The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments | Hacker News Reader

The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments

bloomberg.com

174 pointspseudolus114 comments

That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies!

It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille without its top. That's the effect of all those balconies and floors stacked on top of each other in houses stuck next to each other, 6 to a building square.

In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unberable. At the same time, the city is at its best in the height of summer, the 15th of August (δεκαπενταύγουστος, dekapentavgoustos), when most Athenians take their holidays to coincide with the national holiday of the Dormition of Mary (Jesus' mother) by the Orthodox calendar. Those days, the bustling life described in the article disappears and the streets are deserted of people and cars both, so much so that when I found myself in Athens on the dekapentavgoustos, I would casually walk in the middle of the largest streets of the city, without fear of being run over.

But most of the year, Athens is an ugly, unbearable shithole. I appreciate what the article says, about the constant, but not overwhelming, presence of people, about the constant activity that makes the city look alive, etc. And the summer evenings are magickal. But it's also a city of grey concrete covered in a yellow-brown soup of smog, where there is never a quiet place that the noise of cars stuck in kilomter-long traffic jams or the Ilektrikos (the overground metro) doesn't reach, where trash bins overflow (even more when the binmen are on strike) where the air smells of burned fuel and dust, where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day.

So, I miss it, yeah :) But it's an awful place to live and nothing makes it more obvious than travelling a bit around Europe and seeing the cities and towns of the Europeans, most of whom have preserved their beautiful architecture, like our neoclassica, instead of replacing it with boxy concrete monstrosities. When I was growing up in Athens, I thought everyone, in all the world, lived in polykatoikies. Turns out, they don't.

@ YeGoblynQueenne Although I am in the US, my Greek heritage dragged me back to Athens every summer. For me it was a magical place where I spoke another language, drank funny tasting Tamtam instead of coke, traveled in blue colored busses crammed with people, women with unshaven armpits, the smell of bodies and tobacco, the taste of bougatsa the morning and souvlaki in the evening, the interminable afternoon nap that I could not bear, the lukewarm transparent sea lapping at sandy beaches. In New Smyrna, I stayed with my grandparents and learned to live with other people in the same building. It made living in a dorm later at university less strange. But the most memorable thing about the apartment buildings was that every one was different, unique - like people. At home I lived in a suburb - thousands of copies of the same houses that came in 1 of 4 styles. I was an anonymous child in both places but the home in Greece was less lonely. And there I could walk everywhere but here my mother would have to drive me. That part of discovering the 'world' was more real for me in Greece - being in the town , walking to the market, stopping in the town's central plaza for an orange juice while sitting under a tree. The 'data' I gathered felt more impactful - the closest I felt to that was later in high school when I went to NYC for an event or in college when I went to events in Boston. Today, I think we as Americans would benefit by compulsory time abroad in high school and college. If our government required and paid for all high school students and college students to go abroad for some time at 'world school' , it would cure us of the xenophobia that we see in our leader today who plucks at those anxieties in us, like picking at a wound. For me, Greece was a blessing.

Thanks for this, your account is moving. Despite my moaning about it, Athens can be a magical place and I spent some of my best years there- not just because I've spent most of my life there (I also lived in Corfu for a long time) (which is just a whole 'nother kind of magickal). I guess, one needs to see Athens with fresh eyes, not the eyes of someone who grew up in Athens, to appreciate it best, as something new.

And just to set the record straight- there are many "geitonies" (neighbourhoods) in Athens, places with parks and cafes and communal spaces right next to peoples' homes, like the article says it and as you hint at it. And when it's hot and everyone is outside, mingling, you do get this feeling of people living their lives all together. Finally, most of the "proasteia" (the suburbs, although Athens is now one big conurbation and there's no real demarcation) have always taken care to maintain as much greenery as possible, exactly to offset the grey concrete. That makes it a little better.

And like I say in my original comment, the summer evenings are magic. The temperature falls a little to just bearable levels of warm and the smooth light makes everything seem sweeter, nicer, calmer, prettier - familiar, to me anyway. Athens is, after all, the only place in the world I can truly call "home".

(though, home is were .bashrc is...)

I was looking at the top image in this article and thinking "that'd be even more amazing if all those cars were kicked off that street and it was more pedestrianized." And in your comment you talk about the noise from the cars too. Cities are not loud, cars are loud.

I think many of the areas of issue you discuss with this could be solved, and many of the strengths that the article's author expresses could be maintained.

We learn something from each microexperiment in housing and city building.

Ah, I wish. Unfortunately, Greeks (not just Athenians) suffer from a horrible case of car-i-itis, meaning they have to go everywhere by car (I swear, people get in their car to go get milk or cigarettes) and every family must own a couple of cars, etc. This makes it a lot harder to pedestrianise large parts of the city, if nothing else because there's no space to put all those cars, other than on "pedestrianised" streets.

