31 ms·

Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

485 points by Fricken 5y ago

sul_tasto 5y ago
In the US housing developers heavily lobby local government officials to overturn or grant exemptions to laws requiring the preservation or construction of communal spaces. It’s not something citizens choose. It’s corruption at the local level.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> Places like this are expensive because places like this are scarce, and scarce things almost always become expensive. > The answer to this isn't to lower our standards for design or to be dismissive of the things that are really lovable about these places. The answer is simply to allow a lot more Milwaukee Avenues to exist. And the same goes for the likes of all of today's beloved, "charming" historic districts. It's hard to me to point at the right paradigm, but it reminds me a lot of the "trickle down" principle, of flooding the top with valuable properties at affordable prices and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated. I'm totally in for building more quality housing and neighborhoods, but there needs to be a lot more thought put into it.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated Well, there definitely won't be any still there if you don't build something in the first place.
- sgt101 5y ago
  Housing is an interesting one though - it's not very liquid as in a very small % of the inventory changes hands every year so removing a premium with extra supply might have a big impact, especially if supply costs are not impacted. If impact on supply cost is marginal then ensuring that all properties are nice might be a way to improve the standard of living for a whole lot of folks.
- YmiYugy 5y ago
  The difference is that usually expensive properties are expensive to build. They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge, they are designed by expensive architects, use expensive materials, require custom and labor intensive techniques and have luxurious amenities. Walkable neighborhoods can be build cheaply. What makes them expensive is demand and land.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I am not sure to follow you. > They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge[...] What makes them expensive is demand and land So, cheaply built or not, as long as they are high quality either way they're expensive, no ?
- akanet 5y ago
  The notion that increasing housing supply is similar to "trickle down" economics is common in discourses of housing policy in America, but it is misguided. Reagan's notion that increasing the margins of the wealthy would induce them to pass profits to workers was mistaken in that its proposed mechanism was entirely altruism. Price reductions in housing from an increase in supply do not occur because the rich voluntarily leave some housing for the rest of society, but simply that they will less totally dominate the competition for this resource by virtue of there being more of it.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    My point is that increase in supply alone doesn't automatically lead to less domination. For instance increasing the supply of high quality affordable housing by 2% in a place where there is high demand might not mean 2% more people will get the houses at a good price. It can mean instead that investors buy 2% more houses in that area to rent it at a price aligned with the market value. Wouldn't it be ok then if the increase was 5 or 10 or 50% of high quality housing ? Sure...but have we ever seen this level of increase result in actual well designed and livable areas ? I've personally only seen mild ghettos and weird super structures, and not all by skimping on the budget, but also because it's just damn hard to create a flourishing living environment from nothing.
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    - boondaburrah 5y ago
      I mean that's a weird way to describe Tokyo but it does work. Your last point still stands though & I'm not sure where the tipping point is.
      - makeitdouble 5y ago
        Does Tokyo have much affordable housing ? It's a very special situation on its own, but buying a house will usually get you into the 30+ years mortgage plans, and old buildings are earthquake hazards so I wouldn't call them high quality. Rents haven't much fallen even as inflation grew, and cheap places like Leopalaces are a hell to live in. All in all it looks to me to be a hard to live town if you're not in a decently good paying job.
- brabel 5y ago
  I don't think that's as simple as the article tries to make it out to be. As poorer people start moving into a neighborhood, the richer people will flee away en masse. It seems to me that rich people will pay any amount of money just to make sure they're living where other rich people are, even if that means moving somewhere less convenient. As the poorer people start taking over a hood due to prices going down for whatever reason (e.g. building more "affordable" accommodation), it begins to deteriorate such that in a decade or two, it becomes a "rough" place with badly maintained houses, dirty streets, broken street lamps, youngster gangs roaming around and so on. That's not the default of the poor people themselves only, I think, but a combination of them naturally having lower standards (so they complain less about broken things to the local government - not sure I can accept that poorer areas are less maintained because there's no people living there who are in government), less money to keep up with maintenance (so houses deteriorate and stop looking cute), higher tendency of the youngsters in getting involved in gangs and crime (simply because many of them have far fewer opportunities in life, and they become aware of that very early) and so on. Where I live is not a rough hood by any means, but it's more "affordable" than many other places... and I can see at least some of these things happening here... the government doesn't keep the vegetation on public places nearly as well trimmed as in the rich areas, there's definitely less care with the quality of the street pavement, houses are not completely deteriorated but most are not in perfect shape either... I just need to walk around 20 mins to get into an area where everything changes and houses are all of a sudden perfectly well kept, the public areas are beautiful, even the people look "prettier". This segregation seems to happen naturally with humans everywhere.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    This is a real dynamic seen times and times. The catch is, poor people's houses are not owned by poor people. "Rich" people don't need to live there to own the land and dictate prices up to a point. They'll flee away and rent the house basically, and they can afford to keep it at the highest price the market validates.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    This is function of house prices, not of natural segregation. When I was growing up in London the streets around me were fairly mixed. You could find public school educated lawyers, minor celebrities, and even a few financial types living close to factory and shop workers. As public housing was sold off and property prices were goosed towards the stratosphere the inevitable result was separation, because the poors were economically cleansed into poverty ghettos. Now houses on the street I grew up on - built as cheap and dense worker housing - sell for around £1m. I think the arrow of expense points in both directions. Building more nice neighbourhoods would lower prices. But one of the reasons nice neighbourhoods aren't built is because it's so easy to make money by building cheap trash housing and selling it to people who can barely afford it.
YmiYugy 5y ago
I don’t get why there are so few walkable places. The demand is there and willing to pay a premium, and the small lots and narrow streets should make it fairly inexpensive to build.
- orangeoxidation 5y ago
  Regulation, education, inertia. All of those tell specialist things like "streets have to be at least this wide in residential areas". Zoning can make it impossible for the requirements of daily life to be in walkable distance. There is also some scale issues. A walkable city is great. A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor. Public transport makes only sense if it can move enough people. All drivers (so everyone) will be uncomfortable with the walkable, but disconnected small neighborhood. There has been some rethinking in the last decade or so and cities are trying to become more walkable, more livable and less car focused with increasing frequency.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    > A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor. If a "walkable neighborhood" has none of those things, it's really a neighborhood with sidewalks. There are doctors, dentists, grocers, a theatre, bars, restaurants, hardware store, ... all within walking distance in my neighborhood. Neighborhoods can be like that.
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- jdblair 5y ago
  Zoning is the biggest impediment. Most US cities have parking requirements, rules for setbacks, and limits on number units in a building. There is a strong incentive against changing the rules to allow more construction because scarcity increases the value of existing units.
timthorn 5y ago
The UK Government set up a commission to look at how to improve the quality of places, which reported last year: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-building-beautiful-commission https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-buildin...
