if the Fairy Godmother came and zapped all racism from the Earth. Why? In New Jersey, at least, school districts. The schools are the absolute locus of a town's identity, essential to its sense of being. Even now, I'll use an example. I grew up in the Ocean Township school district in Monmouth County. That school district actually served (serves? I forget current status) multiple towns, Ocean Township and a little tiny place called Loch Arbour. By and large, Loch Arbour had only the thinnest separate identity from Ocean Township. Loch Arbour kids were Ocean kids who had lakefront or beachfront property. (Irony: Ocean Township has...no frontage on the ocean. Long story.) There was otherwise minimal difference, at least when I went to school from when I started handicapped pre-K at age 3 until 2002 when I graduated. Consolidating municipalities will never happen, at least in the NJ case, because of school districts. School district consolidation happens only after the greatest screaming, because it is absolutely true (my mom was in real estate for 30+ years) that people decide where they want to live based upon which schools their kids will go to. If your schools suck, you are doomed, it's that simple. How does this feed into planning? Well, the reality is that (at least in the part of NJ I'm from), until the 1970s-1980s, towns were very very ethnically divided. Neighborhoods were, even. I'd have to check sources before I gave examples, and I don't want to do that at 6 AM, but believe me when I say there was a town where the Irish lived, a town where the Italians lived, a town for the Poles, a town for the WASPs, and on and on. It wasn't just ethnic, too, it was also religious. (Nowadays, everybody's having freakouts because of the Hasidic Jewish population coming up from Lakewood and down from Brooklyn. Jews were always a weird exception - the area has historically had a heavy Jewish population even if their strict numbers weren't that big, and they've historically been well-integrated for as long as I (or my parents, who moved from Boston in the early 70s) can remember. The key, though, was that they were Reform and Conservative Jews, with only a slight presence of Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox Jews. Now, things are changing - it's very much the case that the Hasidim's most vocal and angry opponents are other Jews, though.) Before anybody asks: Class is a bit weird on this part of the Jersey Shore. We've always depended on tourism from NYC, even during the days when we had Fort Monmouth and Bell Labs etc providing jobs. There are economic divides, yes, but they're slightly more muted than I've noticed elsewhere in the US. It helps to remember that this area is kinda a mix between first-line suburbs (we grew originally because of the railroad bringing folks from NYC to the Jersey Shore) and second-line suburbs (a lot of the area, until the 1970s-1980s, was farms, with cows and horses! (It blew my mind as a kid to realize that what I thought of as a long-established shopping area in my town had, 10-15 years prior, been someone's farm)), but the general theme is that a lot of people live in this area, but work in NYC or in North Jersey. At least as a kid, this meant that even if everybody wasn't all middle-class or higher, there wasn't a yawning gap. Not within a school dsitrict, anyway. Looping back to the thread topic, this means: Yes, if my area were a SimCity or Cities Skylines map, you would somehow have to represent the fact that each area on the map is probably its own separate town. It makes any sort of regional planning (Great example: They announced the closing of Fort Monmouth in 2005, closed it in 2011, and it was utterly botched by the towns) really difficult, simply because Mayor A's constituency is very very different from Mayor B's.
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Aug 18, 2018 11:12
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This is all true and these are excellent points. I'm going to provide a counter-example to illustrate that, as with anything city-related, you can go too far in any direction. St. Louis's 90-odd municipalities is a horrendous example of fragmentation (Los Angeles, if you believe Mike Davis, is another). So we talk about consolidating these municipalities. But be careful what you wish for. In 1998, the city of Toronto was forcibly amalgamated with its five surrounding municipalities: Etobicoke, York, North York, East York, and Scarborough:  Since the early 1950s, these six cities were coordinated by a federated municipal structure called Metropolitan Toronto, that handled a lot of shared services and planning requirements at a regional level, but still allowed each city to elect its own local mayor, city council, and so on. The 1998 amalgamation was opposed by every single one of the six municipalities and opposed by three-quarters of voters in a 1997 referendum, but the provincial government didn't care and amalgamated them anyway, into one giant City of Toronto, claiming that doing so would eliminate duplicate services and save money. This was a lie, since a lot of services were already provided at the regional level, and 20 years later we can state plainly that the move didn't save any money and didn't make the government any smaller, which was part of what the conservative provincial government wanted. What it did do was extremely dilute the voting power of the more progressive and dense downtown, voters who prioritized things like public transit when voting (this part of the city is also wealthier and had already been subsidizing the suburbs through the shared services provided by Metro Toronto). Because they now have to share a city with a large population of sprawling suburbanites from the five former municipalities, they no longer control their own destiny when it comes to things like transit planning. What we've seen repeatedly since then is that plans are made for urban development like expanding public transit, but the suburban voters and their representatives defeat it because they want that