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Follow Scott Beyer's byline to his blog to his about page: "My book will argue that cities should instead embrace “Market Urbanism.” This phrase was invented i
by mturmon 12y ago
Follow Scott Beyer's byline to his blog to his about page:
"My book will argue that cities should instead embrace “Market Urbanism.” This phrase was invented in 2007 by Adam Hengels, a development consultant who founded the Market Urbanism blog [where the OP appeared]. He defines it as the intersection between capitalists and urbanists, and his contributors describe how municipal governments repeatedly harm economic productivity. My book will package his ideology into a series of proposals..."
So it seems like he's taken a development consultant as his role model and is fitting his observations into an already-decided ideology and action plan. That's why the article seems so one-dimensional and ignores obvious facts.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoYes, that pretty much puts the article in perspective.
- woah 12y agoWant somewhere to live? Let people build housing. Pretty simple.
- mturmon 12y agoI don't disagree with all of his conclusions. But I think that his piece was so glib as to be meaningless. He essentially promises that, by lifting building restrictions, you can preserve ethnic neighborhoods from gentrification (for what that's worth), because development will be channeled elsewhere, e.g. into high-rises that the professional class (in his reading) favors. Just writing it down exposes how facile this is. And that doesn't even get into other problems, like the unguarded analogies between San Francisco and Miami ("warm-weather cities"). Here's an article that I enjoyed, which also reached a pro-development conclusion, but with a lot more nuance: http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-paradise/ http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-para.... This appeared in a special issue devoted to the SF housing situation.