6 ms·

The Unaffordable Urban Paradise

52 points by piquadrat 9y ago

akanet 9y ago
The author's recommendations are certainly apt, though I wonder if he realizes how much of a political nightmare trying to get cities like Berkeley to build more housing is. Berkeley is probably the staunchest NIMBY city of the major Bay Area cities. The mayor and city council recently outright denied a simple rebuild of a house on Haskell St (heh) that would have added a couple extra units of housing. We believe this to be in violation of the Housing Accountability Act, and have brought a lawsuit against Berkeley that you can read about if you're interested! http://www.carlaef.org/berkeley http://www.carlaef.org/berkeley More broadly, the Bay Area needs to build housing as quickly as possible. If you work at a tech company, please consider getting your company involved. If you can't participate directly, there are increasingly many groups in the Bay Area dedicated to lifting outdated zoning restrictions and accelerating the pace of housing development. We would love to have your patronage! http://www.sfyimby.org/ http://www.sfyimby.org/
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Or you can move if you can't afford the area. There are plenty of places with lower costs of living. You can't live in what is perhaps the most desirable area in the world and then be upset that people want to protect/increase their property value or not change how their community is. Not everybody wants to live in a sea of imposing skyscrapers. -edit So I see a few comments discussing things like commuting, urban sprawl, etc.... Those are fair comments and I largely agree. But the solution proposed is not the right answer either. We need mixed-use developed walkable neighborhoods. We need our work places to be mixed within our neighborhoods along with our parks, convenience stores, and everything in between. Obviously I'm not a fan of sprawl, but I'm not a big fan of skyscrapers, and I'm also not a fan of others being upset about the affordability of the world's most desirable areas. While it is true that there is much more economic opportunity in a place like San Francisco than, say, middle-of-nowhere Arizona or something, it would be incorrect to suggest that there is no economic opportunity. Frankly, the assessment being made here is that you're choosing to suffer a 2-hour each-way commute and unaffordable rent for the opportunity to work at really cool companies, but the solution, which is to force other people to change their way of life, even if you find it contemptable, is an inherently immoral stance. If a town votes in a mayor who does what the town wants, what is more American, and democratic than that? Is overrunning the town with lawsuits and fights an ethical thing to do? I don't think so. Pack your stuff, and move. When (insert company here) can't get employees to relocate to the insanity that is the Bay Area, they'll move their offices, and things will resolve naturally and peacefully. Disclaimer: I have never lived long-term in the Bay Area and I have no vested interest in how any of this turns out. If anything, reading the horror stories about people subletting camping spots in their backyard and the like amuses me (obviously I feel bad too). I do confess I have a vested interest in promoting mixed-use development neighborhoods and I would like to see more people move out of the Bay Area and back into the rest of the United States as I believe that the concentration of wealth and knowledge in one (or a few) areas is contributing to the fractures in our society and anti-competitiveness of our second and third-tier cities.
  - zucchini_head 9y ago
    Doesn't solve the problem. This approach contributes to urban sprawl, which is normally bad for the environment (people doing 2h car commutes is incredibly polluting, verses a shorter and commute or using public transport). A good summary of the bad effects of urban sprawl is available on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Commuting has a cost that is more than just dollars especially for people who can't afford to outsource most non-income earning aspects of their lives.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    1) A city can't survive if the people needed to work the jobs to make it an appealing place to live can't afford to live within commute distance. 2) The more affordable places tend to have less economic opportunity (which is part of why they're in lower demand and more affordable in the first place), so moving there isn't necessarily a win.
    - muninn_ 9y ago
      To your second point. The large issue here has more to do with moving to the areas with more economic opportunity instead of creating economic opportunity where you currently reside. The culture of moving on a whim, not creating a stable network of family and friends in your neighborhoods, and other factors are contributing to our social problems.
      - twobyfour 9y ago
        Well, creating economic opportunity can be a chicken-and-egg problem. For instance, there are extra challenges to starting a tech startup in a location without a large existing pool of software developers.
  - raldi 9y ago
- zucchini_head 9y ago
  Just skim-read through that story. Sounds pretty part-and-parcel for these kind of things, it's the same where I live too (UK). The first step is always to include irrelevant statistics, since this bulks-up the case with "we are good people" rabble, and makes it harder to understand. It's essentially used to drown-out the key details of the case and to slow things down by making it much longer to read. One of my older family members has been a council (our version of states I suppose) member for over 40 years, and some of the stories I hear are incredible. I've heard stories of people submitting 300+ page testimonials and hundreds of correspondence over just 1-2 days just over small renovations, purely to obfuscate the case's legitimate and important details that are against their favour. I'm really glad people are documenting things like this so we can actually see how bad it is getting...
