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Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. But of course, they literally do not want to pay the price.

Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. But of course, they literally do not want to pay the price. Why is there a vegan bakery specialized in Afghan Bagel[1] around the corner? Because there are enough hip, young professionals to pay for even the most unlikely specialty. Business can afford to cater to the most extraordinary taste, but only because there are so many fluent customers. These customers then simply drive prices. Due to the limits of public transportation, there are basically three ways out of this situation: 1. Rent ever-smaller, modernized apartments 2. Move away from the center 3. Get out of the city altogether Modern urbanites will not pick any of these options. They want cheap, large apartments with basically no insulation and 4m high ceilings. They do not want to travel more than 10min with the subway. And the thought of leaving Berlin borders on a crime against humanity. Now add to that the part of the population that lives in the center of the city for decades and literally cannot move anymore and you have a really bad situation at hands. IMO, it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city. Sorry, but I needed to vent that. [1] Exaggeration. I don't even know if there are/were any Jews in Afghanistan, but I like good Bagel.

onion2k 8y ago
Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. I want to live as far from that place as possible.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  Agreed. Especially with the homeless problem in Portland.
crdoconnor 8y ago
It's ironic how much effort is given to justifying the actual amount while the question of "who gets that cash and why do they deserve it?" gets glossed over. It's a bit like when Russia privatised in the 90s and American economists told Russia that it really didn't who (i.e. oligarchs) owned everything provided everything is privatised.
buro9 8y ago
> Due to the limits of public transportation Fix this. People live within n time of where they want to be. If people can travel faster then the space within n time can be greater. This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities. Have public transport offer high speed and frequent rail routes, and then many local solutions from cycling, walking, buses, trams.
- rkwasny 8y ago
  s/Tokyo/Singapore/ If the government wants you to use public transport instead of private cars they have to provide great service 24/7
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities. But they also live in small apartments and homes. I'm not convinced that Tokyo is a good example here. The key to this problem is to have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers. This way the population spreads out and housing becomes more affordable.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    Don't think so. There are good reasons why the existing centers are drawing more and more people and business. Moving to the outside is often detrimental. A better way may be to create new urban centers or develop lesser ones.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    That creates gridlock, because even if people start by working close to their home, they'll change jobs and start commuting farther, and you can't have a dense network of public transport over a huge area, so people start using cars and clogging up everything.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - MagnumOpus 8y ago
    > have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers That creates a very different lower-density city. Think about a sprawl like LA rather than a squeeze like Manhattan. Public transport won't work but parking spaces might actually exist. Your Afghan Bagel place will be 1 hour drive rather than 15 minute by subway on the way to work etc. More space, but less selection and diversity in terms of food, entertainment and other venues.
spiderfarmer 8y ago
Or make more hip city centers.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  It's not something that can be planned. This is a cultural thing perpetuated by people themselves.
- magduf 8y ago
  In most decent cities I've seen, there are: the city has several different "hip" areas, and you can easily travel between them with public transit. There isn't just one single downtown.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
Why did you need to vent that? How does it affect your life that people like unique specialty shops and, like literally every other human who's ever been alive, want a good value on where they live? You come off incredibly condescending writing this.
TomMckenny 8y ago
Rents out pace wages in suburbs and rural areas too. They rise in SF, Fresno and Anchorage. Even places people flee like Flint Michigan, land costs rise. They are unbearably high even in tiny apartment Tokyo where a 4m ceiling means you have no roof. They rise in places with bad public transportation and good. The rise in supposedly under-priced Berlin and supposedly over priced San Francisco. Land is not a normal commodity and the market has never fixed this anywhere using indirect tweaks. By all means, build more public transit but it won't fix housing prices anymore than it did in LA
- bobl 8y ago
  While I do agree that land is different, sometimes I think the problem is that people see it as such. When housing markets rise people get rich, just like they do with e.g. stocks. The lack of affordability is a factor of inequality, and especially inequality in opportunities. That is why moving to a smaller cities isn't a solution for most people, because the problem is with opportunities which are appearing in cities and disappearing most everywhere else.
  - TomMckenny 8y ago
    Stock, in principle, is an investment in an enterprise that creates wealth. Like building cars or growing wheat. Buying and selling houses merely moves wealth around (typically from younger generations to older). It creates nothing, incentivizes nothing and looses more and more to mortgage holders. It can indeed make people rich but only to the degree someone else gets poorer. The trend is for an ever growing number of single family homes to become rentals owned by investors. As prices rise further and further above middle class ability to afford, this trend will increase. You can make far more money buying a house and renting it than buying it and sitting in it. So in the long term owner-residents are never going to be able to compete for homes with large investor in an unregulated market.
- wbl 8y ago
  It did fix housing prices in LA. That's why for the past 50 years LA has frozen its zoned capacity which used to be staggeringly high.
CalRobert 8y ago
4. I think you forgot "build taller"? " it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city." What are you talking about? Cars ARE half the problems of a modern city. Car owners are the other half. Rip out the damn parking and put in flats. Ban cars and put in bike lanes. They're far, far more efficient, and have the added benefit of not mowing down pedestrians and boiling children.
- choeger 8y ago
  Good plan. More people per square meter. That means you have shorter ways and switch your congestion from the road or the subway to the elevator in your apartment complex. Might even be better for climate but does not sound like a better way of live. If you want to remove car ownership you should try to provide an alternative that is actually better. If you want to avoid congestion, don't create a massive black hole in the center of each city that everything gravitates to.
  - ivan_gammel 8y ago
