7 ms·

Urbanism and Standards of Respectability

68 points by apsec112 9y ago

politician 9y ago
> A long-forgotten, under-appreciated aspect of encouraging widely dispersed suburbs was rooted in Cold War defense against nuclear attack. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10.html https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10....
- Bensch 9y ago
  It's an interesting paper, but there's no evidence it was ever used in HUD policy.
  - politician 9y ago
    The national dispersion strategy was established in the late 40s and early 50s, almost 20 years before the Department of Housing and Urban Development was founded [1]. By that time, suburbanization was well advanced. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Housing_and_Urban_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...
neveroffensive 9y ago
> There’s a certain American standard of middle-class normality. [...] A school that has as few black students as possible without making the white middle class feel too guilty. Was this meant to be sarcastic? I feel like most of the article was serious, but the author can't possibly be asserting that this is somehow part of the typical middle class "dream"? Edit: I feel like I've seen this a lot lately, controversial points/jabs being tossed in the middle of unrelated arguments. My personal feelings on the authors statement aside, it seems like an ineffective form of persuasion to make an argument which many people may agree with, then pollute it with random additional politics, without any real qualification or explanation.
jeffreyrogers 9y ago
I don't understand the tweet early in the article. It seems to imply that cities aren't accommodating enough of people with alternative lifestyles? They're more accommodating than anywhere else. Maybe I'm reading what the author meant backwards. In any case, we are currently working out as a society how to make cities livable as more and more people try to move into the same space, but I don't think bringing up distinctions like straight/gay, liberal/conservative, etc. is very productive. And developers don't build single family homes in the suburbs and luxury highrises downtown for nefarious reasons. They build them there because you make more money that way.
- apsec112 9y ago
  In the US, cities and development are essentially centrally planned. For any given piece of land, the city dictates exactly what kind of building can go there, how tall, how wide, how many stores or housing units, what kind of businesses can be there (if retail/commercial), how large the yards are, where the building is on the lot, etc., often down to things like the color of paint on the window shutters. It's illegal to build luxury skyscrapers in the suburbs. Indeed, it's illegal to build anything except detached single family houses with two parking spaces on plots of land measuring 100 feet by 80 feet with twenty feet of side yard and fifteen feet of front yard and two stories tall but with the second story having half the floor area of the first story and etc etc etc., the laws are very detailed and give zero room for any variations.
  - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
    Sure, but zoning is largely done for economic reasons. And cities without zoning (e.g. Houston) end up similar to cities with it. I don't think it changes that there's not an active effort to segregate cities or keep people with alternative lifestyles away.[0] [0]: There was some of this in NYC when Robert Moses was the central planner, but it's hard to argue it's continued today.
    - oftenwrong 9y ago
      Houston doesn't have zoning, but it has development regulations that include many of the same restrictions found in the zoning codes of other US cities. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
I found most insightful the following comment by David Edmondson > Something drilled home to me at my Cornell planning program was the American idea of rural as utopia, urban as dystopia. As my professor would put it, our culture strives for a return to the Garden of Eden – it’s seen in our art, our land-use patterns (pre- and post-independence), our mythology, and our politics. Even Philadelphia was laid out with that idea in mind. I think that is one of the core issues. The idea of having your own home on your own plot of land is something that is deep in the American psyche. And it is something that can be accomplished. Why is there not more remote work even at the big tech companies? If everybody was not forced to crowd into Silicon Valley in order to work for the large tech companies, Silicon Valley and San Francisco home prices would get much better quickly. Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because they want to, but because they have to for their job. If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  I don't think this is true. I used to work for a company in a Connecticut suburb of NYC. Most young people wanted to live in NYC and commute in because they'd rather live in a city.
  - nostromo 9y ago
    I lived in NYC for about five years. I noticed that urban living is prized by people in their 20s, but seems to quickly fall out of fashion later in life. Particularly when it comes to child-bearing age, large cities like New York are fairly impractical for the non-rich. My friends in their 30s and 40s that hadn't left for the suburbs would regularly talk about how they wanted to leave the city.
    - electricslpnsld 9y ago
      > Particularly when it comes to child-bearing age, large cities like New York are fairly impractical Parts of New York City are incredibly child friendly. Park Slope, and huge swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, are chock full of families.
golergka 9y ago
> Haredi Jews are notable in being an oppressed minority in Israel Forgive my french, but what the actual fuck? Haredim are almost dictating the whole country their religious laws, calling them "oppressed" is as far from reality as you could get right now.
slr555 9y ago
The author fundamentally misunderstands some of the economic drivers of family life in NYC. In Manhattan only 20% of households have children. This is not driven by dreams of the suburbs or a love of mega-commutes but dollars. Even good New York public schools are highly competitive. Assuming you can afford an apartment in a neighborhood with a good public school, your child still needs to be able to test into the gifted and talented program to get a good education. The alternative is to spend 50K to send your child to private schools which are insanely competitive. Additionally, you have to have space for those children and adding a bedroom to your real estate holdings is at least a six if not seven figure proposition. Virtually all the people I know who have left the city have done so for at least one of these reasons. No one says, "Hey cool I get to move to Jersey and look forward to riding a bus into Port Authority". I have lived in Manhattan for 26 years and know that of which I speak. Can't say anything about the Bay area.
deltron3030 9y ago
Self driving mobile homes could become a thing, many advantages of cities and rural life could be combined this way. The routing of the individual homes would just happen based on your personal and work shedule and preferences, including the composition of your neighborhood. basically a decentralization of cities.
gumby 9y ago
While the essay is about (and contrasting) American urbanism, this point is not specific to the US: > Not for nothing, urbanism in the United States tends to disproportionately feature people who have other reasons to be dissatisfied with traditional culture. Some cities the author mentions contrast with this (Stockholm, Paris, Singapore) but plenty of others, even in contemporary Europe, are more consistent (e.g. Berlin). In general cities are where people have gone to abandon the entrenched social order for one reason or another (because they are misfits or because they need financial opportunities not available in the countryside). Because of this cities have "always" (OK, I don't know about Ur) challenged the dominant power structure, even when (as in Paris or Rome) they co-opt it. There would be no revolutions without cities.

