The new Seattle, where everything looks the same
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Our priority in boomtowns has been to use our government to create exclusive neighborhoods for the wealthy. People feign surprise when more and more people get excluded from our cities while they fight for laws that exclude people from every single neighborhood.
If we care about ending the disgusting practice of government-imposed income segregation, we must make our neighborhoods inclusive, especially near jobs, parks, and transit. In inclusive neighborhoods, we don't exclude people by declaring the neighborhood full by law. You can always add more homes to include more people. Cities full of inclusive neighborhoods will be affordable to all, especially if we use our tax dollars to subsidize homes for those whose needs the market might not meet.
Our current practice is to decorate exclusive neighborhoods with subsidized homes and pretend we care about inclusion. It's a lie. Providing homes for everyone in our cities near the things they care about is possible. Building homes that people can afford to make look nice is possible. We've chosen to enforce exclusivity instead. It is unjust.
Can you, though? Any given neighborhood has limited space to build things. At some point, you have to start building high-rises all over to pack more people in. This also has a limit, so beyond that you'd have to start building over parks etc.
Of course, without government-imposed zoning laws, you will also have residential units competing with commercial and industrial ones, too...
Oh, and who will take care of the extra infrastructure that is required for more people?
So it would seem to me that this approach would result in extremely densely packed neighborhoods with poor infrastructure, and undesirable placement of (cheap) residential units next to, say, an industrial park.
It would also be pretty effective at inducing more rich flight from urban areas into the suburbs, which is likely to hurt the cities even more (by reducing their tax base).
I don't think this is all that simple.
There is much to be done to make cities like Seattle more livable and affordable before we come anywhere near the density cap you refer to.
[0] http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/7/16/white-single-fa... [1] http://res.cloudinary.com/sagacity/image/upload/v1437089045/...
That's fine. A neighborhood full of high rises that no one wants to pay to knock down to build taller is naturally full. The government hasn't declared it to be full the way we do today.
> Of course, without government-imposed zoning laws, you will also have residential units competing with commercial and industrial ones, too...
Zoning isn't terrible. Density restrictions are terrible. They are explicit exclusion. They are the direct cause of our increasing economic segregation.
> Oh, and who will take care of the extra infrastructure that is required for more people?
Urban infrastructure is cheaper than suburban infrastructure. We're spending more money on infrastructure today than we would if we stopped excluding people.
> It would also be pretty effective at inducing more rich flight from urban areas into the suburbs
This just isn't true. Tons of wealthy people want to live in dense urban neighborhoods. That's why they're so expensive. What we should change is allowing people with different amounts of wealth to live in the same neighborhood. Density restrictions make mixed-income neighborhoods illegal: only the highest bidders get scarce homes, so families are forcibly sorted by income into separate neighborhoods.
If rich people truly don't want to live in mixed-income neighborhoods, they are the ones who should leave. We shouldn't force others out for their benefit. We used to do that. Now we're doing it to even more families. We aren't repeating the mistakes of our forefathers, we're outdoing them.
Yes, but usually they prefer those neighborhoods to be exclusive. So, when you
>> change is allowing people with different amounts of wealth to live in the same neighborhood
what will happen is that a lot of those rich people will find that their love for dense urban neighborhoods wasn't as strong as they thought it would have been, and so
>> If rich people truly don't want to live in mixed-income neighborhoods, they are the ones who should leave.
is exactly what they will do. In fact, we've seen it before - that's a significant part of what drove suburban sprawl. And as those people leave, the tax base shrinks. Now, do you expect those super-dense working class neighborhoods of yours to be self-sustaining, infrastructure-wise? I don't think it will realistically work out that way; I mean, look at Detroit.
My point is that your solution amounts to changing one relatively small thing in a very large framework, that will place that entire framework off-balance. As described, your solution would 1) not actually result in less segregated neighborhoods, and 2) will cause more economic suffering to people in poor neighborhoods.
Before you can realistically make that change and make it work, you need to make a lot of other changes elsewhere, such as e.g. funding schools from the general state fund, rather than from property taxes in the area.
Replacing suburban infrastructure with something that can handle urban density is absurdly expensive. The usual solution is to force the developer to pay for improvements but subterranean improvements like wastewater must be upgraded all the way downstream to the treatment area
Depending on the area this can create quite a pickle because the areas people want to live are prohibitively expensive to put large buildings on.
Meanwhile demand for those areas with cheaply upgraded infrastructure fails to draw mixed income demographics
It's really a cluster to upgrade developed areas in a way they were never planned for. The traditional approaches in the US for paying the big costs need to change or the developers behaviour will not
I think so, or at least, Seattle is a long way from the point of diminishing returns: A lot of Seattle housing is single-family homes.
