Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

Post by ghaff » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

devchix wrote: post #389

Kaibeezy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the USA is only ~250 years old and most of its planning was done in the past ~150 years, whereas most European cities date back to the middle ages or even before that, growing much more organically Agree. This is key. To be sure, Europeans are busy making plenty of wasteful American-style car-based future ghost towns around the edges and satellites of their beautiful (or at least walkable) dense old urban cores. Pl…

Dresden was leveled by bombings in WW2, and rebuilt. There was an attempt to preserve its architectural heritage - red tiled roofs, cobble stone streets, large piazza at the center. There's a burnt church somewhere that's preserved but everything else is new. I remember it being nice, but not as charming as similar places which had preserved its centuries of haphazard, worn, old buildings and alleys. In the main squa…

Post by jandrewrogers » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #377

zchrykng wrote: post #327

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Why not? Seriously, what is your proposal for how it should work? Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so (unless they just like having housing with no real downside investment risk). So what would they do without a landlord? If the builders didn't have people to sell the property to, they wouldn't build them and the housing just wouldn't…

> Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so It's actually quite the opposite. By literal definition , every renter that's paying their rent can already afford the housing they currently occupy, because every renter is already paying for (their entire unit) as well as (all cost of maintenance) and (some extra profit for the landlord) So by de…

Post by dang » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #79

> Would you like to raise a family in those conditions? apparently hundreds of millions of people already do it... A provocative answer to your comment: would you like to raise your family where your kids can walk to school and play with other kids in a nearby park at walking distance and never be afraid of mass shootings? I get the impression that huge houses are a symptom of a bigger issue: people in US feel they n…

Post by xyzelement » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #393

xyzelement wrote: post #352

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> 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…

Post by secabeen » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #270

null_object wrote: post #232

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>It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities. But this is a matter of chosen-lifestyle . This was really brought home to me talking to my mother-in-la…

People prefer to buy all of their weekly groceries at a single store instead of chasing all over town, and they want to spend as little as possible. This is totally rational. You can't expect them to shop at nearby stores if the selection is poor, prices are high, and parking is limited.