I've seen this often. Once, I was sitting at a cafe in a "pedestrianised" street and first one, then a second car, came through, in touching range of where I was seated - in a narrow street half of which was already occupied (illegally) by the cafe's chairs and tables. That has stuck into my mind because I have a big mouth and there was an er altercation with the drivers and some of his friends who was actually sitting at the same cafe as me and my friends. Anyway it's a common occurrence and a hard problem to solve.

Don't even think about going around on a bicylce in Athens, of course. You'll just cut years off your life, either because you'll be breathing cars' exhausts constantly or because someone will just run you over.

Well, cities can be loud without cars. H.L. Mencken said that the pre-automobile days were loader than Baltimore, for deliveries (e.g. of food to stores) used wagons with steel-rimmed wheels going over cobblestones.

I'm not even sure that it's fair to say that Athens failed to preserve it's architecture and replaced it with the concrete monstrosities. Athens grew so dramatically that there simply wasn't much of a city to preserve: in 1822 it had a population of ~5000 families, in the 1907 census it had a population of 167k, by the 1928 census (after the Treaty of Lausanne) it had a population of 802k. So we went from a few thousand houses to 800,000 people in a century. There is really no way to preserve much with that level of growth, and it's not like those 4000 houses would have been worth keeping anyway.

You're right that Athens grew a lot and it grew fast. However, the same is true for many European cities- many larger than Athens, and many of them have preserved their older architecture much better and to a greater extent than we have. They have also built a lot of modern stuff, but in pretty much every French or Italian city I've visited in the last 15 years or so (I travel by train a lot) there is always a part of town, usually the town center, where buildings are at least a century old (I'm not an expert in architecture so I wouldn't really be able to say exactly - but for example, when I step out of the station at Gare De Lyon in Paris, the majority of buildings look positively gothic to me).

In Athens, there is Plaka, of course- but even under the Acropolis you can find a mix of new and old that I haven't seen, e.g. in Bruges, or in Amsterdam, in Rouen, or certainly Venice and even Paris itself. Even London, that prides itself for its modernism, has large regions covered with older buildings. I live in a town outside of London and the house I stay in is probably from the Georgian era. etc.

That was a wonderfully written and richly enjoyable post. The language is so vivid I felt like I could see it through your eyes.

> In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unberable

You may have found it unbearable because it was just really hot, but it would have been far worse in a wood building with similar density. Concrete has very high thermal mass and when thick enough and thermally coupled to the ground, significant thermal resistance, so it acts like a cave. The bigger problem with concrete landscapes is the lack of air flow and shading that would otherwise be provided by clearings, trees and foliage.

There's shade in Athens- the balconies provide plenty of it and also protection from the (sparse) rain. But from my experience, concrete buildings -probably because of their high thermal mass, as you say- trap the heat during the day an then slowly release it at night, keeping the ambient temperature higher than it would be outside the city (the lack of air flow, as you say, makes matters worse as there's not enough of it to take the heat away).

The thermal resistance is true, also. Like I say in another comment, it's common in Athens (and in Greece in general) to keep one's windows closed during the day, to keep out the heat, then open them in the night so cool air comes back in. Especially older houses with thicker walls are very good at that.

The bottom line though is that Athens in the summer is hell, at least during the day. That is the one thing I don't miss now that I've moved in colder climes.

(I miss all the stuff I moan about, above. Stockholm syndrom- or Athens syndrome, I guess)

> In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unbearable.

A friend of mine lived in arizona for a while, where the summer days would routinely hit 110 degrees F (> 40C).

I asked him about it, and he said he worked during the day when it was hot, and when he would get home he could sit out in his backyard comfortably on warm summer nights.

Made more sense.

> where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day.

You can't just close your windows and run an air purifier?

Of course you can, but that won't do anything. The situation is such that you sweep the floor and in a couple of hours everything is again covered with black dust. Unless you keep the windows (and the balcony doors and the lightwell windows) closed and the air purifier running 24/7, year-round, you wouldn't achieve anything in the way you propose.

Besides, keeping the windows and doors closed 24/7 during the summer months (and quite a bit of Spring and Autumn too) in Athens is suicide. You'd have to also run an AC unit 24/7. And that's expensive and pointless- there are times of the day that it is very pleasant outside, even in the heart of summer. So you close your windows in the monring, to keep the heat outside, and reopen them in the evening to let fresh air in. That saves a lot on AC costs (and energy waste) - but of course it lets the dust back in.

In general, Greece is not Dubai. It doesn't make sense to try and create a sealed environment to isolate onself from the outside, in one's home. Finally, Athens is a city of 7 million people. Implementing your proposed solution would significantly increase the cost of living for many, not least because most live in old houses that would need maintainance before they have any chance to be used in this way.

