25 ms·

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship

• urthor 5y ago
  As a non-American... this model is crazy in my mind. How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? Is it entirely driven by the fact that local taxes decline on the outskirts? If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps? Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable, and owners have to build for 100 years in greenfields?
  • minikites 5y ago
    >If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
    • mc32 5y ago
      It, in fact, is their money. There was a time in American history when income taxes were not a thing and still we got along. It’s not a bad thing to pool money for common causes, but to claim it isn’t their or our money is kind of odd.
      • nicoburns 5y ago
        It's only their money because the economic system assigns it to them. If the economic system was different then it wouldn't be theirs.
        • mc32 5y ago
          That's like saying it's only their house because we allow them to own a house. Or, those are their children because we allow them to keep their children and not assign them to the state. It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.
          • nicoburns 5y ago
            Children are a bit different because they are actually created by the parents (and the personal relationship is of course super-important for the child's development). But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.
            • mc32 5y ago
              I think that property-children is on a continuum. When you have raiding parties and tribal warfare, children were taken as slaves. From that PoV then children are in the same basket where they are protected by the norms of society, same as property. Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?
          • jes5199 5y ago
            yes true. property, especially real estate, is a legal construct created by the state. In older eras this was more explicit, property existed “at the pleasure of the Queen” or whatever. Now we rely on a nebulous social consensus reinforced by the courts and legislature. Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.
            • mc32 5y ago
              But that's true for any rights. The right to feel safe, the right to safety and not be harmed, raped or killed. Without society, sure, real-estate, personal safety are out the window and we could expect expropriation, rape and death.
            • frockington1 5y ago
              In the US property is also governed by ones rights to defend your property. We have castle doctrine for a reason
      • minikites 5y ago
        The first US income tax was in 1861, I find it hard to believe "we got along" when we held a significant portion of the population as literal slaves.
        • mc32 5y ago
          That's very true for the south. Yet, the north still got on and did even better than the south. Never the less, you can go to any other place which didn't have slaves and they still got on without income taxes. And, if you go to parts of the middle east where slavery exists today, income taxes have not prevented it, so it's beside the point.
      • titzer 5y ago
        It's your money like it's your water and your oxygen. Build some big tanks on your "property" and put machine gun nests around it to defend it. Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.
        • mc32 5y ago
          That's understood. But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.
          • titzer 5y ago
            We can "choose to include them" until we discover that it is unviable to fund the necessary services and find out society is completely dysfunctional without them. As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
            • mc32 5y ago
              I'm not against taxes. There are things that can only be executed as a group. What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some. It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes. We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions. I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      It's just a theory, but I'm somewhat convinced that half the reason Americans hate taxes is because of how inconvenient and in your face they are in the US: IRS requires you to fill in a complex form with no help and punishes you if you get it wrong, and sales tax is not part of the advertised price of goods. I reckon if you got rid of that then people would care about taxes a lot less.
      • minikites 5y ago
        Absolutely, and it's set up this way on purpose by people who believe that filing taxes should be as painful and difficult as possible so people associate the idea of taxes with the artificially difficult process. It doesn't have to be this way, the rest of us are just held hostage by anti-tax zealots.
        • snakeboy 5y ago
          Same principle as Cookie Banners. Wanting basic browsing privacy is being associated with an annoying, artificially difficult process.
        • flavius29663 5y ago
          You seriously think that people want less taxes just because they are difficult to file? Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it? The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k. Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k. Gas is double the price solely because of taxes Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10% Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month. I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience. By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.
    • atmartins 5y ago
      Maybe a lot of people are struggling to get by? "Their money" represents the ability to pay for food and housing so I'm not sure it's only about wanting others to suffer, as you imply. I think it's at least partially about their own sense of security.
      • pwinnski 5y ago
        A government that provides nothing to support feelings of security in exchange for the taxes they collect is... not a good government.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      >the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving. I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.
      • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Foreign aid is tiny, like less than one percent of the budget. Foreign wars are definitely huge, however.
        • BitwiseFool 5y ago
          I want to clarify that I am okay with foreign aid and disaster relief. The "foreign aid" that acts like soft bribes are the kind I really detest.
    • Karsteski 5y ago
      Is that really the general consensus? If anything, so much of taxation goes to waste on bureaucracy and inane or downright criminal nonsense in the US. I live in Canada, and I basically consider it to be theft that my taxes that are taken from me forcefully go to places such as giant corporations, and military applications that I do not want to happen. OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example. My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such
  • thrower123 5y ago
    It's probably difficult for a non-American to understand just how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime. If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it, although I'd still get itchy at having that many people around. But that's not a reality anywhere in the US that you have that kind of density.
    • minikites 5y ago
      >deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime It's true that people think this, but it's not true in reality. Many people who don't live in cities believe in the 1980s TV and movie version of cities because they're afraid of anything new or diverse.
      • roamerz 5y ago
        I moved from a semi rural area about 30 miles outside of Medford OR to an apartment in a reasonably nice area inside the city about 2 years ago while I am developing and building a house on a piece of property. Compared to the area that I moved from and will be moving back to the level of random violence and crime in this area is much worse and completely offsets any other benefits such as being close to work, city infrastructure (water sewer power and fast internet) and easier access to shopping and dining. Crime and violence thrives in densely populated areas because there is more opportunities for such per square mile. So yeah people think this because unless you live in a dream world that’s reality.
        • cortesoft 5y ago
          This is strange to me. I have lived in big cities for my adult life (San Francisco and Los Angeles), and I have never experienced any crime.
          • bombcar 5y ago
            The thing to look for is evidence of protections against crime - barred windows and high walls, locked garages vs street parking, hotels and businesses with security vs everything just open, having to get a key for the bathroom vs it just being there, etc. It’s like COVID-19- there’s no use in pretending it doesn’t exist because I nor anyone I know well has had it.
