Urbanism and Standards of Respectability
pedestrianobservations.com
pedestrianobservations.com
> Something drilled home to me at my Cornell planning program was the American idea of rural as utopia, urban as dystopia. As my professor would put it, our culture strives for a return to the Garden of Eden – it’s seen in our art, our land-use patterns (pre- and post-independence), our mythology, and our politics. Even Philadelphia was laid out with that idea in mind.
I think that is one of the core issues. The idea of having your own home on your own plot of land is something that is deep in the American psyche.
And it is something that can be accomplished. Why is there not more remote work even at the big tech companies? If everybody was not forced to crowd into Silicon Valley in order to work for the large tech companies, Silicon Valley and San Francisco home prices would get much better quickly.
Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because they want to, but because they have to for their job. If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.
Is this true? I work in a suburbanish portion of the bay area, and 90% of my coworkers commute in from San Francisco and Western Oakland. San Francisco is more expensive and is further away, but the advantages of urban living are multi-fold. Walkable neighborhoods, access to more restaurants, bars, and nightlife, access to more culture (museums, openings, concerts, etc), more people to meet and talk to, etc. Given the choice I would almost certainly choose to live in a city vs. a suburb or rural area.
A big part of that is probably that I wasn't raised in a city, so my contact with them has been while on vacation. Living somewhere and vacationing somewhere are certainly very different experiences.
I live within walking distance of about a dozen restaurants and a bar. I've never been a nightlife guy. There are museums and concert halls 30-60 minutes from here. My home is fairly cheap for the area, and I live under 15 minutes away from work. I don't feel like I'm missing out.
So while I understand that a lot of people would like to live in a city, I don't see the attraction. I feel like the downsides outweigh the benefits.
You're not in the suburbs. At least not the kind that cityfolk say are soulless wastes. It sounds like you live in the downtown of a village or town.
When I think of the 'burbs, I think of vast expanses of asphalt where only the poorest would consider walking and labyrinth enclaves of cul-de-sacs where taking the kid to play with a neighbor requires a half-mile drive to go 500 feet as the crow flies.
Modern design (and redesign, though that has less freedom) of low-density suburbs, while still avoiding street grids to limit residential traffic speeds, often embraces walking and bike paths that are more direct than roadways, and designs that improve transit serviceability, instead of using the branching, cul-de-sac dominated structure of, say, 1960s suburbs.
Further, I want that walk to be reasonably populated all day and into the night, so I feel safe.
Under half an hour away from work (by whatever means), somewhere I can afford to buy, quiet neighborhood, nice view, trees around, good schools, not too tightly packed, with a reputation of being safe enough that I don't have to worry if no one else is around.
Walkability is a plus, but not at the cost of other goals. If I ever want to see family or friends, a car is a given. Survival doesn't strictly require one, but it would complicate a number of things.
When you've got kids, things like bars and restaurants take a back seat to good schools and family-friendly neighborhoods.
Of all my coworkers with children, maybe 10% chose to stick it out in SF and they seem to bitch non-stop about the schools.
If a family with two adults and three children wants a 3-bedroom property, their budget depends on two adults' salaries minus the costs of three children.
On the other hand, if it's house-shared by four childless adults in their mid 20s, their budget is four adults' salaries, with none of the costs of children.
The problem is that with the rise of housing as an investment vehicle, cities have rapidly increased in price. In most countries housing is not a high-yield investment like stocks, it's a safer, low-yield investment like bonds. REITs have managed to destroy the goal of affordable housing for most people.
20s through 50s.
> London is now building so-called “co-housing” which sounds like it should be for retirees but is for the working young who have been priced out of even renting (let alone purchase) but IMO that is a shocking non-solution. It is forced barracks living–for people in their 20s and 30s (soon … 40s & 50s)–and seems very redolent of USSR communal apartments with shared kitchens etc. The common thing within the Anglosphere (and places that mimick it, like HK) is the abandonment of public housing for at least the last 35 years (since 1997 for HK), along with tax policies that promote unproductive property speculation.
I live in a former communist country, and as an urbanism-buff one of the projects I was thinking about in my head was to hunt down the remaining barrack-like buildings that are still extant (most of them have been built in the 1950s and the early 1960s as a temporary solution for a fast-growing urban population, very few actually still exist). Interesting to see that the "West" is resorting to the same ideas 50-60 years after we did.
You're absolutely right! There's a lot that can be done, and it can be done by the big tech companies. However, I'm told it is possible that there might actually be some advantages to sharing a physical location that are not readily replicated remotely. Maybe those people are wrong and I'm horribly misinformed, but what I've read does suggest that the costs are worth it.
Maybe you have better ideas? I hope so! Please, help me understand better!
I share your hope for the possibilities offered by VR, but I'm hesitant to shape urban planning policy for decades around it.
Parts of New York City are incredibly child friendly. Park Slope, and huge swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, are chock full of families.