    Public transportation in Berlin is good, very good - it is the alternative that’s actually better. And the city does not have gravitating center for commuters - at least not the same way as other big cities: office density in Mitte or Kreuzberg is nothing compared to Manhattan or Moscow-City.
  - mtalantikite 8y ago
    What's wrong with more people per square meter? Some of us like living in dense cities that you can navigate by walking and public transit.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    "Nobody goes there anymore! It's too crowded", is basically what you sound like. There are many many people in the world who love cities. All the things that you hate about cities, they love. Cities make up like 1% of the world wide land use. How about we leave this 1% of land to the people who love cities, and let the rest of the people who don't, to have the other 99%?
golemiprague 8y ago
There was a Jewish community in Afghanistan but most of them already immigrated. One thing is certain though, bagel was not part of their menu. Here are some chit chat that a youtuber did with Afghani Jews in Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xq0VEwrSr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xq0VEwrSr8
jseliger 8y ago
McSweeney's already covered this subject well: "I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en.... Berlin will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.
- bobl 8y ago
  At least in big cities it is almost never that people don't want to build more, but that: 1. Property owner do not want to see their quite significant loans, or investments, decrease in value. 2. Renters do not want to get priced out of the city, having to leave a good job and move their kids away from their friends. In addition to that while seemingly intuitive in practice building doesn't seem to decrease costs. Presumably because: 3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible. Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building. If just building more worked there would be good examples and the far majority isn't.
  - CountSessine 8y ago
    3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible. Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other. Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now. This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right? What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices. Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.
debt 8y ago
People want to live near their work so they can spend less time commuting and more time with their families. The people that successfully do this are usually highest in the food chain and push out of that area all the others lower on the food chain. Thus cities filled with high-level management types as they're the only ones that can afford the rent and the mortgages. To be fair, not everyone hates commuting, but many people do, thus the drive towards urbanization. Furthermore, even if people don't mind commuting, they'd want to find a reasonably nice area to live to commute from. Those nice places get populated and overrun and people lower on the food chain get priced out; again the cycle continues. Until all the people lowest on the food chain must commute very far distances. At some point, many of them realize that if they were to calculate the commute as unpaid work hours, that they're actually being paid way less than what they make on paper. So now even those people lowest on the food chain move away in search for higher wage jobs with shorter commute times, and the cycle continues again and again. The sweet spot is finding a short commute time with low-cost housing. That's truly maximizing your wage. It's not just about being a hip urbanite.
helen___keller 8y ago
> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. I don't agree with this assumption. Most people just want to live reasonably close to their job, a grocery store, and maybe a few restaurants, while having enough space that they feel is sufficient. Maybe add in some constraints for feeling safe or being in a decent school district.
yorwba 8y ago
There aren't actually that many people who can afford Afghan Bagel. Shops catering to niche interests mostly get started because the owners overestimate their chances of success. They try to attract customers for a few months but fail to turn a profit and eventually close the shop. The landlord doesn't care, because there will always be another fool with more dreams than business sense. In my neighborhood, all kinds of hip coffee shops and boutiques keep opening and close just as fast. The only ones who hold out for longer have been there for decades, so they're probably protected by the cap on rent increases. It also helps to be an ordinary baker rather than specializing in Afghan Bagel, because that way they can get enough customers to keep the business afloat.
bobl 8y ago
What annoys me about this sentiment is that I was never a hipster, or posh, or greedy. I got priced out from anything decent all the same, while my hipster friends got rich. People aren't flocking to cities because they are entitled, though some might be, but because there are no good alternatives in most countries.
lkrubner 8y ago
You are exaggerating a bit. When I visit Berlin in the summer months, what strikes me is the culture of bicycles, which is much stronger than in any USA city. I recall at 1 AM my friends said “We are going dancing now.” We then rode on bicycles for 45 minutes to get to Berghain. The hip people are willing to bike fairly far to get to the cool places.
cheriot 8y ago
> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city No, people want to live near their jobs. If we build enough office s for X people and in order to find X home, you have to include places more than an hour away then you're going to fuck up housing prices.
unobtaniumstool 8y ago
Wow, your ignorant rant really turned racist at the end there.
anonymous5133 8y ago
I view it from a different approach. The city centers are the most expensive because that's where all the good paying jobs are. Thus if you want to solve the housing crisis, you simply need to shift the density of where these jobs are located. Personally I like the circular city model where you have several CBDs on the outer rings of the city. The current model basically has all the good jobs in the CBD. The further you go from the CBD - the less jobs and the lower paying they are. So of course you get a housing crisis the closer you get to the CBD.
- walshemj 8y ago
  mm working in a soulless business park with no facilities has is downside compared to say central London
- zwaps 8y ago
  Berlin has no singular city center and certainly no CBD.
zwaps 8y ago
Berlin is still empty compared to pre WW2. There are huge empty areas right in the center of the city. There just isn't enough building going on. Building in Germany is expensive, and complicated. Even though almost anything would improve upon this clustereff of 60's communist architecture, you can not even build a skyscraper because people don't want it. Berlin is Berlin. Removing it from Germany would increase its GDP. Nothing makes sense here, and its a chaotic antithesis of the other large cities in Germany. Heck, they can't even finish the airport because our socialist officials just had to show they can build it themselves (they could not).
nerfhammer 8y ago
You say that like moving somewhere where there are a lot of good jobs is something only snotty upperclass twits would ever want to do. This mental image justifies nimby ladder-raising by trivializing labor mobility, the massive decline of which is a huge problem. E.g. https://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-lack-of-labor-mobility-in-the-u-s-is-a-problem-and-how-we-can-fix-it/ https://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-...