  • jes5199 5y ago
    the larger cities have been on a trajectory like what you describe - it’s difficult to increase density, home owners are resistant to it, but it happens gradually anyway. but in small cities, there’s just too much empty space available. people just build further and further out from the old city center, so they can have their giant houses and enormous yards. my state, Oregon, has a concept of an “Urban Growth Boundary” which is a zoning rule meant to reduce sprawl, and it helps somewhat. But generally people in the smaller cities vote to keep density very low.
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    It's worth noting that Japan also has a depreciation-based model of housing construction, but in Japan they don't endlessly sprawl outwards - isntead they knock down the old depreciated homes and rebuild in-place. Their permissive zoning model allows this to provide intensification naturally without the kind of protracted legal and PR battles required for intensification redevelopment here we have here in North America.
    • taneq 5y ago
      The attitude to homes there makes an interesting contrast with Western perceptions of a home as an appreciating asset. As I understand it they treat houses more like cars - a valuable but depreciating purchase that will be replaced within 2-3 decades. (Also I find the conversation-framing interesting here - when discussing a U.S. neighbourhood a "diverse profile" is presented as self-evidently ideal, whereas when discussing a Japanese neighbourhood it's never mentioned.)
    • speeder 5y ago
      I am a fan of city building games, and one thing that greatly annoys me is the fact that all of them use the USA-only model of "Euclidean" zoning (named after Euclid, Ohio, that sued on the supreme court to be allowed to implement that kind of zoning now popular in USA). These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp. Some guy bought the swamp, and started to build offices on it, a ton of them. The construction workers then started to build their homes on the farm, back then intended to be temporary homes while they built the offices, but today the ex-farm is a full blown dense residential neighbourhood in the middle of downtown, and the swamp is a place full of towering glassy high-rises. Meanwhile in another area, a neighbourhood that was USA suburb-style full of big houses, that formerly belonged to wealthy farmers of the region, people realized that place was very easy to reach compared to some others, so perfect for offices, slowly the houses became offices, then torn down to have proper office buildings, then those got torn down and turned into towers, and then some towers had residential apartments built on them so people could live closer to work. None of that would been possible in US model.
      • 5y ago
  • cesaref 5y ago
    A good book to read on the subject is Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's 60 years old now, and is concentrating on cities rather than towns, but you can see the points she is making play out in scenes like the article mentions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
  • pwinnski 5y ago
    Promote how? I'm in the Dallas "metroplex," and it understood here that you get more value for your money the farther out you go. There's the inner loop (Loop 12) and outer loop (I-635) inside Dallas city limits, and then there are suburbs which again can be described (at least in the north) as "inside TX-121" and "inside US-380." As you cross each "boundary," your choices provde more value--defined as less money for more space, or newer construction, or both. I grew up in San Diego, which is naturally constrained by mountains, ocean, an international border, and a military base, even before you add state and local laws. The Dallas area has no such constraints anywhere, nothing to keep it from sprawling until it reaches the state border to the north--and really, nothing to keep it from sprawling beyond that, either.
    • checker 5y ago
      Americans tend to value square footage over their commute time. So the cycle goes: 1. Hmm, I can get 2000 sqft inside the loop and 5000 sqft in the outer suburbs. Outer suburb for me! 2. Everyone else does the same thing and the area grows 3. The people in the outer suburbs starts loudly complaining about how horrible traffic has become (because they moved there when relatively few other people lived at and beyond the edge) 4. Roads are widened and new roads are built to ease traffic. 5. Now that there's road capacity, developers start building out even further. 6. Repeat step one with different people another layer out and the cycle continues.
  • hamaluik 5y ago
    The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes [1] explores this in a short series [2]. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but what he discusses rings true for my city at least. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes [2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
    • arethuza 5y ago
      The episode that mentions the experience of walking 800m in Houston from a hotel to a shop reminds me of an experience where a group of us (drunken Europeans) were trying to get from a bar in one hotel to another bar in another hotel in that city... I'm surprised we weren't arrested.
  • jppope 5y ago
    As an American... this model is crazy
  • btbuildem 5y ago
    Because the driving philosophy is to make a profit. Not to build a liveable place or a sustainable community, not to improve the standard of living for people, not even to build something great. Only to squeeze most dollars out of an invested sum. Once you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense. Depressing, self-destructive, short-sighted, awful, but logical.
    • nine_k 5y ago
      Now let's think about ways to make sustainable communities and higher standards of living a better investment! They are valuable, we just need to be able to share some of that value with the investors who decide what to build and how.
  • purple_ferret 5y ago
    >How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? More houses = more taxes. Development is promoted in less dense areas because it creates jobs and brings in money. New constructions are profitable, and the industry is basically dictated by builders that throw up cheap houses on plots of land they bought for 10k.
  • foxyv 5y ago
    In the United States, 75-90% of all land is zoned for single family residences with maximum densities of 4-5 households per acre. This is a legacy from the era of integration of non-white Americans called "White Flight." White Americans, seeking to avoid living next to non-whites left urban centers and populated suburban centers which had been engineered to be unaffordable or inaccessible to black and non-white Americans. Houses were large and separated by lawns. They also required financing to purchase. Financing which was usually denied to non-whites by red-lining. In addition these neighborhoods were usually walled off and mazed to prevent people from walking through them. This made families depend on expensive cars to get where they were going, further increasing the burden on those living within and excluding poor and lower middle class Americans. Now we have these pointless laws that are slowly strangling us to death with expensive car infrastructure that is insanely expensive and deteriorating fast. Small businesses can't survive because of poor walkability, parking minimums and outside investors jacking up rent costs. People can't find homes because they are all too expensive. The legacy of racism is a death pact for America. I hope we can escape it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#:~:text=White%20flight%20or%20white%20exodus,popular%20in%20the%20United%20States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#:~:text=White%20f.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
    • leetcrew 5y ago
      75-90% of what land? the federal government owns 28% of the entire land area in the US, and that land is not "zoned" for any type of private residence.