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  The UK has an amazing abundance of models for excellent dense walkable villages and neighborhoods... and then builds endless swaths of American-style car-based single-family houses, with not a grocer, chemist, cafe or pub within walking distance. Only one motivation is powerful enough to propel such wave of single-use disposable crap over this green and pleasant land: shortest possible timeframe profit for landowners, developers and builders, ably aided and abetted by jobsworth planning departments and clueless in-their-pocket Councils. Bleh.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    And let's not forget the elephant in the room. Money. How much would it cost to add, say, a cycle lane to an existing road 1km long if it required more than just painting the pavement? £100K? More? How many Kms would be required to change even a small town over to be more pedestrian friendly? I just don't think the money is there. Also, you have many places in the UK that to pedestrianise the centre would create genuine bad problems for drivers. Many small towns simply don't have more than one main route through them. But then it does depress me when they create new build estates that they don't seem to take that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do it right from the beginning.
    - timthorn 5y ago
      The Cambridge City Deal assigned £8M to install 5 new off road cycle lanes around the city, IIRC. I don't have the actual costs and delivered distances to hand (the data is online to be found somewhere), but we're talking about a few miles.
fsloth 5y ago
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can check out my hoods in Helsinki in Google maps and streetview (not giving my actual address but close enough). There are has several high quality universities, and several well known startups and game studios operating within the view I linked below. All of it is walkable/cyclable/public transportable. https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/dat... Most of Scandinavia is similar, as you get to mainland Europe with bigger population density the story diversifies, but we don't really hear "only rich people can walk" stories here.
- jseban 5y ago
  > I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to. Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc
  - dsign 5y ago
    > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day. A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.
hendiatris 5y ago
I read this and think “ah, well there are many more non-rich people so the density requirements make this sort of thing complicated” and then I look out the window over the European city I live in where it has been achieved. Then I think about the town an hour away with a vibrant community and pleasant human-scale environment. What makes it all possible? Good transit. Clean buses. The US simply doesn’t have that, and probably not even the political will to make it happen. What a shame.
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  I'm afraid it's not simply about political will. To have affordable and safe public transport, one would need to completely revamp the fabric of American society Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes. Why all of these factors? Because of massive inequalities, rugged individualism, broken healthcare, missing social nets,... Unless that is fixed, the public transport won't be a decent option. Driving everywhere allows people to form a bubble that shields them from daily witnessing the ills of the system
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? This certainly is not it, because public transportation is in general a public service whose main output is not turning a profit but positive externalities that boil down to quality of life. Consequently, there are plenty of cities around the world where their public transportation network is subsidized to the point where the service is completely free to use. Let's put things in perspective: in the US, Texas wasted close to $3B dollars to expand a highway to a whopping 26 lanes[1]. Wouldn't it be far better if that cash was instead used to put together a commuter railway service that serves the same route, or even in Houston's appallingly tiny light rail network[2]? [1] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-spans-a-whopping-26-lanes https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail
  - 5y ago
schnitzelstoat 5y ago
Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats. I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC). So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?
- hattori31 5y ago
  I love tiny apartments. In Tokyo houses are tiny but enough. You have to be clever when there is no space. Also, we should be more careful with the space we use for living. Smaller living spaces equals more space for park, forests etc
- crooked-v 5y ago
  NYC apartments are tiny because NYC just doesn't have enough housing in general, so everything that's allowed to be subdivided gets subdivided (and some things that aren't allowed get subdivided too).
  - somnic 5y ago
    Partly, but also smaller living space is in fact part of the tradeoff that you make when building stuff close together. It's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion, but I'm also not saying that single-family car-centric suburbs should be illegal for people who prefer it, unlike how building denser housing is illegal in many expensive cities.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      While that's true, there's a significant difference between "you can't give everybody a McMansion" and "everybody must live in spaces objectively describable as 'tiny'". My objection is to the latter.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
pronlover723 5y ago
I'm pretty addicted to "Not Just Bikes" youtube channel which seems to be either directly or indirectly related to stongtowns https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes It's frustrating. Even though I'm currently in SF, SF still doesn't feel remotely as nice as many other places outside the US. Public transportation is slow and although the muni is okay the busses are kinda gross compared to good non-US cities. There are 10 or so walkable neighborhoods but they're missing something. Not sure what it is.
- pja 5y ago
  Does zoning prevent the walkable neighbourhoods from acquiring a full range of amenities? Or maybe the planning restrictions prevent the kind of organic infill development that leads to these places acquiring their own local character?
  - davidw 5y ago
    Absolutely: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-ice-cream-shop-hopeful-sees-dreams-melted-by-16116082.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    Yes it does. I find it really ironic too because a lot of the places praised by modern planning doctrine were allowed to spring up more organically according to need and less subject to such intense planning regulation. It's even worse in that, just like people complain about the personality types that go into policing, I find there's a particular common personality type among planners: weak/mousey people that tend to be low on the totem pole of organic social hierarchies, but who are strongly opinionated and happily embrace their bureaucratic positions to exert power over people and to impose their agendas on the world.
- gkop 5y ago
  SF neighborhoods are missing strong social fabric and welcoming vibes. I moved to Oakland after 7 years of stretches in the Lower Haight, Inner Mission, Outer Sunset, Outer Richmond, Cole Valley, Divisadero, and Potrero Hill, for a better sense of community. I love it here, but must admit I’m afraid to name my Oakland neighborhood for fear of (further) letting the cat out of the bag. I feel like SF is a sink for the forces that lead to social tension, and it protects Oakland somewhat in that way.
CalRobert 5y ago
The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in. If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too. It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can walk or cycle to school. (edit - in case my other comments look inconsistent - I moved from LA to Dublin then back to San Diego for a year (bad idea, that!) then back to Dublin and recently to a dirt cheap place an hour away from Dublin because Dublin's overpriced and still has no neighbourhoods I'd like my child ride a bike to school in)
- swiley 5y ago
  China and India emit far more CO2 than we do.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    So what?
  - dsauerbrun 5y ago
    per Capita?
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      per capita isn't a useful metric. Imagine if you are China and your population is declining, but your GDP is still going up so your per-capita CO2 is going up. That's not fair for them. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... At the same time, if you are a developing country and your GDP is going up, then your absolute emissions will also go up. That's not fair, either. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location... So you look at emissions per dollar of GDP to measure how efficiently you are producing. This is why China's own CO2 commitments are expressed as Kg per GDP. This is what they are targeting to decline, it's what they set policy around, and it's how they publicly measure their own progress. So let's use their own preferred metric: China's CO2 per GDP is ~.47 and dropping For the US it's .24 and also dropping India is .27 -- almost the same as the U.S. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=IN-CN-US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat...
