That's why I left 40%. Maybe 60% isn't the magic number but 10% is BS. We need to eliminate corruption and abuse of power. Contractors of all types regularly get away with over charging local governments. This has to stop.
Have you looked at where your town money actually goes? You think 30-40% is going to corruption? These numbers are public. Dive in. Sprawl is hard to sustain. We should let some paved roads turn to dirt, and encourage fewer dense places to live. (Or you can live far out, but no paved roads, and no fire trucks)
Yes I do. In the form of paying too much and too long for services such as construction.
> When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure -- an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation -- it came to $32 billion. A generation is what, 25 years? If you expect to replace all roads/electricity poles/sewers etc every 25 years you seriously need to look a quality. For this I feel this whole article is off. > Humans are predisposed to highly…
> One of the best test for predicting a child success is seeing if they will defer a treat now for more treats later.
Although a different take on it is provided by [1], which suggests that the marshmallow test is not always testing for the ability to defer reward, but for the ability/will to obey instructions/please authority figures. I consider the post well worth reading.
Part of the problem in the US is too much planning, alongside too many subsidies for cars. Look at a zoning map of any city: there's an incredible level of detail about what's permitted where. The local zoning code here in Bend, until recently, had a section on how many parking spots per customer for barber shops. As if, in a competitive market, those businesses couldn't figure out for themselves the optimal amount o…
> As if, in a competitive market, those businesses couldn't figure out for themselves the optimal amount of parking to pay for to keep their customers happy. I don't know anything about Bend, but speaking generally ... There are many ways that markets are inefficient and flawed; I wouldn't assume they would yield a good result. For example, the barbershops may be incentivized to push the parking costs onto others. It…
In that case, you set up a corporation that buys an entire subdivision of the city, has 'zoning laws' in its corporate bylaws, and makes 'landowners' shareholders.
Isn't this just local city government with another name? Well, no. There are significant differences between a city government and an organization of private citizens. For one, it's illegal for Walmart to bribe voters; but a corporation would love to have Walmart 'bribe' its shareholders.
Since I assume the land value of neatly organized sections is higher than that of poorly organized sections, there would be an entire section of the economy that buys up individual plots of land, forms corporations out of them, and redevelops and resells the area.
You are indeed supporting my assertion that towns have different economics. Mine is an old suburb (1920s) of a medium-sized city (Pittsburgh). And as I stated, our town is sustainable. We have "more" parks not "fewer parks". Parks require much less maintenance cost than does residential spaces(plus much is done by volunteers). I'll also assert again that how "spread out" things are doesn't matter. If anything, denser…
For your last point, if your student demographic is more impoverished, you will get worse results compared to a more well off demographic even with the same per pupil spending; the resources the kid has at home is important! (Charter schools get their results through selection bias, American suburbs with large lots that aren't suitable for low income housing likewise). The white flight to the suburbs in the 60s is la…
This is the 21st century. Urbanites are not impoverished.
But isn't this what public housing projects in the US did, and are now considered massive failures?
The reason for the US public housing projects' failure is wealth inequality. When your population has a mix of well-off people and very poor people, and you provide super-cheap housing, the very poor people gravitate to it, among them those who are desperate, have nothing to lose, involved in drugs and crime, etc. Once this happens the crime rate goes up, the area feels unsafe to 'normal' people, and anyone who can d…
How would having fewer rich people prevent the poor from committing crimes against the middle class (or just publicly engaging in victimless crimes[1]) and engaging in other behaviors that make an area feel unsafe?
As a counterpoint, consider India and most of Asia. Poor areas are dirty and have little infrastructure, but they don't feel unsafe. I occasionally shop in Dharavi and don't feel unsafe at all.
[1] I believe that lots of strung out drug addicts make an area feel unsafe even if they don't harm anyone.
Oh, it was definitely "planned" in the modern era. You can see similar problems to the states in many European suburbs (though not as bad because a lot more planning).