      • foxyv 5y ago
        Incorporated city land. EG: Where most people live. An example would be Fontana here: https://www.fontana.org/DocumentCenter/View/28163/General-Plan-Land-Use-Map-3-2-2021?bidId= https://www.fontana.org/DocumentCenter/View/28163/General-Pl... A little less egricious is Costa Mesa which serves as a commercial center. https://www.avenzamaps.com/maps/489436/city-of-costa-mesa-zoning-map-2017 https://www.avenzamaps.com/maps/489436/city-of-costa-mesa-zo...
    • 5y ago
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? 1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City). That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper. 1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars. 2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you. 3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state. 4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities. 5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.
    • nemoniac 5y ago
      > Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. USA 36 per Km2 Sweden 22 Latvia 30 Finland 16 Estonia 29 Norway 16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe#Population_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe#Populat...
  • cptskippy 5y ago
    > How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? How do you do that? The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments. - In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country). - There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc. - Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price. - When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation. If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.
    • zip1234 5y ago
      Use taxes pay for less than half of road funding. Make it so that use taxes pay for ALL of road funding for a start.
      • refurb 5y ago
        Why? Everybody benefits from roads even if you don’t drive. It’s how food is shipped to stores, public transport uses them, etc.
        • zip1234 5y ago
          It is subsidizing inefficient cities and land use, causes massive environmental harm, and the people that benefit the least from subsidized driving are the poorest people. If it is such a universal good that benefits everyone and people are already paying for it through their taxes, then why would people be upset about not having to pay for it through their taxes and just pay for it directly?
  • rhino369 5y ago
    Has any western nation achieved dense middle class inner city neighborhoods post WWII? The anglosphere cities that rose after the ubiquity of the automobile are all sprawling. The outer run suburbs of all western major cities are sprawling. The cities with dense middle class inner city neighborhoods mostly developed without cars. You'd have to ban cars to achieve it.
    • Steltek 5y ago
      From scratch? What starting point are you looking for? I don't think enough time has passed for a classical organic urban core to have developed from nothing. I guess for walkable postwar communities, I would look at college towns.
    • Qwertious 5y ago
      Check out Amsterdam. You don't need to ban cars, you just need to make bikes a preferable alternative. And as has been mentioned all over this thread, check out the YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes, for a ton of good videos on the subject.
      • throwaway210222 5y ago
        > You don't need to ban cars, you just need to make bikes a preferable alternative. You also need flat ground. Soccer-moms do not do hills.
      • rhino369 5y ago
        Amsterdam is my point. If it were founded in 1906 instead of 1306 it would look more Los Angles. It's very hard take an area developed around a car (everywhere in America since 1920s) and make it bike preferable. You basically need for the area to be so run down that you can start from scratch. Like a taking a formerly industrial area and then only zoning it for mixed use, high density residential/commercial use.
  • Causality1 5y ago
    Because nobody wants to live there. Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's. Sanphillippo wants a return to this 1940s idea of dense small towns, walkable towns with a population of ten thousand. He doesn't get that those towns weren't that way because everyone liked it; they were like that because they had to be. People were too poor to have a personal vehicle. Everybody either farmed and only came into town when they had to, or worked in the same factory, or worked in a store where the factory workers spent their money. Then when the industry changed the factory closed and the town died almost overnight.
    • hycaria 5y ago
      I don’t want to live dependent of a car
      • Causality1 5y ago
        Then don't. Live somewhere with good public transportation. Just don't think that you're ever going to live in a small town and be completely satisfied with not having one. Most people who don't want to live in a concrete jungle simply don't like having everything crammed together like that. I certainly don't.
    • rufus_foreman 5y ago
      >> Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's The majority of Americans live in an area they describe as suburban.
  • GhostVII 5y ago
    If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space. In areas where there is high demand for a particular reason (ex. NYC or the Bay Area because of the job market) I think it makes sense to intensify. But in cities where it isn't important for a lot of people to live close to the center, I don't really see a problem with just building more houses. Having a backyard is nice. If you ever go to Phoenix, all you see is miles of suburbs. And then you drive out of the city, and all you see is miles of open land that they can expand into. I say just keep building them, clearly they are pretty popular.
    • only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      In principle I agree, but I think that in many cases these developments are not well thought out. Any time the housing values in an area significantly drop or the population largely leaves, what gets left behind is a poor and poorly maintained neighborhood that creates a ton of negative externalities for surrounding areas. When you build an entirely new development on undeveloped land this is almost guaranteed to happen as all of the buildings and infrastructure will need to be replaced at the same time.
    • Qwertious 5y ago
      >If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space. 1. The main complaint you hear is R1 zoning, which doesn't just permit single family homes but MANDATES single family homes. This is wasteful lunacy. 2. If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy, then by all means. If they can't pay and expect others to pay for them, then we need to have a conversation on the topic.