Kaibeezy 5y ago
It’s not just scarcity. People “need” a place to park three or four huge (subsidized) vehicles. Also, people like to brag. N-thousand square feet and an n-car garage provide an objective measure. It’s harder to one-up by saying you have a really nice trattoria three blocks over.
- jbjbjbjb 5y ago
  My impression was the whole article is basically just “why don’t people like what I like”. These houses are scarce but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mainstream market wants that. It’s a niche.
  - deadpannini 5y ago
    When a niche becomes expensive, that indicates that there is a bigger market for it, even if it doesn't rise to the level of "mainstream."
  - Kaibeezy 5y ago
    Concur. There's a good argument in the article, and a useless one. The useless one is the one you perceived. The good argument is that there are an array of characteristics that tend -- in various combinations and degrees -- to correspond to places people like. The correlation can be anecdotal, empirical, whatever, that's up to the writer, who should have made a case, not a whinge.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    That's not what the article argued at all. It said that the reason these places are expensive is because they're rare (so demand > supply) and the reason they're rare is because people doing construction just assume that nice houses == expensive, so the average person won't be able to afford it. Except, if there were more of them, the prices would go down (supply >= demand), and more people would be able to afford them.
    - jbjbjbjb 5y ago
      Yes more supply would make it cheaper for the people in the niche that wants that type of house. The writer hints at this but the penny doesn’t drop. It’s most likely that maybe he doesn’t understand the middle and working class market as well as the entire home building industry of America. Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter the type of atmosphere and lifestyle in the towns the writer talks about. In the UK where small houses and towns are abundant, the quaint shops go where the money is and the rest of sit in traffic to drive in and out of town to go to school and work.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Would you like to raise a family in those conditions? apparently hundreds of millions of people already do it... A provocative answer to your comment: would you like to raise your family where your kids can walk to school and play with other kids in a nearby park at walking distance and never be afraid of mass shootings? I get the impression that huge houses are a symptom of a bigger issue: people in US feel they need a lot of "safe space" around them because the more they are isolated from strangers, the more they feel safe.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I would like to (and do) raise my family like that. We live in Cambridge, MA; our kids walk to school and to play with friends in the park, I’ve never feared a mass shooting*, we have reasonable accommodations for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. * - Do you live in fear of drowning, choking, or bicycling? All are significantly higher lifetime risks in America than mass shootings. Drowning is 10x more likely but few live in fear of it. Use statistics to guide your intuition on fears. (I’ve had well-meaning family members caution me about sharks before a day at the ocean. Sharks are sensational and sell ads, but are not the actual risk.) https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-statistics-2018-3?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-sta...
  - oftenwrong 5y ago
    It's sad that "riding inside a car, van or truck" and "pedestrian" are so high on that list, but also surprising that "bicycling" is so significantly safer.
    - alex_smart 5y ago
      Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity is a poor indicator of how safe that activity is. Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity = Probability of dying due to activity while performing it x Expected number of times that activity is performed in lifetime. (Only the first factor corresponds the inherent safety of the activity.) It is not that bicycles are more dangerous than sharks. It is that people are cycling much more than they are interacting with sharks. It is not that walking is more dangerous than cycling. It is that people are walking much more than they are cycling.
lbriner 5y ago
He doesn't talk about who is going to pay for everything. In a road with lots of private ownership, one person can improve their property but they can't force their neighbours to do it as well. The only likely method is the deep pockets of the developer but why would they do this to only sell the properties to low-income families, which might be zero ROI when they might as well do the same in an up-and-coming city and sell for muchos dollars to the rich? I love the idea but the main reason why most good ideas are not implemented is that they are much more difficult than it sounds, often for many reasons, not one.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  You want every topic covered in one article? Strong Towns has done the math on who pays for everything: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme The Strong Towns vision is pretty holistic and deals with all the interrelated issues and their difficult challenges. It's the exact opposite of naive just "this should be easy" attitude.
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eecc 5y ago
I guess there's also some of "beggars can't be choosers" paternalist mindset going on when _deciding for the poor_ what they _deserve to have built with our money_.
mojo74 5y ago
For NYC's little island read London's Marble Arch hill https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2021/07/londons-worst-attraction-reactions-to-the-new-marble-arch-hill/#:~:text=The%20Marble%20Arch%20hill%20has,being%20battered%20by%20three%20lockdowns https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2021/07/londons-worst-a....
- ddek 5y ago
  The things Westminster have done to persuade themselves people don't want Oxford Street pedestrianised.
Neil44 5y ago
My cynical view is that if you put not nice people into nice places, you make the places not nice, not the other way around. 99% of the time.
- jameshart 5y ago
  It seems weird to use ‘having a lot of money’ as a proxy measure for how nice someone is likely to be though?
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    This is covered well in Parasite. There are degrees of “niceness”, some of which are enabled when money is no object and you don’t have someone taking a piss on your house.
  - Neil44 5y ago
    You’re right, maybe stable, tidy and can afford a lawnmower would be a better pidgeon hole than ‘nice’ :)
MisterTea 5y ago
> Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism. No. That's not how that works. You're not an elitist just because you want a nice neighborhood. You're faced with charges of elitism when you advocate for this type of stuff after you've moved into a space once inhabited by low income people who were chased out by developers who artificially beautified the neighborhood thereby inflating its value overnight. Those low income people would love to have a beautiful neighborhood too. Instead they spend most of their day toiling at shitty jobs and riding public transportation. They have so little money things like tree shaded bike paths and flower beds are a fantasy. The real issue is no one wants to spend money making low income peoples lives better. How many beautiful housing projects have you seen vs luxury condo towers?
- zachkatz 5y ago
  > artificially beautified What's the difference between artificially beautifying and genuinely beautifying?
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    Genuine beautifying comes from the community.
    - deleted 5y ago
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- quadrangle 5y ago
  The article isn't saying gentrification-complaints are wrong! Gentrification is a serious problem, and the author isn't denying it. Strong Towns absolutely wants to see money spent making low-income lives better. And the movement does the work to grapple with all these challenges. Tree-shaded bike paths are cheaper than all the costs of crime and health-care issues that are caused by the unhealthy environments imposed on poor communities. Here's an article highlighting their critique of luxury-condo-tower approach: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-four-letter-words-of-vibrant-downtowns https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-fou... And here's a focus on how poorer neighborhoods are actually more fiscally sound while the systems we have effectively subsidize the wealthy: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-value-of-a-poor-neighborhood https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-valu... That one happens to be by the same author as the article you're replying about. And here's one about the way our suburban experiment is creating poverty: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-suburban-poverty-look-like https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-subu... The Strong Towns movement is all about addressing these things. And the initial posted article here is about the tragedy of how good-for-humans places are associated with elitism. It's not saying there's no reason for that association, it's saying that association needs to end by way of making everywhere better.
spodek 5y ago
