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This is an exercise in nostalgia. It's not a prescription for the future. Downtown-centric planning isn't the only valid tool, but it's the only one that New Ur

This is an exercise in nostalgia. It's not a prescription for the future. Downtown-centric planning isn't the only valid tool, but it's the only one that New Urbanists seem to know. Where's the intelligentsia for those of us who don't want to live in small boxes, on top of each other, and don't want to live next door to businesses?

starkruzr 8y ago
There are no intelligentsia for those people, because that's not a sustainable or healthy way to live long-term.
kadenshep 8y ago
>Downtown-centric planning isn't the only valid tool What are the others? >Where's the intelligentsia for those of us who don't want to live in small boxes It's not there because most experienced people in this domain know is a pretty poor way for people to live and architect cities. It needs to be subsidized and take away from the economic productivity of the city centers. As someone who lives in a "small box", I will most likely never leave the city again unless I intend to farm in some way. I spend less material resources living here, all my neighbors are friends and feel like we actually have a community, events are only 10-15 minutes on foot, etc.
- dahdum 8y ago
  This comes across as rather patronizing, dense city centers are not only way people should live. You accept the trade offs of living in a dense city, but not everyone should be expected to feel the same way about the crime rates, poor schools, traffic, noise pollution, or SF style feces/needle filled streets.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I agree that not everyone should have to live in city centers, although that raises questions about the cost per capita of public services and who pays for them. But I can assure you that high crime rates, poor schools and SF style feces/needle filled streets are not inevitable characteristics of dense cities. And as someone currently living in a small town with a lot of farm machinery, I can also assure you that noise pollution is unfortunately not exclusive to cities.
  - kadenshep 8y ago
    >You accept the trade offs of living in a dense city, but not everyone should be expected to feel the same way about the crime rates, poor schools, traffic, noise pollution, or SF style feces/needle filled streets. City centers shouldn't be expected to subsidize other people's ideal life styles. Crime rates and poor schools wouldn't be a problem if we took a fraction of the money we spend on infrastructure of suburbs and pointed it towards maintaining and improving city centers. >or SF style feces/needle filled streets. I'm sorry, what was that about patronizing? None of the characteristics you mentioned are inherit or even a common quality of city centers.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
There are some valuable ideas they brought up. Mega-businesses, like JC_Penny, Walmart, Nordstroms, and similar do open up in an area, but all profit gets siphoned elsewhere. It makes wherever $BigCo's Headquarters much richer at the expense of every community they go into. Whereas, the little one and two store local business takes money from local people, and its turned right around and reinvested in that very community. One drains a community of its wealth, while the other bolsters it. Politicians have always (in recent years) accepted that $BigCo moving in is an absolute boon. And the politicians award the business with abatements, tax writeoffs, and other vehicles to "sweeten the deal". But none of the small businesses have these connections. Nor can they request abatements, or low to 0 interest loans. But as we see, once a chain starts haemorrhaging, every community with one of these carcasses ends up rotting the whole area at its core.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > Whereas, the little one and two store local business takes money from local people, and its turned right around and reinvested in that very community. It's a common one, but I don't really buy this argument. Small local businesses don't usually hire more people than large chains and they don't pay their employees more. Small shops are notorious for low pay and no benefits. In the case of a discounter like Walmart the profits don't get siphoned elsewhere as much as never spent in the first place. There may not be a local shop owner anymore, but everyone else in the community has spent less money.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    Just to add to this, WalMart is primarily a grocery store. Like most grocery stores, it has a net profit margin that hovers around 3%. The Waltons are not rich because each WalMart vacuums money out of a community. The Waltons are rich because there is a metric shit-ton of stores that do a high volume of business, and they get their 2-3% slice of it.
    - bkdbkd 8y ago
      That would be nice, but they make money from sucking wealth. When Walmart Comes to Town https://economics.mit.edu/files/7575 https://economics.mit.edu/files/7575 Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-25/wal-mart-it-came-it-conquered-now-it-s-packing-up-and-leaving https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-25/wal-mart-... An early Snapper Mower take on walmarts practices: https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf-Sr3SjBzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf-Sr3SjBzk
cfv 8y ago
How does having an actually healthy city relate to living in boxes, whatever that means to you?
_jal 8y ago
> Where's the intelligentsia As others have pointed out, there aren't any, at least of the non-rental variety. Cheer up though - you've gotten the better part of a century of subsidization of your lifestyle in a wide variety of ways.
niftich 8y ago
The same as it's been since the 1890s [1]. You move further and further out, because that's all you can afford. When you're rich enough to upgrade a bigger place, you move again, and everyone else does the same. Then some suburbs realize this is a huge drain on their budget, so they attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, and within a couple years they're like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Everywhere else accumulates the same problems that inner cities once did, but without the potential to improve. It's hardly something you'd call sustainable, but there's many metros that have yet to be built out -- there's always another Boise [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#History [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200
Sharlin 8y ago
It’s not like sprawl is going to disappear overnight anyway. But cities should be planned primarily for those who live there, not for those who just want to commute there using unsustainable means.
rayiner 8y ago
You don’t need intelligentsia. You’ve got the municipal governments (elected with 25% turnout) who have banned building a house on less than 1/3 of an acre or mixing retail and commercial.
woolvalley 8y ago
You can live in large boxes on top of each other too! And if built properly you wont hear your neighbors. When you think of urbanization, think barcelona or berlin, don't think of 1970s new york. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.406821,2.1665481,3a,75y,191.45h,85.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjhT_VkrhAppHwlpv-lMLJw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.406821,2.1665481,3a,75y,191....