      • notacoward 5y ago
        > If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy ...and they basically don't, over time. The initial boost in property-tax revenue is eventually overwhelmed by the maintenance costs for all that sprawling infrastructure. It's one of the drivers behind the churn that OP is all about. A fuller exposition was discussed here recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727133
  • maxsilver 5y ago
    > How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? They do promote it. Every city in the US is promoting inner-city neighborhood development (commonly called "gentrification" here). It's just not usually a great for actual citizens. Dense construction is always more expensive, so anytime density goes up, your immediately paying a lot more money for a lot less housing. And property in the US is valued exclusively by it's density (what realtors will call "location, location, location", but really just means "how much stuff is around it -- how dense is the area"). Living near density (even if your own property is not dense) always costs a lot more money, which means your again paying a lot more cash for a lot less housing. Alternative public transit options are poor in most places, but simultaneously, most inner-cities are actively hostile to our current universal public transit (cars), so the closer you live to the center of town, the harder it will be for you as a resident to get anywhere regularly, and you'll be transportation-disadvantaged compared to any of your friends in the suburbs. And because it's more expensive to live there, the taxes there are almost always much higher (since the tax you pay is based in large part on the value of your home, and houses near the city cost more, so you also get to pay more in taxes). And, since families generally don't have lots of money to spend, they are in the same boat as you, and almost entirely pick suburbs (to save lots of cash and get better transport), so their kids all enroll in schools out there, so the quality of the schools out there is a lot higher, which makes future families more likely to make the same decision. And if you have anything "tricky" happen to you (perhaps a elderly family member needs support, or you get divorced, or your kid becomes disabled, or similar), any and all of the assistance you might want or need to help deal with that, is also easier to get out in the suburbs. And since your cost of living is lower out there, if you need extra cash to handle a problem, it's easier to financially float that in the suburbs. The model is crazy, but it's not crazy at the person-level. It's mostly crazy at the federal level. The government could let properties actually depreciate, so that renovating old properties inside the city is cheaper than building new out in the suburbs. But that would require them to let property values fall in urban areas so that housing can become affordable, and cities as well as all rich people are always 100% against that idea. So instead, federal policies prop up artificially high property values in urban areas, with the net effect being a semi-explicit policy that cities are not for most people. The goal is that anyone not single/20-something/wealthy, should not ever actually live there, and these policies are mostly successful at doing that. > If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it help Probably not. The problem with local taxes is not usually that the rate is much higher, it's that the cost of living in a city is much higher, so your property itself costs way more, and that means you pay way more in taxes (even if the rate were hypothetically exactly identical in both, you'd still be paying way more in taxes city-vs-suburbs, because urban housing tends to cost way more to buy, and the taxes you pay are based on the sale price of the property itself) > Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable This is a good idea, but it would actually help the suburban sprawl far more than it would help the city (since lower density is more affordable), it would encourage people to stay in suburban sprawl longer, since those properties would still always be cheaper, but now (under this new rule) would also would be better built and last longer.
  • jandrese 5y ago
    It is a relic of slavery. As former slaves moved into the cities to find work in the reconstruction era and beyond the white residents fled to the suburbs and took their money with them. This lead to a decay of the inner cities which sets up a viscous cycle of poverty and neglect. There's a second problem where people who might have good intentions and try to revitalize the inner city are instead considered to be gentrifiers. Basically in an attempt to break the cycle of poverty they cause the rents to increase and end up pushing out the poor people instead of uplifting them.
    • whymauri 5y ago
      Good keywords and historical moments to Google here are "The Great Northward Migration" and anything related to the founding, population, and history of 19th/20th century Chicago. I believe there was a Chicago newspaper (Tribune, maybe?) that circulated special edition pamphlets to the Deep South with instructions and guidance on how to successfully migrate North. Black supporters caught circulating documents like this could be killed in retaliation -- it was a wild time. Edit: it was the Chicago Defender. >Chicago's African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." They took the trains north. "Then between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side." If a recall correctly, they also circulated imagery and content about the Black experience abroad; for example, in Paris. Arguing that if the condition for Black people was comparatively better abroad, then there was no reason for conditions to remain so dire in the US. This sort of content was particularly enlightening.
  • kuang_eleven 5y ago
    We do in some places! Actual cities have exactly that profile, and have the opposite problem of this article; a dense city core that is so expensive that it can be hard to live in. This article is really describing the failures of suburbia, that soulless monstrosity. By all rights, no matter what is legally true, this 'Appleton' is not a city, or a town or a village, it's just the vestigial growth of people who all want to live in suburbia.
  • SrslyJosh 5y ago
    > How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it? Nope! Not sure who said it first, but... If you don't know why some fucked up thing in America is the way it is, the answer is probably racism. In this case, it's white flight from city centers -> suburbs and racist real-estate practices. You can see it in what the author was told about Appleton, if you read between the lines: > he schools are much better in the newer areas, and people shop for school districts more than they shop for a house itself. While Appleton is a very safe little city, crime is always a bigger problem at the core compared to the edges. You have to think of the children. "Safer" == "whiter"
• baxtr 5y ago
  “These older places (the homes being built today) will then be populated by lower class people with fewer resources and less status thereby reinforcing the perception that it’s best to move on if at all possible. These are fungible, forgettable, disposable places that rapidly age and are then left to quietly decay.“
• minikites 5y ago
  >But aside from the fact that I didn’t care for any of these homes and was never going to buy in these locations, I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments. Capitalism consumes limited resources (land) for temporary gains (poorly built structures that nobody wants after just one generation). This is not a sustainable model to build a strong society.
  • closeparen 5y ago
    Suburbia is centrally planned in extreme detail. American voters understand that when it comes to housing, capitalism must be marginalized to a small box, otherwise the places we live would be “too crowded” with “the wrong kind of people” and “not enough parking.” So it is. And we get out parking, and our open space, and our socioeconomic segregation. And this is what it looks like.
    • mastax 5y ago
      I'm convinced that suburbia is popular enough that it would survive pretty well without government intervention, just not indefinitely in the same locations.
      • Steltek 5y ago
        Strong Towns disagrees with that. Suburbia is expensive and only survives by siphoning off money from cities via state grants.
        • nitrogen 5y ago
          Strong Towns is just one perspective with a strong agenda. I began doubting everything they publish when they got all the important details completely wrong in a story about my home town. The money that goes to cities is paid by the employers of people who commute from suburbs, and the businesses those commuters buy from. The mental and physical space of living outside the city is essential to maintain the productivity and sanity of the urban workforce. Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.