money spent on car-focused infrastructure instead, seeing public transit as something that only benefits downtown (even when the project would expand transit into the suburbs and give them that option where it has not previously existed, they have historically opposed that because they would rather drive their cars). The most infamous moment of this was the 2010 mayoral election, when crack-smoking Rob Ford won the election with this electoral map:  People joked about downtown being shaped like a big middle finger to the suburbs, but there's some truth to that: the suburbs voted one way and the old City of Toronto, pre-amalgamation, almost unanimously voted the other way, but were beaten anyway. Rob Ford's first act in office, literally the first thing he signed as mayor, was to kill a planned large-scale expansion to Toronto's public transit, called Transit City, and declare that the "war on the car" was over. His problem with Transit City was that it was designed around surface-level rail and bus services, and Ford thought the only acceptable transit was subways, for two reasons: one, because subways were seen as a status symbol that downtown had and the suburbs didn't; and two, because subways don't interfere with car traffic. A few years later, thanks in part to Ford and his allies, a planned and fully-funded scheme to replace an aging LRT line in Scarborough with a new 7-stop LRT line was scrapped and replaced with a single subway station that is estimated to be one of the most expensive subway stations ever constructed anywhere, currently at $3.5 billion and continually rising. (During the debates over this project, Ford also revealed that he didn't understand the difference between an LRT line running through a hydro corridor and a streetcar blocking cars on a street, and fought for subways partly because he believed any LRT would block traffic the way Toronto's current streetcars do). Rob's brother Doug Ford is currently the Premier of Ontario and was elected in part because of his affinity with these suburban voters. The amalgamation of Toronto also reduced representation, and Premier Ford is trying to reduce it even more by cutting the number of city councillors in half, which has led to increased influence for businesses and developers and contributed to the inflating of an enormous housing bubble composed primarily of cheaply-built but expensively-sold lovely condos, which has not only reshaped and threatened Toronto's economy but also rapidly driven up the cost of living in the city. In short, we can talk about consolidation or amalgamation as a potential solution to extreme fragmentation like St. Louis, but be careful what you wish for. Amalgamation can mean getting rid of fragmented planning and land-use, but it can also mean reorienting the planning and land-use of the unified city towards suburban purposes, which runs completely contrary to "urbanist" goals of densification and reducing car use. It may be better to create an overarching regional authority that can coordinate planning and services for more fragmented municipalities rather than merging sprawling suburban communities with dense urban ones. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Aug 18, 2018 14:00
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In summary, we should bomb the suburbs.
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Aug 18, 2018 18:36
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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The natural market state for unregulated housing markets is Midgar. "The planet's lyin' Cloud" RuanGacho fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Aug 19, 2018 |
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Aug 19, 2018 00:44
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There was a comment above about how gentrification is at least environmentally friendly. Besides more environmentally friendly building standards (it really depends), displacement often forces more automobile use by lower-income people since they no longer have access to frequent or quality public transportation.
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Aug 19, 2018 11:01
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The suburbs are the worst of both worlds: you miss the opportunities and thrill of the city, while at the same time being deprived of genuine proximity to nature and sense of community in actual rural towns. I think it's important to distinguish, however, between suburbs and actual small cities. I grew up in a small city of around 20,000 people, and I worry sometimes that when people are plotting the demise of the suburb, small cities like my hometown will get lumped in with it. It has a downtown, a particular culture, a sense of character which is missing in suburban sprawl. Yeah, there are some suburb-like housing developments on the perimeter of my home city, but they aren't the defining feature. A good source to look at when celebrating the potential for small cities is James Kunstler. Admittedly, he has some kooky ideas, but he has a pretty great ted talk on the vapidity of modern American architecture.
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Aug 19, 2018 14:36
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CountFosco posted:The suburbs are the worst of both worlds: you miss the opportunities and thrill of the city, while at the same time being deprived of genuine proximity to nature and sense of community in actual rural towns. Some suburbs have grown enough to be more than bedroom communities and have local jobs, shopping, theater, and nightlife now. Some of them are also pivoting to being more bicycle friendly as well (which is easier when the traffic is much lower and you have space to just add bicycle lanes without taking existing lanes away.) Still though, most suburbs really suck and at a minimum need to be be better connected to the main urban centers via rail or BRT so they stop contributing to traffic so much and offer better opportunities for the poorer folks to get to and from them.