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Town councils are approximately the same level of government as cities/counties in the states. (there are also often township governments that operate inside of counties, but modern travel makes them kind of stupid and there is a lot of at least de facto passing of authority up to the county level).
- tryitnow 9y ago
  I love what you're doing, so let me tell you what's holding me back from jumping on board. Traffic. You want more housing, but that almost always means more cars - and how do you handle that? But it's more than just traffic - broadly speaking it's the principle of Chesterton's fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...). Before making rapid changes, let's understand why the status quo is the status quo. The reason I can't support YIMBY is because it comes off as too much like reverse stupidity - let's just do the opposite of those nasty NIMBY's and then things will be all right! That never works. As for your claims about Berkeley, I've been frequenting Berkeley since 2014 and I've witnessed a pretty significant amount of construction on Shattuck - and I'm left wondering - how on earth are the roads going to accommodate the massive increase in traffic? One thing people should consider is banning automobile ownership for residents of new buildings. That would address the concerns of critics like myself and lead to a whole lot less opposition to new construction. Plus, it would create stronger demand for public transportation and car-sharing - both of which are conducive to the goal of greater density. And honestly, a lot of tech-savvy millennials don't even want to own a car.
  - dgacmu 9y ago
    Traffic is an important concern. If it doesn't take proposition 13 into account, it's probably not going to be as effective as it should. Prop 13 creates too many financial incentives not to relocate to be near your job -- part of the reason that California has become a commute nightmare [0]. It also creates too strong an incentive to hang on to empty property and not improve it. [1] That said, increasing the housing density in some of those currently-suburban areas (around Google, Apple, and Facebook, for example) could help them transform into more viable urban areas, without an increase in car traffic. [0] http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.pdf http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.p... " observed changes in commuting patterns in major metropolitan areas in California support that hypothesis. In particular, between 1980 and 1990, the number of workers in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles who commute outside the metropolitan statistical area to work increased 119 percent, 88 percent, and 80 percent, respectively. That is well above the growth in the number of similar commuters in other metropolitan areas across the nation, which generally ranged from 25 percent to 45 percent." [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_proposition_13_is_bad_policy_and_here_are_some_graphs_to_show.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_...
shawnee_ 9y ago
Now everything’s changed. In 2016, the San Francisco metro area was the top location for venture capital investment in the country, hauling in $23.4 billion—more than triple the VC investment in Silicon Valley proper. Interesting numbers, what seems to be evidence of inflation chasing inflation. There's no logical justification for such a concentrated purse of investment dollars benefiting so few people. Furthermore, it would seem that it's benefiting the same people over and over ... the most obvious driver here is turnover. Probably there are a lot of PMCs in SF who absolutely bet on (hope for) the failure of most of the companies getting these investment dollars, the second they've signed their leases. Because who doesn't lose out when a startup fails and has to shutdown? The rent takers, the leaseholders prepared with aggressive litigation... everybody else loses. (As a side note, I'm pretty sure this is how the current US president's family empire was built: http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s-son-in-law-is-a-baltimore-slumlord-and-that-s-not-even-the-worst-of-it-20170523-story.html http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s...) In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley, or Microsoft in the Seattle suburbs, but the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, and the corporate campuses of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Because companies in the 80's were smarter. They knew that if you wanted to build a company that can build equity, you cannot be beholden to the lease holders and the rent takers. They built in the burbs because that is where they could establish equity. Today the "barriers to entry" for owning in SF are just too high for most; the continual delusion of people who think they can build a sustainable business model while being based in SF is mind-boggling to me.
- api 9y ago
  "Inflation chasing inflation." Thanks for that concise summary.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Renting has been the standard model for suburban office parks too. Most companies do not own their own office buildings. It's more common for specialized space, e.g. manufacturing facilities but not usually done for offices.
ionwake 9y ago
