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Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

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Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#341

Post by neutronicus »

leetcrew wrote: post #266
addicted wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one of the cities you mention is in the top 10 cities with the highest murders per capita. https://www.roadsnacks.net/murder-capitals-of-america/ The same is probably true of other crime as well.

murder per capita is an important statistic for a city, but it can be misleading. for one thing, it depends a lot on how city borders are drawn. for example, baltimore city usually shows up in top five lists for per capita murders, and indeed it is an unusually violent place. but unlike many (most?) american cities, baltimore county is completely separate from the enclosed city. if you calculated murders per capital…

IIRC St. Louis has a similar arrangement with the surrounding county.

Addressing the context, though, Baltimore certainly belongs in any discussion of unpleasant downtowns. Altercations are a potential issue even driving (more so than walking actually). But there's also increasingly little to even walk to. The nightlife and culture all moved to the surrounding neighborhoods, now you just go downtown for the aquarium or the occasional bureaucratic necessity.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#342

Post by bobthepanda »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #239
tsunamifury wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being. American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car…

So this is not as black and white as it seems. There are three major pushes that end up pushing people out of the cities.

* the aforementioned highway boom, but this is not enough to actually kickstart the whole thing; most European nations also had a highway boom around this time with much less sprawl

* lending standards. Prior to the Great Depression, banks are wholly in control of mortgage lending. The collapse of the economy also collapses the banking system and the housing market; banks have to foreclose on properties that are no longer worth anything. As part of the bank stabilization efforts, the FHA creates national standards for loans that it will insure. These standards are restricted to single family homes, and to properties without commercial (small businesses have a really high rate of failure). This has the effect of encouraging banks and developers to stampede into single family suburban development; the cost of financing is a lot cheaper because of the Uncle Sam guarantee, and it's a lot more profitable as a result. No other type of property is given this kind of preferential treatment to this extent, and this still more or less persists today.

* desegregation. This is the big one; prior to the civil rights era, suburbs are expanding rapidly, but cities are still growing. The moment Brown vs Board of Ed passes in 1954 all hell breaks loose. The real estate practice of blockbusting gets into full gear, where real estate agents spook the white people out of a neighborhood by having one black family move in; they proceed to buy the houses on the cheap from white people fire selling as fast as possible, and then take advantage of black and minority sellers. Whites move into suburbs in droves, because it's "where the good schools are" without the minorities they used to be legally separated from. And this is a national phenomenon. Even today, we see whites flee school districts with increasing minority populations; they do so even in districts where the minority groups are affluent and educational metrics remain positive, like Cupertino, CA or Johns Creek, GA: https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#343

Post by bobthepanda »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #265
tsunamifury wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other. We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t. We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, t…

This just historically inaccurate. Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby. Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each ot…

I wouldn't say it's an emergence of a general dislike of each other. It was desegregation; the dislike always existed, but before Brown vs Board of Ed and other decisions in the same cities different racial groups lived in different worlds.

Blockbusting was a real phenomenon in which real estate agents would move a black family into the neighborhood to get white families to fire sell their homes, and it worked because they could no longer legally isolate minorities from their children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

We know that this happens today, even with minority groups that are affluent and do well in education metrics. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/silicon-valley-whit... (And before anyone accuses me of "wokism", the original story was broken by the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not a "woke" publication.)

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#344

Post by theli0nheart »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #318
theli0nheart wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the reason why the US is number one at producing greenhouse gases. This is incorrect. China currently holds this spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

Yeah this is because the USA has offloaded making all its stuff to China. With this in mind the USA CO2 number is even worse than it first appears.

Are you saying that emissions shouldn't be attributed to the country they're generated in? If so, that's certainly an interesting perspective.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#345

Post by zanny »

VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215
cpursley wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

I've been in Portland the past month and have managed pretty fine on the public transit here. Its also quite affordable.

They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#346

Post by ghaff »

makotobestgirl wrote: post #54
cameronh90 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me but racism on the level of being kicked out of places for being non-Japanese a handful of times in 5 years sounds terrible. Even once is insane. I'm white so don't have any personal experience, but my partner is a brown immigrant to the UK and has experienced nothing even remotely close to that anywhere she's been in UK or Europe.

I guess that's true. It wasn't really kicked out (just edited it to clarify) but rather not being allowed in - It's probably also important to note that most of these places, except one, were what you would call nighttime establishments a bit on the shadier side. So we're not talking about restaurants or anything like that.

Somewhere like the Golden Gai, I'd absolutely expect that a Westerner would be waved away from some places. Some may even have signs up although I don't specifically remember.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#348

Post by zanny »

pantalaimon wrote: post #202
aurelianito wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service). Those things affect urban planning a lot.

That's silly. Phones can get damaged or stolen, looking at a sign is much faster than looking at a phony and signs hardly take up any space.

Its still really convenient. It is really starting to pick up - I can use my phone to pay fares in a lot of metros now, have real time transit tracking, and use it for navigation even when walking.

Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#349

Post by acdha »

throwawayboise wrote: post #292
acdha wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans don’t like each-other. Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.

It's more than that. Jews, Asians (individually, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc), Italians, Polish, Irish, Arabic ... all segregated into their own neighborhoods. The "melting pot" was never really real. We are a nation of immigrants that never really got along with one another except when common interests were threatened. I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that di…

I think the intensity matters: my Irish ancestors weren’t considered white when they got here but there wasn’t a mass exodus from cities rather than sharing infrastructure, and they were allowed into whiteness over time (especially when large numbers of cops were needed to police black populations). The ones who served in the military weren’t restricted to certain units and duties, etc. When white people moved to the suburbs, the neighborhoods which were razed to make highways had a very uneven distribution.

That’s definitely not perfect (and it’s like, say, Chinatowns weren’t raided or sacked) but that option of coexistence wasn’t on offer in much of the country.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#350

Post by thruway516 »

xvilka wrote: post #244
tluyben2 wrote: post #107

I generally do not like cities, at least not to live in, but I really liked HK, Shanghai, Phnom Penh, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Tokyo and Melbourne are often mentioned as the greatest and I spent months in both; it really depends what you want, situation you are in, what period in your life etc. I though Melbourne was dead; after midnight the city is just a graveyard. And so was Tokyo. I like cities that are alive: in…

Moscow is 24/7 city as well. Shanghai is promoting nightlife economy on the city level. Both are insanely pedestrian-friendly with one of the best public transportation infrastructure in the world.

I would like to hear more from people with experience living in Moscow. All of my impressions so far are negative: brutal winters, lawless driving, organized crime - but I think this is due to my relative ignorance. I'm genuinely interested as it's one of the top cities on my travel list
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