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A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

chrisbarber.co

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Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#101

Post by constantcrying »

petsfed wrote: post #87
constantcrying wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order. I live in a country with a right to housing. The government will literally pay your rent. Public transit is still full of homeless people. Guess why? Spoiler: It is not because housing is unaffordable or because transit is bad. >Hell, I'm actively watching my brothe…

So, do you live in a country that is notoriously designed almost exclusively for personal automobiles? Whose cities' growth was informed as much by lobbying from the automotive industry as by a desire to use personal automobiles? Do you live in a country where prison sentences are applied in such a way that meaningfully decreases the recidivism rate? I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do unde…

>I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right?

Is it? Much of Germany is rural, especially manufacturing, you would be surprised.

>But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions.

My point is that the homelessness problem is downstream of drugs. I have never said, nor do I believe, that just putting drug addicts in prison will solve anything. Especially when the prisons are full of drugs, as they are, even in Germany.

I do believe that trying to solve homelessness, while not addressing how to get people of drugs is a pointless endeavor.

>And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.

But the drugs clearly started it all. It is the root cause, not the lack of housing or distance to jobs. We both know that had he never taken any drugs none of this would have happened.

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#102

Post by chaps »

hexis wrote: post #86
lapetitejort wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write a peer reviewed paper with facts and figures

Unreasonable standard for reaching conclusions, I suspect if you thought about it, you would agree.

Vibes are also an unreasonable standard. :)

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#103

Post by kyawzazaw »

larrik wrote: post #4

"Here's what people said:" before the actual list was super annoying. > Allow single‑stair buildings up to 6 stories This seemed like a terrible suggestion, but it caused me to google it and now I see it's not that terrible. I didn't fully understand all of these, and some are clearly specific to California. I also worry about some of these opening the floodgates for greedy developers (a lot of existing laws are due…

Nashville just passed this. so did Austin.

here's a relevant info with visualizations: https://secondegress.ca

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#104

Post by Aurornis »

bix6 wrote: post #15

My dream is for my section of my town to ban cars. It’s already heavy pedestrian but if the cars went away (and everyone had to walk or e-bike or mobility scooter in the zone) it would be a utopia. Sure there’d be some issues to address and frustrations but we’d figure it out. The net would be amazingly positive.

> (and everyone had to walk or e-bike or mobility scooter in the zone)

E-bikes are very popular where I live. At first it was great to see people of all ages out biking everywhere.

But now everyone has started modifying their e-bikes to be overpowered and not require any pedaling. A lot of the cheap e-bikes have trivial procedures to unlock the power limit. Anyone who can search Reddit can figure out what to buy and how to do it quickly.

There's a multi-use pedestrian and bike path that parallels a road on my way to the office. In the mornings I commonly see e-bikes on the bike path going faster than the 30mph road traffic. I've been clipped by multiple e-bike riders who blew through stop signs or jumped from sidewalk to road. Last week I had to jump out of the way of an older woman on an e-bike who zoomed through a red light and turned right because she didn't see me in the crosswalk somehow.

A lot of these things are illegal, of course, but enforcement is non-existent.

It's weird to see it play out like this, though I should have seen it coming. I think even a small threat of enforcement and having modified bikes confiscated if used on public roads would make a lot of people think twice. For now, it feels like it's just an electric motorcycle free for all wherever we have a dedicated pedestrian and bike area.

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#105

Post by Karrot_Kream »

rickydroll wrote: post #84
harmmonica wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to focus on the greedy developers comment, but one thing I'd ask you to consider is that sometimes you need some greedy developers to balance things out a bit. The US has gotten so bad at building housing supply to meet the demand that prices have obviously gotten out of whack. The past several years in Austin, TX, though, as an example, have shown that unshackling some greedy developers to come in and build is…

Things are bad in the US for housing because we count on market forces to provide what's necessary. Market forces shut down development if housing prices drop. After all, why start a project if you have a chance of being underwater by the time you're done with it? see: https://clmarohn.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-housing-pr... If you want affordable housing, it will have to be government-funded, allowing develop…

> Another way of expressing it is the government pays for housing to be built at cost plus and then charges rent according to what people can afford, i.e., income and expense-based rent.

