Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing her best to prevent any new housing from being constructed. She wrings her hands over lack of transit (her favorite excuse for opposing density) and supports transit as an idea while always finding an excuse to oppose any specific proposal for improving it.
I have fears about Amazon as well (it could be fine, but it also could be horrible, and I know Austin will be fine without it) and they're the same as the ones she articulates, but to me they mean nothing coming out of her mouth when I know her only agenda is protecting her single-family-with-yard-and-three-cars constituents from sharing space with apartment dwellers and public transit users.
visual example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prague,+Czechia/@50.079818...
You never have privacy. I could hear my neighbour having sex. Party music vibrated through the floors regardless of dampening in the walls ( we tried cork sheets ). The back gardens were all overlooked. Everything you did was known. It was like growing up in a commune.
When I see new terraced developments I am angry at the human cost being paid just so a contractor can save the cost of one wall and a metre of land per house.
Building codes throughout the United States require a measure of sound insulation between floors of multi-family dwellings. They specify a minimum architectural design standard of privacy of 50 STC (Sound Transmission Class) and a 50 IIC (Impact Isolation Class). The codes also state that validation of the minimum noise criteria can be field measured and the field measurements shall not be less than a 45 FSTC or a 45 FIIC.
Of course, contractors sometimes find ways to cut corners. But in general, neighbor-noise is a solved problem.
There are elements in the architecture which make the original European implementations especially livable. These are details that are entirely lost on average Americans who have never lived in these buildings. It seems to be a moot effort to communicate the luxury of lifestyle that can be found in these buildings, with their cozy crooks and jagged crannys, if you will. Popular thought is that this is outdated. It really takes living in them to appreciate the lifestyle French windows afford, for example.
Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’ is some reading that I think speaks directly for the psychological value in this attention to detail.
I think they are referring to post-war social housing common in Europe. The concrete exteriors were meant to convey stability in a society wrought with precarity. Those raised in these buildings generally express this exact sense of appreciation. An architecture nerd, I find these buildings simply marvelous. The style is termed ‘Brutalist’ architecture.
EDIT: I didn’t see their link before but, after following it, I guess it’s not what they meant.
More density is something Austin requires but that of course involves transforming the nature of neighborhoods and whether that's gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods or tasteful (imo) multi-family residences in traditionally genteel white suburban neighborhoods, it's something out of everyone's hands.
People in Austin and other cities are resistant to change for a host of reasons both legitimate and not. Change is inevitable though. Fortunately I'm not a native and I don't have strong ties to the area so I'm preparing to move back home before the next 1.5 million people move here in the next decade. I'm planning to hold onto my relatively large lot and house and rent it for entirely selfish reasons, though.
It's the pace of change that locals can't handle, and part of it is all the outside money transforming the city for its own profit, the city and its neighborhoods and people be-damned.
It's these kinds of bogus characterizations that NIMBYs subsist on.
In truth the well-off professionals are gentrifying the single-family neighborhoods by renovating houses, buying tear-downs, and buying new houses on lots where the existing properties have been demolished. This kind of gentrification would have (and still could) gentrify the entire neighborhood without any change in density, and the NIMBYs don't have any problem with it.
The high-rise residential units are displacing some single-family homes but just as often former commercial spaces. There are a lot of luxury units, but there are also a lot of units occupied by young people who are cutting hair, tending bar, and working in low-level jobs at tech companies, people who are light-years from being able to afford the kind of single-family housing the NIMBYs want to preserve. East Austin is affordable for them because they can get by without a car and without car insurance. In a pinch (doctor's appointment across town) they can use Uber and Lyft. This new lifestyle and new look to the city is the change that the NIMBYs are opposing, but because they identify as progressive, they have to flip the economics and pretend the single-family homes are for middle-class people and the high-rises are for those obnoxious rich folks.
Hence the NUMTOT meme of "new housing is unaffordable housing." It's a way to square the circle and sound progressive and claim you want affordable housing and green cities while keeping the supply of housing low and forcing sprawl. Every time somebody tries to build high-density housing, you paint it as a luxury amenity for the rich and say we can't have this, we need affordable housing instead.
As for architecture, it's true that most developers don't give a shit about how their buildings look, but if you look around in the older single-family neighborhoods, and even more so the newer single-family neighborhoods sprawling at the edges, you see exactly the same thing, a load of ugly houses built by developers and a few charming or beautiful ones where by some miracle something nice fell through the cracks. As the high rises go up, we'll get a lot of bad and some good here and there, just like we already have.
Don't know Austin, but they way it works most places is that the well off single family home neighborhoods usually have the means to resist apartment buildings, so there is no choice but to build in poorer neighborhoods.
So are most people in the cities pitching Amazon, which is why I’m rooting for Amazon to take them to the mat.
http://cityobservatory.org/cash-prizes-for-bad-corporate-cit...
Whoever 'wins', may not come out ahead.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/9/10/what-can-i-do-...
It is also a very hypocritical example of, speaking generally of these things, business decrying "the nanny state" while actually engaging and encouraging it, full force.
It's just that they want all the nanny's attention and preferential treatment.
They could pick a specific city and the city council could say "hell no" or just be unable to pass legislation to deliver on it.
Any city that can't pass (or force through) favorable legislation isn't one that Amazon would want to choose long-term anyway, especially viewed in the context of their relationships with local governments in Seattle [0]. The key point here is that this is a descriptive feature that's hard to ask about, but easy to test for.
0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogervaldez/2018/07/31/good-new...
Speaking of Cupertino, right near there, a huge battle to allow I think 1,000 units replacing a dead shopping mall. All the usual complaints of traffic.
So 1000 apartments would have intolerable traffic, but 25,000 people in one building won't, seemed to be the argument.
However, I heard the Virginia's governor speak about this broad topic, and given what he'd already indicated the state had done to attract tech and defence sector bis, I pretty much consider NoVA to get something.
He also mentioned that consultants do much of the footwork to feel out which which locales will provide the be$t offers. He indicated that such consulting is actually a billion dollar industry and that to even be a viable contender in such races, cities/states must offer some incentive(s).
Amazon seems unlikely to choose a city randomly, its likely to already have decided which city suits it best in terms of logistics, efficiency, cost and available labour pool so this seems to be an elaborate game to squeeze its preferred city.
Maryland's "Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland's Economy (PRIME Act)", signed 4/25/2018, provides credits against all these kinds of taxes [2].
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-paid-250...
[2] http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/webmga/frmMain.aspx?pid=billpage&...
You've been posting a lot of this for a long time. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended. In the meantime, would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
Plenty of kinds of critique don't have this effect, and most HN users have no trouble practicing them—it's mostly just a question of wanting to.
Rinse and repeat.
That's what I see around SLU.
Amazon is incredibly efficient, and that's good. But please don't let them take over a city with their work life culture.
I was interviewing at AWS just last year and one of the interviewers(in a Virginia/remote work setup) went so far as to admit he doesn't wear any amazon branded shirts or swag when he is in town.
To be fair that is Amazon US. Amazon where I work is so far divorced from all the famous crazy US practices that it seems like a different company.
Judging from the conditions in their warehouses, I doubt this would be true for all the other labor needed to run the city...