• hef19898 5y ago
  Looking at those older houses, I would rather have on of those than a soleless suburban cardboard home. But then I never buy stuff with an eye on resell value, I am not a broker or trader after all.
  • Steltek 5y ago
    In 2019, we began a home addition. Every contractor who looked at our plan told us to make a tradeoff to allow for a fourth bedroom. We persisted, as we were doing this for ourselves rather than future buyers. In 2020 and 2021, we're absolutely loving that we went for our home office plan instead of that bedroom. We knew we wanted it but had no idea how much we would need it!
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Sometimes the trade off is as simple as making sure an office could “legally” be considered a bedroom - usually an egress window and/or something that’s arguably a closet (in some areas). It can be worth doing those (or leaving them able to be done) for sale and valuation purposes. Alternatively, when buying, look for those things that can’t be counted as a bedroom for bonus value (basement office, etc).
      • Steltek 5y ago
        In our case, it was hallway access and layout but you're missing the larger point: there is no resale in our future here. If this house is being sold, it's because we're both dead and at that point, I don't care. Inflating value could only increase our prop taxes, why do that? And just for a funny addendum, right now, Boston home buyers have only one requirement: a home to buy. The market is insane on a level never heard of before. All contingencies are waived. No home inspection is allowed. During Covid, you had 15 minutes to look over a house and you needed to make an offer that day or tomorrow at the latest. Your offer also needs to be $50-100k over asking to be taken seriously.
        • ghc 5y ago
• AlanYx 5y ago
  Can anyone explain the "We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship" expression? I understand the overall point of the article, but I'm having trouble parsing the last paragraph, where he seems to assume that one reading of that expression is somehow obvious. Is it the ship that's ephemeral, or the iceberg? (It seems like a reference to the Titanic, and at least in my mind, both the Titanic and the iceberg were ephemeral.)
  • hamaluik 5y ago
    I read it as "if we have to choose between maintaining nature and having cruise ships, we'd rather maintain nature and not have cruises".
    • LanceH 5y ago
      The solution is worse than the problem.
  • pimlottc 5y ago
    Yeah, it’s not very clear to me either. From my reading, the poem is comparing the overwhelming majesty and elegance of the natural iceberg to the comparatively shoddy man-made vessel. But it’s open to interpretation. The author definitely doesn’t do themselves any favors, though, by making an analogy with a fairly obscure poem and not even bothering to explain it.
    • AlanYx 5y ago
      After reading the poem, I agree that it's open to interpretation, but I also wonder whether the author of the linked article has really thought about what the poem means. As far as I can tell, the poem seems to be about how icebergs exist in some majestic perpetual space of recurrence. The first stanza talks about how icebergs are impermanent, melt and eventually turn into rain ("Are you aware an iceberg takes repose / With you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?") but then the last stanza talks about how they perpetually arise again ("Like jewelry from a grave / It saves itself perpetually"). If anything, the poem seems like it would be perfect for referring to America's perpetual capacity to reinvent itself -- i.e., areas may fall into decay but then are rebuilt, much like urban Detroit is enjoying a revival -- not the more pessimistic take of the author of the piece.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  I'll never understand it. If you look at the places that suburbanites visit - the vacations they take, none of those places look like the ones they live in. Paris. Manhattan. Smaller locations like Niagara Falls still represents a level of age and density far beyond suburbia. Heck, even Vegas represents a level of density when you think about the fact that nobody's visiting the sprawl. It's like we know what nice places look and feel like, but choose to build the exact opposite because of parking convenience.
  • baggy_trough 5y ago
    Just because I might like to visit Disneyland doesn't mean I want to live there.
    • jen20 5y ago
      Ironic given the average “abandoned Disney castle” style of the McMansions that pervade in the suburbs around my city!
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Less than a mile from Disneyland you have what appear to be mobile homes permanently affixed to the ground, probably to get around density rules.
  • pwinnski 5y ago
    Have you never heard the common English expression, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there?"
    • hungryforcodes 5y ago
      You mean suburbia? Yes, I know.
      • baggy_trough 5y ago
        Then it's great that we have different options for people who have different preferences!
• bb101 5y ago
  For anyone interested in these topics and how they developed, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere [1] is an informative, if sad, read. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_Nowhere https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Highly recommend his TED talk. It’s both hilarious and horrifying.
• D13Fd 5y ago
  > All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn. Crank out new stuff, sell it fast, cash out, and move on to the next project. Blighted neighborhoods aren’t an accident. They’re baked in to every facet of how we do everything. I'm surprised there isn't more pushback here about the author's central premise, which is very flawed in my view. I've never found what he is saying to be true at all, even in the real estate market. I live in a 40-year-old house that I bought 5 years ago, and its value has only increased. Before that I lived in another 40-year-old house in a thriving and busy market. Some of the most expensive places to live in my area date to the 1930's-1960's - I know, because my realtor showed them to me last time we moved. The author states that this is some kind of universal truth about America, but it's not.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    > I've never found what he is saying to be true at all, even in the real estate market. I live in a 40-year-old house that I bought 5 years ago, and its value has only increased. Before that I lived in another 40-year-old house in a thriving and busy market. Some of the most expensive places to live in my area date to the 1930's-1960's - I know, because my realtor showed them to me last time we moved. There's no contradiction between an area being blighted and expensive. I've seen incredibly crappy neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York that were extremely expensive and clearly was in need of work.
    • D13Fd 5y ago
      > There's no contradiction between an area being blighted and expensive. I'm not sure what kind of "blight" you are talking about, but the author was focused on real estate values for older locations being very low: >Half the original structures were so devalued that they were torn down and replaced with surface parking lots >The building had been on the market for a very long time with no bids. It eventually sold a few months ago for $65,000. For comparison, here’s a review of a $65,000 luxury 2021 Ram pickup truck. Yeah, if you define "blight" as "I don't like how the place looks," then there are probably a lot of "extremely expensive" places that are "blighted." But I don't think that's what the author was talking about.