The article applies to farmers markets too. By any measure, farmers markets are better than supermarkets and takeout. Cheaper, faster, more convenient (if there's one nearby), more friendly, cleaner, healthier, but talk about their benefits and prepare to be called privileged and lectured on single moms in food deserts who only have time for McDonald's. Do they think people at farmers markets want to wall them off and keep poor people away? A moment's thought and they'd realize everyone involved is trying to fill in food deserts, reduce big agriculture subsidies, that McDonald's is causing poverty in time and money, but their defensiveness and I'm-so-smart-ness blinds them.
- ip26 5y ago
  I love the idea, and I'd never push for fewer farmer's markets, but I must say I've always found them more expensive, slower, and less convenient with hardly any selection. I often wind up heading to the supermarket immediately after, because I need another ingredient to cook what I've just bought.
- bradlys 5y ago
  This isn’t my personal experience. Farmers markets are always more expensive than going to a grocery store. Substantially so as well. Otherwise I would spend more time at them.
nathias 5y ago
Even Europe is terrible because we have no urbanism except on areas of cultural heritage, square cheap shops, add panels etc. really destroy everything for all.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Great article. I’d like to see a follow up addressing how to get from A to B without causing displacement due to gentrification. The article treats it as a false scare but it is real and can’t be overlooked. Millions of houses can’t be built over night so there will be gentrification. Sucessful development needs to maintain mixed income, and price caps/rent control need to exist in order to avoid that IMO. Property developers will not do that without a helping hand from the government.
kgin 5y ago
When housing markets are extremely tight, people fear improvements. Improvements mean the neighborhood will be more desirable. More desirable neighborhood means people with more money will be interested. More people with money means higher rents. In tight housing markets, people come to see the unlivability of their neighborhood as a shield to defect attention of people who could price them out.
xyzelement 5y ago
Really enjoyable article. There's a thread that's running through it - that places that are rare and desireable are expensive. While this article talks about a specific kind of place, the pattern is true on general. It's another way to say "supply and demand" Whenever we talk on HN about high rents or house prices, we need to keep this in mind - what makes a place "affordable" is that either not that many other people want to live in a place like it, or that there's a lot of other places like it that exist. I am not implying policy but simply that this is the baseline of all real estate conversation whether we want it to be or not.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. When you have more options and less of a perception of scarcity, prices adjust. We really erred in allowing homes to become a vehicle of generational wealth. It creates perverse incentives that prevent cities from growing in ways that serve their populations, and instead only serve people wealthy enough to own property in desirable areas.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    > Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. Well - what does that actually mean? I own a home, and I am not interested in a huge apartment building going up next door (for reasons that aren't property values) but I have no objection to the boundary of my town expanding, or a new town being established a little bit down the road. Yes sure those things will create competition for my home and lower my values in some way but it's just not something I or any other sane homeowner go around thinking about. Nor frankly do I have any influence over that.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - gkop 5y ago
      Huge apartment buildings are “lumpy” and indeed impose externalities locally. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about if we could evenly distribute housing, we could cut through some of the NIMBY opposition. Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem. Unfortunately, in many places SFH owners will come out in force to fight nearby quad plexes. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-changes-zoning-code-to-allow-duplexes-triplexes-fourplexes-in-areas-previously-reserved-for-single-family-homes.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-changes...
nradov 5y ago
It's bizarre how this article defines "nice" in terms of architecture and walkability. In the US most people care more about crime rates and school quality. If the local school is rated 2/10 and there are drug dealers in the neighborhood park then it doesn't matter how many shops and restaurants are within walking distance.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  I suppose it depends on how you define walkability. I think a good walkability metric decreases when you no longer prefer walking — which tends to be the case when the neighborhood park becomes a drug hotspot, per your example.
refurb 5y ago
Bizarre article. Calling out working class housing built in 1880 seems to ignore why it’s not longer a working class neighborhood - because it’s now in a prime location.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  While that's a good point, the article remains spot-on. People would readily pay 1/2 to 3/4 the price of that neighborhood to live in a place that felt similar in terms of the general neighborhood even in a much less prime location. By contrast, the people who choose to live in this particular prime location would not prefer to live in the same location if the neighborhood were razed and replaced by car-dependent style development but in the same land. The prime location will always have a premium over other locations, but that is far from the determining factor here. There's *tons* of examples of formerly-prime locations that were razed and made car-centric with tons of parking lots and such, and they aren't so desirable or expensive, they are crap and far less people want to live there.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Right but what’s the argument? That the people who razed it 50 years ago should have known that the old style would be more desirable in 2021? I mean, cities change. Shit gets torn down, neighborhoods that were wealthy go to crap, neighborhoods that were crap become trendy. The article infers there is one “right” was to design a city and complains that people in the past didn’t know that.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      No, the point is that these neighborhoods aren't just relativist taste and opinion. Human-scale walkable life is more deeply and objectively a better way to live. Your last sentence gets in the right direction. There are TONS of "right" ways to design a city. ZERO of them are car-dependent. Car-dependent building approaches are a completely new experiment that is less than 100 years old, and it is a failure. This is not about styles and trends. All the changes in styles and trends across huge diversity of human societies went along for thousands of years without car-dependency. Around 80 years ago, people started building fundamentally unsustainable, impoverished, inhuman, financially insolvent styles of development on a grand scale, and it turns out that about any place that has been protected from that experiment is now desirable, and it's not because the features are culturally associated with wealth or because they are in historic prime locations, it's because car-dependent life is crappy, and people with enough wealth to escape it without cramming into extreme density are often doing that, and it's possible to build medium-density non-car-dependent life for far more people and we should be doing it.
RivieraKid 5y ago
Is is just my feeling or has there been a large increase in anti-car sentiment, interest in neighbourhood niceness and walkability, etc?
- typest 5y ago
  There has been. With work from home, people are spending way more time in their neighborhoods, and online. They’re simultaneously discovering that their neighborhoods aren’t very nice, and (through urbanist social media) that nice walkable neighborhoods do exist! When you don’t have to commute by car to your job, you spend more time walking around your neighborhood. It’s nice if it’s a nice neighborhood to walk around.
mark-r 5y ago
In a capitalist society, when you find something that people are willing to spend above average on, there's usually no shortage of providers trying to produce it. Why isn't that happening in this case?
- milkytron 5y ago
  Put simply, zoning doesn't allow it.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    and land — largely speaking — isn’t producible. a capitalist can’t really spin up a land factory when demand for specific land grows whereas one could spin up a silverware factory as demand for at-home dining grows.
elendee 5y ago
I would imagine most people agree with the What and the Why of the article in about 30 seconds of reading. What I think is missing from the article and perhaps from all of us is the How. Tracing the line from urban design aesthetics to policy to legislation to legislators and lobbyists is a very obscure line with many sharks looking to stay obscure and keep their cut in the pipeline I imagine. This probably explains the prevalence of bike lanes (I do use them frequently) because its so much easier for polticians to say “I built that!” than it is to say “I prevented abstract concept X!”