starkruzr 8y ago

There are no intelligentsia for those people, because that's not a sustainable or healthy way to live long-term.

kadenshep 8y ago

>Downtown-centric planning isn't the only valid tool What are the others? >Where's the intelligentsia for those of us who don't want to live in small boxes It's not there because most experienced people in this domain know is a pretty poor way for people to live and architect cities. It needs to be subsidized and take away from the economic productivity of the city centers. As someone who lives in a "small box", I will most likely never leave the city again unless I intend to farm in some way. I spend less material resources living here, all my neighbors are friends and feel like we actually have a community, events are only 10-15 minutes on foot, etc.

dahdum 8y ago
This comes across as rather patronizing, dense city centers are not only way people should live. You accept the trade offs of living in a dense city, but not everyone should be expected to feel the same way about the crime rates, poor schools, traffic, noise pollution, or SF style feces/needle filled streets.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I agree that not everyone should have to live in city centers, although that raises questions about the cost per capita of public services and who pays for them. But I can assure you that high crime rates, poor schools and SF style feces/needle filled streets are not inevitable characteristics of dense cities. And as someone currently living in a small town with a lot of farm machinery, I can also assure you that noise pollution is unfortunately not exclusive to cities.
- kadenshep 8y ago
  >You accept the trade offs of living in a dense city, but not everyone should be expected to feel the same way about the crime rates, poor schools, traffic, noise pollution, or SF style feces/needle filled streets. City centers shouldn't be expected to subsidize other people's ideal life styles. Crime rates and poor schools wouldn't be a problem if we took a fraction of the money we spend on infrastructure of suburbs and pointed it towards maintaining and improving city centers. >or SF style feces/needle filled streets. I'm sorry, what was that about patronizing? None of the characteristics you mentioned are inherit or even a common quality of city centers.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

There are some valuable ideas they brought up. Mega-businesses, like JC_Penny, Walmart, Nordstroms, and similar do open up in an area, but all profit gets siphoned elsewhere. It makes wherever $BigCo's Headquarters much richer at the expense of every community they go into. Whereas, the little one and two store local business takes money from local people, and its turned right around and reinvested in that very community. One drains a community of its wealth, while the other bolsters it. Politicians have always (in recent years) accepted that $BigCo moving in is an absolute boon. And the politicians award the business with abatements, tax writeoffs, and other vehicles to "sweeten the deal". But none of the small businesses have these connections. Nor can they request abatements, or low to 0 interest loans. But as we see, once a chain starts haemorrhaging, every community with one of these carcasses ends up rotting the whole area at its core.

jonknee 8y ago
> Whereas, the little one and two store local business takes money from local people, and its turned right around and reinvested in that very community. It's a common one, but I don't really buy this argument. Small local businesses don't usually hire more people than large chains and they don't pay their employees more. Small shops are notorious for low pay and no benefits. In the case of a discounter like Walmart the profits don't get siphoned elsewhere as much as never spent in the first place. There may not be a local shop owner anymore, but everyone else in the community has spent less money.
- coredog64 8y ago
  Just to add to this, WalMart is primarily a grocery store. Like most grocery stores, it has a net profit margin that hovers around 3%. The Waltons are not rich because each WalMart vacuums money out of a community. The Waltons are rich because there is a metric shit-ton of stores that do a high volume of business, and they get their 2-3% slice of it.
  - bkdbkd 8y ago
    That would be nice, but they make money from sucking wealth. When Walmart Comes to Town https://economics.mit.edu/files/7575 https://economics.mit.edu/files/7575 Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-25/wal-mart-it-came-it-conquered-now-it-s-packing-up-and-leaving https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-25/wal-mart-... An early Snapper Mower take on walmarts practices: https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf-Sr3SjBzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf-Sr3SjBzk

cfv 8y ago

How does having an actually healthy city relate to living in boxes, whatever that means to you?

_jal 8y ago

> Where's the intelligentsia As others have pointed out, there aren't any, at least of the non-rental variety. Cheer up though - you've gotten the better part of a century of subsidization of your lifestyle in a wide variety of ways.

niftich 8y ago

The same as it's been since the 1890s [1]. You move further and further out, because that's all you can afford. When you're rich enough to upgrade a bigger place, you move again, and everyone else does the same. Then some suburbs realize this is a huge drain on their budget, so they attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, and within a couple years they're like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Everywhere else accumulates the same problems that inner cities once did, but without the potential to improve. It's hardly something you'd call sustainable, but there's many metros that have yet to be built out -- there's always another Boise [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#History [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898200

Sharlin 8y ago

It’s not like sprawl is going to disappear overnight anyway. But cities should be planned primarily for those who live there, not for those who just want to commute there using unsustainable means.

rayiner 8y ago

You don’t need intelligentsia. You’ve got the municipal governments (elected with 25% turnout) who have banned building a house on less than 1/3 of an acre or mixing retail and commercial.

woolvalley 8y ago

You can live in large boxes on top of each other too! And if built properly you wont hear your neighbors. When you think of urbanization, think barcelona or berlin, don't think of 1970s new york. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.406821,2.1665481,3a,75y,191.45h,85.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjhT_VkrhAppHwlpv-lMLJw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.406821,2.1665481,3a,75y,191....