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Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

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Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#241

Post by willio58 »

mathverse wrote: post #202
willio58 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By condo you mean apartment right? Condos are usually just apartments you own. Apartments are not inherently bad. They allow for density which, if you went through the tour this site provides, you know allows for cheaper public services. I've lived in many great apartments and a few bad ones. It's not the style of building that's bad, it's the owners and the laws they are forced to or not forced to follow. Suburbs ar…

I always feel bad not replying or replying with a short sentence to such long comment. Anyway I have never lived in NA and while I understand your concerns I dont think they are valid. I am not a cattle that you need to optimize. In Europe we subsidize many, many things and I dont see a reason why living like a human should not be one of them.

No reason to feel bad! I like taking opportunities like this to respond with facts I've learned through heavy research in this area in the past few years.

I also don't want _anyone_ to feel like cattle. When I talk about apartments I want to be clear, I'm not talking about shacks with thin walls, 50 stories, and no greenspace. The ideal apartment has almost all the benefits of living in a suburb (good amount of space for yourself and others, greenery, privacy, sturdiness and soundproofing, cleanliness etc.) with the added benefit of allowing you to potentially not own a car, and without the extreme requirement of subsidies from any level of government.

These ideas are growing in popularity, in part led by content creators like Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, Climate Town, and thought leaders like those at Strong Towns. If you have a chance, please check any of those out. I think you'll find what I found after learning about this stuff which is that no way of living is inherently evil, but some ways of living such as suburban sprawl are just more expensive in many ways. We just haven't done a good job at making those costs clear to those who live in suburbs, because governments absorb the cost and collect increased taxes from all to make up the difference. And as is so common worldwide, people tend to hate taxes, so that isn't even enough and it leads to cities with budgets that will never be healthy and simply cannot provide the services everyone wants such as regular cleaning, better education, solid public transportation, etc.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#242

Post by ska »

Axsuul wrote: post #56
stetrain wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More dense construction in urban areas will probably help make single family homes affordable for those who want them. I imagine people who own single family homes in nice suburbs are pretty happy about it, especially if they bought it when prices were half of what they are currently and are paying <3% interest.

> More dense construction in urban areas will probably help make single family homes affordable for those who want them. Probably the opposite effect for SFHs in the urban areas. People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family, and those are gradually being replaced by these multi-family dwellings, so the supply of them is actually going down.

> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family,

I don't think it's that simple. I mean, everyone would love a big house on a big yard that is close to everything, but approximately nobody gets to do that. In reality there are always tradeoffs, and the the tradeoffs build in incentives - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, that people respond to. In a lot of the US those incentives have skewed pretty hard recently to exurban singles but that's not universal.

These sorts of things are hugely affected by infrastructure planning and subsidies, etc. At the end of the day people choose between the options they have, not the ones they wish they had.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#243

Post by splitstud »

btbuildem wrote: post #238
ShrigmaMale wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East). importing large groups of…

You omit the masses of working poor immigrants that do a lot of the manual labour North Americans do not want to do -- predominantly in agriculture, construction, small manufacturing, and healthcare. They're the de-facto essential workers. Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this i…

[dead]

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#247

Post by [deleted] »

mathverse wrote: post #202
willio58 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By condo you mean apartment right? Condos are usually just apartments you own. Apartments are not inherently bad. They allow for density which, if you went through the tour this site provides, you know allows for cheaper public services. I've lived in many great apartments and a few bad ones. It's not the style of building that's bad, it's the owners and the laws they are forced to or not forced to follow. Suburbs ar…

I always feel bad not replying or replying with a short sentence to such long comment. Anyway I have never lived in NA and while I understand your concerns I dont think they are valid. I am not a cattle that you need to optimize. In Europe we subsidize many, many things and I dont see a reason why living like a human should not be one of them.

[deleted]

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#248

Post by RomanPushkin »

acchow wrote: post #245
RomanPushkin wrote: post #244

The website is ugly, this is exactly how you should NOT build websites, consumes CPU, and everything is lagging. Animation is like 0.1 FPS

Animation is smooth as butter for me (M1 Mac, Chrome)

Linux, Chrome. I can't even read the website, feels like it watching animated GIF loading on dialup modem in 1994. It jumps from one area to another randomly

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#249

Post by kjkjadksj »

Joeri wrote: post #155
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focu…

I agree that immigration is a quick fix for a low fertility rate. But the people worrying about fertility rates fear cultural displacement by immigrants. They want less immigration, not more, and instead see a return to family values as the answer to the fertility rate problem. Anyway, the problem is not the current decline in population, it is a fertility rate that remains far below a replacement rate. That means th…

People worrying about cultural displacement in europe need to crack open a history book and understand the movement of people is just how the world works. Its like the movement of air from different pressure areas. Most spanish people are actually a mix of moors and visigoths, other mediterranean people through history, and even celtic or germanic peoples who by and large displaced some earlier occupant of the iberian pennisula, who displaced some even earlier people, and so on and so forth until we get to whoever displaced the neanderthals. And all of this displacement involved assimilation too. Acting like migration should stop now would be like asking the wind to stop blowing or the tides to stop. Its like a natural law that people will go where theres better opportunities for them.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#250

Post by anthk »

anovikov wrote: post #118

Poverty, that's how. They live in flats because they can't afford US-style houses (climate would allow them easily), and can't afford 70km average commute radius - car-only because sprawl can't be covered by public transport. They live in apartments not because they are so conscious about urban planning, but because they can't afford to do otherwise. Give people money and they want to move to single-family houses in…

No, buddy, it's the reverse. The sparsest provinces with rural backgrounds (the Castilles [except for maybe Zamora-Salamanca-Leon] , Aragon, Extremadura)... are the poorest. The most populated ones are the ones with the most quality jobs and people has much better salaries and ofc the cost of everything it's on par: Bilbao, Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid...

Also, as they stated owning a flat in the center of your city or town it's expensive as fuck, while owning a 'villa' in the outskirts in the middle of nowhere in Ye Olde Farmtown it's dirt cheap.

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