Sure, there's planning there, but not quite as much as the US. I own a flat in a suburb of Padova, Italy. It's in a building with 5 other flats. Next to it are two single family homes, as well as another apartment building with 8 flats. Some of the flats are owned, some are rented. In the US, things get separated out into giant apartment complexes where everyone rents, and single family home districts, where people l…
I think the issue here is what is meant by "more planning"
The US is "more planned" in the sense that zoning laws are more strict. More lenient policies in many countries in Europe have more thought put into them, but end up being less strict because that's the way to build nicer cities the way people want them.
I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…
Part of the problem in the US is too much planning, alongside too many subsidies for cars. Look at a zoning map of any city: there's an incredible level of detail about what's permitted where. The local zoning code here in Bend, until recently, had a section on how many parking spots per customer for barber shops. As if, in a competitive market, those businesses couldn't figure out for themselves the optimal amount o…
The number of parking spots isn't for the barber, it's so that the customers don't park their cars in the spots of the residents or other users of the area! We in 'Europe' have exactly those rules (and then some). And we need them, because these old, not-planned looking cities lack space for everything that didn't exist 500 years ago, obvious things like cars but also 100's of people per building (few residential building were higher than 3 stories 300 years ago) and even bicycles (which already increase the travel range and thus centralization viability for core infrastructure like shops).
I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…
Why did that town exist? Why did a small number of people live in that isolated area, instead of closer in to population centers?
Said town site is on a communication mainline - railroad.
Guess what, US lacks those for what would mostly be called political lobbying reasons. Including light rail and underground rail.
Rail is comparatively cheap to maintain compared to roads due to much higher passenger density and construction details. Even a tunnel is cheaper to maintain (not build) than a properly drained, pothole free and soft road.
I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…
Well, they got walkability mostly right, but living in those panel boxes was still not great. I'd never want to go back to that... Personally, I find the 5-8 story setups of cities like Paris, Barcelona or Rome much more appealing - enough density to make all the good things like walkability and local cafes happen, but no blocked out sun (Like in NYC) or need to climb to 20th floor when the elevator gives out for the…
Having lived in Berlin, which is mostly 5-6 story buildings, I think there's a real sweet spot at this height, perhaps a bit higher if people want larger apartments. This puts enough people in a small area that having good transit, including subways, makes economic sense, and all of the daily essentials are within a block or two. Going higher means you need bigger spacing between buildings in order for the lower floors to get any sunlight, especially in the winter. Bigger spacing between buildings creates a sense of disconnectednes between buildings. At 5-6 stories, you do need fairly wide streets. If you do them like Berlin, you allocate a lot of that width to sidewalks, which are then wide enough for the retail to spill out onto the streets with outdoor displays and sidewalk seating for cafes and bars. It also gives you plenty of room on the sidewalk for other infrastructure like subway stops with adequate width stairwells, bus stops, bike sharing stations, etc. It's also fairly easy to work on underground infrastructure without huge disruption because it runs near the street but under the sidewalk, so normally working on it just means closing off part of the sidewalk. The streets aren't so wide though that they create this cut-off feeling, everything feels continuous.
I can't say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it's city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store,…
If your quality of life is determined solely by walkability, then sure, you'd consider it "high". In the USSR things were walkable out of necessity: not everyone had cars. And besides, if you're building a block of high rises (stuffed with tiny 650sqft apartments, for the proletariat) and estimate there will be 1K kids, you might as well build a school, a drug store and a grocery store in the middle. Swimming pool within a walking distance was a rather extravagant luxury, not everyone had that. Shit, I hadn't even seen a real swimming pool until I started college. Woods, sure, that's kinda nice.
My point being, you make it sound like every town in the USSR was like that whereas in reality what you're describing sounds like a "unicorn" situation that was rarely encountered in reality. Walkability was about the only thing Soviet urban planning had going for it. Ironically, these days I live in US suburbia within walking distance of a pool, elementary/middle/high school, and a convenience store. And woods too: we pretty regularly see deer in our back yard.