  • 5y ago
• m3kw9 5y ago
  This is a similar trend if you were in the metro, except things change right at the spot. Small towns change at a different scale. But I’m not so sure towns get abandoned like that regularly unless it was mismanaged by the economic development centres.
• trevin 5y ago
  A tangent: Granola Shotgun is one of my favorite blogs and Johnny has a unique viewpoint on many issues like urbanism, homesteads, town planning, etc. A quote from him that summarizes his writing to me: "So this is what America is actually like. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Look out your window. Take a drive down to your local big box store. Walk around your neighborhood. This is reality. Just sayin’." I have little specific interest in these topics but love his storytelling and detailed posts. A few of my all-time favorites he has written: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/not-for-camera-view https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/not-for-camera... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-show-horse-and-the-work-horse/ https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-show-hor... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/levittown/ https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/levittown/
  • Rendello 5y ago
    Not Just Bikes is a great channel on urban development, and he did a series on Strong Towns' ideas specifically. I like this one, "How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
    • tempest_ 5y ago
      I always laugh when watching his videos because it feels like his go to bad example is London Ontario. I recognize it in all the bad example B roll he uses.
      • Rendello 5y ago
        He grew up in London so it makes sense! I'm always happy (or sad, maybe) when I get to see Ottawa in the b-roll
    • nicbou 5y ago
      That's exactly the video I was thinking of while watching. It's a good complement to this article.
  • 5y ago
• howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  | All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn. Planning prior to 1990s was predicated on the assumption of continued upward mobility, middle class persistence and strength of US production of goods and services (a/k/a wealth). Instead, the US exported all of that to China, and praised its new service-led, consumer-based, greener economy. Of all the self-inflicted (likely fatal) wounds inflicted upon great societies throughout history, the civic ignorance (and arrogance) of our body politic is the greatest.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    Let them serve lattes ? to rephrase an unfortunate quote from France
    • kcatskcolbdi 5y ago
      Let them eat cake was a monarch's response to being told the starving poor had no bread. She offered to let them eat cake, as that's what she had been eating. Your version would only make sense if the rich were previously serving lattes.
      • mistrial9 5y ago
        "Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", said to have been spoken in the 17th or 18th century by "a great princess" upon being told that the peasants had no bread.
        • kcatskcolbdi 5y ago
          I'm not sure what your point is exactly. You italicize peasants as if that's a meaningful distinction from what I stated. I used the term "starving poor" in place of peasants.
      • frenchyatwork 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure it was a silly joke. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" (brioche is a light pastry bread) is unlikely to have actually been said by Mme Antoinette anyways.
• samlevine 5y ago
  > I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments. This is possible, but a lot of suburbs are old and quite successful. Bellevue and Redmond come to mind just from where I live but there are lots of places in America where the periphery is long lived and maintained.
  • bkberry352 5y ago
    Just speculating here, but is there a possibility that Bellevue & Redmond's success is due in part to Microsoft HQ being located there? I imagine that without that, those suburbs would look quite different...
    • alisonkisk 5y ago
      Yes, they are company towns.
• nine_zeros 5y ago
  Why don't American cities redevelop older houses? New England (except some posh suburbs) is filled with old rotting wooden houses. Fit for the 19th century but today they just look like slummy creaky shacks. Just why wouldn't the cities raze old houses to build new ones?
  • only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    Financial incentives aren't there. Why would I redevelop and old house if it's cheaper for me to buy a lot and build new?
    • nine_zeros 5y ago
      Cities should just add a deforestation/nature tax to new lots. The market will only have lots that already has a property on it. It is important for older cities to rejuvenate and when cheaper alternatives don't exist, they will be forced to redevelop. See how large cities redevelop in constrained areas.
      • only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        A land value tax might be a more effective way to encourage redevelopment. That way it doesn't matter if unused land is in public or private hands.
• aeturnum 5y ago
  Time to once again post my favorite TED talk "the ghastly tragedy of the Suburbs": https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_tragedy_of_the_suburbs/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
• godot 5y ago
  I agree with the author that the real estate agent described something most people want, and not necessarily what the author himself wanted. I think it's unfortunate that the agent didn't hear what the author wanted and just pointed him to the general public's preference anyway. However, I disagree with his take that America's housing development model is to develop into outskirt suburbs, let middle class move in, let it deteriorate in 30 years, and build more outskirts. Now, maybe I live in California and things are different. In the bay area even old areas with very old houses rise in values, and in fact, they rise more than newer developments. Demand for housing everywhere in the bay area + surrounding areas are high regardless of how new they are and how deep in town or out in the outskirts they are. Areas developed 30+ years ago continue to have high demand from middle to wealthy families. These areas didn't just not deteriorate but have grown into larger and more modern areas and in some cases developed their own downtown. Admittedly California and bay area specifically is probably a bubble and behaves differently than much of America. But I have a feeling more than a few popular cities are going through something similar. Appleton might not be, and maybe he's right that the new development outskirts will deteriorate in 30 years, but I doubt that'll be the case in new developments around Phoenix or Denver.