68 points by apsec112 9y ago

> A long-forgotten, under-appreciated aspect of encouraging widely dispersed suburbs was rooted in Cold War defense against nuclear attack. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10.html https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10....

Bensch 9y ago
It's an interesting paper, but there's no evidence it was ever used in HUD policy.
- politician 9y ago
  The national dispersion strategy was established in the late 40s and early 50s, almost 20 years before the Department of Housing and Urban Development was founded [1]. By that time, suburbanization was well advanced. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Housing_and_Urban_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...

neveroffensive 9y ago

> There’s a certain American standard of middle-class normality. [...] A school that has as few black students as possible without making the white middle class feel too guilty. Was this meant to be sarcastic? I feel like most of the article was serious, but the author can't possibly be asserting that this is somehow part of the typical middle class "dream"? Edit: I feel like I've seen this a lot lately, controversial points/jabs being tossed in the middle of unrelated arguments. My personal feelings on the authors statement aside, it seems like an ineffective form of persuasion to make an argument which many people may agree with, then pollute it with random additional politics, without any real qualification or explanation.

jeffreyrogers 9y ago

I don't understand the tweet early in the article. It seems to imply that cities aren't accommodating enough of people with alternative lifestyles? They're more accommodating than anywhere else. Maybe I'm reading what the author meant backwards. In any case, we are currently working out as a society how to make cities livable as more and more people try to move into the same space, but I don't think bringing up distinctions like straight/gay, liberal/conservative, etc. is very productive. And developers don't build single family homes in the suburbs and luxury highrises downtown for nefarious reasons. They build them there because you make more money that way.

