We need ‘Goldilocks,’ not ‘voodoo,’ urbanism
cnu.org
cnu.org
I mean, there are just some realities about people that, I think, are oftentimes overlooked. He calls them "social networks", but at their root, it's the manifestation of the tendency for humans to be tribal. You can try to move San Fran to Omaha Nebraska if you like, but it won't work. People are tribal. The cool kids will still want to hang with the cool kids. In fact, it's extremely probable that the cool kids would just not move.
I'll even go one step further and say that not only will the new proposal fail to elicit the desired behavior from the cool kids, but I'll go ahead and predict that this proposed change would also do nothing to better the lot of, say, impoverished minorities. It's just a fact of life that the human proclivity for tribalism will work against them. It worked against them in the post war "urban sprawl" model, it's working against them in the current "urban revival" model, and it will work against them in the "goldilocks" model. Why has it worked against them so consistently over time? Because we're not changing the people, we're just changing the model.
And so much of what is happening is due to people, and how people think and behave.
But I _think_ what the author is saying is that we need good urban design everywhere, not just in downtowns. That would benefit everyone. Ie, if you make necessities available in walking or transit distance, people can save money. It doesn't really matter where the cool kids choose to live, if everyone has the benefit of more people-oriented urban planning.
If I take Tokyo as an example there is no denying it is huge, probably too big at 10m in the urban area and a further 15m in the outer urban areas. But the important thing is that for a relatively low cost you can get from anywhere to anywhere else in 30-60 minutes. And even a short walk from the busiest train station in the world (Shinjuku, close to 4m people a day) you can own a semi-detached house of your own for less than $1m (roughly).
One of the big moves here in Australia is to make Sydney & Melbourne 30 minute cities. The idea being that people generally only travel 30 minutes each way to work every day. It's based on the idea of the city having multiple CBDs (Central Business Districts/Downtown areas) so someone who works in the Sydney based one can live within 30 minutes of it, while someone who works in the Parramatta based CBD can live further away from Sydney.
In principle it's a great idea, in practice I know a lot of people who commute for well over an hour each way to work in the Sydney CBD and my wife commutes the other way from our inner city residence to her job in the third (and furthest inland) CBD area and is considering quitting after just a few months.
My personal feeling (and I should add that while I do haThe same as the Portland/Vancouver/The same as the Portland/Vancouver/ve extensive local government experience I am not a town/traffic/transit planner, engineer or anything similar) is that the largest problem is that currently virtually all major transport routes are predicated on getting to the original Sydney CBD. Want to get from Cronulla to Parramatta by train, well you get a train to the Sydney CBD and then get one out to Parramatta, a trip that takes almost 2 hours. There is no option by bus, so you drive and travel less than half the distance in 1/3 the time (except for traffic); now the roads from Cronulla to Parramatta are not large freeways designed to move thousands of cars per hour so it's stop start at traffic lights and a generally sub-par experience. So in reality you are most likely to decide to work in the Sydney CBD.
Tokyo & other mega-cities tend to have a lot of crisscrossing or overlapping mass transit systems and roads to make it easier to get from A to B, regardless of their orientation to the historic spot where the first GPO was built.
Personal Story Time, feel free to stop reading here:
Last night I attended the birthday drinks of an old friend. Our friendship is old enough to legally drink in any state of America now. It was the first time I'd seen him in years, despite the fact we live relatively close (as the crow flies) because of that CBD centric transit system, we go out and socialise in different areas. I caught up with a lot of friends last night including an ex girlfriend and another very very dear friend who again I don't see because for either of us to visit requires an hour or more on a train or in a car.
Surprisingly it is Uber that has actually improved my attendance at events like this. Now I can for a relatively low cost go home on the shorter third side of the triangle and not have to worry about changing trains/buses or staying sober to drive home (and hoping every other road user stays sober too).
Where do those losing to income inequality come in? You haven't changed the nature of the jobs. They still require a level of education and training that the people you're not thinking about don't have.
Think of it this way, you had a nice party with all of your old friends. Awesome. But how does the lady living in the trailer park, or the guy living in the ghetto start making connections among your friend group? How do they start launching businesses with you guys in the hypothetical urban model that you've put forth? Those answers are not so easy, because they have a lot to do with people.
So if you like this model better, then by all means implement it, just don't expect it to help those at the bottom. A little honesty, and an acknowledgement that it's a model that's better only for some group of the people at the top, basically only for their convenience, would be appreciated. Society at large would still have the inequality problems it has now after the changes are made. In fact, the problems would be worse, because right now we're only pushing inner-city people out, under the proposed changes, people in suburban and rural areas would be pushed out too.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
All because transport became easier.
I'm pretty far left, I think public transport should be free for anyone earning less than lets say $50,000pa, I think that entry to cultural institutions should likewise be free for the same demographic. The idea that some of my high school peers have never seen a play or gone to the museum because the cost is too high upsets me.
I have very vivid memories of the anger & shame I felt when my power was cut off because I couldn't pay the bill with a child under 6 months in the house. I couldn't pay the bill because I hadn't received my unemployment benefit that fortnight, because I couldn't afford the $2.50 for a bus into town to hand in my compulsory forms. I didn't have a job because I was still very much in the youthful stage of my life when I thought everyone should accept me for the way I am, instead of to paraphrase George Thorogood, getting a hair cut and getting any job.
In the last month I've been binge reading books on closing the gaps such as Richard Florida's new book "The New Urban Crisis", "How Children Succeed" by Paul Tough, "Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on it" by Ian Leslie and more. I acknowledge there is no silver bullet that makes everything better. But there are a lot of things that could be changed to make things easier. There are also a lot of things we just don't know, and to be sure a lot of unintended consequences for the changes we are trying to make now.
Competition between jurisdictions is real. Suburbs capitalized on the proximity to a city without having to bear the costs of legacy infrastructure and social services. Today, towns in mid-tier regions fight over the same trickle-down scraps, offering enormous incentives that aren't likely to be recouped, in a desperate act to attract an income stream. They do this because others do it too, and no one wants to lose out for not having been persistent. Meanwhile, budgets for infrastructure and social services are tight everywhere, unless the relevant jurisdiction has an enormous wealth fund, typically from resource extraction.
The functioning of cities are barely economically sustainable, in our economic system largely based around capital and competition. Is it any wonder why their leaders strive so hard to attract wealth and forces that further attract that wealth?
More to the point, it doesn’t make any argument that the current level of growth is the Goldilocks zone. A YIMBY may read all this and agree that there’s such a thing as too much, while still thinking of the optimum as much higher than the status quo.
Also it's interesting that a society that prides itself on strength finds itself all but helpless to address these issues.
Agree with 99% of your post, but these two ideas contradict each other.
Zoning/land use restrictions are things that lower the concentration of wealth (they literally cap the wealth of a parcel of land).
When you reduce/eliminate zoning controls, you will increase concentration of wealth, because the value of that land is now allowed to rise as high as private capital will allow it -- higher than it could have ever risen before. (This can be seen by the cities in the US currently reducing/eliminating their zoning).
If the entire urban area were allowed to incrementally and organically build to market demand, then land value would not be so concentrated in the core.
That's also a thing too, but I'm referring to the trend of cities to remove zoning city-wide, all at once.