  • ocschwar 5y ago
    > Now, maybe I live in California and things are different. You live in California and things are different. You live there because you want to be in a specific location and near a some-what-specific crowd of people for work reasons. In the rest of the country, (most of it), that is not the consideration people have.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • majormajor 5y ago
    It might be a thriving city vs smaller town thing. Thriving cities outside of California (say Atlanta or Dallas) have valuable real estate in central locations just like in California cities. Nobody wants to be on the furthest outskirts with the furthest commute - it's more just an exhaust valve for growth so you don't get the same absolutely insane prices and resulting problems like homelessness to the same level.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jimmaswell 5y ago
  If these downtown areas were suddenly cleaned up, packed full of operating businesses, and had bicycle lanes and everything added overnight, would any customers even show up? I'm not sure how much demand there even is for such a thing outside the online urban development enthusiast crowd. I got a sense that the "themed strip mall" was put forward with derision but I think people are increasingly going to need more of an incentive to go to these kinds of areas beyond shopping. A historically preserved area that's neat to look at with educational placards/statues, a nice waterfront, an amusement park, really good food, some reason to make the trip. Otherwise personally I'll just order something online or go to a big box store.
  • pja 5y ago
    If we’re talking about a medium density mixed residential / commercial suburbs with walkable streets & a varied housing mix, including local schools and shops then those are usually pretty popular places to live. The YT channel Not Just Bikes talks about Riverdale in Toronto, Canada here as an example: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?t=521 https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?t=521 It has some of the highest house prices in Toronto & that reflects people’s desire to live there. Zoning into sidely dispersed commercial / residential areas where the only way to get from one to the other is by car is a curse on society.
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      > Riverdale in Toronto, Canada Other "streetcar suburbs" are listed in: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb There are multiple in Toronto, all of which were not expensive post-WW2 since downtown was mostly considered 'for immigrants' and all the WASPs moved to the car-centric suburbs. Urban living became cool again in the post-1990s, and now Old Toronto is quite pricey. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Toronto
  • pkulak 5y ago
    I don't know about other places, but historic downtown areas in Oregon are pretty consistently packed, especially now. My family just took a trip to a small town mid-week, which is when you can usually get a seat at a restaurant on the "strip". We had to wait nearly two hours for lunch this time. Walking between shops was bordering on bothersome because of the crowds. I can't even fathom how it is on the weekend.
• simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  Great post, and agree with pretty much everything. Solutions? It's going to be hard, for sure, to find anything. Maybe: 1) Move to Italy, or equivalent (I'm in Italy at the moment and I'm Italian, so why not some free advertising for my own nice country?). Not in a big city, but pick a small town. E.g. Montalcino, in Tuscany, is home of the best Brunello wine, amazing food, lots of history, etc, and they're bringing fiber internet to every home as we speak (yes, I saw the temporary cables this morning, running from one place to another. The entire town will have high speed internet in a few weeks). 2) Build a new city. I've dreamed about doing this for the past ~30 years or so. I think I know how a city like this should be, and it would be a mix of something like Montalcino, and something like the modern world. But I have failed to find a way to do it that doesn't require having a few Billion dollars of disposable money. 3) ??
  • voldacar 5y ago
    Do most small-town Italians speak English, and would they actually want a bunch of expat Americans showing up in their neighborhoods one day? You may be Italian, but for others...
    • simonebrunozzi 5y ago
      I think that most would be very welcoming, and the younger generations speak a decent English for the most part.
• debrice 5y ago
  Would making illegal to discount taxes a solution? It seems that businesses jump on the next tax discount according to this article.
  • pepetf 5y ago
    no such thing as appealx or not, ceptuxyuax, any s perfx nmw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569631
• hackeraccount 5y ago
  This is probably off tangent but who shops for a home like this? My wife and I are looking right now and we told our agent what we want and then proceeded to spend time on Redfin trying to find a house. We find something we want and then ask our agent to get us inside of it. Our agent has suggested a couple of places but she's also had us point out 4 or 5 that we were specifically interested in and - she works in the area that we're looking in. I can understand that the beginning with an inexperienced buyer being told "how it is" by the experienced agent might be a hook but instead it makes me think the buyer is a bit of a flake. Sorry if that's mean but honestly that's what I thought.
• JeremyNT 5y ago
  This is a monumental issue in how American cities develop. I'm from the south and am currently moving from one southern city (Durham - which is near Raleigh - NC) to another (Nashville, TN) and it's depressing to see how both places keep making the same mistakes (Nashville is maybe 20 years further down the road to failure than Raleigh, though). What are those mistakes? Designing all these unwalkable neighborhoods filled with single family dwellings with no cross streets or any retail corridors, then cramming them in along "strips" that connect them to the Old City and accumulate strip malls (eventually, holding so much traffic that they are a nightmare to navigate). So what you end up with, is the Old City has an actual grid of sorts, with cross streets and some walkability, with commercial near residential, and feels vibrant. But most people simply can't afford those areas, because they're so desirable for the people who recognize the value of this. Since the old areas are so expensive, most people have to buy into one of the aforementioned crappy new neighborhoods, and suffer all the subtle ill effects of being isolated from most other humans by walls of traffic. When individual developers buy these massive swathes of land in (formerly) rural areas, they optimize for the short term profit they can make from selling the new homes, and nothing else. As more of those crappy neighborhoods pile up, the traffic gets worse, and getting to/from the core parts of town becomes more and more painful. In this respect Raleigh fares better better, but only because rather than having one city center, the Raleigh area has many (Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and various other small towns). The web of sprawl grows between these places, but in each core is a small grid with retail, which means that as the megalopolis fills in all the gaps (rather than growing outward in ever increasing circles from a single center point) people can remain close to something attractive. One big issue is that the cookie-cutter neighborhoods have no grid system that connects to their surroundings, and instead there's just limited ingress/egress from the neighborhood onto the main strips. The developers don't own adjacent corridors, so there is no short term incentive to connect to them. This creates vast areas where no retail could ever exist, because they're along dead-end cul-de-sacs which "belong" to individual neighborhoods. I don't really know what the solution is. I don't really think humans want to live in these places, but there are no incentives to do better for builders, and real estate is treated as a valuable commodity, so here we are. In the south, where rural land is cheap, it all feels depressingly inevitable. I'd love to see a counterpoint of a city (especially a Southern city, in a red state) that has taken a different approach to development, which has managed to prioritize connectivity and walkability in a successful manner.
