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Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

strongtowns.org

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Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#421

Post by PaulHoule »

null_object wrote: post #101
fsloth wrote: post #8

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…

Walkability isn't uniform across Europe, Scandinavia or even within a single country: other people have mentioned Stockholm - which is still a walkable town, even though car-traffic is prioritized over cycles and pedestrians[0] - but other towns in Sweden are definitely not modelled for pedestrians. Nyköping is a town I need to visit regularly, and there pretty much all of the grocery and larger stores have been plac…

So often I read a German engineer lament that one pedestrian is causing hundreds of motorists to stop.

I listen to French people in documentaries and podcasts who can't go five minutes without using an analogy about cars and garages.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#422

Post by rhacker »

neutronicus wrote: post #302
jelly wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. >companies that grow or sell food. House builders would be the analogous party to that. The parent comment is describing landlords, specifically part-time landlords who buy up family homes and turn them into rental properties. Your analogy doesn't apply to those landlords.

The main service landlords provide is maintenance. There's no direct food analogy but I don't think it's too stretched

A home needs so damn little maintenance. They're not providing that as a service. If the person owned a home maintained it - what fix a broken hot water heater for 600? And that's a reason to make more people required to rent?

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#423

Post by torben-friis »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #307
torben-friis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value: People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage…

>> Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material If you make something less profitable, less of it will be provided.

legitimate (non-speculative) demand is more than enough to fuel construction. People will still need to live somewhere, and therefore will pay for it. They just won't need to pay stupidly high prices because half the offer is hoarded by large companies to artificially inflate the price.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#424

Post by quadrangle »

MisterTea wrote: post #219

> Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism. No. That's not how that works. You're not an elitist just because you want a nice neighborhood. You're faced with charges of elitism when you advocate for this type of stuff after you've moved into a space once inhabited by low income people…

The article isn't saying gentrification-complaints are wrong! Gentrification is a serious problem, and the author isn't denying it.

Strong Towns absolutely wants to see money spent making low-income lives better. And the movement does the work to grapple with all these challenges.

Tree-shaded bike paths are cheaper than all the costs of crime and health-care issues that are caused by the unhealthy environments imposed on poor communities.

Here's an article highlighting their critique of luxury-condo-tower approach: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-fou...

And here's a focus on how poorer neighborhoods are actually more fiscally sound while the systems we have effectively subsidize the wealthy: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-valu...

That one happens to be by the same author as the article you're replying about.

And here's one about the way our suburban experiment is creating poverty: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-subu...

The Strong Towns movement is all about addressing these things. And the initial posted article here is about the tragedy of how good-for-humans places are associated with elitism. It's not saying there's no reason for that association, it's saying that association needs to end by way of making everywhere better.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#425

Post by torben-friis »

sokoloff wrote: post #116
torben-friis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value: People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage…

> Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material. Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food. These companies are invested in precisely because these are basic needs. The company…

>Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food.

Companies providing and selling food are providing a service. Large investors that buy in bulk, keeping new hosing out of the market to keep prices high, are not really providing anything - they are just a different kind of consumer.

I would make a parallel with the relation between gamers and bitcoin miners in the graphic cards market: miners can pay more and buy in bulk, which makes prices rise and prices out gamers. Only in this case, the people who are being priced out are no longer able to cover a basic need.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#426

Post by wayoutthere »

gkop wrote: post #393
xyzelement wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. Well - what does that actually mean? I own a home, and I am not interested in a huge apartment building going up next door (for reasons that aren't property values) but I have no objection to the boundary of my town expanding, or a new town being established a little bit down the road. Yes sure those things will creat…

Huge apartment buildings are “lumpy” and indeed impose externalities locally. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about if we could evenly distribute housing, we could cut through some of the NIMBY opposition. Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem. Unfortunately, in many places SFH owners will come out in force to fig…

Car culture makes this difficult. Either you make requirements for on-site parking (more expensive; limits housing styles in residential areas) or the neighborhood becomes a parking lot.

Until we have a less car-centric economy, anything more than a duplex will change the character of most residential neighborhoods.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#427

Post by rp1 »

nend wrote: post #321
CalRobert wrote: post #21

The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in. If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too. It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can…

What an odd comment. You don't need to move out of the US in order to reduce how much you drive, or live somewhere your kids can walk to school (source: me). Expecting people to make such a drastic change for fairly minor lifestyle changes isn't realistic. Also, I don't think it's fear that prevents Americans from moving across the world. I think it's more related to, they don't want to leave their family, friends, a…

You're also not allowed to simply move to other countries. You generally need to get some type of work authorization if you want to be able to get a job. This isn't available to everyone, and can often require proficiency in the native language.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#428

Post by torben-friis »

easytiger wrote: post #135
torben-friis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value: People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage…

If it's so easy, do it yourself then? Who do you think funds the building and maintenance of property?

>If it's so easy, do it yourself then?

A decent apartment here costs the equivalent of 20 times the average income. you need to have roughly 25% of the cost for a mortgage to be granted, according to local regulation, which would be 5 times your yearly salary. Try to save that considering that just renting (while you save) will easily take 50-60% of your income.

Even those who can do it will only achieve it after more than a decade of paying through the nose.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#429

Post by dang »

null_object wrote: post #101
fsloth wrote: post #8

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…

Walkability isn't uniform across Europe, Scandinavia or even within a single country: other people have mentioned Stockholm - which is still a walkable town, even though car-traffic is prioritized over cycles and pedestrians[0] - but other towns in Sweden are definitely not modelled for pedestrians. Nyköping is a town I need to visit regularly, and there pretty much all of the grocery and larger stores have been plac…

I appreciate your sharing your personal experience, and counterintuitive points are always welcome - but please don't point the threads flameward like this:

> So any [...] as some sort of [sarcastic overstatement] is really just idealized bullshit.

You made the pH of this discussion noticeably more acidic with this swipe, and the parent did not deserve it. It's not hard to make comments in a swipe-free way—for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105572 is making a similar point to yours in a conversational style, as opposed to a cross-examining one. That's what we're going for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#430

Post by pja »

jbjbjbjb wrote: post #330
bogwog wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the article argued at all. It said that the reason these places are expensive is because they're rare (so demand > supply) and the reason they're rare is because people doing construction just assume that nice houses == expensive, so the average person won't be able to afford it. Except, if there were more of them, the prices would go down (supply >= demand), and more people would be able to afford th…

Yes more supply would make it cheaper for the people in the niche that wants that type of house. The writer hints at this but the penny doesn’t drop. It’s most likely that maybe he doesn’t understand the middle and working class market as well as the entire home building industry of America. Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter th…

This isn’t about “quaint shops”. This is being able to walk or cycle to your GP, or to the local shops to grab some milk, or to the nearest park to play with your kids. In the most sought after places, it’s about being able to take regular, fast public transport to your place of work, because it’s obviously quicker & less hassle than driving.

In most of the US, you can’t build like this, because of zoning & planning restrictions, so regardless of whether the “middle and working classes” want them, they can’t. The fact that the neighbourhoods that do offer these features have incredibly expensive housing is evidence that people do want to live in these kinds of places.

The UK, like a lot of Europe is a mix - in general new development is very car centric, but still much higher density than in the US.

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