The obvious solution to the problem of course, is to improve air quality across the city. After all, at some point most people have to go out and they can't very well take with them their sealed, air-conditioned home cocoon.

> That saves a lot on AC costs (and energy waste) - but of course it lets the dust back in.

By the way, this is why traditional Japanese homes have shoji screens instead of glass windows. Japan has a lot of dust and pollen. Shoji paper is permeable to air (and so convective heat) and light, but not to dust or pollen. So essentially the entirety of the house has a HEPA-like "firewall" between the inside air and outside air, without needing any powered forced-air system to get fresh air inside. The windows are "open" in a breeze sense, while being "closed" in a dust sense. (Thus why they don't actually "open"; this is already kind of an optimal combination.) The wind still blows air into and through the house—especially when the doors are also shoji panels.

The only downside is that, like a HEPA filter, the screens will get dusty/sooty on the outside, and need to be wiped clean. (But shoji is not a rough material, so the dust doesn't adhere very strongly, and can be wiped off pretty easily.)

To clarify, do shoji screens allow a current to form? In Athens, homes that have balconies or windows on opposing sides, so that opening them creates a (stronger) draught, are highly valued (also partly because they are brighter because they let more light in). I haven't lived in a house with shoji, but I would think that the paper stops a draught forming?

I agree that it sounds like an elegant solution, regardless. I'm just concerned it would be difficult to convince 7 million Athenians to adopt it :)

There's also the issue of noise, of course. Especially relevant for people living close to main thoroughfares, which is very common in Athens, a city of many main thoroughfares.

I believe—don't quote me on this, I haven't lived in a shoji-panel house either—you can't really get a "breeze" going through a shoji-panel house, in the sense of air pushing its way through the house (without opening the doors on the intake side and so negating the air-cleaning benefits); but what you can do is get air to pull through the house, which is sorta like a breeze. It's fresh air, rather than stagnant/humid air, but it won't dry your laundry.

I believe how this works, is that you wait for wind or sun to be hitting the house on one side, and then open the windows/doors on the opposite side of the house from the wind/sun. Then, either the vacuum created by the turbulence at the far side of the house (in the case of wind)—or the air-pressure difference between the hot and cool sides of the house (in the case of sun)—will create a low-air-pressure area on the outtake side, and so suck air out of the house through the outtake gap. There's then a pressure difference between the inside of the house and the high-air-pressure on the intake side; and since shoji is permeable, the house will suck air in through the shoji to balance the pressure difference.

Probably, in a modern house designed to take advantage of the same principle, you could avoid having to run around opening and closing doors, and instead passively automate this, by putting low-friction one-way valved vents on all exterior walls of the house. Then, no matter which way the air-pressure-gradient formed, the house would release air in some direction and then intake air from every other direction to fill it.

I believe this system falls down when the house is equally-lit (e.g. at noon) and the wind is stagnant (e.g. when you're in a high-pressure system.) But at that point, there's also no wind to blow dust in, so you may as well open all the doors and turn on a fan.

Also, rather than needing a passive environmental pressure difference, you could just run a blower fan that pushes air out of the house, e.g. an oven hood fan or bathroom vent fan. That'd also create an air-pressure difference with the power to suck air in through the shoji.

The part of the article that mentioned vertical stratification to avoid horizontal stratification hit a chord with me. I personally come from a family of great means but due to unique circumstances spent much of my childhood living in low income areas and having friends whose parents worked fast food jobs. I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me and I think we would have a better society if more people had close interactions with people going through a different experience than themselves.

That part jumped out at me, too.

> “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor.

In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued.

In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools.

Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but nothing has changed.

I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse areas.

This is false. Redlining and racist covenants predate Brown by decades.

Yes, there was segregation before Brown. But it was not so pervasive and near-universal in the way it became after. There were many places where whites and Blacks did live in the same areas. These places may have been segregated, but it was on the scale of city blocks or streets. You did not have large urban ghettoes in virtually every city of any size like you do today.

Of course Brown was not bad, it was just not enough, and we still have to finish what Brown started. A big part of the problem is that the Supreme Court undermined the force of Brown in subsequent rulings instead of following through.

The current system zoning still reinforces racial and socioeconomic division. Wealthy neighborhoods keep out less wealthy people by only allowing certain types of housing (more expensive housing).

>In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools.

In the US, school funding is (on average) progressive because federal and state funding more than offsets any local inequalities. See https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...

In the United States teachers school supplies, equipment for band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience are funded by bake sales, booster clubs and other sources of funding that was not at all accounted for in the article you linked or argument you make. At some schools these programs bring in six figure $ from kids reselling boutique cupcakes their mom bought, probably taking a $2 loss on each. Other schools can barely manage to raise $200 at a bake sale.

