21–30 of 30 posts
Pittsburgh is a mess. I grew up there and came back recently to visit after 20 years. I walked a street for a few miles, and it was homeless after homeless. Heartbreaking change to see. I spoke with some missionaries who were handing out provisions, and they said the next street up was even worse. Reminds me of what happened to San Francisco after the tech boom. What a loss. These people who come to these cities for…
Unexpected to see this talked about on HN. I actually went through the Allegheny county “newcomer tax” just some months ago. It was a bit of a strange process to appeal (I lost; my house is very weird for the area). While I do see the benefit for not raising taxes so consistently for long-term owners (and could definitely see gentrification-esque effects) it does seem like a pretty obvious - if bitter - pill to swall…
Pittsburgh is a mess. I grew up there and came back recently to visit after 20 years. I walked a street for a few miles, and it was homeless after homeless. Heartbreaking change to see. I spoke with some missionaries who were handing out provisions, and they said the next street up was even worse. Reminds me of what happened to San Francisco after the tech boom. What a loss. These people who come to these cities for…
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If the only way to have growth is to kick out the existing inhabitants, one wonders what the purpose of “growth” is.
How can you sustain a city if the existing inhabitants children would rather leave?
Tech bros and crypto bros moving into a city and then griping “housing is too expensive here” doesn’t count, particularly when they’re the cause of the problem in the first place.
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That’s one approach, but then you get people playing with the system, adding a single apartment to the multimillion dollar lot, or the aforementioned parking lot (technically a business). The great thing about LVT is that it bypasses these shell games. The biggest weakness is that you have to fight off any attempt to seize control of the valuation process, and that is going to be difficult except in places with highl…
That is fair. Would business zoning help in this scenario and business specific property taxes?
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Continued growth to what end...?
Jobs and new families? I’ve become intimately familiar with Youngstown, OH - about 70 miles away from the Pittsburgh - and it’s a great case study of how far a once-powerhouse city can fall if it doesn’t a actively reinvent itself.
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How can you sustain a city if the existing inhabitants children would rather leave?
That seems like a problem for the inhabitants to work out through a democratic process. Tech bros and crypto bros moving into a city and then griping “housing is too expensive here” doesn’t count, particularly when they’re the cause of the problem in the first place.
The industries sustaining the city are healthcare, finance and higher edu. There’s no invasion of m fedora-toting tech bros building B2B SaaS AI Agents.
This is a group of current inhabitants who do want the city to improve who are submitting -honestly minor - proposals to keep Pittsburgh from going the way of many of the other Rust-Belt cities.
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Jobs and new families? I’ve become intimately familiar with Youngstown, OH - about 70 miles away from the Pittsburgh - and it’s a great case study of how far a once-powerhouse city can fall if it doesn’t a actively reinvent itself.
That's causally backwards. What we want is for families to have jobs and an American quality of life. Not to just create "jobs and families" as if they are the product at the end of the manufacturing line. That goal only makes sense for politicians (and short-term thinking politicians, at that).
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario though - the lack of economic opportunity across the border is a key reason of why I’m married.
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That's causally backwards. What we want is for families to have jobs and an American quality of life. Not to just create "jobs and families" as if they are the product at the end of the manufacturing line. That goal only makes sense for politicians (and short-term thinking politicians, at that).
Perhaps “Jobs for new families” would be better phrasing? This isn’t a hypothetical scenario though - the lack of economic opportunity across the border is a key reason of why I’m married.