Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help.

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.

How I wish we could build European block housing (is this the correct term?) in this country. The buildings are shoulder to shoulder and take up the whole block.

visual example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prague,+Czechia/@50.079818...

Maybe "row housing"? "Block housing" evokes images of soviet-era detached apartment buildings.

“Soviet-era”? What era is that?

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.

> “Soviet-era”? What era is that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_architecture

Given the conflation with development style and architecture style, I’m not sure which term you’re looking for. Development-wise, I think we would just call this 18th/19th century urban apartment buildings. The architecture style could be mixed. But, what would you say the differences between this and older apartment buildings in NYC? Urban development typically has a bias for ground-level storefronts these days.

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 grew up in terraced housing in the biggest social housing scheme outside the Warsaw Pact, under the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.

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.

Modern construction methods have largely solved these acoustic/privacy issues.

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.

Yeah sure, but Cannabis fumes from the shared heating system are not. My friends are selling their downtown condos to GTFO to the suburbs.

Don't like it? Don't live in it.

You can. The large older water-locked cities are built this way. They're also coincidentally the cities with public mass transit rail systems. See: NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago

I can understand some of the fears of her constituents who purchased houses on large lots and have seen houses in those neighborhoods torn down for multi-family dwellings.

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.

> gentrification of the East Side

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.

gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods

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.

> Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY.

So are most people in the cities pitching Amazon, which is why I’m rooting for Amazon to take them to the mat.

Sure, except Texas has far more moderate and right-leaning sorts in their cities than California and Washington to counteract viewpoints like this. Austin is my favorite frickin' city in the US and I had a blast living there. I hope to return soon.

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