How Los Angeles Banned Some of Its Most Popular Building Types | Hacker News Reader

How Los Angeles Banned Some of Its Most Popular Building Types

urbanize.la

78 pointsapsec11220 comments

This is a pretty good article.

Centering most of the greatest U.S. cities around the automobile is one of the greatest tragedies we're still living through today.

However, It's not just the automobile that is making us suffer through endless traffic and increased housing costs. The article also touched on the various housing ordinances that were racially charged, and were precisely implemented so that only PoC could not afford to move out of their designated neighborhoods.

These ordinances are stratifying the well-to-do from the poor to this very day.

Similar racially-motivated tactics were used in New York. Specifically, I recall that Robert Moses designed bridges and roads out of the city to not be accessible by bus, so only people who could afford cars could live in the suburbs.

"City of Quartz" by Mike Davis is a book that explores the life of Los angeles, most notably through housing and style evolution - there is some heavy discussion in there on the creation of panopticon-like malls, and how the architecture is slowly devolving into this two tiered system, the well-to-do and the others. A bigger discussion surely - but the book is a labor of love, make no mistake.

> The article also touched on the various housing ordinances that were racially charged, and were precisely implemented so that only PoC could not afford to move out of their designated neighborhoods.

This is something that is very interesting for me. When I post in USA forums how good are housing ordinances, that keep public spaces, protect beaches and make life a lot better for Spanish citizens. And how bad is that it took so long to implement, as a big chunk of the Spanish coast was destroyed anyway. I get a lot of answers vilifying housing ordinances. Nowadays, I understand why. It is a completely different history depending on where you live.

Regulations and market self-regulation can be good and bad. This article does an amazing job giving background to the current situation of LA and by extension some other USA's big cities.

Beach access in California is another hot issue. In general, beaches (defined as the strip of sand between the water and the high-tide line) are supposed to be open to the public all along the California coast (with exceptions, like military bases).

But just because you are allowed to play and picnic on the beach, does not mean you can get to it. In a host of notable beach locations, the owners of rows of houses along the beach have used all kinds of shady or illegal tactics to keep people from getting to the beach.

You may be aware of all this, but here is a starting point: http://www.latimes.com/local/westside/la-me-lopez-malibu-acc...

It's also useful to understand how this kind of zoning restriction raises the price of housing, leading to all kinds of amusing and depressing unintended outcomes: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f...

I'd love to read the article, but whenever I block notifications from that site, the website automatically closes itself.

In general I find websites asking permission to send desktop notifications extremely impolite. I have the feature disabled, and can see the site. Alternatively, maybe uBlock or Privacy Badger is blocking something which checks whether I've allowed notifications?

I can confirm the behavior - rejecting the notifications permission closed the tab out. I do have uBlock, so I wonder if a "no" takes you to some sort of advertising vendor's "why you should allow this permission" doc.

I did okay closing the notification permission, but not rejecting.

For such websites, closing and never coming back is a good option. The internet is large and full of alternatives. I often give up reading from offending sites.

I've got uBlock Origin and declined the notifications, but the tab didn't close, and I was able to read the article.

I think that the beauty of the internet is that you do not have to wait for the invisible hand of the market to produce acceptable competition. You can simply render what you choose to render, how you want to render it.

I don't mind them asking, but I'd much rather it be via one of those very unobtrusive icons in the url bar as opposed to a pop up with a choice required.

With NoScript, the article displays completely correctly except for the large banner image at the top, and it is unable to even ask about notifications, let alone close itself.

Using Safari's reader mode circumvents all that bullshit. No pop-ups, no large banners, no questions about notifications, no ads. Just the article (though ads were probably downloaded - I never saw them).

Same with Firefox

Yeah, that was pretty passive aggressive, assuming it was intentional. Didn't ask the second time I opened the link, though. Offending scripts come from pushengage.com .

Is this a new dark pattern we're going to see, "Allow us to push notifications or else"?

http://web.archive.org/web/20171023073055/https://urbanize.l...

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