485 points by Fricken 5y ago

In the US housing developers heavily lobby local government officials to overturn or grant exemptions to laws requiring the preservation or construction of communal spaces. It’s not something citizens choose. It’s corruption at the local level.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> Places like this are expensive because places like this are scarce, and scarce things almost always become expensive. > The answer to this isn't to lower our standards for design or to be dismissive of the things that are really lovable about these places. The answer is simply to allow a lot more Milwaukee Avenues to exist. And the same goes for the likes of all of today's beloved, "charming" historic districts. It's hard to me to point at the right paradigm, but it reminds me a lot of the "trickle down" principle, of flooding the top with valuable properties at affordable prices and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated. I'm totally in for building more quality housing and neighborhoods, but there needs to be a lot more thought put into it.

crooked-v 5y ago
> and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated Well, there definitely won't be any still there if you don't build something in the first place.
sgt101 5y ago
Housing is an interesting one though - it's not very liquid as in a very small % of the inventory changes hands every year so removing a premium with extra supply might have a big impact, especially if supply costs are not impacted. If impact on supply cost is marginal then ensuring that all properties are nice might be a way to improve the standard of living for a whole lot of folks.
YmiYugy 5y ago
The difference is that usually expensive properties are expensive to build. They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge, they are designed by expensive architects, use expensive materials, require custom and labor intensive techniques and have luxurious amenities. Walkable neighborhoods can be build cheaply. What makes them expensive is demand and land.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I am not sure to follow you. > They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge[...] What makes them expensive is demand and land So, cheaply built or not, as long as they are high quality either way they're expensive, no ?
akanet 5y ago
The notion that increasing housing supply is similar to "trickle down" economics is common in discourses of housing policy in America, but it is misguided. Reagan's notion that increasing the margins of the wealthy would induce them to pass profits to workers was mistaken in that its proposed mechanism was entirely altruism. Price reductions in housing from an increase in supply do not occur because the rich voluntarily leave some housing for the rest of society, but simply that they will less totally dominate the competition for this resource by virtue of there being more of it.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  My point is that increase in supply alone doesn't automatically lead to less domination. For instance increasing the supply of high quality affordable housing by 2% in a place where there is high demand might not mean 2% more people will get the houses at a good price. It can mean instead that investors buy 2% more houses in that area to rent it at a price aligned with the market value. Wouldn't it be ok then if the increase was 5 or 10 or 50% of high quality housing ? Sure...but have we ever seen this level of increase result in actual well designed and livable areas ? I've personally only seen mild ghettos and weird super structures, and not all by skimping on the budget, but also because it's just damn hard to create a flourishing living environment from nothing.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - boondaburrah 5y ago
    I mean that's a weird way to describe Tokyo but it does work. Your last point still stands though & I'm not sure where the tipping point is.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      Does Tokyo have much affordable housing ? It's a very special situation on its own, but buying a house will usually get you into the 30+ years mortgage plans, and old buildings are earthquake hazards so I wouldn't call them high quality. Rents haven't much fallen even as inflation grew, and cheap places like Leopalaces are a hell to live in. All in all it looks to me to be a hard to live town if you're not in a decently good paying job.
brabel 5y ago
I don't think that's as simple as the article tries to make it out to be. As poorer people start moving into a neighborhood, the richer people will flee away en masse. It seems to me that rich people will pay any amount of money just to make sure they're living where other rich people are, even if that means moving somewhere less convenient. As the poorer people start taking over a hood due to prices going down for whatever reason (e.g. building more "affordable" accommodation), it begins to deteriorate such that in a decade or two, it becomes a "rough" place with badly maintained houses, dirty streets, broken street lamps, youngster gangs roaming around and so on. That's not the default of the poor people themselves only, I think, but a combination of them naturally having lower standards (so they complain less about broken things to the local government - not sure I can accept that poorer areas are less maintained because there's no people living there who are in government), less money to keep up with maintenance (so houses deteriorate and stop looking cute), higher tendency of the youngsters in getting involved in gangs and crime (simply because many of them have far fewer opportunities in life, and they become aware of that very early) and so on. Where I live is not a rough hood by any means, but it's more "affordable" than many other places... and I can see at least some of these things happening here... the government doesn't keep the vegetation on public places nearly as well trimmed as in the rich areas, there's definitely less care with the quality of the street pavement, houses are not completely deteriorated but most are not in perfect shape either... I just need to walk around 20 mins to get into an area where everything changes and houses are all of a sudden perfectly well kept, the public areas are beautiful, even the people look "prettier". This segregation seems to happen naturally with humans everywhere.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  This is a real dynamic seen times and times. The catch is, poor people's houses are not owned by poor people. "Rich" people don't need to live there to own the land and dictate prices up to a point. They'll flee away and rent the house basically, and they can afford to keep it at the highest price the market validates.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  This is function of house prices, not of natural segregation. When I was growing up in London the streets around me were fairly mixed. You could find public school educated lawyers, minor celebrities, and even a few financial types living close to factory and shop workers. As public housing was sold off and property prices were goosed towards the stratosphere the inevitable result was separation, because the poors were economically cleansed into poverty ghettos. Now houses on the street I grew up on - built as cheap and dense worker housing - sell for around £1m. I think the arrow of expense points in both directions. Building more nice neighbourhoods would lower prices. But one of the reasons nice neighbourhoods aren't built is because it's so easy to make money by building cheap trash housing and selling it to people who can barely afford it.

YmiYugy 5y ago

I don’t get why there are so few walkable places. The demand is there and willing to pay a premium, and the small lots and narrow streets should make it fairly inexpensive to build.

orangeoxidation 5y ago
Regulation, education, inertia. All of those tell specialist things like "streets have to be at least this wide in residential areas". Zoning can make it impossible for the requirements of daily life to be in walkable distance. There is also some scale issues. A walkable city is great. A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor. Public transport makes only sense if it can move enough people. All drivers (so everyone) will be uncomfortable with the walkable, but disconnected small neighborhood. There has been some rethinking in the last decade or so and cities are trying to become more walkable, more livable and less car focused with increasing frequency.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  > A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor. If a "walkable neighborhood" has none of those things, it's really a neighborhood with sidewalks. There are doctors, dentists, grocers, a theatre, bars, restaurants, hardware store, ... all within walking distance in my neighborhood. Neighborhoods can be like that.
  - deleted 5y ago
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jdblair 5y ago
Zoning is the biggest impediment. Most US cities have parking requirements, rules for setbacks, and limits on number units in a building. There is a strong incentive against changing the rules to allow more construction because scarcity increases the value of existing units.

timthorn 5y ago

The UK Government set up a commission to look at how to improve the quality of places, which reported last year: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-building-beautiful-commission https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-buildin...