• brandonhorst 5y ago
  Off topic, but looking through the comments, so many people seem to believe that any multi-family housing is noisy. That has literally never been my experience despite living exclusively in multi-family housing for the past 15 years. Sometimes I can hear my neighbor's kid when they're directly outside my front door. That's it. Have the folks who think that apartments are noisy just never lived in apartment? Or is my experience the skewed one?
  • devonkim 5y ago
    Most US stock of multi-family housing in low and mid-rise apartments were not built with modern building code with STC above 45 (hotel framing AKA staggered studs). Furthermore, between floors sound can carry, and even older homes can drop in STC over time depending upon the material used in insulation as well as deterioration of materials over time. My friends that lived in only high rise buildings haven't had noise issues like myself and many others where we could hear conversations on the other side of walls of neighbors similar to the extent parodied in the movie Office Space with the main character's neighbor.
  • greedo 5y ago
    The "modern" apartments I've lived in have been relatively quiet, but the one 50's era apartment was terribly noisy. It was a two story with an attic appt and a basement appt wedged in-between the main floors. I lived on the second floor, and loved the hardwood floors and french doors etc. Then someone moved in above me, and another across the hall. I could hear the guy across the hall every time he opened or closed the door. The guy who moved into the attic above me must have been related to Sting. His lovemaking sessions lasted for what felt like weeks.
  • therealdrag0 5y ago
    I think this is a key point of customer discrimination. It would be really helpful for housing to have a required and standardized "sound-proof" rating. If customers could be informed and builders incentivized, then what is build and bought could change. That being said most apts I've lived have been pretty quiet, but I'm not sure how much that is from materials or luck with neighbors.
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• andrew_ 5y ago
  That was a really good read. I see this happening all over the Tampa Bay area. But I also see the opposite, where once-blighted structures are transformed into beautiful establishments. Grand Cathedral Cigars [1] is one I like to mention, as I have close ties to the area that's been an extremely high crime area for decades. It's turned around quite a bit recently, and seemingly abandoned structures like the old church which Grand Cathedral occupies, are being repurposed rather than torn asunder. There's a running joke about "up and coming neighborhoods" in the Tampa Bay area, but there is visible progress and fewer parking lots being created in place of structure. [1] https://grandcathedralcigars.com/ https://grandcathedralcigars.com/
• SrslyJosh 5y ago
  > As proof of its bright future they also mentioned Amazon is building a giant fulfillment center out by the airport. Who's gonna tell them?
• ramoz 5y ago
  The authors point on churn hits me. Business/Tech
• sunshineforever 5y ago
  I can't describe now baldly I'd love to live above that former Chinese restaurant and operate some kind of eclectic low effort business out of the front. For only the price of one of those gaudy new pickups.
• giantrobot 5y ago
  Sort of an aside: this reminds me of a presentation I saw years ago by an architect(?) talking about architectural anti-patterns. My favorite comment was how planters are added around buildings as an afterthought as "green band aids". Unfortunately for me I have no idea who the presenter was nor the venue. It was maybe a TED Talk but this was back when YouTube's only content was ripped off Newgrounds animations and clips from The Daily Show. It must have been over ten years ago because the Iraq war was mentioned as being a contemporaneous event. I'd love it if someone knows the presentation I'm talking about. I think a lot of the points (as I remember them) are germane to this article.
  • zacherates 5y ago
    I think this is the talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_tragedy_of_the_suburbs/up-next?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
    • giantrobot 5y ago
      Holy crap you beautiful creature that's it! I've been hunting for that video for years.
• mapt 5y ago
  Recommended watching on the channel 'Not Just Bikes': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
  • itronitron 5y ago
    'donoteat' also has a good series (Cities: Skylines) on city building in the US >> https://www.youtube.com/user/donoteat01/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/donoteat01/videos
    • mapt 5y ago
      Yeah, I enjoyed this and the WTYP podcast. I disagree with Justin a bit on his favored idea of "De-commodification of housing", making it some type of individual right rather than a form of tradeable property, versus leaving the capitalist framework by which we allocate individual housing in place, and just aggressively intervening by changing infrastructure, zoning, taxation, and development to create market conditions amenable to the population's interests. I respect his POV, but I see the latter as more achievable. I think he sees a pernicious influence from local developers, and believes any government-led change that leaves them intact will necessarily be corrupted by them.
• brailsafe 5y ago
  Not Just Bikes is a great YouTube channel that discusses this repulsive suburban decay and covers a lot of Strong Towns material as well. It's a very upsetting pattern that strips towns of the feeling of community you only really get with walkable and enjoyable neighbourhoods. These are very much similar between the U.S and Canada, the only difference in my mind being the impression I get from this quote > So here’s the big picture. All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn. Crank out new stuff, sell it fast, cash out, and move on to the next project. Blighted neighborhoods aren’t an accident. They’re baked in to every facet of how we do everything. It's my impression that this has wormed it's way into other facets of U.S capitalistic culture. Visiting for the first time, every sign in the airport seemed to be shouting at me "BUY BUY BUY" "BURGERS CHICKEN TACOS IPADS GUNS" etc.. as if I wasn't expected to come back. Massive absurd super Walmarts, Super Targets,(I thought "Super" was just a colloquialism until I saw that in fact they literally have/had it in the name) places to gain as much weight as possible and then lose it instantly with this one easy trick. It was the first time I saw a living blob of a person literally just vibrating on a chair in the damn airport. Not that I have anything against overweight people, but it's symbolic of a level of pure hedonism I'm uncomfortable with. Everything's cheaper and bigger and awful. Not that Canada doesn't have some elements of this, but it's a much much smaller scale of crazy. The cities though are a similar hellscape, with just a few nice walkable exceptions.