13 ms·

> New York’s zoning rules were intended to create less cramped quarters, but they also have consequences for the number of aggregate apartments in the city. Suc

> New York’s zoning rules were intended to create less cramped quarters, but they also have consequences for the number of aggregate apartments in the city. Such limitations can quickly decrease the supply of housing, and most likely drive up rents. If every tenement in the city were reconfigured in these ways, they would be less crowded, but there would also be fewer apartments to go around. Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. I'm not sure how these regulations are supposed to have anything but a profound effect on rents. I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost? There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.

dilemma 10y ago
These regulations are the results of social evolution, and explain why it's so hard to be a young adult today, across all industrialized societies. I believe that the saying "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it" applies to societies as well as families. Current policy makers have no idea about the cost at which today's societies were built, and take for granted what they've been given and squander it. NIMBY laws are absolutely an example as the cherished old buildings were built in a different type of political climate and could not be built today, ironically.
- s_q_b 10y ago
  "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it." Digression: Interestingly, this adage about hereditary rule is one of the loan phrases brought back after the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars. Primarily these were from the language of the ruling Pathans (as we would call them Pashtuns.) The original Pashto, more literally translated: "The grandfather was born in a tent. He remembers living in a tent. He will lead the people well. The father was born in a tent. He remembers both living in a tent, and living in a palace. He will lead the people well. The son was born in a palace. He has never lived in a tent. He will not lead the people at all." There are several of these Afghan sayings, from both the Pashtunwali and folk-wisdom, that the British officers brought back home. The most well-known of these most don't realize is an Pashto loan phrase at all: "Revenge is a dish best served cold."
  - nickonline 10y ago
    It's really not some crazy idea. I'm sure you've heard "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"
    - s_q_b 10y ago
      Yeah, it's so common as to have become a television trope. It's not difficult to see how a life of luxury can cause one to divorce the notion of wealth (or power) from the hard work necessary to obtain it.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      Formal name for the pattern is regression toward the mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      That reads more like a joke about Land Rover maintenance costs.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      that quote is just about oil running out.
      - gozur88 10y ago
        The source of the quote, Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, died in 1990. By my reckoning the last Land Rover generation will have been born by now.
  - ef4 10y ago
    It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance 富不过三代 (wealth does not pass three generations)
- akgerber 10y ago
  Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston. One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
  - mjevans 10y ago
    For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts). For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
    - anamoulous 10y ago
      Honestly, in Manhattan they should eliminate automobile access to a great deal of the streets and avenues.
      - AJ007 10y ago
        They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly. There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight. I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
        10y ago
- home_boi 10y ago
  NYC is still very cheap. With roommates and an hour long commute, you will be looking at $700-800/month rent.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    For how many square feet of non-shared personal space?
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    Why is an hour long commute considered acceptable? If you value your time at $50/hr, a daily 1-hr commute equates to an additional $2,000/month
    - jonknee 10y ago
      People who live with roommates an hour away to save money almost certainly don't value their time at $50/hr.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
      - hx87 10y ago
        I value my time much more than my space. Hence living with roommates close to work.
    - grillvogel 10y ago
      what's so bad about sitting on a train for an hour? its some nice personal time to do whatever you want or just space out and relax.
      - JDiculous 10y ago
- rcthompson 10y ago
  I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat. The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true. See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
  - akkartik 10y ago
    I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.
uola 10y ago
"Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930" That isn't exactly unexpected when pretty much every factor in construction says that it gets harder to build the more developed an area is. Comparing pictures shows that plenty of high buildings has been built since then. [0] [1] "I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?" Politically motivated zoning rules isn't first and foremost about aesthetics, it's about preserving property values (at the high end) and not being squeezed out (at the low end). [0] http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Lower-Manhattan-from-airplane-looking-south-1934.jpg http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/... [1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.j...
sbov 10y ago
I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today. Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?
- humanrebar 10y ago
  1. I'm assuming the 60% were small enough, short enough, set back enough from the property line, etc., that they would meet zoning regulations. 2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    >2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930. I don't think the population of NYC has increased that much from 1930. By 1930 NYC was a massive city and many boroughs have shrank since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor... Shows were population shrinkage and growth have occurred.
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    True, but Manhattan, where people think it the most packed, hasn't. The population has gone down.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)
  - 10y ago
nihonde 10y ago
The reason those commutes are awful is not because Manhattan is unaffordable. The areas around New York City are among the least functional urban zones I've ever encountered. Total, utter, abject mismanagement of resources——and I say that as someone who used to live in Sheldon Silver's district of Manhattan. It's unreasonable to expect Manhattan to be affordable, but it's not unreasonable to expect the surrounding areas to be safe, able to operate trains, have reasonable housing, etc. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but New Jersey and Long Island are a toxic trash fire compared to somewhere like Tokyo. I wouldn't send my worst enemies to live in a place like Jersey City or East New York.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I have to agree. It always boggles me when I visit Manhattan and think to myself: "This is one of the richest and grandest cities in human history - so why are the public spaces so putrid?" Constantly stepping on old gum and cigarette butts...and God help you if you need to use the subway on a hot summer day. I often feel the same way walking about San Francisco and encountering the unmistakeable stench of human excrement. Having been to old European cities like Berlin and Rome, I was surprised at how graffiti-strewn their walls tended to be, but at least their streets were CLEAN!
  - douche 10y ago
    Berlin is without a doubt the nicest city I have ever been to. Every time I go there, I think to myself, why couldn't the T in Boston be 10% as nice as the U/S-Bahn system? I absolutely hate cities, and I think I could possibly stomach living in Berlin.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      It's a shame the US really came into its own around the time of the automobile. Once cities were designed around cars, it became impossible to dislodge. Old European cities were constrained by the distance one could reasonably travel by foot, so they were densely packed together. When I lived in Rome for a short while, every service I needed - groceries, dining, haircut, gelato - was within a 3-block radius. Pretty much the entire city was like that. As much as we want to densify in the US, the fact is that two-lane streets with sidewalks HUGELY increase the distance between buildings and are horrible for walkability. Most of the twisty streets in Rome could fit 1 Fiat at a time. I wish we could do that here, but we would A: have to knock down almost everything and start from scratch, and B: figure out a way for emergency services to get there and back quickly.
elahd 10y ago
>There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. It's partly because of NIMBY zoning laws, but I'd say it has more to do with our awful public transit system. It's bad enough trying to head downtown within Manhattan on the Lexington Ave express -- commutes from the outer boroughs can be measured in hours. There are no plans for new subway lines (excluding the 2nd Ave subway, which isn't even fully funded) and city council won't approve true bus rapid transit.
danielweber 10y ago
> There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. Why are these people so eager to work in Manhattan if working there sucks so much? If employees refused to work in places with unacceptable commutes, employers will create other places to work. If enough people want to "live the dream" or have some reason they Absolutely Must Work in Manhattan, all the dressage in the world won't stop it from becoming intolerable.
- swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
  While capitalism tends to balance itself out, zoning laws aren't as flexible. It's a fine line between inconvenient to intolerable, as more and more people living in San Francisco are discovering.
- cauterized 10y ago
  Because an office in Manhattan gives you access to talent from the entire heavily populated (20 million) and relatively well educated NY metro area. (Which in turn grows because highly educated people are drawn there for employment opportunities. Positive feedback cycle.) An office in SmallTown USA gives you access to the talent of the 10,000 people who live in SmallTown and an additional 10,000 people who live in the vicinity and are willing to drive 30-60 minutes to your office. And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    > And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city. If they've rationally moved to the larger city, I don't see why anyone should cater to their problems. You can't have it both ways, where people are rationally moving to cities but also surprisingly victimized by cruel city commute times. Also, there is also plenty of room between SmallTown and New York City. It's a strawman to think the alternate to to Manhattan is a town of 10,000.
    - cauterized 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