Kaibeezy 5y ago
The UK has an amazing abundance of models for excellent dense walkable villages and neighborhoods... and then builds endless swaths of American-style car-based single-family houses, with not a grocer, chemist, cafe or pub within walking distance. Only one motivation is powerful enough to propel such wave of single-use disposable crap over this green and pleasant land: shortest possible timeframe profit for landowners, developers and builders, ably aided and abetted by jobsworth planning departments and clueless in-their-pocket Councils. Bleh.
- lbriner 5y ago
  And let's not forget the elephant in the room. Money. How much would it cost to add, say, a cycle lane to an existing road 1km long if it required more than just painting the pavement? £100K? More? How many Kms would be required to change even a small town over to be more pedestrian friendly? I just don't think the money is there. Also, you have many places in the UK that to pedestrianise the centre would create genuine bad problems for drivers. Many small towns simply don't have more than one main route through them. But then it does depress me when they create new build estates that they don't seem to take that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do it right from the beginning.
  - timthorn 5y ago
    The Cambridge City Deal assigned £8M to install 5 new off road cycle lanes around the city, IIRC. I don't have the actual costs and delivered distances to hand (the data is online to be found somewhere), but we're talking about a few miles.

fsloth 5y ago

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can check out my hoods in Helsinki in Google maps and streetview (not giving my actual address but close enough). There are has several high quality universities, and several well known startups and game studios operating within the view I linked below. All of it is walkable/cyclable/public transportable. https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/dat... Most of Scandinavia is similar, as you get to mainland Europe with bigger population density the story diversifies, but we don't really hear "only rich people can walk" stories here.

jseban 5y ago
> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to. Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc
- dsign 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day. A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.

hendiatris 5y ago

I read this and think “ah, well there are many more non-rich people so the density requirements make this sort of thing complicated” and then I look out the window over the European city I live in where it has been achieved. Then I think about the town an hour away with a vibrant community and pleasant human-scale environment. What makes it all possible? Good transit. Clean buses. The US simply doesn’t have that, and probably not even the political will to make it happen. What a shame.

thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
I'm afraid it's not simply about political will. To have affordable and safe public transport, one would need to completely revamp the fabric of American society Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes. Why all of these factors? Because of massive inequalities, rugged individualism, broken healthcare, missing social nets,... Unless that is fixed, the public transport won't be a decent option. Driving everywhere allows people to form a bubble that shields them from daily witnessing the ills of the system
- nuerow 5y ago
  > Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? This certainly is not it, because public transportation is in general a public service whose main output is not turning a profit but positive externalities that boil down to quality of life. Consequently, there are plenty of cities around the world where their public transportation network is subsidized to the point where the service is completely free to use. Let's put things in perspective: in the US, Texas wasted close to $3B dollars to expand a highway to a whopping 26 lanes[1]. Wouldn't it be far better if that cash was instead used to put together a commuter railway service that serves the same route, or even in Houston's appallingly tiny light rail network[2]? [1] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-spans-a-whopping-26-lanes https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail
- 5y ago

schnitzelstoat 5y ago

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats. I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC). So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

hattori31 5y ago
I love tiny apartments. In Tokyo houses are tiny but enough. You have to be clever when there is no space. Also, we should be more careful with the space we use for living. Smaller living spaces equals more space for park, forests etc
crooked-v 5y ago
NYC apartments are tiny because NYC just doesn't have enough housing in general, so everything that's allowed to be subdivided gets subdivided (and some things that aren't allowed get subdivided too).
- somnic 5y ago
  Partly, but also smaller living space is in fact part of the tradeoff that you make when building stuff close together. It's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion, but I'm also not saying that single-family car-centric suburbs should be illegal for people who prefer it, unlike how building denser housing is illegal in many expensive cities.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    While that's true, there's a significant difference between "you can't give everybody a McMansion" and "everybody must live in spaces objectively describable as 'tiny'". My objection is to the latter.
    - nitrogen 5y ago

pronlover723 5y ago

I'm pretty addicted to "Not Just Bikes" youtube channel which seems to be either directly or indirectly related to stongtowns https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes It's frustrating. Even though I'm currently in SF, SF still doesn't feel remotely as nice as many other places outside the US. Public transportation is slow and although the muni is okay the busses are kinda gross compared to good non-US cities. There are 10 or so walkable neighborhoods but they're missing something. Not sure what it is.

pja 5y ago
Does zoning prevent the walkable neighbourhoods from acquiring a full range of amenities? Or maybe the planning restrictions prevent the kind of organic infill development that leads to these places acquiring their own local character?
- davidw 5y ago
  Absolutely: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-ice-cream-shop-hopeful-sees-dreams-melted-by-16116082.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Yes it does. I find it really ironic too because a lot of the places praised by modern planning doctrine were allowed to spring up more organically according to need and less subject to such intense planning regulation. It's even worse in that, just like people complain about the personality types that go into policing, I find there's a particular common personality type among planners: weak/mousey people that tend to be low on the totem pole of organic social hierarchies, but who are strongly opinionated and happily embrace their bureaucratic positions to exert power over people and to impose their agendas on the world.
gkop 5y ago
SF neighborhoods are missing strong social fabric and welcoming vibes. I moved to Oakland after 7 years of stretches in the Lower Haight, Inner Mission, Outer Sunset, Outer Richmond, Cole Valley, Divisadero, and Potrero Hill, for a better sense of community. I love it here, but must admit I’m afraid to name my Oakland neighborhood for fear of (further) letting the cat out of the bag. I feel like SF is a sink for the forces that lead to social tension, and it protects Oakland somewhat in that way.

CalRobert 5y ago

The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in. If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too. It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can walk or cycle to school. (edit - in case my other comments look inconsistent - I moved from LA to Dublin then back to San Diego for a year (bad idea, that!) then back to Dublin and recently to a dirt cheap place an hour away from Dublin because Dublin's overpriced and still has no neighbourhoods I'd like my child ride a bike to school in)

swiley 5y ago
China and India emit far more CO2 than we do.
- fsflover 5y ago
  So what?
- dsauerbrun 5y ago
  per Capita?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    per capita isn't a useful metric. Imagine if you are China and your population is declining, but your GDP is still going up so your per-capita CO2 is going up. That's not fair for them. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... At the same time, if you are a developing country and your GDP is going up, then your absolute emissions will also go up. That's not fair, either. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location... So you look at emissions per dollar of GDP to measure how efficiently you are producing. This is why China's own CO2 commitments are expressed as Kg per GDP. This is what they are targeting to decline, it's what they set policy around, and it's how they publicly measure their own progress. So let's use their own preferred metric: China's CO2 per GDP is ~.47 and dropping For the US it's .24 and also dropping India is .27 -- almost the same as the U.S. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=IN-CN-US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat...