This idea destroys what any normal people think of as actual rural or country life. Densely clustered homes and buildings (like this: http://www.citymetric.com/sites/default/files/styles/nodeima... or like this: http://tomsavagebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Swiss-t...) do a much better job of preserving the landscape and the ecology than sprawling out (like this: http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/d46e2d569d6948eea499aa20f2d1709c/n...) does.
Also, the appeal of living in the country isn't privately owned "wide open spaces" it's that cozy small town vibe where everyone knows each other and is in each others' business all the time (for better or worse). If all you want to have a ton of space for yourself it's actually fairly easy to do that, it's just hard to expect society to subsidize the infrastructure that makes it convenient and easy to have your social and commercial needs met at the same time.
>If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.
Cities have what are called agglomeration effects. Work isn't just punching a clock for a wage, especially not knowledge work. It takes creativity and collaboration to get good results and not being able to do that in real way with your colleagues just doesn't work.
Also, most people in nice cities actually rather enjoy it once you take noise and cost of living issues out of the equation. The former is just a problem of not investing enough in noise abatement and the latter is just an issue of not having enough mixed-use urban land available for the number of people who want that lifestyle.
>more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley
Or you could spread a culture of urbanism so places like Cincinnati or Minneapolis can build themselves the same kinds of civic amenities that draw people to New York and Silicon Valley and fostered the kinds of entrepreneurship that made those cities into what they are today.
The wealth in NYC and SF aren't properties of the soil. Those places are rich because the people there built businesses that made them rich. Sure, having major ports helped but that hasn't been a significant enough factor to bring cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, or St. Louis to prominence in the modern economy.
Based on what I know, people are flocking to cities because they want to be there, and companies are locating there in order to be attractive to employees. Cities have very high levels of services (due to economy of scale and density), restaurants, the arts, sports, walkability, bikeability, energy, community ... sustainability ...
San Francisco has all that in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Many people prefer that.
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/19/17029308/trash-needles-feces...
I am not sure I want my children dealing with human feces (and the risk of diseases such as hepatitis A) and used needles as part of their childhood experience.
Although I don't see why "just get a vaccine" is a sufficient response to "I don't want my children around feces and needles".
Density still matters though. You can go your whole life in the middle of nowhere without seeing someone take a dump in a public place or see a car that's been broken into.
The problem in cities is usually that some people aren't allowed to use any of the many toilets that exist, which is a much easier problem to fix.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...
In Manhattan only 20% of households have children. This is not driven by dreams of the suburbs or a love of mega-commutes but dollars. Even good New York public schools are highly competitive. Assuming you can afford an apartment in a neighborhood with a good public school, your child still needs to be able to test into the gifted and talented program to get a good education. The alternative is to spend 50K to send your child to private schools which are insanely competitive.
Additionally, you have to have space for those children and adding a bedroom to your real estate holdings is at least a six if not seven figure proposition. Virtually all the people I know who have left the city have done so for at least one of these reasons. No one says, "Hey cool I get to move to Jersey and look forward to riding a bus into Port Authority". I have lived in Manhattan for 26 years and know that of which I speak. Can't say anything about the Bay area.
In any case, we are currently working out as a society how to make cities livable as more and more people try to move into the same space, but I don't think bringing up distinctions like straight/gay, liberal/conservative, etc. is very productive.
And developers don't build single family homes in the suburbs and luxury highrises downtown for nefarious reasons. They build them there because you make more money that way.
I also do think bringing up this distinction is important. A conservative, landed gentry has controlled Bay Area cities and their zoning laws for decades now and are ferociously resisting a change to their ideas of normal. The article presents examples with how this gentry specifically casts the pro-urban Bloc, with a hammer and sickle flag, and hippie clothing, not to mention the minorities falling out of the buildings. Folks who made those images seem to explicitly see high density housing as not only an affront to the look of the neighborhood, but an afront on their values. To deny that this is a war between 2 different views of the way a city should behave culturally, and to explicitly ignore the anti-queer and anti-minority imagery, is to be both intellectually dishonest and inaccurate.
> But is this really a liberal vs. conservative issue?
I wish I could provide you something more than this, but in my anecdotal experience as a minority in many ways, yes. I don't have the statistical evidence to agree or disagree though.
> I've heard Berkeley has similar NIMBYism, and that's a very liberal area, right?
Berkeley has less of it (again, in my anecdotal experience as a minority) than most other parts of the Bay. Most of Berkeley's NIMBYism seems to be confined to parts around North Berkeley.
> Is Sunset really that conservative?
From my time in the neighborhood, yes. It was older and more racially segregated than other parts of SF for sure. The neighborhood tended to be split into Chinese (mostly Cantonese) and white sections, and even when neighbors were of different races, most people stuck to a clique. Residents were also much older (older than my parents). Again though, this is just my anecdotal experience.