Please do correct me if I am wrong. But isn't the whole reason lower class job salaries increased in the USA was simply because they had just won a world war? I do not know enough about the reasons for affluence in the 50s, but surely it was in large part to success in the war? If so, how could one suggest the minimum wage is just raised without it causing mass unemployment in the present? I must be misunderstanding something.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  I'm not sure how you think winning a war leads "simply" to higher wages? There were a lot of factors surrounding WW2 which contributed to the success of the US afterwards, but they're nowhere near as simple as the fact that they won. If anything, the most immediate outcome of the victory is a sudden influx of unemployed soldiers needing jobs, which causes downward pressure on wages.
  - hueving 9y ago
    The shattered manufacturing capabilities of Europe put the US in a leading position to be the primary provider to take its place. Essentially Europe was gone as a competitor in the global economy and became a consumer. This led to massive demand in the US which of course led to companies paying lots of workers to fulfill it.
  - SmellTheGlove 9y ago
    > If anything, the most immediate outcome of the victory is a sudden influx of unemployed soldiers needing jobs, which causes downward pressure on wages. You had fewer soldiers coming back than you had shipping off. You also had worldwide demand for manufactured goods to meet, and Europe lost basically its entire infrastructure and nearly an entire generation of working age men.
    - ionwake 9y ago
      Good points
  - 9y ago
dasmoth 9y ago
This is an incredibly "urbanist" piece. No mention at all of companies moving to less-populous locations, let alone alternatives such as remote work. It's hard not to be left with the impression that the author isn't going to be happy until everyone is living like ants.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  Hard not to be left with the impression that you consider people who enjoy living in cities to be insects, and expect every piece you read to reflect that bizarre prejudice.
  - dasmoth 9y ago
    There are many variations on "living in cities". Some of them involve single-family dwellings and lots of private space. It actually seems to be those models which are most strongly under attack right now.
    - TulliusCicero 9y ago
      They're under attack because they make those cities unaffordable to most, they're a cash transfer from immigrants to the emplaced, from the young to the old. They're under attack because they can't possibly scale. They're under attack because they take more energy and are more hostile to walking, biking, and transit. They're under attack because they're not the natural outcome of people expressing preferences in the market, but rather the result of enforced government zoning regulations. They're under attack because said zoning regulations are social engineering designed to -- in concert with neighborhood-based school district boundaries -- segregate people based on class.
      - hueving 9y ago
        And that's why New York city is so affordable?
        9y ago
petraeus 9y ago
Privatize the profits and socialize the losses, the great American dream.
sevensor 9y ago
This piece is by Richard Florida, who helped create the very problem he laments. Ten-fifteen years ago, he was talking up the same cities as magnets for the "creative class." Now all of a sudden he's concerned about the janitors and street sweepers? I'm not taking Florida seriously if he can't acknowledge his past myopia.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Isn't this an ad homin argument? What is wrong with his actual policy proposals?
  - sevensor 9y ago
    They're pretty thin. Build housing. Build transit. Raise the minimum wage. There's nothing wrong with those, but he's pretty late to the party. So I'd say this isn't an ad hominem. I'm not trying to attack the argument by attacking the man. I'm just attacking the man. Florida in particular isn't credible because a decade ago he was boosting municipal gold-digging -- chasing after high-flying tech companies and ignoring bread and butter issues like the ones he's lately rediscovered.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  Isn't this him doing just that? The creative class came back to the cities, changing what the problems are?
  - sevensor 9y ago
    We needed better transit and affordable housing ten years ago too. Florida just didn't care at the time. That's what I think is missing -- a mea culpa for ignoring crucial urban issues and promoting the kind of growth that would muscle out the non-"creative" people a city needs to function. Big scare quotes for "creative", by the way. My other pet peeve with Florida is that he thinks creativity is the exclusive province of the affluent.
    - 9y ago
ptero 9y ago
Be careful what you wish for -- setting the minimum wage to half the prevailing wage at a municipality is likely to create very weird setups, especially where a richer cluster is next to a residential or poorer one, e.g. Manhattan and Jersey City. Bank tellers and janitors in Manhattan would be getting a fortune compared to the same job being done (by the same company) less than a mile away. I suspect the "bonus" jobs will quickly have all sorts of semi-illegal strings attached to them; there will be a rush by employers to reclassify jobs as being done in a poorer area (we do not work there, we are just visiting / delivering), etc. While the current state has problems, the proposed fix may be worse than the disease it is trying to cure. My 2c.
awkward 9y ago
This article is a pretty big turnaround for Richard Florida - he's credited with the ideological underpinning of a lot of the urban renewal that has caused gentrification and other problems.
sgt101 9y ago
Or tech companies could pay taxes that allow for proper urban development just like real companies do? Apple, I am looking at you and your $200bn pile of not taxed money and I am not impressed!