Do you know of any systematic figures on such things?

A six-figure bake sale (if I grant that it happened) is probably 1% of the school's budget (at a school of 1000 in CA, or 500 in NY). I always thought such things existed more as social occasions for parents to get to know teachers and v-v, in a more co-operative context than parent-teacher evenings.

Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu...

"PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives."

"I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."

Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC.

But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.

The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I.

[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...

Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.

Yes. It exacerbates the inequality because most of the top-50 richest PTA schools can afford extras that boost student engagement or provide in-class assistance via teaching assistants thus lowering the student:teacher ratio.

When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.

Yes this is true. But it doesn't seem that big to me: 10% extra budget isn't nothing, but it's at a few schools which are competing with private schools, which (I think) charge more like 2-3 times as much.

And this is the top fraction of 1% of public schools. The merely top-20% schools, nice suburbs far away from wall street, they raise a fraction of this. I don't think it can explain very much of what's different there compared to the bottom-20% schools across town.

That doesn’t say anything about a Uber style bake sale lose money on every order scheme. PTAs accept donations.

I agree with your overall premise, there was no need to make up a story around it.

This was hyperbole. I don't think I made anything up, I only exaggerated the concept of buying commercially produced muffins to be resold for 0 revenue to the purchaser.

A more grounded example of this behavior is well off parents buying their child's quota of items that are meant to be sold door to door out of a catalog to raise money. I don't know the name of this type of fundraising but this is a behavior I have witnessed many times. Parents buying overpriced crap out of a catalog so that their kid gets the extra credit and other perks offered by the school in exchange for this.

>band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience

You don't fiddle your way out of generations of poverty.

Parents like to see their kids do extracurricular activities but technical skills (math, also physics) and communication skills (English) are what people need to succeed in life if they are coming from a background lacking in material wealth. When you don't have a lot of opportunities coming your way you need to be able to make good on the ones you do get.

There was a pretty good line about this in the John Adams dramatization from HBO:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(No idea what this website is, it was the first search result I found that had the quotation: https://livingforimprovement.com/two-powerful-life-lessons-f...)

Children do not thrive in stale, lifeless institutions that treat them like machines to be programmed with knowledge. They require opportunities for creativity, play, exploration, and also nutritious food and exercise.

Miserable, sickly children do not grow into intelligent, resilient, persistent adults who can claw their way out of poverty.

Hmm... Asian children educated in such schools seem to thrive just fine.

I didn't believe you so I looked up estimated suicide rates per 100,000 per country from the WHO[1].

Turns out my intuition was incorrect based solely on estimated suicide data: The US has an estimated suicide rate for kids between 10-19 of 12.5 per 100K, while most other Asian country have lower estimated suicide rates (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc), except for India which has the 4th highest estimated suicide rate for 10-19 year olds of 23.1 per 100K.

Although I'd still argue (weakly) that most Asian children aren't exactly thriving based on anecdotal evidence, and perhaps all that the estimated suicide rates indicate are that Asian children can grind through their respective education systems. However, I can't think of any other readily available figures that could help make my case so I am checking my gut intuition at the door.

[1] https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDE5YEARAGEGRO...

True, but there are cheap ways to get the play, exploration and exercise needed. Nutrition is overall cheap as well, but it requires time and effort that might not be available.

Go look at the schools in poor Black neighborhoods in Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cincinnatti. You will find buildings in disrepair, lacking basic things like air conditioning. Last year, Columbus City Schools cancelled classes several days because it was too hot. If you look at teachers' salaries, the city school districts pay significantly less than the surrounding suburbs, while having higher student/teacher ratios and a disproportionate number of students with Individualized Education Plans, that are English-learners, or that have other unique challenges to overcome. Standardized testing shows these schools, as one migh expect, have far poorer learning outcomes for their students, as well.

I can't tell you why your numbers appear to show otherwise, but anyone can easily verify that there is an enormous disparity between the quality of schools attended by residents of poor--often mostly Black--school districts and that attended by residents of wealthier--typically whiter--school districts.

Having grown up in Cleveland and having spent plenty of time in Detroit, it is true that the school systems are in very bad condition. However, quite shockingly, they spend more per student than the nicer suburban school systems.

I don't know why this is, or how it is explained, if anyone knows I'd be all ears. It does seem like teachers get paid more in the suburbs, so that's not the reason. If I remember correctly, I saw some data suggesting that administration and building expenses are much higher, but it's hard to imagine they are getting their money's worth given the current state of things.

> You will find buildings in disrepair, lacking basic things like air conditioning.

Offtopic, but schools are closed for the summer. How many US states need air conditioning in schools? Honest question as an outsider who's never lived in an apartment with AC.

