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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Koesj posted:Would semi-public housing cooperatives work in the US? there are already private coops and the like, but like all other american housing they tend to be exclusive based on income
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Aug 7, 2018 16:22
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ProperGanderPusher posted:The best short term solution to this problem is that unless you work in a super specialized field, there’s plenty of lower cost cities to move to where gentrification has been minimal. St. Louis, Birmingham, Dallas, Kansas City, Charlotte, and other areas are full of cheap housing and plenty of decent white collar jobs if you’re just looking for generic cubicle-dwelling office type work. Everywhere has brewpubs and dive bars and cafes with four dollar toast, so you won’t be culturally deprived, either. You might have to actually talk to a Republican now and then, but I think it’s a fair trade off. gentrification is a closely linked but distinct problem from rising urban home prices in general. but otherwise yeah, it sucks hard trying to get a home in seattle, san francisco, los angeles, new york, etc. on a middle class salary. one viable solution is to move to a cheaper metro. this is a huge reason why sunbelt cities are growing, they strike a balance between job growth, cultural/entertainment options, and cost of living the rust belt will swing back this way soon enough (within a few decades)
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Aug 14, 2018 20:06
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CountFosco posted:the reasoning behind criticism. i don't like (new_thing) it is not like the thing i am used to, (old_thing). this new thing represents change, which i do not like, as it reminds me of the passage of time and my own mortality
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Aug 14, 2018 23:01
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CountFosco posted:Actually, I think you'll find that the architecture of late stage capitalism reflects the values and quality of late stage capitalism. i dont really want to continue this conversation because it seems very silly and and bickering over personal aesthetic preferences, i just want to point out that "the architecture of late stage capitalism" could refer to any one of many styles of architecture prevalent in the western world over the last two centuries starting with like neo-gothic like, are you going to go full on i-dont-like-postmodernism-whatever-that-means-at-this-moment or are you gonna throw me a curveball and start talking about googie or streamline moderne or something
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Aug 14, 2018 23:36
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just talking about "the architecture of late stage capitalism" itself as if we are at the end of history and on the verge of the revolution is why postmodernism even has to be a term
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Aug 14, 2018 23:43
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i too long for the days of socialist rococo putting the chinoiserie in PRC
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Aug 15, 2018 01:51
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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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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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itt we publicly grapple with is/ought
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Aug 17, 2018 16:45
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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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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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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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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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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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Cugel the Clever posted:This. Cities need to take up the burden rather than only leaving it to private developers and mandating carve outs to address affordability. The reason I also fight for the latter is because it's still miles better than the status quo of Boomer NIMBYs fighting to keep their single-family housing in the middle of the city. they need to, but funding is the crucial problem. some kind of consolidated metro regional agency would have more resources available, but lol at the political screaming of causing tax dollars to flow across city jurisdictions to pay for housing for poor people. and the us federal government has spent the last thirty years trying to wiggle out of matching funding for public housing a small city near me that's pretty much just wealthy white liberals has a robust housing authority that is renovating and expanding existing public housing. the idea is to provide a mix of incomes as well as enhance socioeconomic diversity in the city school system. it's a great initiative but the problem is that the amount of housing the city can provide, while a decent chunk of housing units within city limits, doesn't even move the needle on the regional housing shortage
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Aug 23, 2018 14:22
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effects_of_gentrification.png https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1032840368667209729
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Aug 24, 2018 15:56
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Troy Queef posted:Any thoughts on this? he's pretty right on about the problems and potential solutions, the issue is how do you implement this stuff. like i dont see the city of san francisco being able to set up a public bank large enough to handle the task