Kaibeezy 5y ago

It’s not just scarcity. People “need” a place to park three or four huge (subsidized) vehicles. Also, people like to brag. N-thousand square feet and an n-car garage provide an objective measure. It’s harder to one-up by saying you have a really nice trattoria three blocks over.

jbjbjbjb 5y ago
My impression was the whole article is basically just “why don’t people like what I like”. These houses are scarce but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mainstream market wants that. It’s a niche.
- deadpannini 5y ago
  When a niche becomes expensive, that indicates that there is a bigger market for it, even if it doesn't rise to the level of "mainstream."
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  Concur. There's a good argument in the article, and a useless one. The useless one is the one you perceived. The good argument is that there are an array of characteristics that tend -- in various combinations and degrees -- to correspond to places people like. The correlation can be anecdotal, empirical, whatever, that's up to the writer, who should have made a case, not a whinge.
- bogwog 5y ago
  That's not what the article argued at all. It said that the reason these places are expensive is because they're rare (so demand > supply) and the reason they're rare is because people doing construction just assume that nice houses == expensive, so the average person won't be able to afford it. Except, if there were more of them, the prices would go down (supply >= demand), and more people would be able to afford them.
  - jbjbjbjb 5y ago
    Yes more supply would make it cheaper for the people in the niche that wants that type of house. The writer hints at this but the penny doesn’t drop. It’s most likely that maybe he doesn’t understand the middle and working class market as well as the entire home building industry of America. Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter the type of atmosphere and lifestyle in the towns the writer talks about. In the UK where small houses and towns are abundant, the quaint shops go where the money is and the rest of sit in traffic to drive in and out of town to go to school and work.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> Would you like to raise a family in those conditions? apparently hundreds of millions of people already do it... A provocative answer to your comment: would you like to raise your family where your kids can walk to school and play with other kids in a nearby park at walking distance and never be afraid of mass shootings? I get the impression that huge houses are a symptom of a bigger issue: people in US feel they need a lot of "safe space" around them because the more they are isolated from strangers, the more they feel safe.

sokoloff 5y ago
I would like to (and do) raise my family like that. We live in Cambridge, MA; our kids walk to school and to play with friends in the park, I’ve never feared a mass shooting*, we have reasonable accommodations for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. * - Do you live in fear of drowning, choking, or bicycling? All are significantly higher lifetime risks in America than mass shootings. Drowning is 10x more likely but few live in fear of it. Use statistics to guide your intuition on fears. (I’ve had well-meaning family members caution me about sharks before a day at the ocean. Sharks are sensational and sell ads, but are not the actual risk.) https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-statistics-2018-3?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-sta...
- oftenwrong 5y ago
  It's sad that "riding inside a car, van or truck" and "pedestrian" are so high on that list, but also surprising that "bicycling" is so significantly safer.
  - alex_smart 5y ago
    Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity is a poor indicator of how safe that activity is. Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity = Probability of dying due to activity while performing it x Expected number of times that activity is performed in lifetime. (Only the first factor corresponds the inherent safety of the activity.) It is not that bicycles are more dangerous than sharks. It is that people are cycling much more than they are interacting with sharks. It is not that walking is more dangerous than cycling. It is that people are walking much more than they are cycling.

lbriner 5y ago

He doesn't talk about who is going to pay for everything. In a road with lots of private ownership, one person can improve their property but they can't force their neighbours to do it as well. The only likely method is the deep pockets of the developer but why would they do this to only sell the properties to low-income families, which might be zero ROI when they might as well do the same in an up-and-coming city and sell for muchos dollars to the rich? I love the idea but the main reason why most good ideas are not implemented is that they are much more difficult than it sounds, often for many reasons, not one.

quadrangle 5y ago
You want every topic covered in one article? Strong Towns has done the math on who pays for everything: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme The Strong Towns vision is pretty holistic and deals with all the interrelated issues and their difficult challenges. It's the exact opposite of naive just "this should be easy" attitude.

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eecc 5y ago

I guess there's also some of "beggars can't be choosers" paternalist mindset going on when _deciding for the poor_ what they _deserve to have built with our money_.

mojo74 5y ago

For NYC's little island read London's Marble Arch hill https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2021/07/londons-worst-attraction-reactions-to-the-new-marble-arch-hill/#:~:text=The%20Marble%20Arch%20hill%20has,being%20battered%20by%20three%20lockdowns https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2021/07/londons-worst-a....

ddek 5y ago
The things Westminster have done to persuade themselves people don't want Oxford Street pedestrianised.

Neil44 5y ago

My cynical view is that if you put not nice people into nice places, you make the places not nice, not the other way around. 99% of the time.

jameshart 5y ago
It seems weird to use ‘having a lot of money’ as a proxy measure for how nice someone is likely to be though?
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  This is covered well in Parasite. There are degrees of “niceness”, some of which are enabled when money is no object and you don’t have someone taking a piss on your house.
- Neil44 5y ago
  You’re right, maybe stable, tidy and can afford a lawnmower would be a better pidgeon hole than ‘nice’ :)

MisterTea 5y ago

> Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism. No. That's not how that works. You're not an elitist just because you want a nice neighborhood. You're faced with charges of elitism when you advocate for this type of stuff after you've moved into a space once inhabited by low income people who were chased out by developers who artificially beautified the neighborhood thereby inflating its value overnight. Those low income people would love to have a beautiful neighborhood too. Instead they spend most of their day toiling at shitty jobs and riding public transportation. They have so little money things like tree shaded bike paths and flower beds are a fantasy. The real issue is no one wants to spend money making low income peoples lives better. How many beautiful housing projects have you seen vs luxury condo towers?

zachkatz 5y ago
> artificially beautified What's the difference between artificially beautifying and genuinely beautifying?
- MisterTea 5y ago
  Genuine beautifying comes from the community.
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quadrangle 5y ago
The article isn't saying gentrification-complaints are wrong! Gentrification is a serious problem, and the author isn't denying it. Strong Towns absolutely wants to see money spent making low-income lives better. And the movement does the work to grapple with all these challenges. Tree-shaded bike paths are cheaper than all the costs of crime and health-care issues that are caused by the unhealthy environments imposed on poor communities. Here's an article highlighting their critique of luxury-condo-tower approach: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-four-letter-words-of-vibrant-downtowns https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-fou... And here's a focus on how poorer neighborhoods are actually more fiscally sound while the systems we have effectively subsidize the wealthy: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-value-of-a-poor-neighborhood https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-valu... That one happens to be by the same author as the article you're replying about. And here's one about the way our suburban experiment is creating poverty: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-suburban-poverty-look-like https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-subu... The Strong Towns movement is all about addressing these things. And the initial posted article here is about the tragedy of how good-for-humans places are associated with elitism. It's not saying there's no reason for that association, it's saying that association needs to end by way of making everywhere better.

spodek 5y ago

The article applies to farmers markets too. By any measure, farmers markets are better than supermarkets and takeout. Cheaper, faster, more convenient (if there's one nearby), more friendly, cleaner, healthier, but talk about their benefits and prepare to be called privileged and lectured on single moms in food deserts who only have time for McDonald's. Do they think people at farmers markets want to wall them off and keep poor people away? A moment's thought and they'd realize everyone involved is trying to fill in food deserts, reduce big agriculture subsidies, that McDonald's is causing poverty in time and money, but their defensiveness and I'm-so-smart-ness blinds them.