Does this sound like a realistic policy in any part of the US to you? Do you think the tax base in the US is eager to increase their taxes significantly to fund the creation of a government housing arm? My experience has been that even US megaprojects can't justify keeping staff in-house, let alone a housing authority. The stuff in this list is much more politically palatable.

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#106

Post by petsfed »

constantcrying wrote: post #101
petsfed wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, do you live in a country that is notoriously designed almost exclusively for personal automobiles? Whose cities' growth was informed as much by lobbying from the automotive industry as by a desire to use personal automobiles? Do you live in a country where prison sentences are applied in such a way that meaningfully decreases the recidivism rate? I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do unde…

>I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right? Is it? Much of Germany is rural, especially manufacturing, you would be surprised. >But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions. My point is that th…

Some quick googling suggests that 80% of California's land area is rural, compared to 39% of Germany's. Considering they're very nearly the same size, that's considerable. And also understandable, considering that Germany has more than double the population.

At no point did I say "don't try to solve the drug problem". I even said as much when I said "help the homeless get their life back on track". What I'm trying to say (and clearly failing at saying) is that "don't even bother with 'x' until we accomplish 'y'" misses the fact that at least as it pertains to dealing with making cities people want to live in, its a complex, interrelated system. In my, highly limited experience, for instance, homelessness drives drug use, because its a relatively cheap escape from the desperate reality of homelessness and long-term unemployment. I'm not here to make excuses for people, but I am here to say that its a lot more complicated than "get rid of the drugs, and people won't be homeless". If it were that easy, then Reagan's War On Drugs would've actually, you know, worked.

You should educate yourself on the root cause of the US's opiate problem. While there a lot of recreational drug users who went off the rails, virtually all of the addicts I know personally were initially wildly over-prescribed opiates for a legitimate medical reason, and in trusting their doctor, got addicted. There was a big court case around it. I know, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is in fact data about it.

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#108

Post by Karrot_Kream »

iambateman wrote: post #63
eptcyka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdotal experience visiting LA and SF in 2022 was wild - homeless and mentally ill people yelling, being a public nuissance, defecating on the streets, multi-story tents on the same block as the Hollywood stars. It bewildered me that the same state that houses Apple and Google can’t afford to help these people. Whilst I am empathetic and understand that these people need help, I wouldn’t let an 8 year old roam t…

I think this is a dominating perspective for a lot of people. A few neighborhoods in LA and SF get infinitely more news coverage than the thousands of quiet urban places where nothing spectacular is going wrong, which creates an illusion of widespread despair. I’m not saying crime or homelessness don’t exist, but urban LA is just not representative. It is shocking that the richest state in the history of the world ca…

Skid Row has been in LA since the 30s. The problem is largely that there's a lot of vested interest in painting Californian Urban Areas as bad and so negative coverage focuses on the Tenderloin, Union Square, and Skid Row.

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#109

Post by BobaFloutist »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #96
jplrssn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking around in platform shoes as a substitute for driving around in a lifted truck, maybe?

Yeah, but how do you modify platform shoes to hit children?

You can just kick the little shits whenever you want

Re: A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places

#110

Post by dragonwriter »

petsfed wrote: post #106
constantcrying wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right? Is it? Much of Germany is rural, especially manufacturing, you would be surprised. >But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions. My point is that th…

Some quick googling suggests that 80% of California's land area is rural, compared to 39% of Germany's. Considering they're very nearly the same size, that's considerable. And also understandable, considering that Germany has more than double the population. At no point did I say "don't try to solve the drug problem". I even said as much when I said "help the homeless get their life back on track". What I'm trying to…

> Some quick googling suggests that 80% of California's land area is rural, compared to 39% of Germany's.

Yeah, just the federally controlled (mostly protected national parks, forests, wilderness, wildlife refuges, etc.) land is 45% of California’s land area.

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