52 points by piquadrat 9y ago

The author's recommendations are certainly apt, though I wonder if he realizes how much of a political nightmare trying to get cities like Berkeley to build more housing is. Berkeley is probably the staunchest NIMBY city of the major Bay Area cities. The mayor and city council recently outright denied a simple rebuild of a house on Haskell St (heh) that would have added a couple extra units of housing. We believe this to be in violation of the Housing Accountability Act, and have brought a lawsuit against Berkeley that you can read about if you're interested! http://www.carlaef.org/berkeley http://www.carlaef.org/berkeley More broadly, the Bay Area needs to build housing as quickly as possible. If you work at a tech company, please consider getting your company involved. If you can't participate directly, there are increasingly many groups in the Bay Area dedicated to lifting outdated zoning restrictions and accelerating the pace of housing development. We would love to have your patronage! http://www.sfyimby.org/ http://www.sfyimby.org/

muninn_ 9y ago
Or you can move if you can't afford the area. There are plenty of places with lower costs of living. You can't live in what is perhaps the most desirable area in the world and then be upset that people want to protect/increase their property value or not change how their community is. Not everybody wants to live in a sea of imposing skyscrapers. -edit So I see a few comments discussing things like commuting, urban sprawl, etc.... Those are fair comments and I largely agree. But the solution proposed is not the right answer either. We need mixed-use developed walkable neighborhoods. We need our work places to be mixed within our neighborhoods along with our parks, convenience stores, and everything in between. Obviously I'm not a fan of sprawl, but I'm not a big fan of skyscrapers, and I'm also not a fan of others being upset about the affordability of the world's most desirable areas. While it is true that there is much more economic opportunity in a place like San Francisco than, say, middle-of-nowhere Arizona or something, it would be incorrect to suggest that there is no economic opportunity. Frankly, the assessment being made here is that you're choosing to suffer a 2-hour each-way commute and unaffordable rent for the opportunity to work at really cool companies, but the solution, which is to force other people to change their way of life, even if you find it contemptable, is an inherently immoral stance. If a town votes in a mayor who does what the town wants, what is more American, and democratic than that? Is overrunning the town with lawsuits and fights an ethical thing to do? I don't think so. Pack your stuff, and move. When (insert company here) can't get employees to relocate to the insanity that is the Bay Area, they'll move their offices, and things will resolve naturally and peacefully. Disclaimer: I have never lived long-term in the Bay Area and I have no vested interest in how any of this turns out. If anything, reading the horror stories about people subletting camping spots in their backyard and the like amuses me (obviously I feel bad too). I do confess I have a vested interest in promoting mixed-use development neighborhoods and I would like to see more people move out of the Bay Area and back into the rest of the United States as I believe that the concentration of wealth and knowledge in one (or a few) areas is contributing to the fractures in our society and anti-competitiveness of our second and third-tier cities.
- zucchini_head 9y ago
  Doesn't solve the problem. This approach contributes to urban sprawl, which is normally bad for the environment (people doing 2h car commutes is incredibly polluting, verses a shorter and commute or using public transport). A good summary of the bad effects of urban sprawl is available on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Commuting has a cost that is more than just dollars especially for people who can't afford to outsource most non-income earning aspects of their lives.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  1) A city can't survive if the people needed to work the jobs to make it an appealing place to live can't afford to live within commute distance. 2) The more affordable places tend to have less economic opportunity (which is part of why they're in lower demand and more affordable in the first place), so moving there isn't necessarily a win.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    To your second point. The large issue here has more to do with moving to the areas with more economic opportunity instead of creating economic opportunity where you currently reside. The culture of moving on a whim, not creating a stable network of family and friends in your neighborhoods, and other factors are contributing to our social problems.
    - twobyfour 9y ago
      Well, creating economic opportunity can be a chicken-and-egg problem. For instance, there are extra challenges to starting a tech startup in a location without a large existing pool of software developers.
- raldi 9y ago
zucchini_head 9y ago
Just skim-read through that story. Sounds pretty part-and-parcel for these kind of things, it's the same where I live too (UK). The first step is always to include irrelevant statistics, since this bulks-up the case with "we are good people" rabble, and makes it harder to understand. It's essentially used to drown-out the key details of the case and to slow things down by making it much longer to read. One of my older family members has been a council (our version of states I suppose) member for over 40 years, and some of the stories I hear are incredible. I've heard stories of people submitting 300+ page testimonials and hundreds of correspondence over just 1-2 days just over small renovations, purely to obfuscate the case's legitimate and important details that are against their favour. I'm really glad people are documenting things like this so we can actually see how bad it is getting...
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Town councils are approximately the same level of government as cities/counties in the states. (there are also often township governments that operate inside of counties, but modern travel makes them kind of stupid and there is a lot of at least de facto passing of authority up to the county level).
tryitnow 9y ago
I love what you're doing, so let me tell you what's holding me back from jumping on board. Traffic. You want more housing, but that almost always means more cars - and how do you handle that? But it's more than just traffic - broadly speaking it's the principle of Chesterton's fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...). Before making rapid changes, let's understand why the status quo is the status quo. The reason I can't support YIMBY is because it comes off as too much like reverse stupidity - let's just do the opposite of those nasty NIMBY's and then things will be all right! That never works. As for your claims about Berkeley, I've been frequenting Berkeley since 2014 and I've witnessed a pretty significant amount of construction on Shattuck - and I'm left wondering - how on earth are the roads going to accommodate the massive increase in traffic? One thing people should consider is banning automobile ownership for residents of new buildings. That would address the concerns of critics like myself and lead to a whole lot less opposition to new construction. Plus, it would create stronger demand for public transportation and car-sharing - both of which are conducive to the goal of greater density. And honestly, a lot of tech-savvy millennials don't even want to own a car.
- dgacmu 9y ago
  Traffic is an important concern. If it doesn't take proposition 13 into account, it's probably not going to be as effective as it should. Prop 13 creates too many financial incentives not to relocate to be near your job -- part of the reason that California has become a commute nightmare [0]. It also creates too strong an incentive to hang on to empty property and not improve it. [1] That said, increasing the housing density in some of those currently-suburban areas (around Google, Apple, and Facebook, for example) could help them transform into more viable urban areas, without an increase in car traffic. [0] http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.pdf http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.p... " observed changes in commuting patterns in major metropolitan areas in California support that hypothesis. In particular, between 1980 and 1990, the number of workers in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles who commute outside the metropolitan statistical area to work increased 119 percent, 88 percent, and 80 percent, respectively. That is well above the growth in the number of similar commuters in other metropolitan areas across the nation, which generally ranged from 25 percent to 45 percent." [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_proposition_13_is_bad_policy_and_here_are_some_graphs_to_show.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_...

