7 ms·

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized a

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses. You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older.

revlolz 4y ago
How do you find out what kind of city a place is? This might seem downright stupid to say, but I don't even know what types to even be looking for.
- hermannj314 4y ago
  Visit and take a walk around. Look at the minutes of the city council, see what they are focusing on. There are endless rhetorical questions to ask yourself: Where are you in your life and how do you define yourself? Do you prefer cafes or clubs; care about schools and parks? Safety or autonomy? How do you want to commute? Do you want small shops or shopping centers? Small town monoculture or big city diversity? Do you want to your city to attract tourists or be hostile to them? A city government has a lot of levers to pull to build a city around each of these things, and some do it poorly and some it well. Don't move to Moline, Illinois or Cupertino, CA and not expect to find a city that bends to the will of John Deere/ Apple respectively. Some cities exist to serve a large corporation above all else (since the entire population works for them). Others exist to serve the local University or the tourist board, and others the soccer moms. None are wrong, they are all trying to find a local maximum to serve the people that live there.
xxpor 4y ago
The problem is when the "healthy community" is close to the central city and has good transit. Metro areas are networks, nothing happens in isolation.
- SllX 4y ago
  Correct, but municipal corporations are generally[1] legal monopolies on the land within their jurisdiction. San Francisco has no legal jurisdiction over what Daly City or San Mateo County does, let alone Atherton and vice versa. [1] Your State may vary.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    Right, and how is that working out for regional transit in the Bay Area? Probably better than most other places in the US ... but as far from functional for most residents in the area. The standard seems to be creating some kind of cross-county or cross-municipal agency with either delegated to independent funding mechanisms. Different states explicitly support or allow this to varying degrees.
    - SllX 4y ago
      I could write a thousand books on problems I have with regional transit in the Bay Area, but that’s irrelevant to how it actually works from a policy perspective. Each and every City in California is its own legal monopoly on land use, all of them, how it’s working out for them isn’t pertinent to whether or not that’s how it works. Don’t mistake my position for advocacy, it’s a relaying of facts. By and large, this is more or less how it works across the States, but that can vary since the States can basically do anything as far as how they organize local government so long as it falls within some kind of democratic principles and norms. So effecting regional transit policy basically has three paths in the Bay Area: setup a special cross-county district government like BART, or get buy-in between the relevant jurisdictions you want to run a train through. If that’s a dozen cities and three counties, you’re going to need to talk to all of them. The third path is for the State to implement something directly, but in practice that’s subject to local politics as well, and the State Government per its own laws does not actually have carte blanche to do as it likes with the land over the wishes of local government.
kilgnad 4y ago
The problem with this is that the taglines enforce a theme even when the circumstances change. Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a housing affordability problem along with every "themed" community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the original theme? No. It doesn't. The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you bought. The only way forward is eminent domain. But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of property owners then that could generate enough conflict towards social change. But that level of organization won't happen until the desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.
- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
  [dead]
- mcguire 4y ago
  As AlgorithmicTime (now dead) wrote, American home ownership rates peaked in 2004 at 69%, fell to 64% in 2016, and are back up to 66%. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat...) In California, it's about 56%. You gave to get San Francisco proper to get a minority and then it's still 38% (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocountycalifornia,sanfranciscocitycalifornia,CA/HSG445221#HSG445221 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...)
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    You have to look at age and location. If you characterize the whole US you're including people who are much older and people who live away from very urban areas. Among older people and in small towns and villages the housing problems, are of course, much milder.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nikanj 4y ago
Would I be correct in guessing homes in the former were much more expensive than the latter?
tclancy 4y ago
>entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.
- scetron 4y ago
  Indeed! Not everyone has the capability to up and move. I've recently heard that having a good community around you is one of the best things for healthy longevity, it becomes even more difficult to do this. It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established community, or stay and try to change where I am.
- bumby 4y ago
  General question related to this: are the spiraling property taxes related to similarly spiraling home values?
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    Strong correlation, but not exclusively. Plenty of areas regularly vote for bond measures paid by increases in property taxes. So you can get increases of BOTH rate and value.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I don’t know what the alternative is, unless we find a completely different funding scheme. While I do feel for seniors who get priced out of their homes, that feeling it mitigated somewhat knowing they are in that situation because they are sitting on a large asset. If we want to treat housing as an “investment” we have to take the good with the bad.
  - tclancy 4y ago
    Couldn't say from NH. It's the only source of revenue, so they go up no matter what housing values do.
JeremyNT 4y ago
> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older. I feel like people need to understand this. I'm currently living in Nashville, TN, which you may as well have been referring to in the second half of your comment (not mentioned: the focus exclusively on tourism while ignoring needs of actual residents). I did not appreciate how different values could lead to such wildly different outcomes in quality of life. The situation with the government at both the state and city levels is absolutely dire here (for different reasons) and there's really no hope in changing anything. "Vote with your feet" is the smart approach.
- bumby 4y ago
  There is an unacknowledged knock-on effect though. I doubt anyone completely assimilates to the new locale, with the result becoming a mix of values. This may not suit so well with local residents (see opinions from ID and TX regarding new CA residents who “voted with their feet”)
- nradov 4y ago
  Nashville has been experiencing rapid population growth. How do reconcile that with your claim that the governmental situation is dire?
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    Let's just say that many of these people do not value the things that I find important and vice versa. Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits. A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke." Nashville also, until recently, had a low COL compared to similarly sized non-Southern metros. Personally I am here for work, and realistically many others would do the same. Nashville has more employment opportunities than the deep south and is a logical place for such people to end up.
maxsilver 4y ago
> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long time. Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.
- RhysU 4y ago
  > But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had. Within reason, supporting the people you wish you had, instead of the people you have, is called leadership. It is how we progress as a species.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    What kind of democracy is that? "thanks for your vote, for your taxes, for your contributions to the community, now fuck off"
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  > Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had. I'm living in a district subject to heavy gentrification at the moment. (And as I'm transitioning from student to Yuppie, I'm part of it) The conflicts between newly moved in rich people and the entrenched working class are intense, and looking at other places it is incredibly obvious who is going to win. The process of moving to a place, then expecting that place to cater to you needs over the people who originally lived there seems deeply problematic to me: Considering the power dynamics at place, the process as a whole is a really mean way of punching down. Just to give one concrete example, there was a bar close by that basically served as a living room for many of the neighbors. The people living above me are 5 in 2 rooms, obviously they need the space. But there were noise complains, the police came (never used to even come out 10y ago, and lawyers were used). The bar closed, a fashion store moved in, there are of course other bars but they are much more expensive, the staff doesn't speak german and the community largely consists of academics and expats.
hammock 4y ago
> generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older. This notion sounds right, but observationally it is incorrect in practice. In Chicago the neighborhoods cycle between bustling, vibrant - when filled with new, young singles who move in and bring business with them; and eventually evolving over a decade or so into a bougie DINK family-oriented community, before completing the lifecycle as a sleepy, economically depressed place with miserably stable/flat real estate values that you just pass over. Seen this exact cycle happen with a dozen different neighborhoods in Chicago. If people were instead moving to a different area, this wouldn't happen. Well, some are moving to different areas (the suburbs, etc) but not entirely.
geysersam 4y ago
Citizensare entitled to change their municipalities (or prevent change) by campaigning and voting. It's quite neo-liberal to tell people to just vote with their feet. When rents in your neighborhoo skyrocket because the local leadership has decided to gentrify the area to improve tax revenue, many would agree that's not entirely just to the long term residents.
piloto_ciego 4y ago
I wish I could leave my country of origin. It’s basically impossible to vote with your feet.