onion2k 8y ago

Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. I want to live as far from that place as possible.

loco5niner 8y ago
Agreed. Especially with the homeless problem in Portland.

crdoconnor 8y ago

It's ironic how much effort is given to justifying the actual amount while the question of "who gets that cash and why do they deserve it?" gets glossed over. It's a bit like when Russia privatised in the 90s and American economists told Russia that it really didn't who (i.e. oligarchs) owned everything provided everything is privatised.

buro9 8y ago

> Due to the limits of public transportation Fix this. People live within n time of where they want to be. If people can travel faster then the space within n time can be greater. This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities. Have public transport offer high speed and frequent rail routes, and then many local solutions from cycling, walking, buses, trams.

rkwasny 8y ago
s/Tokyo/Singapore/ If the government wants you to use public transport instead of private cars they have to provide great service 24/7
Mirioron 8y ago
>This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities. But they also live in small apartments and homes. I'm not convinced that Tokyo is a good example here. The key to this problem is to have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers. This way the population spreads out and housing becomes more affordable.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Don't think so. There are good reasons why the existing centers are drawing more and more people and business. Moving to the outside is often detrimental. A better way may be to create new urban centers or develop lesser ones.
- icebraining 8y ago
  That creates gridlock, because even if people start by working close to their home, they'll change jobs and start commuting farther, and you can't have a dense network of public transport over a huge area, so people start using cars and clogging up everything.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- MagnumOpus 8y ago
  > have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers That creates a very different lower-density city. Think about a sprawl like LA rather than a squeeze like Manhattan. Public transport won't work but parking spaces might actually exist. Your Afghan Bagel place will be 1 hour drive rather than 15 minute by subway on the way to work etc. More space, but less selection and diversity in terms of food, entertainment and other venues.

spiderfarmer 8y ago

Or make more hip city centers.