shawnee_ 9y ago

Now everything’s changed. In 2016, the San Francisco metro area was the top location for venture capital investment in the country, hauling in $23.4 billion—more than triple the VC investment in Silicon Valley proper. Interesting numbers, what seems to be evidence of inflation chasing inflation. There's no logical justification for such a concentrated purse of investment dollars benefiting so few people. Furthermore, it would seem that it's benefiting the same people over and over ... the most obvious driver here is turnover. Probably there are a lot of PMCs in SF who absolutely bet on (hope for) the failure of most of the companies getting these investment dollars, the second they've signed their leases. Because who doesn't lose out when a startup fails and has to shutdown? The rent takers, the leaseholders prepared with aggressive litigation... everybody else loses. (As a side note, I'm pretty sure this is how the current US president's family empire was built: http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s-son-in-law-is-a-baltimore-slumlord-and-that-s-not-even-the-worst-of-it-20170523-story.html http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s...) In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley, or Microsoft in the Seattle suburbs, but the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, and the corporate campuses of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Because companies in the 80's were smarter. They knew that if you wanted to build a company that can build equity, you cannot be beholden to the lease holders and the rent takers. They built in the burbs because that is where they could establish equity. Today the "barriers to entry" for owning in SF are just too high for most; the continual delusion of people who think they can build a sustainable business model while being based in SF is mind-boggling to me.

api 9y ago
"Inflation chasing inflation." Thanks for that concise summary.
ams6110 9y ago
Renting has been the standard model for suburban office parks too. Most companies do not own their own office buildings. It's more common for specialized space, e.g. manufacturing facilities but not usually done for offices.

ionwake 9y ago

Please do correct me if I am wrong. But isn't the whole reason lower class job salaries increased in the USA was simply because they had just won a world war? I do not know enough about the reasons for affluence in the 50s, but surely it was in large part to success in the war? If so, how could one suggest the minimum wage is just raised without it causing mass unemployment in the present? I must be misunderstanding something.