revlolz 4y ago

How do you find out what kind of city a place is? This might seem downright stupid to say, but I don't even know what types to even be looking for.

hermannj314 4y ago
Visit and take a walk around. Look at the minutes of the city council, see what they are focusing on. There are endless rhetorical questions to ask yourself: Where are you in your life and how do you define yourself? Do you prefer cafes or clubs; care about schools and parks? Safety or autonomy? How do you want to commute? Do you want small shops or shopping centers? Small town monoculture or big city diversity? Do you want to your city to attract tourists or be hostile to them? A city government has a lot of levers to pull to build a city around each of these things, and some do it poorly and some it well. Don't move to Moline, Illinois or Cupertino, CA and not expect to find a city that bends to the will of John Deere/ Apple respectively. Some cities exist to serve a large corporation above all else (since the entire population works for them). Others exist to serve the local University or the tourist board, and others the soccer moms. None are wrong, they are all trying to find a local maximum to serve the people that live there.

xxpor 4y ago

The problem is when the "healthy community" is close to the central city and has good transit. Metro areas are networks, nothing happens in isolation.

SllX 4y ago
Correct, but municipal corporations are generally[1] legal monopolies on the land within their jurisdiction. San Francisco has no legal jurisdiction over what Daly City or San Mateo County does, let alone Atherton and vice versa. [1] Your State may vary.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Right, and how is that working out for regional transit in the Bay Area? Probably better than most other places in the US ... but as far from functional for most residents in the area. The standard seems to be creating some kind of cross-county or cross-municipal agency with either delegated to independent funding mechanisms. Different states explicitly support or allow this to varying degrees.
  - SllX 4y ago
    I could write a thousand books on problems I have with regional transit in the Bay Area, but that’s irrelevant to how it actually works from a policy perspective. Each and every City in California is its own legal monopoly on land use, all of them, how it’s working out for them isn’t pertinent to whether or not that’s how it works. Don’t mistake my position for advocacy, it’s a relaying of facts. By and large, this is more or less how it works across the States, but that can vary since the States can basically do anything as far as how they organize local government so long as it falls within some kind of democratic principles and norms. So effecting regional transit policy basically has three paths in the Bay Area: setup a special cross-county district government like BART, or get buy-in between the relevant jurisdictions you want to run a train through. If that’s a dozen cities and three counties, you’re going to need to talk to all of them. The third path is for the State to implement something directly, but in practice that’s subject to local politics as well, and the State Government per its own laws does not actually have carte blanche to do as it likes with the land over the wishes of local government.

kilgnad 4y ago

The problem with this is that the taglines enforce a theme even when the circumstances change. Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a housing affordability problem along with every "themed" community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the original theme? No. It doesn't. The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you bought. The only way forward is eminent domain. But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of property owners then that could generate enough conflict towards social change. But that level of organization won't happen until the desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.

AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
[dead]
mcguire 4y ago
As AlgorithmicTime (now dead) wrote, American home ownership rates peaked in 2004 at 69%, fell to 64% in 2016, and are back up to 66%. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat...) In California, it's about 56%. You gave to get San Francisco proper to get a minority and then it's still 38% (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocountycalifornia,sanfranciscocitycalifornia,CA/HSG445221#HSG445221 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...)
- kilgnad 4y ago
  You have to look at age and location. If you characterize the whole US you're including people who are much older and people who live away from very urban areas. Among older people and in small towns and villages the housing problems, are of course, much milder.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nikanj 4y ago

Would I be correct in guessing homes in the former were much more expensive than the latter?

tclancy 4y ago

>entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.

scetron 4y ago
Indeed! Not everyone has the capability to up and move. I've recently heard that having a good community around you is one of the best things for healthy longevity, it becomes even more difficult to do this. It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established community, or stay and try to change where I am.
bumby 4y ago
General question related to this: are the spiraling property taxes related to similarly spiraling home values?
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Strong correlation, but not exclusively. Plenty of areas regularly vote for bond measures paid by increases in property taxes. So you can get increases of BOTH rate and value.
  - bumby 4y ago
    I don’t know what the alternative is, unless we find a completely different funding scheme. While I do feel for seniors who get priced out of their homes, that feeling it mitigated somewhat knowing they are in that situation because they are sitting on a large asset. If we want to treat housing as an “investment” we have to take the good with the bad.
- tclancy 4y ago
  Couldn't say from NH. It's the only source of revenue, so they go up no matter what housing values do.

JeremyNT 4y ago

> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older. I feel like people need to understand this. I'm currently living in Nashville, TN, which you may as well have been referring to in the second half of your comment (not mentioned: the focus exclusively on tourism while ignoring needs of actual residents). I did not appreciate how different values could lead to such wildly different outcomes in quality of life. The situation with the government at both the state and city levels is absolutely dire here (for different reasons) and there's really no hope in changing anything. "Vote with your feet" is the smart approach.

bumby 4y ago
There is an unacknowledged knock-on effect though. I doubt anyone completely assimilates to the new locale, with the result becoming a mix of values. This may not suit so well with local residents (see opinions from ID and TX regarding new CA residents who “voted with their feet”)
nradov 4y ago
Nashville has been experiencing rapid population growth. How do reconcile that with your claim that the governmental situation is dire?
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  Let's just say that many of these people do not value the things that I find important and vice versa. Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits. A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke." Nashville also, until recently, had a low COL compared to similarly sized non-Southern metros. Personally I am here for work, and realistically many others would do the same. Nashville has more employment opportunities than the deep south and is a logical place for such people to end up.

maxsilver 4y ago

> You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long time. Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.

RhysU 4y ago
> But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had. Within reason, supporting the people you wish you had, instead of the people you have, is called leadership. It is how we progress as a species.
- pnt12 4y ago
  What kind of democracy is that? "thanks for your vote, for your taxes, for your contributions to the community, now fuck off"
bakuninsbart 4y ago
> Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had. I'm living in a district subject to heavy gentrification at the moment. (And as I'm transitioning from student to Yuppie, I'm part of it) The conflicts between newly moved in rich people and the entrenched working class are intense, and looking at other places it is incredibly obvious who is going to win. The process of moving to a place, then expecting that place to cater to you needs over the people who originally lived there seems deeply problematic to me: Considering the power dynamics at place, the process as a whole is a really mean way of punching down. Just to give one concrete example, there was a bar close by that basically served as a living room for many of the neighbors. The people living above me are 5 in 2 rooms, obviously they need the space. But there were noise complains, the police came (never used to even come out 10y ago, and lawyers were used). The bar closed, a fashion store moved in, there are of course other bars but they are much more expensive, the staff doesn't speak german and the community largely consists of academics and expats.

hammock 4y ago

> generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older. This notion sounds right, but observationally it is incorrect in practice. In Chicago the neighborhoods cycle between bustling, vibrant - when filled with new, young singles who move in and bring business with them; and eventually evolving over a decade or so into a bougie DINK family-oriented community, before completing the lifecycle as a sleepy, economically depressed place with miserably stable/flat real estate values that you just pass over. Seen this exact cycle happen with a dozen different neighborhoods in Chicago. If people were instead moving to a different area, this wouldn't happen. Well, some are moving to different areas (the suburbs, etc) but not entirely.

geysersam 4y ago

Citizensare entitled to change their municipalities (or prevent change) by campaigning and voting. It's quite neo-liberal to tell people to just vote with their feet. When rents in your neighborhoo skyrocket because the local leadership has decided to gentrify the area to improve tax revenue, many would agree that's not entirely just to the long term residents.

piloto_ciego 4y ago

I wish I could leave my country of origin. It’s basically impossible to vote with your feet.