Mirioron 8y ago
It's not something that can be planned. This is a cultural thing perpetuated by people themselves.
magduf 8y ago
In most decent cities I've seen, there are: the city has several different "hip" areas, and you can easily travel between them with public transit. There isn't just one single downtown.

PascLeRasc 8y ago

Why did you need to vent that? How does it affect your life that people like unique specialty shops and, like literally every other human who's ever been alive, want a good value on where they live? You come off incredibly condescending writing this.

TomMckenny 8y ago

Rents out pace wages in suburbs and rural areas too. They rise in SF, Fresno and Anchorage. Even places people flee like Flint Michigan, land costs rise. They are unbearably high even in tiny apartment Tokyo where a 4m ceiling means you have no roof. They rise in places with bad public transportation and good. The rise in supposedly under-priced Berlin and supposedly over priced San Francisco. Land is not a normal commodity and the market has never fixed this anywhere using indirect tweaks. By all means, build more public transit but it won't fix housing prices anymore than it did in LA

bobl 8y ago
While I do agree that land is different, sometimes I think the problem is that people see it as such. When housing markets rise people get rich, just like they do with e.g. stocks. The lack of affordability is a factor of inequality, and especially inequality in opportunities. That is why moving to a smaller cities isn't a solution for most people, because the problem is with opportunities which are appearing in cities and disappearing most everywhere else.
- TomMckenny 8y ago
  Stock, in principle, is an investment in an enterprise that creates wealth. Like building cars or growing wheat. Buying and selling houses merely moves wealth around (typically from younger generations to older). It creates nothing, incentivizes nothing and looses more and more to mortgage holders. It can indeed make people rich but only to the degree someone else gets poorer. The trend is for an ever growing number of single family homes to become rentals owned by investors. As prices rise further and further above middle class ability to afford, this trend will increase. You can make far more money buying a house and renting it than buying it and sitting in it. So in the long term owner-residents are never going to be able to compete for homes with large investor in an unregulated market.
wbl 8y ago
It did fix housing prices in LA. That's why for the past 50 years LA has frozen its zoned capacity which used to be staggeringly high.

CalRobert 8y ago

4. I think you forgot "build taller"? " it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city." What are you talking about? Cars ARE half the problems of a modern city. Car owners are the other half. Rip out the damn parking and put in flats. Ban cars and put in bike lanes. They're far, far more efficient, and have the added benefit of not mowing down pedestrians and boiling children.

choeger 8y ago
Good plan. More people per square meter. That means you have shorter ways and switch your congestion from the road or the subway to the elevator in your apartment complex. Might even be better for climate but does not sound like a better way of live. If you want to remove car ownership you should try to provide an alternative that is actually better. If you want to avoid congestion, don't create a massive black hole in the center of each city that everything gravitates to.
- ivan_gammel 8y ago
  Public transportation in Berlin is good, very good - it is the alternative that’s actually better. And the city does not have gravitating center for commuters - at least not the same way as other big cities: office density in Mitte or Kreuzberg is nothing compared to Manhattan or Moscow-City.
- mtalantikite 8y ago
  What's wrong with more people per square meter? Some of us like living in dense cities that you can navigate by walking and public transit.
- stale2002 8y ago
  "Nobody goes there anymore! It's too crowded", is basically what you sound like. There are many many people in the world who love cities. All the things that you hate about cities, they love. Cities make up like 1% of the world wide land use. How about we leave this 1% of land to the people who love cities, and let the rest of the people who don't, to have the other 99%?

golemiprague 8y ago

There was a Jewish community in Afghanistan but most of them already immigrated. One thing is certain though, bagel was not part of their menu. Here are some chit chat that a youtuber did with Afghani Jews in Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xq0VEwrSr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xq0VEwrSr8

jseliger 8y ago

McSweeney's already covered this subject well: "I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en.... Berlin will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

bobl 8y ago
At least in big cities it is almost never that people don't want to build more, but that: 1. Property owner do not want to see their quite significant loans, or investments, decrease in value. 2. Renters do not want to get priced out of the city, having to leave a good job and move their kids away from their friends. In addition to that while seemingly intuitive in practice building doesn't seem to decrease costs. Presumably because: 3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible. Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building. If just building more worked there would be good examples and the far majority isn't.
- CountSessine 8y ago
  3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible. Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other. Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now. This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right? What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices. Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