dilemma 10y ago

These regulations are the results of social evolution, and explain why it's so hard to be a young adult today, across all industrialized societies. I believe that the saying "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it" applies to societies as well as families. Current policy makers have no idea about the cost at which today's societies were built, and take for granted what they've been given and squander it. NIMBY laws are absolutely an example as the cherished old buildings were built in a different type of political climate and could not be built today, ironically.

s_q_b 10y ago
"The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it." Digression: Interestingly, this adage about hereditary rule is one of the loan phrases brought back after the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars. Primarily these were from the language of the ruling Pathans (as we would call them Pashtuns.) The original Pashto, more literally translated: "The grandfather was born in a tent. He remembers living in a tent. He will lead the people well. The father was born in a tent. He remembers both living in a tent, and living in a palace. He will lead the people well. The son was born in a palace. He has never lived in a tent. He will not lead the people at all." There are several of these Afghan sayings, from both the Pashtunwali and folk-wisdom, that the British officers brought back home. The most well-known of these most don't realize is an Pashto loan phrase at all: "Revenge is a dish best served cold."
- nickonline 10y ago
  It's really not some crazy idea. I'm sure you've heard "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"
  - s_q_b 10y ago
    Yeah, it's so common as to have become a television trope. It's not difficult to see how a life of luxury can cause one to divorce the notion of wealth (or power) from the hard work necessary to obtain it.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Formal name for the pattern is regression toward the mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    That reads more like a joke about Land Rover maintenance costs.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    that quote is just about oil running out.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      The source of the quote, Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, died in 1990. By my reckoning the last Land Rover generation will have been born by now.
- ef4 10y ago
  It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance 富不过三代 (wealth does not pass three generations)
akgerber 10y ago
Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston. One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
- mjevans 10y ago
  For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts). For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
  - anamoulous 10y ago
    Honestly, in Manhattan they should eliminate automobile access to a great deal of the streets and avenues.
    - AJ007 10y ago
      They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly. There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight. I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
      - 10y ago
home_boi 10y ago
NYC is still very cheap. With roommates and an hour long commute, you will be looking at $700-800/month rent.
- nxzero 10y ago
  For how many square feet of non-shared personal space?
- JDiculous 10y ago
  Why is an hour long commute considered acceptable? If you value your time at $50/hr, a daily 1-hr commute equates to an additional $2,000/month
  - jonknee 10y ago
    People who live with roommates an hour away to save money almost certainly don't value their time at $50/hr.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
    - hx87 10y ago
      I value my time much more than my space. Hence living with roommates close to work.
  - grillvogel 10y ago
    what's so bad about sitting on a train for an hour? its some nice personal time to do whatever you want or just space out and relax.
    - JDiculous 10y ago
rcthompson 10y ago
I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat. The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true. See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
- akkartik 10y ago
  I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.

