Why Every City Feels the Same Now

> and likely installing 70k worth of elevators and a 30k sprinkler system in a two story 3k sqft building and even then, if a single person on the review board dislikes the project on a whim, it's out.

Your complaint is that your new business has to not be a fire hazard or completely inaccessible to the mobility-disabled?

I get you on the fact that zoning laws can get pretty wonky, but these requirements here seem pretty reasonable to me.

> I had a realization while going through the process that this is the thing that causes our cities to be so drastically inferior to european cities which were designed before zoning laws were in vogue.

Zoning laws are in fact an American invention, and they were originally designed to limit where Chinese immigrants could live and work[0]. Their actual impact on the quality of a city was kind of besides the point; the only goal was to hurt racial out groups. Viewed from this lens, it isn't terribly surprising that zoning laws haven't done a great job at making American cities good places to work & live; that's not what those tools were designed for.

0 - https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/

Are you familiar with Moto in Hudson, NY? They are almost exactly this business model. http://www.motocoffeemachine.com/

Obviously every town/city's zoning is different but you may want to try to see if they're willing to discuss the process they went through.

In one town a WalMart was able to go up after years of resisting any sort of development. They used 3 layers of shell companies to buy up the parcels of land and then re-sell them to each other in a maze of county filings until Wal-Mart finally was purchased the sum of the parcels so they had the land to build. Then they sent an army of lawyers and immediately began suing the shit out of the local leadership that was resisting them. A friend, a developer, built a retail strip adjacent to the new Wal-Mart. He didn't have the resources of Wal-Mart despite already being wealthy. He ended up just having to line everyone's pockets in order to get his permits. Yes, that's right, good old fashioned bribes.

Obviously this is just one narrow example, but it just goes to show things still work this way in some parts of the US.

I hate to say it but you probably should have just bribed them.

Building codes and zoning laws are, in part, a way of increasing the barrier of entry for new businesses. This benefits established businesses at the cost of reducing the number of new businesses.

Licensing, permits, insurance, and complex tax codes are also often used for this purpose. I hope we find a better balance between protecting the consumer, and creating an environment where new and unique businesses can flourish.

What you're describing is gentrification. And yes, it's dehumanizing... to all but the gentry. But until we place another golden idol ahead of Capitalism, the natural gradient of life will forever serve the current idol -- the pursuit of personal profit above all else.

It smells like regulatory capture whenever the barrier to entry is set to a point where it's almost impossible for small players to enter the market.

For this reason I think it makes sense to have a cutoff (or maybe several) for businesses under a certain size to operate in a lazies-faire environment with only the essential regulations to be accountable to. Regulation of business is important in a lot of cases, but if you really want to encourage innovation you need to carve out a space where people can grow up to the point where they can really contend with all that complexity.

Yeah I understand why there are rules to protect workers, the environment, disabled customers, city aesthetics and more. But it does end up making it a huge barrier for anyone to do anything. I'd like to think I'd do a good job starting a small business but the rulebook is so huge it seems insurmountable.

Corona would have ruined the coffee side of the business, so you probably dodged a bullet.

The American regulatory landscape is a death-by-a-thousand cuts that ends up serving to entrench established businesses. Most of them seem reasonable when looked at in isolation, but they add up to an insurmountable burden for most would-be small businesses.

It's absurd to expect a local cafe to spend $70k to become accessible for a tiny fraction of the population. That investment, and the maintenance fees it generates, will likely never balance out. On the other side of the coin, if the disabled community will never spend enough money to justify the cost of installing accessibility features in a cafe, do we as a community just accept that? It seems like something that ought to be handled with tax incentives to those opting to provide accessibility. People smarter than me have thought about this, and it's no accident that they landed on the option that makes it possible for Starbucks to have less competition.

My sister's chocolate shop requires state and local duplicate inspectors, fire inspectors and health inspections. She's required to install 7 sinks (minimum) because she serves food. She has to have handicapped parking spot, for a walk-in business with exactly 1 parking space. She has to undergo regular 'training' in food handling. All to serve boxes of chocolates and a latte.