debt 8y ago

People want to live near their work so they can spend less time commuting and more time with their families. The people that successfully do this are usually highest in the food chain and push out of that area all the others lower on the food chain. Thus cities filled with high-level management types as they're the only ones that can afford the rent and the mortgages. To be fair, not everyone hates commuting, but many people do, thus the drive towards urbanization. Furthermore, even if people don't mind commuting, they'd want to find a reasonably nice area to live to commute from. Those nice places get populated and overrun and people lower on the food chain get priced out; again the cycle continues. Until all the people lowest on the food chain must commute very far distances. At some point, many of them realize that if they were to calculate the commute as unpaid work hours, that they're actually being paid way less than what they make on paper. So now even those people lowest on the food chain move away in search for higher wage jobs with shorter commute times, and the cycle continues again and again. The sweet spot is finding a short commute time with low-cost housing. That's truly maximizing your wage. It's not just about being a hip urbanite.

helen___keller 8y ago

> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. I don't agree with this assumption. Most people just want to live reasonably close to their job, a grocery store, and maybe a few restaurants, while having enough space that they feel is sufficient. Maybe add in some constraints for feeling safe or being in a decent school district.

yorwba 8y ago

There aren't actually that many people who can afford Afghan Bagel. Shops catering to niche interests mostly get started because the owners overestimate their chances of success. They try to attract customers for a few months but fail to turn a profit and eventually close the shop. The landlord doesn't care, because there will always be another fool with more dreams than business sense. In my neighborhood, all kinds of hip coffee shops and boutiques keep opening and close just as fast. The only ones who hold out for longer have been there for decades, so they're probably protected by the cap on rent increases. It also helps to be an ordinary baker rather than specializing in Afghan Bagel, because that way they can get enough customers to keep the business afloat.

bobl 8y ago

What annoys me about this sentiment is that I was never a hipster, or posh, or greedy. I got priced out from anything decent all the same, while my hipster friends got rich. People aren't flocking to cities because they are entitled, though some might be, but because there are no good alternatives in most countries.

lkrubner 8y ago

You are exaggerating a bit. When I visit Berlin in the summer months, what strikes me is the culture of bicycles, which is much stronger than in any USA city. I recall at 1 AM my friends said “We are going dancing now.” We then rode on bicycles for 45 minutes to get to Berghain. The hip people are willing to bike fairly far to get to the cool places.

cheriot 8y ago

> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city No, people want to live near their jobs. If we build enough office s for X people and in order to find X home, you have to include places more than an hour away then you're going to fuck up housing prices.

unobtaniumstool 8y ago

Wow, your ignorant rant really turned racist at the end there.

anonymous5133 8y ago

I view it from a different approach. The city centers are the most expensive because that's where all the good paying jobs are. Thus if you want to solve the housing crisis, you simply need to shift the density of where these jobs are located. Personally I like the circular city model where you have several CBDs on the outer rings of the city. The current model basically has all the good jobs in the CBD. The further you go from the CBD - the less jobs and the lower paying they are. So of course you get a housing crisis the closer you get to the CBD.

walshemj 8y ago
mm working in a soulless business park with no facilities has is downside compared to say central London
zwaps 8y ago
Berlin has no singular city center and certainly no CBD.

zwaps 8y ago

Berlin is still empty compared to pre WW2. There are huge empty areas right in the center of the city. There just isn't enough building going on. Building in Germany is expensive, and complicated. Even though almost anything would improve upon this clustereff of 60's communist architecture, you can not even build a skyscraper because people don't want it. Berlin is Berlin. Removing it from Germany would increase its GDP. Nothing makes sense here, and its a chaotic antithesis of the other large cities in Germany. Heck, they can't even finish the airport because our socialist officials just had to show they can build it themselves (they could not).

nerfhammer 8y ago

You say that like moving somewhere where there are a lot of good jobs is something only snotty upperclass twits would ever want to do. This mental image justifies nimby ladder-raising by trivializing labor mobility, the massive decline of which is a huge problem. E.g. https://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-lack-of-labor-mobility-in-the-u-s-is-a-problem-and-how-we-can-fix-it/ https://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-...