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Aug 19, 2018 17:17
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Transit inner ring suburbs are fine, and way better than rural life, which are heavily subsidized economically and environmentally.Spacewolf posted:Consolidating municipalities will never happen, at least in the NJ case, because of school districts. School district consolidation happens only after the greatest screaming, because it is absolutely true (my mom was in real estate for 30+ years) that people decide where they want to live based upon which schools their kids will go to. If your schools suck, you are doomed, it's that simple. This example is different from Canada as they already had a lot more regional consolidation. I think the schools are less of a problem in NJ than other municipal services, schools already do have a lot of regionalization. Doing this is REALLY hard in NJ even in cases where the towns are very similar. They've been trying the very light incentives approach for 30 years, and I can only think of one case (Princeton) where it worked. The state government needs to get real and withhold funds from towns below a certain population threshold to force the issue.
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Aug 19, 2018 23:36
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i made a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdeirDrinWk
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Aug 22, 2018 13:24
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donoteat posted:i made a thing Great work, I liked 98% of the video. The one bit I felt that was lacking was exploring the consequences of inaction or massive public investment for the posited change. So let's say a new company moved into 52nd street and creates 1k new high income jobs. If the land is already built out to the maximum zoned potential that is able to be financed then, what happens for the residents? I.e. what happens under the no development option? This seems to be something many NIMBYS would perfer. The standard answer would be that the 1000 new highly paid workers would use thier greater incomes to bid up the cost of rent driving 1000 units worth of residents from the city. The NIMBYs benefit because thier homes increase in value giving them every incentives to oppose all development. Also they don't have to deal with any construction, and likely the city becomes more white. See Seattle as an example, one of the few major cities getting whiter every year So even with 0 change in the housing supply or the condition of the housing displacement still occurs. In the decommodification section, it would have been useful to cover the Vienna and Singapore models of social housing. Both cities have decommodofied housing through an essentially massive supply of public housing. I think within the context of the US capitalist system this is the best bet to achieve the goal of housing everyone and removing the mechanisms which drive up rent costs. Most of the policies you highlighted seem to address the "keep people in thier homes" problem and not the "how do we house everyone" problem. Unfortunately as you correctly noted building lots of high quality public housing wouldn't "keep everyone in thier homes". Since the buildings have to go somewhere, ideally next to the mass transit. I'd like to see you show an example of a city that has a law along the lines of "rent should be $500 per bedroom" and if 1000 new highly paid people move in then the city would respond by building 1000 more units of high quality public housing to absorb all the new demand so rent stays the same. Lastly you might want to cover land value taxes as a means for maximizing the taxes collected to government and encouraging private land owners to build the optimal development for a location given it tax value. This would naturally encourage redevelopment where the greatest utility exists. KingFisher fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 17:51
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KingFisher posted:Great work, I liked 98% of the video. A lot of public housing also completely ignores the middle income people who are also getting squeezed for affordable housing and rent, but also don't qualify for public housing because they make too much. Mixing below market housing in with other units in the same building also makes finding a new place extremely hard for middle income earners as the apartments will advertise the affordable housing rate that amounts to 5% of the units in their building, but actually none of those are available to people above the poverty line. This drives up the costs and time needed to apartment hunt for folks too. To a certain extent this can be avoided by just requiring advertisements to list BOTH the affordable units rates and the market rate units in any ads where the affordable units are quoted, but it still doesn't really help people who are above the cut-off point for below market rate units but unable to afford reasonably close apartments at market rates. And of course, the "affordable" units are also usually just tiny portion of the actual number of units needed for the people at the income level in that area. So they do very little, if anything, to actually provide the poorer people with meaningful numbers of available housing. Ultimately, with the population of cities increasing and density increasing, people HAVE to get shuffled around to increase the housing stock. It's just physics, unless you're in an area like Philly or Detroit (the latter of which isn't actually growing) where there's so many abandoned buildings in some areas that you can knock down and build new stuff while impacting almost no one currently living there.