It's part of the one-size-fits-all regulation that states and cities adopt to 'streamline' their rules.

I've seen a couple of shops that have an open doorway to the shop next door, and in fact I know some anecdotes of people skirting blue laws (which I suspect have bigger teeth than the things you're dealing with) by opening two shops next to each other.

That arm's length separation may help you with the health dept too.

Mixing light industrial with commercial restaurant in a single building / space sounds like a nightmare to get approved.

You can't be doing welding, metalworking, spray painting, and dealing with gasoline, oil, and other industrial solvents in the same space as food preparation.

One big issue is we Americans are very picky about what rules they choose to obey. Highway speed limits are for entertainment value but parking availability is written in blood.

> I get that I don't want a power plant or steel forge next to my house, but that's not what we are talking about here.

Reflecting for a bit, I don't know what you're talking about here.

Either you could get the permit to start a garage, or you couldn't. I don't understand why it's relevant that you'd have a cafe next door.

If on the other hand you're describing some kind of hybrid shared space where food, drink, and combustible engines come together then that is way beyond "doesn't fit a cookie cutter mold." Just off the top of my head safety and noise come to mind.

That reminds me of this case in SF, where someone spent 4 years and $1M just trying to get approval to convert their laundromat into an apartment building.

https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...

If you actually want to try to change it, you are welcome to come hang out on r/CitizenPlanners.

Nothing takes the past away like the future. What is currently is not what has to be tomorrow.

Move to Houston where they are extremely lacks on zoning. I visited there and you can tell that its all intertwined.

That's a good point - in the past, when lands were conquered by the Muslim empire, they started to share architectural style. Now, as more lands are conquered by the international-corporate-capitalist empire, they too start to share an architectural style ;-)

ADA rules also add a lot of expense that is important, I believe, but certainly limits the amount of 'uniqueness' that is possible when building new structures.

And yet another case, I suspect, of the Pareto principle: 20% of regulations are load-bearing. They keep lead out of our pipes, asbestos out of our ceilings, and make electrical fires thankfully rare.

The remaining 80% all look good on paper (or they wouldn't be there) but do things like require bathrooms to be wheelchair accessible, even if there's an accessible bathroom two doors down, at a business which would be happy to extend its use to any wheelchair-using customers. Or dictate ceiling heights so that the occasional 2 meter tall customer won't hit his head on exposed pipe.

But these regulations aren't optional "best practices", they have the same weight as ones which prevent building collapse, fire, and cancer. And the sum total is a landscape which is prohibitively hostile, in many cases, to starting a small business.

Collective action, especially purchase preferences, are notoriously hard to change but that's where the action comes from. The trend of putting every dollar into square footage, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, didn't come from nowhere. They are easily quantifiable metrics about a house that sorta-kinda-if-you-squint give you an impression of livability and they're what every house searching tool gives users to filter on and $/sq. ft is the most prominently displayed metric for "value." Worse, even if you don't care about playing stupid games, you still likely have to play if you ever want to sell your house.

Changing how we evaluate the quality of a house changes how they're built.

There's the universal "not invented here" syndrome though. Often I find a lot of good ideas, proven in practice - that simply can not be taken to use somewhere else.

If you want nice architecture, it basically has to be legislated. The neighborhood I grew up in is full of beautiful, unique homes, but this is only because there was a law on the books that no 2 homes on the same block could use the same floor-plan or facade, and each house had to be designed independently by an architect. That plus aggressive rules about how homes and properties have to be maintained.

It's a great place to live, but it's not without its cost. Surely it would be more efficient to print out a bunch of template homes, but if you want distinctive architecture you have to prioritize it.

Ya, OP is wisdom-free whinge fest.

From the OP:

"Historically, political and economic dominance have dictated building styles."

