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Comment by nerfhammer | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if growing cities are economic growth multipliers and perhaps even a key part of that whole civilization thing.

Meanwhile over here it's taken as assumed that cities cannot and/or should not grow ever again.

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> Meanwhile over here it's taken as assumed that cities cannot and/or should not grow ever again.

How do you mean?

entrenched building zoning and building restrictions that mop up massive amounts of economic potential in rent (see the housing crises throughout the major cities of the US)

Probably referring to the hatred many in the United States have towards urban development. In pretty much every city in the United States development has been slowed to a crawl due to zoning restrictions, despite increasing huge demand. People love to use SF as a prime example but I will point to my city, Somerville MA where rents have been soaring, yet there are only 22 lots that meet the residential zoning requirements. All other lots are over the density requirement. So practically any future development has to decrease the number of people who can live in the city, rather then increase it. http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

That is weird, and saddening. As a lifelong city dweller (primarily Chicago) I love the character, chaos, and depth of dense cities. Visiting some of the big cities in China, I was really taken with their bustling nature, the crowded street markets, the densely packed housing, and the diverse architecture. They seem to me so much more "alive" than the sprawling, strip-mall-filled anonymity of many American cities. I had chalked it up to American's desire for personal space, proliferation of cars and scarcity of public transit options. But I hadn't really considered the effects of zoning and other legal restrictions.

When people rhapsodize about the aesthetic appeal of densely packed cities, I always wonder how that translates into quality of life for the majority of residents, especially those below the poverty line.

Poverty exists within cities and without. I’m not sure how suburban sprawl is helpful to those in poverty.

Maybe it doesn't cause poverty so much as it allows you to see poverty, so it's natural to assume that cities must have created it.

It's shit. It might be fine if you're living in a luxury flat but otherwise a lot of Chinese cities are shit. Maybe not in 30 years when they develop further but I don't understand how anyone could want to live there. I'm excluding the wealthy areas of Shanghai in these, I'm talking more of the tier 2/3 places.

> In pretty much every city in the United States development has been slowed to a crawl

You don't think that's far too much of a generalization?

Houston has added a city the size of San Francisco since 1980. Austin and Charlotte doubled in size since 1990, and are both now comparable to SF in size. Las Vegas grew by 140% or so since 1990. Seattle's population curve goes vertical the last decade, they added about 16% to their population in seven years, and 50% expansion since 1990.

New York has added a million people in 20 years, after five decades of stagnation. There's plenty of development going on there.

There overwhelming evidence that labor mobility has decreased drastically over recent decades, that this is a tremendous drag on economic growth, and that local land use restrictions are a primary cause of it.

http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l...

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/the-other-side-of-har...

America's and Europe's urbanization rates have basically stabilized. I'm not sure where growth would come from, except via immigration and from other less prosperous cities (e.g. moving from Detroit to Seattle).

> America's and Europe's urbanization rates have basically stabilized.

That's a lot more true in parts of Western Europe than the US. The US has seen a burst of further urbanization, after a few decades of flatlining. Cities like Las Vegas, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Austin, San Jose, San Diego, Charlotte, Denver, El Paso, Orlando, etc. are still 'young' in their most recent expansions.

Charlotte NC, for example, has doubled in size since 1990, as has Raleigh NC. Charlotte is now comparable to Frankfurt and Stockholm in size.

Or take Gilbert, Scottdale and Chandler Arizona, as part of the Phoenix metro area. Gilbert has gone from barely existing (30k), to 240,000 since 1990. Scottsdale nearly doubled. Phoenix has grown by 60% since 1990, adding about 600k people.

Urbanization in the US over time:

1970: 73.6% -> 1980: 73.74% -> 1990: 75% -> 2000: 79% -> 2015: 81.6%

That urbanization increase since 1980 is nearly equivalent to three NYC size cities.

On urbanization, the US now matches up with the UK (83%), Spain (80%, France (80%) and Norway; is far ahead of Italy (69%), ahead of Germany (75%); and far behind the Netherlands (91%) and Denmark (88%).

I'd expect US urbanization to continue. It's likely heading toward 85% in the next 20 years. The income and opportunity is extreme between rural and urban in the US, that will continue to drain the rural areas (which almost universally have zero population growth).

But these are generally happening between cities, and near-city suburbs, not from rural areas or exurbs. Basically, people are trading some form of urbanization for another, leading to huge imbalances in our infrastructure while our urbanization rate stays basically the same (maybe inching up 1% every ten years as it has done for the last 30).

That's refuted by the data I included showing the increase in urbanization since 1980. From 73% to roughly 82% in 2018. As I noted, that's equivalent to three New Yorks.

The urbanization shift is equivalent to 27 million people (versus if it had stayed at 73.x%). Or 30 San Franciscos.

The last 30 years, 1990, 2000, 2010, ... 2020. There was a weird abnormally big leap between 1980 and 1990, but then it was super low 1970 and 1980 (only .1%!). So while growth was from 73.7% to 80.7% between 1980 and 2010 (a definite cherry pick), it was only from 78% to 80.7% from 1990 to 2010! Now say we are at 82% (predicted) now in 2018, I don't see how we are going anywhere near the 1980-1990 rate for the 2020 census.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

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