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Aug 24, 2018 16:44
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Cicero posted:For example, community input: sounds great in theory, in practice it means the old boomers with tons of free time on their hand, or the politically connected, get their way. Community input means homeless shelters or halfway houses or other "undesirable" type buildings will never make their way into affluent neighborhoods. It also means that in addition to the published, transparent, democratically created regulations governing new developments, you have a second set that exist only in the minds of a subset of people that live near each development. That's bad. as annoying as charettes are to run they are way more accessible than other forms of community input like local organizing and lobbying groups. the thing you're flipped on here is "should we accept community input or no" which is different from what this guy is saying, "community input should be equalized so that everyone has it and not just the people with time/money to lawyer up" Cicero posted:See, this is a mix of true and false. Developers will target the top end as much as they can, yes, but developers ALWAYS target the top end, because that is where the money is. there's no market for brand new intown cheap homes, none, which is why the government or private charities like habitat for humanity must intervene in the first place if developers can't make money building housing for wealthier people intown, they're not going to try to cater to lower incomes in the same area. they're going to try to develop housing for wealthier people, or less wealthy people, in places where land is cheaper. the only time you're going to see market rate housing for less wealthy people being built intown is in weird scenarios like the price of intown land falling or something, which isn't likely to happen again with current trends Cicero posted:I dunno if he's right or not, but the person you're quoting here says it's not gentrification in the very next twee gentrification is not the sole explanation of housing segregation, but the effect of gentrification is segregation. draw a big circle and label it segregation, draw a smaller circle inside of that and label it gentrification e: draw a big circle around them both and label it "local control of school district borders and funding" Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Aug 24, 2018 |
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Aug 24, 2018 17:21
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Cicero posted:Developers will always target the top end to the extent that they can, because they like money. If demand at the top is sufficiently satisfied and there's still money to make elsewhere, sure they'll do that. Toyota doesn't make middle-class cars out of generosity, they do it because Lexuses are only going to be bought by so many people. to extend the car analogy, there's a minimum level of profit to be made on a vehicle before it's not worth producing. toyota isn't going to crank out bare minimum cheap cars if it projects it might clear a hundred dollars in net revenue on each car, because of the risk involved. likewise, developers aren't going to invest $99k to build a $100k home because any market swing could end up costing you money. and housing has some volatile inputs, especially if you're building larger projects, think materials and labor cost here Cicero posted:Like I said, you're probably not going to see new market-rate housing in SF for the working class even with huge rezoning, that's true. Right now it's too desirable and booming for that. But you probably could get new housing for the middle class (middle class by SF/bay area standards, anyway). Not disputing that public housing is something we should have a lot of, but it mostly doesn't conflict with what urbanists/YIMBYs want anyway, so framing it as either/or is dumb. the bay area is a particularly bad example in terms of the american housing market because it has unique challenges, but as a mental exercise, consider that if the developers of luxury condos in SF proper suddenly see their market opportunities collapse, they're not going to scale down their projects in the city, they're going to go further out to oakland, richmond etc. to do scaled down projects. the price of infill and redevelopable land in the city of SF is not going to drop appreciably
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Aug 24, 2018 17:37
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Cicero posted:If housing is inherently expensive in an area, having housing for middle-class/poor people just be "used" housing isn't automatically bad. this is exactly how housing is provided for lower income persons, except that this mechanism entirely breaks down in areas with intense competition for housing. trickle down doesn't work when even shacks are being bid on with same day 100% cash offers Cicero posted:Honestly I feel like the bay area's "unique challenges" are largely self-inflicted. some are and some aren't you've got prop 13, a terribly stupid law, but that's a state law the bay area is also home to an extremely lucrative industry right now that throws wages out of whack this is in addition to decades of san francisco punching way above its weight culturally, so it has a tremendous amount of cool factor - seattle and new york have the same problems, and portland, dear god. compare this to like, chicago, or new orleans which is very cool but also has a lot of Problems to whittle away that desirablility also geography, both local (peninsula, coastal, somewhat rocky) and global (pacific coast, climate is nice and big access to immigrant populations from south and west) and then on top of that all the dumb zoning and nimbys
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Aug 24, 2018 17:50
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