> Offtopic, but schools are closed for the summer.

A very substantial share of schools either have a year round schedule or (especially for secondary schools) offer a summer session if main instruction is on a traditional schedule.

My anecdote is from Columbus, Ohio, so I'd say a lot of states do considering Columbus' latitude.

It could be private funding that makes up the difference. Or that money is spent elsewhere (maybe more counseling, meals, etc)

Looking at the conditions externally should not be enough to contradict data, assuming the data exists ave is accurate (I didn’t check).

Looking at the conditions externally should not be enough to contradict data

Data can easily be used to lie or conceal, and if the observed conditions are clearly inferior, then the data is qualitatively inaccurate and/or incomplete.

Seems like a puzzle worth understanding. If the budgets & class sizes are similar, and the teacher salaries are lower in tough schools, then what is the rest spent on?

In some countries I would guess that the budget is being pocketed along the way, but I doubt that's the case here.

Is there sufficient extra off-the-books spending in rich areas to explain the difference? e.g. a volunteer donating to fix the AC? While I'm sure there are anecdotes I'm dubious this could add up to enough.

I thought that in fact teacher salaries were higher in tough schools (and that, when they got sick of it, teachers would take a pay cut to teach in a nice suburb instead) but this was from conversations, and looking for data, it does look like average salaries are higher in rich areas (although for more senior teachers), and class sizes a little smaller, although I haven't dug very deep.

A lot of schools use teachers aides to support kids with special needs, like Chicago has 12k teachers, 4k special ed classroom assistants, and 3.7k special ed teachers. So like the top line teacher to student ratio may be similar to a suburban school, but I doubt that the suburban schools have that high of a ratio of special ed support staff and teachers.

https://cps.edu/About_CPS/Financial_information/Pages/Employ...

Thanks. Those are huge numbers, 40% of teaching staff who (it seems) don't count as teachers. Presumably these totals include richer & poorer parts of the city, and if it's skewed then the proportion may be even higher in the poorer bits? (Or will all the richer bits be outside Chicago school district?)

I agree it's a worth exploring. Just spitballing, part of it may be the cost of maintaining old buildings, particularly when changing demographics lead to over-capacity in some neighborhoods and under-capacity in others. It may also stem from financial mismanagement. There is generally less parental engagement, since poor families have more pressing concerns, so it's easier for waste or fraud to go unchecked. I don't know, none of these explanations are particularly convincing.

Ohio is probably doing nothing about it because their state Supreme Court decision contradicts the national Supreme Court decision in San Antonio vs Rodriguez. I'm no legal scholar, but I think this is right up there with Dred Scott and Citizens United for worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...

I believe the Ohio ruling was based on Ohio's own state constitution.

Which is overruled by the United States Constitution.

White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often enough they were black as well.

Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.

These are certainly multi-factor situations, as you say, but white flight isn't the only race-related contributor to deteriorating home prices in predominantly non-white neighborhoods.

For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non-white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today. If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those homes.

We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism (assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using institutional power).

https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

True, but that doesn't mean it was racism that kept individual people out.

Some of the first zoning in the US was race-based.

No, that's simply false. White flight was about racism. Period. And it was not "a tiny minority acting in a bad direction," it was one of many ways Blacks were systematically oppressed at the time, see, e.g., red-lining, employment descrimination, and discriminatory policing. (To be clear, except traditional red-lining, all of this still happends.) White opposition to school integration was so mainstream, presidential candidate Joe Biden vocally opposed busing in the 1970's when he was a Deleware senator. You may remember Kamala Harris pointing this out in a Democratic primary debate. In Boston, white residents rioted in opposition to school desegregation.

For more evidence that white flight was motivated by racism and not something more innocuous, look at the story school enrollment numbers tell:

> Upon desegregation in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; ten years later, it had twelve white students and 2,037 black students. In northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School's student body declined from 2,504 whites and twelve blacks to 297 whites and 1,263 blacks in that period.[1]

Now look at this chart of Columbus City Schools enrollment over the past 100 years.[2] It looks like a church steeple with the peak at 1971. In the nine years leading up to 1971, enrollment increased 19%. In the nine years following 1971, enrollment fell 34%. What happened?

In 1972, the CCS school board adopted a pledge stating, "It shall be the goal and policy of the Columbus Public Schools to prepare every student for life in an integrated society by giving each student the opportunity of integrated educational experiences." In 1974, the board approved a program to transport students in a voluntary racial balance plan. In 1975, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the school district, demanding desegregation. Finally, in 1979, the district implemented a busing plan to desegregate its schools after the district court ruled against it.[3] White families in the 1970's saw change coming and fled to the suburbs in response.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_...

[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMy...

[3] Getting Around Brown details the entire history of school segregation in Columbus, including the events cited in this paragraph. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg...