aninhumer 9y ago
I'm not sure how you think winning a war leads "simply" to higher wages? There were a lot of factors surrounding WW2 which contributed to the success of the US afterwards, but they're nowhere near as simple as the fact that they won. If anything, the most immediate outcome of the victory is a sudden influx of unemployed soldiers needing jobs, which causes downward pressure on wages.
- hueving 9y ago
  The shattered manufacturing capabilities of Europe put the US in a leading position to be the primary provider to take its place. Essentially Europe was gone as a competitor in the global economy and became a consumer. This led to massive demand in the US which of course led to companies paying lots of workers to fulfill it.
- SmellTheGlove 9y ago
  > If anything, the most immediate outcome of the victory is a sudden influx of unemployed soldiers needing jobs, which causes downward pressure on wages. You had fewer soldiers coming back than you had shipping off. You also had worldwide demand for manufactured goods to meet, and Europe lost basically its entire infrastructure and nearly an entire generation of working age men.
  - ionwake 9y ago
    Good points
- 9y ago

dasmoth 9y ago

This is an incredibly "urbanist" piece. No mention at all of companies moving to less-populous locations, let alone alternatives such as remote work. It's hard not to be left with the impression that the author isn't going to be happy until everyone is living like ants.

stupidcar 9y ago
Hard not to be left with the impression that you consider people who enjoy living in cities to be insects, and expect every piece you read to reflect that bizarre prejudice.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  There are many variations on "living in cities". Some of them involve single-family dwellings and lots of private space. It actually seems to be those models which are most strongly under attack right now.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    They're under attack because they make those cities unaffordable to most, they're a cash transfer from immigrants to the emplaced, from the young to the old. They're under attack because they can't possibly scale. They're under attack because they take more energy and are more hostile to walking, biking, and transit. They're under attack because they're not the natural outcome of people expressing preferences in the market, but rather the result of enforced government zoning regulations. They're under attack because said zoning regulations are social engineering designed to -- in concert with neighborhood-based school district boundaries -- segregate people based on class.
    - hueving 9y ago
      And that's why New York city is so affordable?
      - 9y ago

petraeus 9y ago

Privatize the profits and socialize the losses, the great American dream.

sevensor 9y ago

This piece is by Richard Florida, who helped create the very problem he laments. Ten-fifteen years ago, he was talking up the same cities as magnets for the "creative class." Now all of a sudden he's concerned about the janitors and street sweepers? I'm not taking Florida seriously if he can't acknowledge his past myopia.

jdavis703 9y ago
Isn't this an ad homin argument? What is wrong with his actual policy proposals?
- sevensor 9y ago
  They're pretty thin. Build housing. Build transit. Raise the minimum wage. There's nothing wrong with those, but he's pretty late to the party. So I'd say this isn't an ad hominem. I'm not trying to attack the argument by attacking the man. I'm just attacking the man. Florida in particular isn't credible because a decade ago he was boosting municipal gold-digging -- chasing after high-flying tech companies and ignoring bread and butter issues like the ones he's lately rediscovered.
kasey_junk 9y ago
Isn't this him doing just that? The creative class came back to the cities, changing what the problems are?
- sevensor 9y ago
  We needed better transit and affordable housing ten years ago too. Florida just didn't care at the time. That's what I think is missing -- a mea culpa for ignoring crucial urban issues and promoting the kind of growth that would muscle out the non-"creative" people a city needs to function. Big scare quotes for "creative", by the way. My other pet peeve with Florida is that he thinks creativity is the exclusive province of the affluent.
  - 9y ago

ptero 9y ago

Be careful what you wish for -- setting the minimum wage to half the prevailing wage at a municipality is likely to create very weird setups, especially where a richer cluster is next to a residential or poorer one, e.g. Manhattan and Jersey City. Bank tellers and janitors in Manhattan would be getting a fortune compared to the same job being done (by the same company) less than a mile away. I suspect the "bonus" jobs will quickly have all sorts of semi-illegal strings attached to them; there will be a rush by employers to reclassify jobs as being done in a poorer area (we do not work there, we are just visiting / delivering), etc. While the current state has problems, the proposed fix may be worse than the disease it is trying to cure. My 2c.

awkward 9y ago

This article is a pretty big turnaround for Richard Florida - he's credited with the ideological underpinning of a lot of the urban renewal that has caused gentrification and other problems.

sgt101 9y ago

Or tech companies could pay taxes that allow for proper urban development just like real companies do? Apple, I am looking at you and your $200bn pile of not taxed money and I am not impressed!