ip26 5y ago
I love the idea, and I'd never push for fewer farmer's markets, but I must say I've always found them more expensive, slower, and less convenient with hardly any selection. I often wind up heading to the supermarket immediately after, because I need another ingredient to cook what I've just bought.
bradlys 5y ago
This isn’t my personal experience. Farmers markets are always more expensive than going to a grocery store. Substantially so as well. Otherwise I would spend more time at them.

nathias 5y ago

Even Europe is terrible because we have no urbanism except on areas of cultural heritage, square cheap shops, add panels etc. really destroy everything for all.

twobitshifter 5y ago

Great article. I’d like to see a follow up addressing how to get from A to B without causing displacement due to gentrification. The article treats it as a false scare but it is real and can’t be overlooked. Millions of houses can’t be built over night so there will be gentrification. Sucessful development needs to maintain mixed income, and price caps/rent control need to exist in order to avoid that IMO. Property developers will not do that without a helping hand from the government.

kgin 5y ago

When housing markets are extremely tight, people fear improvements. Improvements mean the neighborhood will be more desirable. More desirable neighborhood means people with more money will be interested. More people with money means higher rents. In tight housing markets, people come to see the unlivability of their neighborhood as a shield to defect attention of people who could price them out.

xyzelement 5y ago

Really enjoyable article. There's a thread that's running through it - that places that are rare and desireable are expensive. While this article talks about a specific kind of place, the pattern is true on general. It's another way to say "supply and demand" Whenever we talk on HN about high rents or house prices, we need to keep this in mind - what makes a place "affordable" is that either not that many other people want to live in a place like it, or that there's a lot of other places like it that exist. I am not implying policy but simply that this is the baseline of all real estate conversation whether we want it to be or not.

wayoutthere 5y ago
Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. When you have more options and less of a perception of scarcity, prices adjust. We really erred in allowing homes to become a vehicle of generational wealth. It creates perverse incentives that prevent cities from growing in ways that serve their populations, and instead only serve people wealthy enough to own property in desirable areas.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  > Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. Well - what does that actually mean? I own a home, and I am not interested in a huge apartment building going up next door (for reasons that aren't property values) but I have no objection to the boundary of my town expanding, or a new town being established a little bit down the road. Yes sure those things will create competition for my home and lower my values in some way but it's just not something I or any other sane homeowner go around thinking about. Nor frankly do I have any influence over that.
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  - gkop 5y ago
    Huge apartment buildings are “lumpy” and indeed impose externalities locally. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about if we could evenly distribute housing, we could cut through some of the NIMBY opposition. Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem. Unfortunately, in many places SFH owners will come out in force to fight nearby quad plexes. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-changes-zoning-code-to-allow-duplexes-triplexes-fourplexes-in-areas-previously-reserved-for-single-family-homes.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-changes...

nradov 5y ago

It's bizarre how this article defines "nice" in terms of architecture and walkability. In the US most people care more about crime rates and school quality. If the local school is rated 2/10 and there are drug dealers in the neighborhood park then it doesn't matter how many shops and restaurants are within walking distance.

wallacoloo 5y ago
I suppose it depends on how you define walkability. I think a good walkability metric decreases when you no longer prefer walking — which tends to be the case when the neighborhood park becomes a drug hotspot, per your example.

refurb 5y ago

Bizarre article. Calling out working class housing built in 1880 seems to ignore why it’s not longer a working class neighborhood - because it’s now in a prime location.

quadrangle 5y ago
While that's a good point, the article remains spot-on. People would readily pay 1/2 to 3/4 the price of that neighborhood to live in a place that felt similar in terms of the general neighborhood even in a much less prime location. By contrast, the people who choose to live in this particular prime location would not prefer to live in the same location if the neighborhood were razed and replaced by car-dependent style development but in the same land. The prime location will always have a premium over other locations, but that is far from the determining factor here. There's *tons* of examples of formerly-prime locations that were razed and made car-centric with tons of parking lots and such, and they aren't so desirable or expensive, they are crap and far less people want to live there.
- refurb 5y ago
  Right but what’s the argument? That the people who razed it 50 years ago should have known that the old style would be more desirable in 2021? I mean, cities change. Shit gets torn down, neighborhoods that were wealthy go to crap, neighborhoods that were crap become trendy. The article infers there is one “right” was to design a city and complains that people in the past didn’t know that.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    No, the point is that these neighborhoods aren't just relativist taste and opinion. Human-scale walkable life is more deeply and objectively a better way to live. Your last sentence gets in the right direction. There are TONS of "right" ways to design a city. ZERO of them are car-dependent. Car-dependent building approaches are a completely new experiment that is less than 100 years old, and it is a failure. This is not about styles and trends. All the changes in styles and trends across huge diversity of human societies went along for thousands of years without car-dependency. Around 80 years ago, people started building fundamentally unsustainable, impoverished, inhuman, financially insolvent styles of development on a grand scale, and it turns out that about any place that has been protected from that experiment is now desirable, and it's not because the features are culturally associated with wealth or because they are in historic prime locations, it's because car-dependent life is crappy, and people with enough wealth to escape it without cramming into extreme density are often doing that, and it's possible to build medium-density non-car-dependent life for far more people and we should be doing it.

RivieraKid 5y ago

Is is just my feeling or has there been a large increase in anti-car sentiment, interest in neighbourhood niceness and walkability, etc?

typest 5y ago
There has been. With work from home, people are spending way more time in their neighborhoods, and online. They’re simultaneously discovering that their neighborhoods aren’t very nice, and (through urbanist social media) that nice walkable neighborhoods do exist! When you don’t have to commute by car to your job, you spend more time walking around your neighborhood. It’s nice if it’s a nice neighborhood to walk around.

mark-r 5y ago

In a capitalist society, when you find something that people are willing to spend above average on, there's usually no shortage of providers trying to produce it. Why isn't that happening in this case?

milkytron 5y ago
Put simply, zoning doesn't allow it.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  and land — largely speaking — isn’t producible. a capitalist can’t really spin up a land factory when demand for specific land grows whereas one could spin up a silverware factory as demand for at-home dining grows.

elendee 5y ago

I would imagine most people agree with the What and the Why of the article in about 30 seconds of reading. What I think is missing from the article and perhaps from all of us is the How. Tracing the line from urban design aesthetics to policy to legislation to legislators and lobbyists is a very obscure line with many sharks looking to stay obscure and keep their cut in the pipeline I imagine. This probably explains the prevalence of bike lanes (I do use them frequently) because its so much easier for polticians to say “I built that!” than it is to say “I prevented abstract concept X!”