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It's really rich being on HN having everyone seemingly not understand that non-exclusionary communities don't scale. You can't take a good neighborhood and make
by Spivak 3y ago
It's really rich being on HN having everyone seemingly not understand that non-exclusionary communities don't scale. You can't take a good neighborhood and make it bigger and keep the good, you just regress to the mean.
We all have watched the enshittification of everything in the pursuit of scale and profits from everything from social networks and subcultures to appliances but somehow forget that the high buy-in either in the form of investment in the community in early stages to the extremely high price in the later stages is what makes it work. In places where there is legitimately nowhere to start a new community sure, but the loudest complainers about housing affordability in my area ignore there there are sub $300k, $200k and even a few sub $100k houses right fucking next to the $600k houses. You could break one of their windows with a stray baseball they're so close. You just think that living there is beneath you.
If you don't have dollars you're supposed to pick somewhere cheap to live and put in the work instead to make it the next good neighborhood but seems like the people complaining want good cheap and easy.
- tsunagatta 3y ago> You can't take a good neighborhood and make it bigger and keep the good I suppose this is true, but I don’t feel like it contradicts the option of: instead of making a good neighborhood very large, building many small neighborhoods. This was the principle of the scaling of the Web back when it was agreed to be pretty good, and it is in a sense the principle of the scaling of the United States (and most governments). As an added bonus, most people would live closer to places to work and shop, since each neighborhood must necessarily have those, rather than being in the far-flung reaches of sprawl. The only trick then, I guess, is the neighborhoods do need to be small.