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If a city is nice, then crowds will arrive until it is not nice. There are two main kinds of "not nice", prices and the annoyances of your fellow human beings.

by burfog 8y ago

If a city is nice, then crowds will arrive until it is not nice. There are two main kinds of "not nice", prices and the annoyances of your fellow human beings. The end result is that locations that are physically nice will be occupied by people who have a relatively high tolerance for those two not-nice attributes and a relatively high desire for the physical niceness. So if you like cool weather and pretty hills and the ocean, and you don't mind violent crime or hepatitis or $2,000,000 houses, then you'll be happy to wedge yourself in like a chicken in a factory farm. It takes a certain type of person to decide that this is the best choice.

osdiab 8y ago
There are plenty of examples of nice places that remain nice even as people move in. It's up to the city to be dynamic enough to adapt to a changing environment. In concrete terms, that means: building sufficient housing and infrastructure to keep life affordable and smooth; designing (or shepherding emergent patterns of) functional, livable neighborhoods; and addressing social problems as they arise. You might be surprised to find that you can still get a studio in Tokyo within 45 minutes of the city center for ~$400/mo (bump up to ~$600 if you want to be 15 minutes away), that it's easy and efficient to get around to nice urban and natural amenities, and that there are endless quiet, peaceful, and utterly charming neighborhoods, parks, and temples right next to all the hotspots. You'll never see any feces on the street, you never see anybody shooting up needles, and nobody will ever beg you to spare a dollar. Part of that is cultural, but most of that is by concerted effort. But positive outcomes like that can only happen if a city successfully adapts to changes—which San Francisco (and virtually every American city to varying degrees) has abysmally failed at. As another commenter pointed out up the page, San Francisco's public policy has been very nativist, and the physical form of the city has remained more or less unchanged for decades, which spells disaster for one of the most coveted places to move to in the world.

by burfog 8y ago

osdiab 8y ago

There are plenty of examples of nice places that remain nice even as people move in. It's up to the city to be dynamic enough to adapt to a changing environment. In concrete terms, that means: building sufficient housing and infrastructure to keep life affordable and smooth; designing (or shepherding emergent patterns of) functional, livable neighborhoods; and addressing social problems as they arise. You might be surprised to find that you can still get a studio in Tokyo within 45 minutes of the city center for ~$400/mo (bump up to ~$600 if you want to be 15 minutes away), that it's easy and efficient to get around to nice urban and natural amenities, and that there are endless quiet, peaceful, and utterly charming neighborhoods, parks, and temples right next to all the hotspots. You'll never see any feces on the street, you never see anybody shooting up needles, and nobody will ever beg you to spare a dollar. Part of that is cultural, but most of that is by concerted effort. But positive outcomes like that can only happen if a city successfully adapts to changes—which San Francisco (and virtually every American city to varying degrees) has abysmally failed at. As another commenter pointed out up the page, San Francisco's public policy has been very nativist, and the physical form of the city has remained more or less unchanged for decades, which spells disaster for one of the most coveted places to move to in the world.