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Aug 22, 2018 18:24
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Nitrousoxide posted:A lot of public housing also completely ignores the middle income people who are also getting squeezed for affordable housing and rent, but also don't qualify for public housing because they make too much. you're kind of skipping over the huge portion of the country that isn't at one end of an extreme or another. like, most of the united states is not in a condition of middle class unaffordability or excessive property abandonment - which i wouldn't describe for philly anyway
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Aug 22, 2018 18:28
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Here's a news story that's insanely relevant to this thread about abolishing the suburbs: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/22/addicts-crooks-thieves-the-campaign-to-kill-baltimores-light-rail The short version is that white people living in the suburbs of Baltimore are aggressively campaigning to have less public transit serve their area because they're convinced that black criminals are coming from downtown Baltimore on light rail to commit crimes in their pristine suburb. They believe this despite all the data showing that crime is decreasing and most crimes there are committed by people who also live in the suburb, because they have collected anecdotal evidence over social media. Highlights: quote:“Looking at his rap sheet or whatever, he was from Baltimore city,” Kim said of the intruder. “He missed the light rail and had to find a place to stay, and he chose to climb our fence.” quote:Sandra German, a retired security escort who is president of the Greater FernGlen Community Association, said the area’s transformation into “a cesspool of crime” in recent years had done significant damage to a once-prosperous mall nearby. “If this light rail continues at this stop we will no longer have a shopping centre,” German told an approving crowd. quote:Addressing the rally, state attorney Wes Adams, whose brother-in-law died of an overdose, said “the bulk” of opioid overdoses in recent years had occurred on a corridor from Glen Burnie stretching roughly along the route of the light rail. The police department is sceptical of this, pointing Guardian Cities to a map showing overdoses all over the county, but activists are convinced. “They are coming down here and bringing, I don’t want to say the thugs – but it is the thugs,” local resident Vanessa Watson told Guardian Cities. quote:“The underlying assumption seems to be that Baltimore is full of criminals who want nothing more than to rob county residents but are prevented merely by the lack of transportation,” said an editorial in the Baltimore Sun. “In the context of the Baltimore region’s legacy of segregation, it’s impossible to avoid the racial implications of that thinking.” quote:Joseph Piazzola, 35, was among the few present in opposition. He served in the US army reserve until 2015, when he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. “I have cancer and my nurse comes on the light rail to take care of me,” Piazzola shouted at one point.
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Aug 22, 2018 20:50
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vyelkin posted:Here's a news story that's insanely relevant to this thread about abolishing the suburbs: as usual, abolishing the suburbs addresses the symptom, not the cause we must abolish white people
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Aug 22, 2018 20:53
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vyelkin posted:Here's a news story that's insanely relevant to this thread about abolishing the suburbs: IIRC the same sort of thing happened... maybe.. 40 or so...? years ago to block the extension of Boston-area subway's Red Line to the town of Arlington.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:16
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donoteat posted:i made a thing i like the part where you said rent control
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Aug 22, 2018 23:13
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donoteat posted:i made a thing At least in my area, the Twin Cities, YIMBYs tend strongly to agree with most of the solutions in the decommodification section, perceiving NIMBYs to be a bulwark to any change to the status quo. The most vocal local anti-gentrification activists also seem more interested in preserving the status quo than in working together toward a better future for all. My main quibble with the video is 1m30s in which you state that the reason for the gentrification occurring in the neighborhood doesn't matter, as it overlooks why the gentrification is possibly occurring in this specific neighborhood, as opposed to the swathes of highly-valued single family homes in the neighborhood a few blocks away with equal potential transit access and distance from economic opportunity: exclusionary zoning and rabid opposition from monied house owners. One of the most import tenants of YIMBYism, to me, is putting an end to the exclusionary practices of wealthy property owners. For example, a local neighborhood of rich shits that has been actively fighting to keep anyone but other rich shits from living close to "their" lake. The latest victim is a proposed 21-unit assisted living building. It has been decried for potentially: bringing in people dependent on Medicare, bringing in noisy ambulances to disturb the neighborhood's tranquility, and, of course, dozens of potential grandchildren taking up the neighborhood's street parking. Thread: https://twitter.com/WedgeLIVE/status/1031700909347282946 Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 00:44
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Cugel the Clever posted:My main quibble with the video is 1m30s in which you state that the reason for the gentrification occurring in the neighborhood doesn't matter, as it overlooks why the gentrification is possibly occurring in this specific neighborhood, as opposed to the swathes of highly-valued single family homes in the neighborhood a few blocks away with equal potential transit access and distance from economic opportunity: exclusionary zoning and rabid opposition from monied house owners. One of the most import tenants of YIMBYism, to me, is putting an end to the exclusionary practices of wealthy property owners. In my experience, the most important tenant of YIMBYism in practice, has been fighting against the rights of tenants and enshrining the exclusionary practices of wealthy property owners and developers to build more housing for those like them, the wealthy urbanist. edit: I live in San Francisco, where my experience of YIMBYism is as such http://www.sfexaminer.com/endorse-prop-10-no-sf-yimby-faces-soul-defining-choice/ the leadership against even allowing any city in the state to enact a rent control law. fermun fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 09:47
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