A tiny minority combined with many who have better things to do than care is enough to be explain that. Fear of racism in others is more powerful than the reality of racism.

You can't design a new city from the ground up and make it perfect. Cities grow organically over the time. Athens is one of the oldest inhabitated cities in the world. Growing up in Athens I really hated this ugly architecture but now I realize that nearly every little neighbourhood has it's own piece of history and every street is so full of life. I wouldn't trade that with any lifeless good-looking residential area on a European country

Communities are interesting things - I grew up in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland which was extremely socially integrated - everyone went to the same school regardless if their parents were worth millions (and some were, although I only realised this years later) or were unemployed.

Then I lived in Edinburgh's New Town for over 20 years which is utterly gorgeous but a bit lacking in community as there is a fairly narrow band of people who live there and school attendance is largely private and even more stratified.

Now I am back living near a old small town and to me the whole place just feels more "organic" than where I lived in Edinburgh (although I dearly love the place).

My whole life growing up I was taught about how repressive the socially integrated model was, where everybody knows everybody, and how we should celebrate that the modern world has left it behind.

As time goes by, I'm starting to realize that while it can be very repressive for people who don't fit in, in trying to discard that model outright we've lost something incredibly important.

I think what is important is that everybody find community. And it shouldn't be a surprise that that is easiest in the smaller settings that most humans have lived their lives in before the modern era. But we can have both. The great cities of the world have vibrant local neighborhoods AND "scenes" based on common interests. And for the smaller towns and villages the internet enables both online communities, and more importantly, the coordination of regional communities of shared interests. More Meetup.com, less twitter.

Well, we've gone all-in on "digital community", which has the unfortunate outcomes of 1) easy to find your echo chamber of choice and 2) limited in-person interaction. In-person community can still be found, but it seems to be in decline. For example, teenagers are spending less & less time with their friends, and church congregations continue to shrink.

For the avoidance of doubt, Edinburgh as a city is about as vibrant as it is possible to be, just that the achingly pretty neighbourhood we lived in was a bit stuffy. :-)

Its funny because both my wife and I feel that about playgrounds near our apartment -- we have 3 playgrounds and only managed to click with other parents and children on a playground that is a bit farther away, while the one right across our apartment building where we meet our neighbours we somehow always feel alien.

But you have to balance that with the common aphorism that "we don't know our own neibhrous". We meet them when tennants' councils are held to discuss the koinoxrista[1], we bump into them on the stairs or the elevator, we bang on their doors to complain about the noise, perhaps- but other than that, a polykatoikia is not often a community, it's just a place where many people live their unconnected lives together with minimal contact with each other.

__________

[1] For non-Greeks: that's the maintainance and heating bill that is split among tennants of a polykatoikia.

To some people (including me), that just makes it better. I'm relatively social, but never knew who my neighbors were.

Also happens here in Portugal, I thought it was pretty normal.

As an outsider I found it charming. Especially the Orange trees on sidewalks :) in the Lycabettus area.

I lived in that area for a few months and I still miss it.

To solve this conundrum, Greeks created their own funding system called antiparochi, in which developers saved themselves the cost of buying land by giving landowners a share of the constructed units when they were completed. “The best translation of the term is probably ‘flats for land,’ or as some people say, ‘quid pro quo,’” says Panos Dragonas, an architect and professor at Greece’s University of Patras. “The system saw landowners hand over their property, and in return get, say, two to five apartments back in the completed building to live in, or rent or sell. It was a bottom-up system of housing development not created by any law change by the government, though the state did offer motives for construction by granting tax breaks.”

I'm surprised to see that this arrangement is mentioned as novel/quaint.

This kind of deal is extremely pervasive here in Brazil, and I suppose in the rest of the world as well: developers don't acquire residential lots with cash; rather they build up an apartment building and pay the original land owner(s) with apartment units. This is so common I assumed it was a worldwide "thing".

Where I live it's more extreme. Construction materials are sourced from different suppliers, and they are given apartments instead of cash. A developer can get started with around an apartment worth of capital. He'll leverage 2-3x through a bank to pay for workers and various. Then raise money before building from some want-to-be homeowners. The pre-construction sale gets you a cheaper price. So he gets 2-3x his capital, whatever he raised from future owners, and free construction materials. If he plays his cards correctly and do sell all of the building, he can 4-5x his money in a 3 years period.

I had a relative in this kinda business and most of his job was "building connections" and "deal striking".

Interesting. What part of the world are you talking about?

I bet that, with so many moving parts, if there is the slightest problem the whole thing falls apart and unlucky buyers end up cash-strapped and with no apartments to show for it.

A lessor version of this happens in the US where previous phases of a development pay for later phases. A cash strapped developer may offer initial phases at especially low prices.