Well if we take the words "conservative" and "liberal" literally, then a landed gentry trying to keep the status quo that advantages them is conservative almost by definition. While people wishing to permit other things are liberal -- at least on that issue.
But whether that maps onto the American tribal labels of "conservative" and "liberal" is a different matter. As far as I know, Republicans and Democrats are both split on these issues.
Liberal/conservative on civil rights and social issues isn't the right model to use to understand the sides of this issue.
It's more of an intergenerational conflict amplified by differences in wealth and income. In the Bay Area, the NIMBY contingent tends to skew to the older (i.e. baby boomer, early gen-X) generation, especially the more wealthy (in $ and property) among them.
The YIMBY crowd skews to the younger generations (late gen-X to millenials), who sometimes have good incomes, but lack the wealth/capital to afford the local housing market as it is currently configured.
Come on now, let's at least use the right words. These folks are "homeowners", not the wealthy living off of rental properties. Used improperly, that term is exclusionary.
Due to the impossibility of becoming "landed gentry" in the modern United States of America -- in the same way that being knighted is likewise impossible here -- using the phrase to describe a group of people is taken as intentionally misapplying a metaphor to insult, divide, denigrate, and bully the target group.
When folks misuse a term like "landed gentry" that tells me that the argument they want to signal is that "those people" are evil and bad while "our people" are good and honorable. Therefore, those people's homes should be taken away and replaced with high density housing for our people. That's certainly an argument. I personally don't find it particularly compelling, but I'm not an SF voter.
As far as MWOD, that publication might consider reviewing whether or not they should be making such low quality definitions publicly available -- it's a sad day when you're upstaged by Urban Dictionary [1].
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=landed+gentr...
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landed%20gentry
It's debatable whether MWOD is guilty of playing a dangerous game of propaganda by peddling low quality definitions online with high SEO. They have an ethical obligation to not revise words out from under the population unless, of course, they are a non-neutral party with a particular agenda.
It's not fair to people, like yourself, who want to advance strongly-felt arguments to spoil those arguments with terms based on these weak definitions just because they showed up high in Google Search results.
As the terms our society uses to communicate continue to degrade into group-specific definitions, we will generally lose the ability to communicate effectively across groups; and, in turn, the ability to compromise and negotiate in good faith.
In other words, one's political opponents might interpret a speech differently due to the use of a different dictionary rather than (merely) disagreement with a particular argument.
To glimpse at one dystopian future, consider that the recent phenomenon of declaring one's personal pronouns might soon include identification of one's personal dictionary, one's personal thesaurus, one's personal collection of idioms, and one's personal grammar.
EDIT: Here is an excerpt from the zoning code of Newark, Delaware, a random smallish city I happened to visit five years ago:
"(1) Minimum lot area. Except as specified in Article XVI, Section 32-56.2(a) of this chapter, the minimum lot area for any dwelling or permitted nonresidential use, together with accessory buildings, shall be as follows: a. RH—One-half acre. b. RT—15,000 square feet. c. RS—9,000 square feet. (2) Maximum lot coverage. The maximum lot coverage for any building, exclusive of accessory buildings, shall be 20%, and the total maximum lot coverage, including any building, accessory buildings, and manmade improvements on the ground surface which are more impervious than the natural surface and which are used for parking and driveways, but not including swimming pools, patios, terraces, outdoor grills, and similar facilities not intended for parking, shall be 44%. (3) Minimum lot width. Except as specified in Article XVI, Section 32-56.2(b) of this chapter, the minimum width of a lot shall be as follows: a. RH—100 feet. b. RT—90 feet. c. RS—75 feet."
It goes on like this for hundreds and hundreds of pages.
[0]: There was some of this in NYC when Robert Moses was the central planner, but it's hard to argue it's continued today.
According to this site, rental prices in Houston were less than a third of prices in San Francisco in June 2017 ($1046 vs $3441).
That sort of difference is certainly going to drive away less affluent people.
These regulations appear to deal with things like setbacks, street access, etc. but it sounds like you can do whatever you want on the land. I think these regulations are just to deal with how to divide up a parcel of land, rather than to regulate anything you do with it.
> Not for nothing, urbanism in the United States tends to disproportionately feature people who have other reasons to be dissatisfied with traditional culture.
Some cities the author mentions contrast with this (Stockholm, Paris, Singapore) but plenty of others, even in contemporary Europe, are more consistent (e.g. Berlin). In general cities are where people have gone to abandon the entrenched social order for one reason or another (because they are misfits or because they need financial opportunities not available in the countryside). Because of this cities have "always" (OK, I don't know about Ur) challenged the dominant power structure, even when (as in Paris or Rome) they co-opt it.
There would be no revolutions without cities.
Forgive my french, but what the actual fuck? Haredim are almost dictating the whole country their religious laws, calling them "oppressed" is as far from reality as you could get right now.