Low-income, high-density housing attracts problems. It has literally nothing to do with race. You could guarantee that the high-rise apartment building you want to construct down the street from me would be 100% filled with people who look like me, and I'd still oppose it.
Keep your YIMBY nonsense IYBY.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
If that makes you feel uncomfortable, so be it.
Americans spend zillions of dollars every year visiting Europe, which is full of high density housing. And come home raving about how much they love it. It does not 'cause problems'.
Every time I’ve seen this type of argument brought up, it’s fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built here because it does end up working. We’re really not so unique.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Look up the US Census definition of "urban." In the town where I live, three houses around me are on 100 acres collectively--not to mention even more adjacent conservation land and that's classified as urban because it's near a smaller old mill town and only about 50 miles from a major city.
Which doesn’t mean that the same infrastructure you’d see in a dense European city would make sense in your town, mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren’t as incomparable as some people seem to think.
About an hour drive from a major city.
Though not that different really from small English countryside towns I've walked through.
It seemed bizarre that even "one strip mall" towns didn't have certain categories of business. Down in the south, you can't measure a mile without hitting two serviceable Tex-Mex restaurants.
Up north? The nearest Tex-Mex is often 30 minutes away, and the nearest pizza place (which often isn't great) is 20 minutes.
>Adopting 500 persons per square mile (PPSM) as the minimum density criterion for recognizing some types of urban territory.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/24/2022-06...
Which basically means anything "town-like" or higher is "urban".
So most Americans live in urban areas even if they are in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.
Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your expectations.
I think it would be good to do away with these simplistic this or that doesn't work here because... The US society was remodelled quite dramatically to be very car centred over a very short time and now people say that it can't be any other way because of the geography? The US was literally different 70-80 years ago.
The amount of violent criminality? Look at any major light rail network in America and they are nowhere near as safe as the European equivalents.
And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID when voting, I’d get an endless stream of replies about why that’s fundamentally impossible in the US (and racist, naturally). And that’s a FAR easier problem to solve than pie-in-the-sky “make everything more dense and have high speed rail everywhere and European-style public transit in every city” daydreams that are so popular.
Maybe some things really aren’t that easy to do in the US.
Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches, community recreation centers, and schools.
The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress turnout under the guise of "election security".
That correlation may be because of historic and current structural racism, lack of access to mental health services and a social safety net, or a myriad of other socio-economic issues, but it doesn't change the fact that it exists.
Insinuating that anyone who brings up those issues is racist isn't helpful.
It would be more productive to say "Yes, I understand why neighborhoods might be resistant to denser, low-income tolerant development, and here are some ways we could incorporate that fact into a productive plan..." E.g. building more mixed-income developments.
Like with most policies, the details are much more nuanced.
Check out the history of the Gropiusstadt in Berlin:
Look to Vienna’s social housing program for an example of this done very well. That doesn’t look like it attracts problems, now does it?
How exactly is it best for the well-off? I'm curious what pros and cons it would have for them.
Historically, the decline of most late-stage empires was triggered by spiraling economic bifurcation.
Sometimes, it's better to be less wealthy but on top of an ordered country vs more wealthy and without the rule of law as society breaks down.
Restaurants are shutting down for want of workers. Because they can't afford it.
Low income workers provide valuable services in our communities. Telling them they can't live where they work creates all kinds of problems, both social and environmental - they often drive in to do those jobs, creating more pollution and traffic.
It's much easier to hire and retain staff for your business when your pool of potential employees isn't a 30+ minute bus ride away.
For the well-off residents, it means better and more consistent service at their neighborhood grocery, coffee shop, restaurant, pharmacy, etc.
The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure, investors won't want to build a 30 stories building.
But they might want to build a 3-4 units building, something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY densification is impossible.
You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see giant cement buildings. But you do see livable neighbourhood with buildings that are just slightly higher than the norm and can house multiple families.
Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people infect with your ideas turns to hell.
If you’re talking new suburbs of existing cities, well, that’s basically the only expansion we’ve done in many places. Some problems with that:
- It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right now).
- If the implication is that you’re building outward because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to live in (which will happen if they don’t densify at all and the population grows), then you’re basically forcing most kids to move far away from their parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won’t want to live near their family but many do, and being able to maintain those close family ties feels important.