Well, ya. But what of the material and technical?

I'm very interested in differences. Yayaya, everything's the same. Hegemony, "kids these days", and other old saws.

But things are also different. If you look long enough, close enough.

Why?

Even in the small, differences are really very interesting, can have far reaching impacts.

I've been slowly remodeling my house, built in the 50s. The 30 years I've owned this house, the available materials, technologies, and products have greatly changed. Frankly, it's hard for a noob casual like me to keep up.

But even with my limited awareness, I can see how each new innovation impacts new construction. For better or worse, depending on one's esthetics.

These differences percolate out.

One of the few perks of getting older is the opportunity to see the changes on a longer time scale.

This is true-ish. Building techniques have a lot of regional factors. How much rainfall do you get? Does the ground freeze? Is the ground dry and solid enough for basements? Do you need to worry about heating, cooling, or both? Humidity? There are a lot of practical reasons for architecture to differ from place to place even today.

At the same time, materials are more homogenous because more of them are engineered and shipped across the country, so that contributes to some homogeniety, as does the media environment.

The point is the perception, not the reality.

Yeah I think there are economies of scale at work here, similar to how Hollywood designs blockbusters to be globally marketable (https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53676789).

Maybe this article was the one? https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-...

Your comment made the think: The Atlantic, the Verge, Vox, New Yörker, they all sound the same to me. Whenever I pick up a magazine these days, I don't know what I'm reading.

My other thought is that bouncing between cities is the unusual activity here. Maybe after sleeping in so many hotels or airbnbs, the brain no longer has a sense of place and gets confused. I'm sure universal IKEA-decor helps, but why do we expect to jet around and visit so many different places and feel connected to them. In most cases people are busy and stressed, moving around without getting to know the place, just to hop in a car, go to a meeting, then back to the hotel or airport. Maybe that's what the brain is having trouble with.

It's interesting that this is the outcome of capitalism considering it was always a point used to ridicule communism. That and the deep state espionage which we've also got now.

I don't.

I'm of the opinion that optimization is a natural enemy of variety and diversity. Our businesses, economy, and more encroachingly, culture, are dictated by the requirement for many to optimize on cost and ROI. As such, we converge on all but a few well established optimized processes we essentially copy and repeat. Occasionally "disruptive" strategies emerge and find a new, better cost/ROI optimization solution.

Variety and diversity on the other hand need to be able to discard cost/ROI focused optimization. They need to be inefficient/"wasteful", they need to take time and more resources because they're new or their fundamental variance that makes them appealing are defined by their very state of being sub-optimal. They need to be able to fail and iterate, not fail and die.

I'm a proponent of optimizing on certain factors like cost, time, space and so forth under certain conditions, but I think we need to stand back as humans and be mindful of processes we seek to optimize and ask if some of them are factors we really want to optimize on. Do we want more square footage so we can cram another person or piece of furniture in or do we want to change our target optimization to include aesthetic appeal, variety, mental health... and so forth. We have our priorities way off as a society, I'd argue, and those priorities are being less of a choice and more of a mandate for many.

Right now we're on a runaway freight train across society to optimize on cost and ignore everything else. This pandemic is sure to expedite that problem with the economic toll its taken. That cost saving/ROI optimization strategy, in our economic system, will "win" most times over other choices. If we are able to relax the financial constraints of many, then we can use that slack to focus on other factors that aren't always cost and profit driven.

I'll concede that most US cities are probably not worth traveling to for the architecture alone. most US cities I've visited do have some hidden gems though. it's not stuff you'd easily find researching for a vacation though. when possible, I try to stay with a friend who already lives in the place I want to travel too. I've always been pleasantly surprised by what a city has to offer when I travel this way.

> There's a despair here that I bet the French or Portuguese have a perfect word for.

Why those languages? I'd imagine that kind of dispair would be the specialty of German or some East European language.

