41–50 of 57 posts
DC should just let Amazon run the city government as Amazon sees fit. I wouldn’t mind living in an Amazon company town, I bet they’d shape things up around here.
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This comment violates the HN guidelines. We don't want ideological battle here (not to mention low-rent rants). That's not because we're capitalist pigs or socialist moochers; it's because it's all repetitive and therefore boring, and it leads directly to flamewar. All scorched earth is the same. You've been posting a lot of this for a long time. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one. If you don't wan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Soviet-era”? What era is that? I think they are referring to post-war social housing common in Europe. The concrete exteriors were meant to convey stability in a society wrought with precarity. Those raised in these buildings generally express this exact sense of appreciation. An architecture nerd, I find these buildings simply marvelous. The style is termed ‘Brutalist’ architecture. EDIT: I didn’t see their link be…
> “Soviet-era”? What era is that? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_architecture
Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help. She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing…
How I wish we could build European block housing (is this the correct term?) in this country. The buildings are shoulder to shoulder and take up the whole block. visual example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prague,+Czechia/@50.079818...
You never have privacy. I could hear my neighbour having sex. Party music vibrated through the floors regardless of dampening in the walls ( we tried cork sheets ). The back gardens were all overlooked. Everything you did was known. It was like growing up in a commune.
When I see new terraced developments I am angry at the human cost being paid just so a contractor can save the cost of one wall and a metre of land per house.
Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help. She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing…
How I wish we could build European block housing (is this the correct term?) in this country. The buildings are shoulder to shoulder and take up the whole block. visual example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prague,+Czechia/@50.079818...
Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help. She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing…
I can understand some of the fears of her constituents who purchased houses on large lots and have seen houses in those neighborhoods torn down for multi-family dwellings. More density is something Austin requires but that of course involves transforming the nature of neighborhoods and whether that's gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods or tasteful…
Don't know Austin, but they way it works most places is that the well off single family home neighborhoods usually have the means to resist apartment buildings, so there is no choice but to build in poorer neighborhoods.
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My cynical side says that this is a feature, not a bug - a litmus test to see whether or not the selected city will be politically pliable under Amazon's significant financial leverage. Any city that can't pass (or force through) favorable legislation isn't one that Amazon would want to choose long-term anyway, especially viewed in the context of their relationships with local governments in Seattle [0]. The key poin…
Yeah, my guess is that the principal function of HQ2 is to increase negotiating leverage with Seattle.
Speaking of Cupertino, right near there, a huge battle to allow I think 1,000 units replacing a dead shopping mall. All the usual complaints of traffic.
So 1000 apartments would have intolerable traffic, but 25,000 people in one building won't, seemed to be the argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How I wish we could build European block housing (is this the correct term?) in this country. The buildings are shoulder to shoulder and take up the whole block. visual example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prague,+Czechia/@50.079818...
I grew up in terraced housing in the biggest social housing scheme outside the Warsaw Pact, under the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. You never have privacy. I could hear my neighbour having sex. Party music vibrated through the floors regardless of dampening in the walls ( we tried cork sheets ). The back gardens were all overlooked. Everything you did was known. It was like growing up in a commune. When I see n…
Building codes throughout the United States require a measure of sound insulation between floors of multi-family dwellings. They specify a minimum architectural design standard of privacy of 50 STC (Sound Transmission Class) and a 50 IIC (Impact Isolation Class). The codes also state that validation of the minimum noise criteria can be field measured and the field measurements shall not be less than a 45 FSTC or a 45 FIIC.
Of course, contractors sometimes find ways to cut corners. But in general, neighbor-noise is a solved problem.
Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help. She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing…
I can understand some of the fears of her constituents who purchased houses on large lots and have seen houses in those neighborhoods torn down for multi-family dwellings. More density is something Austin requires but that of course involves transforming the nature of neighborhoods and whether that's gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods or tasteful…
It's these kinds of bogus characterizations that NIMBYs subsist on.
In truth the well-off professionals are gentrifying the single-family neighborhoods by renovating houses, buying tear-downs, and buying new houses on lots where the existing properties have been demolished. This kind of gentrification would have (and still could) gentrify the entire neighborhood without any change in density, and the NIMBYs don't have any problem with it.
The high-rise residential units are displacing some single-family homes but just as often former commercial spaces. There are a lot of luxury units, but there are also a lot of units occupied by young people who are cutting hair, tending bar, and working in low-level jobs at tech companies, people who are light-years from being able to afford the kind of single-family housing the NIMBYs want to preserve. East Austin is affordable for them because they can get by without a car and without car insurance. In a pinch (doctor's appointment across town) they can use Uber and Lyft. This new lifestyle and new look to the city is the change that the NIMBYs are opposing, but because they identify as progressive, they have to flip the economics and pretend the single-family homes are for middle-class people and the high-rises are for those obnoxious rich folks.
Hence the NUMTOT meme of "new housing is unaffordable housing." It's a way to square the circle and sound progressive and claim you want affordable housing and green cities while keeping the supply of housing low and forcing sprawl. Every time somebody tries to build high-density housing, you paint it as a luxury amenity for the rich and say we can't have this, we need affordable housing instead.
As for architecture, it's true that most developers don't give a shit about how their buildings look, but if you look around in the older single-family neighborhoods, and even more so the newer single-family neighborhoods sprawling at the edges, you see exactly the same thing, a load of ugly houses built by developers and a few charming or beautiful ones where by some miracle something nice fell through the cracks. As the high rises go up, we'll get a lot of bad and some good here and there, just like we already have.
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Except for the first line it is a fairly interesting comment.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it reads like a predictable rant to me, the kind of comment that destroys thoughtful discussion rather than supports it. That goes against the kind of website we want HN to be. Of course a good paint-stripping rant can be great fun (or outraging, a variant of the same), and there are other kinds of website for that. Plenty of kinds of critique don't have this effect, and most HN use…
Frankly, I think your style is god awful. I think you're ruining what could be a good discussion site with aggressive and arbitrary censorship of opinions you don't like.