uola 10y ago

"Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930" That isn't exactly unexpected when pretty much every factor in construction says that it gets harder to build the more developed an area is. Comparing pictures shows that plenty of high buildings has been built since then. [0] [1] "I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?" Politically motivated zoning rules isn't first and foremost about aesthetics, it's about preserving property values (at the high end) and not being squeezed out (at the low end). [0] http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Lower-Manhattan-from-airplane-looking-south-1934.jpg http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/... [1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.j...

sbov 10y ago

I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today. Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?

humanrebar 10y ago
1. I'm assuming the 60% were small enough, short enough, set back enough from the property line, etc., that they would meet zoning regulations. 2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.
- pixl97 10y ago
  >2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930. I don't think the population of NYC has increased that much from 1930. By 1930 NYC was a massive city and many boroughs have shrank since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor... Shows were population shrinkage and growth have occurred.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  True, but Manhattan, where people think it the most packed, hasn't. The population has gone down.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)
- 10y ago

nihonde 10y ago

The reason those commutes are awful is not because Manhattan is unaffordable. The areas around New York City are among the least functional urban zones I've ever encountered. Total, utter, abject mismanagement of resources——and I say that as someone who used to live in Sheldon Silver's district of Manhattan. It's unreasonable to expect Manhattan to be affordable, but it's not unreasonable to expect the surrounding areas to be safe, able to operate trains, have reasonable housing, etc. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but New Jersey and Long Island are a toxic trash fire compared to somewhere like Tokyo. I wouldn't send my worst enemies to live in a place like Jersey City or East New York.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I have to agree. It always boggles me when I visit Manhattan and think to myself: "This is one of the richest and grandest cities in human history - so why are the public spaces so putrid?" Constantly stepping on old gum and cigarette butts...and God help you if you need to use the subway on a hot summer day. I often feel the same way walking about San Francisco and encountering the unmistakeable stench of human excrement. Having been to old European cities like Berlin and Rome, I was surprised at how graffiti-strewn their walls tended to be, but at least their streets were CLEAN!
- douche 10y ago
  Berlin is without a doubt the nicest city I have ever been to. Every time I go there, I think to myself, why couldn't the T in Boston be 10% as nice as the U/S-Bahn system? I absolutely hate cities, and I think I could possibly stomach living in Berlin.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    It's a shame the US really came into its own around the time of the automobile. Once cities were designed around cars, it became impossible to dislodge. Old European cities were constrained by the distance one could reasonably travel by foot, so they were densely packed together. When I lived in Rome for a short while, every service I needed - groceries, dining, haircut, gelato - was within a 3-block radius. Pretty much the entire city was like that. As much as we want to densify in the US, the fact is that two-lane streets with sidewalks HUGELY increase the distance between buildings and are horrible for walkability. Most of the twisty streets in Rome could fit 1 Fiat at a time. I wish we could do that here, but we would A: have to knock down almost everything and start from scratch, and B: figure out a way for emergency services to get there and back quickly.

elahd 10y ago

>There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. It's partly because of NIMBY zoning laws, but I'd say it has more to do with our awful public transit system. It's bad enough trying to head downtown within Manhattan on the Lexington Ave express -- commutes from the outer boroughs can be measured in hours. There are no plans for new subway lines (excluding the 2nd Ave subway, which isn't even fully funded) and city council won't approve true bus rapid transit.

danielweber 10y ago

> There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. Why are these people so eager to work in Manhattan if working there sucks so much? If employees refused to work in places with unacceptable commutes, employers will create other places to work. If enough people want to "live the dream" or have some reason they Absolutely Must Work in Manhattan, all the dressage in the world won't stop it from becoming intolerable.

swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
While capitalism tends to balance itself out, zoning laws aren't as flexible. It's a fine line between inconvenient to intolerable, as more and more people living in San Francisco are discovering.
cauterized 10y ago
Because an office in Manhattan gives you access to talent from the entire heavily populated (20 million) and relatively well educated NY metro area. (Which in turn grows because highly educated people are drawn there for employment opportunities. Positive feedback cycle.) An office in SmallTown USA gives you access to the talent of the 10,000 people who live in SmallTown and an additional 10,000 people who live in the vicinity and are willing to drive 30-60 minutes to your office. And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city.
- danielweber 10y ago
  > And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city. If they've rationally moved to the larger city, I don't see why anyone should cater to their problems. You can't have it both ways, where people are rationally moving to cities but also surprisingly victimized by cruel city commute times. Also, there is also plenty of room between SmallTown and New York City. It's a strawman to think the alternate to to Manhattan is a town of 10,000.
  - cauterized 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]