I think most people in the US find it more expedient to use cash for the land, rather than take in-kind compensation. Consider, for instance: where will you live while your apartment is under construction? And, can you actually trust the value that the developer touts, attached to the new apartment? Financing for this sort of up-front buyout will be readily available so there is no major barrier.

Credit is insanely available in the US. Developers can get a significant loan; which is a better deal than channeling your apartment through such a scheme (assuming selling is easy).

Right, this sort of scheme is a great way to get things done without a lot of formal banking & legal machinery. And it's pretty resilient: if building is interrupted by (say) political unrest, or there's an episode of hyperinflation in the middle, everyone understands the deal -- the landowner still gets his 2 flats when it's done.

> Consider, for instance: where will you live while your apartment is under construction?

It many parts of the world where this is practiced, there are strong familial ties and obligations. No one would think twice of living with a parent or sibling while the apartment was under construction.

>where will you live while your apartment is under construction?

Maybe my wording was confusing, but this kind of thing won't really happen. If someone in a large city owns a patch of land that is big enough and well-located enough to become an apartment complex, then that person(s) is usually wealthy enough to have other real estate already. Its seen as an investment, not as a more affordable way to own an apartment.

Ah. I had assumed that part of the Greek setup came from relatively small owners with an individual plot of land and a much smaller owner-occupied building on it. Perhaps this is expectation is in error!

"In poorer quality apartments, there might be full windows only along the balcony side of the apartment, their kitchens only lit naturally by dingy light wells."

Housing blocks built with 1, 2, and 3 bedroom flats (apartments) are routinely built with windowless kitchens and bathrooms today. This is regardless of whether the housing blocks are 'architect-designed' or cut from generic layouts.

In modern flats, the kitchen is shoved to the back of the living room away from windows and lacks any natural ventilation. This is sold as 'open plan living'.

Mechanical ventilation has became a crutch for many architects and housebuilders. It lets them lay out unappealing single-aspect apartments (including north-facing flats which should be banned). Single aspect means windows run across only one side of the apartment as opposed to dual-aspect design where windows run across two sides of the flat allowing cross-ventilation.

Modern blocks of flats, including 'architect-designed' ones, show a completely paucity of imagination when it comes to layout.

I frequently think I should sell my townhouse and buy a flat, but then I look at photos in various real-estate listings and they're all dark and gloomy. It seems you're lucky if the flat has floor-ceiling windows in the main room, even luckier if it has a balcony. I don't know how people live in such darkness. As it is, the dining room in my townhome sits between thee kitchen and living room and is noticeable darker then either (and subsequently rarely used).

What I say to my non-Greek friends is that Athens is a really beautiful city, because it is really ugly. I have yet to meet a person living in Athens that likes these buildings for any other reasons than that you've grew up in them.

In fact, the houses made in what Greeks call "neo-classical" style are considered to be a major improvement. This is the style you can find in the area of Plaka, Metz etc.

Many people call Vienna beautiful, but I have a direct comparison. I spent most of my childhood in Attica (northern suburbs, 8 Km from Syntagma square, so basically still Athens), in 5 different polykatoikies. All of them had balconies, bidets, elevators, good heating, plenty of light, were quiet and relatively clean. Here in Vienna, I've had one apartment with terrace and 0 with balconies (of 6 total I've lived in), lots of noise, thin walls and dirt. Elevators and toilets inside the apartment were often added in the last 20-30 years in older buildings, balconies are often impossible and you usually have noisy and somewhat dangerous gas heating with boilers inside the apartment. IOW, housing quality in Athens was significantly better even though back then we were lower middle class (my mother was a single mother with 2 kids). The apartment I'm sitting in right now cost me approx. €750k (for 75m²) and has no balconies.

I don't want to go back to Athens, but apartments are typically much better there.

FWIW, the house I lived in from 1985-1990 is still standing and looks exactly the same: https://www.google.at/maps/@38.0225488,23.8094767,3a,65.9y,1...

I did a similar move from flats in Buenos Aires with balconies, bidets, and modern lifts to flats without those things in London. I would choose the London ones every time.

In paper they might seem worse, but in practice my current flat is much better: London is much less noisy than Buenos Aires, nearby flats don't usually get robbed, and I'm reasonably sure that the fire alarm works. My large and beautiful Buenos Aires flat had an alarm that stayed silent during a major fire.

I don't think any Greek likes them, but I think most of the problem is that each one looks different. They don't have a common aesthetic, so the city looks like you bumped your building tray and all your buildings fell over and now you can't be bothered to sort them all again.