apsec112 9y ago
In the US, cities and development are essentially centrally planned. For any given piece of land, the city dictates exactly what kind of building can go there, how tall, how wide, how many stores or housing units, what kind of businesses can be there (if retail/commercial), how large the yards are, where the building is on the lot, etc., often down to things like the color of paint on the window shutters. It's illegal to build luxury skyscrapers in the suburbs. Indeed, it's illegal to build anything except detached single family houses with two parking spaces on plots of land measuring 100 feet by 80 feet with twenty feet of side yard and fifteen feet of front yard and two stories tall but with the second story having half the floor area of the first story and etc etc etc., the laws are very detailed and give zero room for any variations.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  Sure, but zoning is largely done for economic reasons. And cities without zoning (e.g. Houston) end up similar to cities with it. I don't think it changes that there's not an active effort to segregate cities or keep people with alternative lifestyles away.[0] [0]: There was some of this in NYC when Robert Moses was the central planner, but it's hard to argue it's continued today.
  - oftenwrong 9y ago
    Houston doesn't have zoning, but it has development regulations that include many of the same restrictions found in the zoning codes of other US cities. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

I found most insightful the following comment by David Edmondson > Something drilled home to me at my Cornell planning program was the American idea of rural as utopia, urban as dystopia. As my professor would put it, our culture strives for a return to the Garden of Eden – it’s seen in our art, our land-use patterns (pre- and post-independence), our mythology, and our politics. Even Philadelphia was laid out with that idea in mind. I think that is one of the core issues. The idea of having your own home on your own plot of land is something that is deep in the American psyche. And it is something that can be accomplished. Why is there not more remote work even at the big tech companies? If everybody was not forced to crowd into Silicon Valley in order to work for the large tech companies, Silicon Valley and San Francisco home prices would get much better quickly. Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because they want to, but because they have to for their job. If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.

jeffreyrogers 9y ago
I don't think this is true. I used to work for a company in a Connecticut suburb of NYC. Most young people wanted to live in NYC and commute in because they'd rather live in a city.
- nostromo 9y ago
  I lived in NYC for about five years. I noticed that urban living is prized by people in their 20s, but seems to quickly fall out of fashion later in life. Particularly when it comes to child-bearing age, large cities like New York are fairly impractical for the non-rich. My friends in their 30s and 40s that hadn't left for the suburbs would regularly talk about how they wanted to leave the city.
  - electricslpnsld 9y ago
    > Particularly when it comes to child-bearing age, large cities like New York are fairly impractical Parts of New York City are incredibly child friendly. Park Slope, and huge swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, are chock full of families.

golergka 9y ago

> Haredi Jews are notable in being an oppressed minority in Israel Forgive my french, but what the actual fuck? Haredim are almost dictating the whole country their religious laws, calling them "oppressed" is as far from reality as you could get right now.

slr555 9y ago

The author fundamentally misunderstands some of the economic drivers of family life in NYC. In Manhattan only 20% of households have children. This is not driven by dreams of the suburbs or a love of mega-commutes but dollars. Even good New York public schools are highly competitive. Assuming you can afford an apartment in a neighborhood with a good public school, your child still needs to be able to test into the gifted and talented program to get a good education. The alternative is to spend 50K to send your child to private schools which are insanely competitive. Additionally, you have to have space for those children and adding a bedroom to your real estate holdings is at least a six if not seven figure proposition. Virtually all the people I know who have left the city have done so for at least one of these reasons. No one says, "Hey cool I get to move to Jersey and look forward to riding a bus into Port Authority". I have lived in Manhattan for 26 years and know that of which I speak. Can't say anything about the Bay area.

deltron3030 9y ago

Self driving mobile homes could become a thing, many advantages of cities and rural life could be combined this way. The routing of the individual homes would just happen based on your personal and work shedule and preferences, including the composition of your neighborhood. basically a decentralization of cities.

gumby 9y ago

While the essay is about (and contrasting) American urbanism, this point is not specific to the US: > Not for nothing, urbanism in the United States tends to disproportionately feature people who have other reasons to be dissatisfied with traditional culture. Some cities the author mentions contrast with this (Stockholm, Paris, Singapore) but plenty of others, even in contemporary Europe, are more consistent (e.g. Berlin). In general cities are where people have gone to abandon the entrenched social order for one reason or another (because they are misfits or because they need financial opportunities not available in the countryside). Because of this cities have "always" (OK, I don't know about Ur) challenged the dominant power structure, even when (as in Paris or Rome) they co-opt it. There would be no revolutions without cities.