I like how London does it: Houses have to stay houses, but can be carved up into smaller flats, and (in some cases) rebuilt higher to accommodate more tenants.
> Of course, without government-imposed zoning laws, you will also have residential units competing with commercial and industrial ones, too...
So what? I like living between a high street and a park, and I think Americans would adapt to it. There are other ways to curtail the problems living next to manufacturers than to force people to spend four hours behind the wheel of a car.
> It would also be pretty effective at inducing more rich flight from urban areas into the suburbs, which is likely to hurt the cities even more (by reducing their tax base).
New York has a number of "city" taxes that they apply to commuters who work in Manhattan, but want more green. I suspect that would work well.
> I don't think this is all that simple.
I don't think it has to be simple, but it isn't the unknown either: The answers have already been found by other cities.
This argument is overblown to the point of absurdity. Hong Kong, a city known for its high rises, has 1/2 the density of Brooklyn, a place which is hardly known at all for its high rises, and 1/3 as dense as Paris, which has limited height city-wide by statute. Neither has a lack of parks or public spaces.
You don't need high rises to build more homes. Seattle, at Brooklyn's level of density characterized by mid rises and townhomes, could house 4x as many people as it does today. And it doesn't mean infrastructure and public services would suffer any more than it does for New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, or any other dense first world city. In fact, it might even get better.
Why is a significantly less dense city such as Jacksonville, FL so much less expensive?
Hong Kong and Paris have significant restrictions on development (Hong Kong on where you can build, Paris on how high), and would likely be much more affordable if they were lifted.
There is a finite amount of water, and only so many places to bury trash and process human waste.
Allowing more buildings imposes additional strains on the city and its taxpayers.
Infrastructure can be expanded and improved.
Seattle is nowhere near the density of Manhattan, which is comfortable enough to contain many very rich people who could choose to live elsewhere.
Sure it has: you just outvote the NIMBYs. One of the big problems is that cities no longer annex their suburbs. In the Bay Area, the City of San Francisco really should be everything from Golden Gate Park to San Jose. Once you set up coherent governance, you can enact coherent policy.
In general, if you feel like society just isn't working like it used to work and you can't figure out why, try to see what's actually done differently now and think about why it might have changed.
(But this problem at least Seattle can probably avoid, since it's entirely possible to withstand the climate; you just need a different design.)
http://mattrisinger.com/understanding-vapor-drive-in-reservo...
The fallout cost billions and many homeowners were straight up screwed as contractors and builders went under one after another.
Most of SF is wood framed housing, and much of this housing stock has been standing for a a century. It is redwood, which is unusually resistant to water damage, and you do have to be careful to keep your roof and exterior up.
Just want to be clear, I'm not advocating for wood framed SFHs, and SF doesn't as much rain as Seattle, but could this be more the result of poorly weatherized wood framed buildings than wood frame per se?
That makes a lot of sense - SF may be cool, but it's rarely cold. SF heating bills, even in houses with a pretty ancient and inefficient system, are low.
Yeah, no way you'd get away with that in those other cities you mentioned.
Styles can still be very boring and samey though. You can almost see the catalogue numbers on the photos.
Also, why do we have the same taste in multi-units buildings appearance, while our individual houses keep looking very different?
As for the styles of modern homes - blame the "volume housebuilders", it's like complaining that all Fords look the same.
However, it would be impractical to use those techniques today.
[0] http://seattleurbanism.blogspot.com/2009/10/townhouses-part-...
As information and transport gets cheaper and cheaper, common building plans and prefabrication are replacing architects and buildin crews with factory built material.
Also, as liability and labor costs have risen, more and more machines are used. A dozen masons a few years ago are replaced by a boom lift, glassroc/faux finish and 4 guys.
That trickles down to other places. You cannot get the variety of bricks that you once could, for example. You cannot build classical building elements because the tradesmen are gone.
But there's nothing wrong with a city having an architectural style -- in a few decades people may be flocking to see the classic seattle architecture like we go to Miami for art deco.
That loss of finesse has been acute, and one way to address this regression, and it's an approach that's been waxing and waning since WW2, is by looking at the building as a sculpture in itself, as opposed to its own art form that can accommodate other fine arts like sculpture or ornamentation.
The "well done"-picture is a case in point. The whole building is shaped to pop from a distance, but it will look uninspiring up close. Great architecture, like Miami's art deco, doesn't have this, it looks good at all scales. Smaller buildings get away with simple forms, if you use high quality natural materials that are pleasing to the touch. But generally, the larger a building gets, the more care it requires the architect to introduce a hierarchical order, that gradually refines as you approach.
So I don't think Seattle's style will endure, because it isn't sensual up close, and mostly drab from a-far.
I'm far more concerned that we are overbuilding and could end up going the way of Miami circa 2007 than I am about what we are building.