The ugliness is only visible from 10000 feet. Up close, the uniqueness of each building, the uniqueness of each intersection, street width, flora, etc gives each neighborhood the character that allows a human to grow their identity, their feeling that they too are unique, that they have a place in the world that is ‘justified and allowed to be different, even unique’

The one beauty I can attribute to polykatoikies is the balconies. They are often filled with plants (at least my parents kept it that way) which makes for your little private oasis in the mess that is Athens.

Neoclassicals don't have that

That's helpful to know. I've always thought they were really ugly but I can't put my finger on why. I wonder why the tenements of Amsterdam aren't as practical. I guess they miss out on big balconies....

Here's a YT video showing how one of these style apartments was redone into a very modern and style - https://youtu.be/JEnL2nljPdY

>The municipality of Athens only practiced zoning for heavy industry, leaving people free to set up shop in a polikatoikia.

Really, this should be the article. Zoning is responsible for resiliency and affordability. The actual implementation (Polikatoikias) is just an accident of fate.

But the sentence you quoted says there was no zoning.

That’s what I meant - generous/permissive zoning is responsible.

Athens is so ugly that it comes the other way around.

It looks like no other. When I travel around Europe I sometimes feel that all cities look the same. When I go to Athens I feel that I am not in Europe anymore, it's a different planet.

Comic map of "every European city": https://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2018/10/omnimappus-europeus.h...

And for equal representation, the corresponding map of "every American city": https://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2018/10/omnimappus-americanus...

"all cities look the same"

Except, of course, for the one that has as a centrepiece a huge old fortress (still used by the local military) on the plug on an ancient volcano. ;-)

I need to be more accurate... Most cities look similar (beautiful, neat, European)

I dunno. I always thought that one looked kind of like a scaled-up version of Bath.

Which city is that?

Edinburgh? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology)

Correct

"But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,

Fitful and dark,

Unseizable in Leith

And wildered by the Forth,

But irresistibly at last

Cleaving to somber heights

Of passionate imagining

Till stonily,

From soaring battlements,

Earth eyes eternity."

I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwl7tthqzkA

Khrushchev apartments get a lot of bad press, but represent a statist approach to a similar problem: mass housing needs in a hurry, in a post war recovery economy.

I really don't want this to descend into 'private did better' because there are climate differences as well as political and social differences. I think the command economy ran out of the will to succeed.

> To keep costs down, developers adopted a modernist construction model — the Le Corbusier-developed Dom-Ino system, in which reinforced concrete pillars freed a building of the need for load-bearing interior walls.

A modernist, Corbusier-influenced building that actually works and that people like living in! Fantastic.

As far as Athens is concerned, they've also proven to be rather earthquake-proof, which is amazing. I was in a polykatoikia in a northern suburb of Attica myself in 1981 during a severe earthquake and while the floor was all wobbly, the building showed just minor cracks afterwards.

I think I key point underrepresented is the government and other authoritative bodies (HOAs) stepped out of the way or weren't present to enforce laws and policies that ensure systemic racism and inequality.

Yeah many of the buildings are ugly, but man, the plant-filled wide balconies are something else. I always wonder why eg LA condos haven't adopted balconies. I miss my hometown :/

Athens is an extremely ugly city. It's so ugly that, if you grow up there or live there long enough, the ugliness slowly seeps inside of you and empties your inside, too.

Everything looks as if beauty has no role to play in our lives. The ugliness is not confined to the buildings, people dress in ugly clothes and are poorly groomed and rude.

Working for a Greek employer is hell. People hate working and all the time they talk about how much they hate working. Everyone is eager to start their own business in order to avoid having a Greek boss. This has resulted in a fragmented economy with a huge number of self-employed people that invest nothing.

Litter is everywhere, stray dogs are everywhere, dog shit on the pavement is a certainty.

Have you ever lived on a different country? Despite it's ugliness, Athens is a vibrant and diverse city that never sleeps. Everything you need to do is close to your home. Jobs, night life, shops, bookstores, etc even a walk by the sea near mikrolimano. It's an interconnected community of human randomness that depicts the randomess of the real life.

I can confirm that most Greeks will agree with both comments above.

Perhaps you just need a good therapist to lift your spirits. I enjoyed my stay in Attica (not the center of Athens, but I visited it frequently) from 1980 to 1990 and a couple of times later. Greeks (I'm half greek) whine a bit too much (for historical reasons presumably, such a formerly grand civilization faring so poorly today) and this probably affects their opinions of greek bosses. How can they not tolerate procrastination, laziness, moaning!

>Litter is everywhere

The busy parts of Athens are much much less dirty than the busy parts of Paris or London.

>People dress in ugly clothes and are poorly groomed and rude.

So it's like a typical big city then.

>People hate working and all the time they talk about how much they hate working.

So, these people are experiencing city life.

A couple of other points I'll give you, but I think this is mostly a case of the grass always being greener.

Now I want to visit the city and find out by myself.

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