I've traveled most of the US on wheels and I feel this. I have an intense urge to take my oldest car on a long unplanned roadtrip just for the adventure of doing it, but I never go because 'Where would I go? It's all an interstate and a bunch of nothing new". Yes, there are small towns, but even through those you have to drive 15hs to find something that stands out.

What they don't tell you in movies about the American roadtrip in a convertible is that it's really long no matte where you go and really boring for the most part.

"C'est déprimant ici" is what I usually say when I enter any midsize US city.

I don't see European cities going this way, people care about architecture there. Just look south of the border how Mexico has a lot of beautiful cities.

Funny - as someone in Europe that has spent time in the US I kinda see the opposite. I wonder if some psychological biases are at play here.

To me my home country feels all very regular and the US has strong styles to where I could pick out an American town from most other countries. But to you the opposite is probably true, USA towns seem all very normal and regular to you.

I can't help but feel like this is a result of capitalist optimization, melting pot culture, and declining religious adherents among other factors. In other words: the cities are reflections of the individual level, where diversity in all it's meanings continue to decrease. Much of the biggest differences between the Midwest and the South or the East Coast and the West are summed up to first order economically - some areas are cheaper, have fewer restaurants and jobs, and vice versa. There's little serious cultural difference between these areas relative to the "interesting areas".

Homogenization begins at the people level, and America is increasingly homogenized at the surface level.

"At least we're not Detroit!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM

Haha, like NYC and SF are so different.

I think DC is the exception here. Most cities are cookie cutter buildings downtown, with the same restaurants. Out towards the suburbs its cookie cutter strip malls and the same restaurants. Oklahoma and Texas feel a little more unique since they tend to have a local set of franchises.

Can't speak of DC but I feel that even culturally, large cities have more in common with each other than they do with the sparesly populated regions in their own countries.

London, Paris, NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, KL, Singapore, Cape Town, Shanghai, Buenos Aires... Same same but different.

I agree that DC seems more unique to me than other cities. It's done a good job of retaining it's historical architecture almost everywhere. The Navy Yard is the only area I can think of that's switched over to the modern glass style, but even there the height restrictions result in buildings that look a bit different from the glass skyscrapers of other cities.

Both DC and Seattle are old cities where growth has happened recently. So the new build is shaped or at least influenced by the surroundings.

It's easiest to look at new places, or rapid growth places since 1960. You need to look regional vs. "the city". The areas around Atlanta are a great example. The area around the Atlanta Braves stadium exemplifies modern development -- a shopping mall posing as a city, with Comcast, a theatre and the baseball stadium as anchor tenants. The assembly square area just north of Boston is a similar thing.

Philosophically, on one extreme you have a real "organic" city like NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc. On the other you have a corporate campus or malls that started popping up in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern development requires much more capital, so you end up with bland campus/mall environments controlled by one big entity. Once developers scale out, you end up with more vacancies, etc as it makes business sense to leave storefronts vacant due to tax law and other factors.

Even outside of big developments, modern buildings turn out to be a hybrid. End users don't own the buildings, so the REIT/leaseholder/developer wants it to look as prestigious as the market demand as cheap as possible. So lots of cheap glass and stucco to quack like a nice building. Usually the fittings, doors, etc are garbage. Best example of this is a medical arts building. The nicer ones will have a weird sculpture, but everything else in public areas are the cheapest available materials from the carpet tile to the elevators. CFOs managing a portfolio of 2,000 buildings see value in saving $0.08/square foot on carpet tile.

I'm from the same places. Definitely some overlaps, but IMO the big difference is the weather and the culture. All them security clearance types right next to one of the worst ghettos in the US vs. Seattle's Portlandia-light + Amazon/Boeing/Sbux/MS money all over the place. SLU is sooo much nicer than a lot of DC, save for maybe parts of Georgetown.

I recently did a cross country drive and there are some cities that stand out, but a whole lot that blend in. There were moments where I was looking around unsure if I was in Nashville, Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, Kansas City, or Des Moines. Anywhere that has a renovated or new "hip downtown" area with wood framed 1+4 (1 floor for retail and 4 of "luxury" apartments) painted in bright Ikea colors.

Yeah... I just can't agree with the premise of this article

I've spent sizable chunks of my life in DC, NYC, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Barcelona, and Bangkok. These cities all feel wildly different to me.

COVID is gonna kill the small local joints. Large chains, or well-entrenched local places are the only ones that will survive. Over time, they take over.

Post-COVID is going to look like a cyberpunk dystopia.

I wonder how much the locals thought the same thing when the Dutch East India company setup shop.

What goes around, comes around.

For now.

Even Europe has seen a great deal of architectural convergence. The Nordic style, for example, spread from Finland to the surrounding countries, and if one has known the Baltic countries since the 1990s, one marvels at how in the post-Soviet era they have begun to converge architecturally, and in terms of certain aspects of urban planning, towards the Nordic countries.

within Europe I would tend to agree, if you stay in city centres - it's just old buildings with churches, narrow streets and cobblestones, you could hardly distinguish the countries if it weren't for language, which makes sense considering how compact Europe is

but if you compare European, African and East Asian city you can clearly see differences

What is really consumerist about it is that it is the ultimate first world problem in treating minor inconveniences as grand oppression and demanding the world change how it operates alienated, smuggly alienated from the realities of production and calling themselves enlightened for it.

Get a disgruntled real estate developer with a few drinks in them to lower inhibitions and demand make less homogenous housing. Prepare for an earsplitting rant about every last detail they need to go through from economies of scale, cost of getting it, to building codes to zoning approval processes and meetings as they lack and the utter presumptious cluelessness of the demand from someone practically irrelevant to the whole process.

Our needs as humans are mostly the same, as are our wants. Thus chains to fill the same needs the same way everywhere.

> The destruction of culture is an important part of progress.

You lost me here.

> This is seen as unfortunate for the viewers on the outside but swapping a ramshackle house that floods for a brick box that works and access to McDonald's is a godsend for the occupants.

Do some reading about all of the terrible things large fast food conglomerates have done to our food supply. Cheap food is easy to get in places like India -- rice and dahl for what would be pennies in USD -- and eradicating their culture via McDicks benefits no one.

> Now the (physical) Irish pub delivered in a shipping container has gone to a (designed) shipping container Irish pub.

This sounds like all of the worst parts of Irish drinking culture, inside a metal container, and without any of the things that make Irish pubs appealing, such as old crackpot sods who've sat at the same stool for ~20+ years.

I guess people in Barcelona, Venice and Prague would disagree, this is really the best side effect of coronavirus despite the loss of income

I will rather have less frequent public transport to save money the whole city (center) occupied by tourists

"Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars."

Easy. Tourism generates sales tax revenue, keeps storefronts occupied and employs people.

It's relatively non-polluting and leads to growth in amenities that can also be enjoyed by locals.

Naive economics: it's good for us when foreigners come here, give us money, and then leave.

The services industry is highly sought after in general. It is very labour dependant rather than industrial. With tourism, it cannot be off-shored. Plus, increased foot traffic brings vibrancy to the city. More arts and culture, parks, museums, restaurants, etc.

They want job growth but building up a sustainable knowledge based service sector (and to a lesser degree) a skilled manufacturing sector is really hard. You need high quality universities, some mechanism to attract talented people, a thoughtful tax structure, multiple large companies willing to relocate for bootstrapping, infrastructure for startups, and an industry that isn't highly centralized around existing hubs (you're not going to be the biotech place when Boston and SF already are, for example).

Building up a tourism sector to generate jobs is trivial in comparison and it's a idea everyone can wrap their heads around without any specific domain knowledge.

In the 1980s they told me it goes back to the 1960s. It is safe to assume the the grandkids of the first humans said much the same. And their grandparents complained that kids these days dont know how to behave like they did when I was a kid...