Nice Downtowns: How Did They Get That Way? People Made Them
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.
Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous.
The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.
The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.
Liveable downtowns are definitely a matter of policy, not history.
It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel
I'm perpetually amazed at what people can be condescending about.
The Union Squarea?
Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse.
As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.
The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.
Many Western European countries like the Netherlands we have seen the same pattern of the white middle classes fleeing to new suburbs whilst the old city neighborhoods got taken over by newcomers.
And it is still how things are in many cities. Whilst the city center may have been revived and gentrified and looking all lovely and touristy, the surrounding neighborhoods are often dominated by poor immigrants, whilst the original lower middle class and working class lives in the suburbs.
The only options in the city for the ordinary "white" families are neighborhoods they can't afford and neighborhoods they don't want to live in. Sounds familiar?
I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s...
Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.
Was the problem really cleaned up, or was it just flushed away?
By and large, we made it illegal to be poor in the city.
> In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it’s still on the books there its enforced here. “The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece.” When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.
Yeah, that's a pile of shit: http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059964426.
TL;DR version: they were arrested and convicted for importing over $15 million in illegal lobster tails. The plastic versus cardboard boxes issue is a red herring--it was the means by which they concealed the undersized tails, not the primary basis for prosecution. As for the Honduran law--the Court of Appeals determined that the Honduran law was in fact valid during the relevant time period. Moreover, the Lacey Act only criminalizes importing animals harvested in violation of a foreign law when the importer knows or should know about the law. The prosecution proved that the defendants took measures to conceal the undersized tails and evade inspectors.
People love to fixate on the "undersized lobster" part of this story, but that's an irrelevant detail. The important fact is that all fishermen were required to take lobsters under a specific set of rules, and report their compliance with those rules. This particular fisherman cheated the rest of the market by ignoring those rules.
Nobody bats an eyelid when "banksters" are convicted and serve sentences† for violating rules far more abstract and far less connected to real-world consequences than overfishing regulations.
† yes, this actually happens, probably more often than it does to fishermen
In fact, most people think it's weird that I live downtown. It's definitely not a common choice around here.
It is largely true that young tech workers want to live "in the city" (as opposed to in the suburbs), but (at least in Seattle) that means one of the "cool" neighborhoods in the city, not downtown.
That's a much, much larger area than the central/financial/business district and it might be what the author actually means: especially with how Belltown has changed.
There are no schools downtown, there aren't affordable apartments with enough space for kids, which essentially siphons the entire kid-oriented group out of downtown for their condos/houses. The high end stuff downtown is high end, so you get an entire coterie of very rich traveling place to place in their cars from the parking garages, as near as I can tell.
Pike Place is cool, but largely a tourist trap.
So I think maybe the author of the essay should roll down the CBD about 7pm on a Tuesday night and think about his piece.... :-) might have a few corrections.
That's a good thing, it keeps prices down.
I live on 1st & Union.
Everything is next door:
- the market, Target, Kress, dry cleaners, all downtown stores
- all the bus lines stop on 3rd, 4th or 5th
- the light rail station is 2 blocks away
- numerous bars and restaurants in a 3 blocks radius
- Belltown is 5 min away
- Capitol Hill is 15 min away
- Pioneer Square is 10 min away
- the waterfront is 2 min away
It is a bargain compared to other neighborhoods.
After my trip I told people that Seattle seemed to have a "fake downtown" to me. This was mostly because of how dead it seemed to me. I stayed in a downtown hotel and walked around the city for a few days and my overwhelming feeling was nothingness (other than Pike Place market).
Since we've moved from no one living in downtown to lots of 20-somethings living in downtown, I hope eventually that will eventually turn into people living and staying in downtown.
> 'downtown' isn't a terribly attractive area.
> midtown
Midtown is not downtown: Hence the name midtown - it's about midway between downtown and uptown.
Most people would consider the villages as the start of downtown.
We call them infills here. Watch for residential development popping up around you. Seattle is ripe.
It is a long-term commitment to mixed used development, walkable streets, view corridors for everyone, public parks within walking distance, and mass public transit into and out of the core.
Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs. There are many people that have no interest in living in an expensive downtown apartment. If you start to lose the small percentage of the population that desires and can afford the downtown lifestyle, it will either on the vine regardless of the amount of planning that goes into them.
this is true not just of the downtown. Cities die because the money stops. The suburbs don't keep on thriving after the industry collapses
> or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs
Not enough investment in downtown and urban spaces can be a contributing factor to this. People move to the suburbs because the suburbs are nicer than the urban core, which causes a cascading effect as the urban core empties and becomes even less desirable. If you make downtown a desirable place, you'll stem some of the shift to suburbia.
Some people prefer their peaceful cookie cut house and desire nothing much to do with the big cities. More often then not it's zoning, job availability, and affordability.
It's not that common to want wide open fields in front of you. On top of that, it's not that expensive to get a big chunk of land in the middle of nowhere.
What you are describing is a culture that already dislikes being downtown but is only there because the transit sucks. That's not a sign of a healthy downtown.
The very presence of freeways drives people away because they are noisy eyesores and impediments to local travel. In Seattle, I-5 cuts across the street grid and separates downtown from Capital Hill and First Hill, while the Alaskan Way Viaduct cuts downtown off from the waterfront. If both of these were removed (I-5 could take a bypass route around the Seattle city center using what is now I-405), downtown Seattle would be much more livable and would have better traffic on account of being able to reconnect the street grid.
The presence of freeways does not drive away people. If that were true there would be no freeways in any populated location.
If you remove all freeways it would impede people's ability to visit and make the downtown less crowded. Perhaps that's your intention.
Today the area is hot enough that it commands rents comparable to SF & Manhattan. The median rent for the area is $3,200 and one bedrooms in newer construction (w/o an ocean view!) can go for $5k.
i like to think of santa monica as an improved version of san francisco, with the rest of los angeles attached as a bonus. if you live and work (i.e. no commute) in santa monica, it's easily the highest quality of life in urban california, and i've lived in pacific heights, downtown san diego, and central LA proper.
If you bicycle around Santa Monica/Venice there's not much going on compared to SF. Sure you could hop in your car and drive to Hollywood, DTLA, or other parts of the city but that's not really the same as the work/live urban core ideal.
It took a long time, but for nearly fifty years this effort has carried on, successfully I think, but hardly anyone recalls that the origins of the effort were very deliberate and came about when the nighttime downtown was the precise opposite of what it is today, and few people probably think of it as involving a conscious goal then or now. They just think "that's the way Seattle is." But Seattle wasn't.
This should remind us of yesterday's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400259) about the importance of long-term planning. The good things about today came about because people decades ago consciously made efforts to make them happen. The good things that are to come—light rail, bike lanes, reasonable rents that stem from increasing housing supply—are only going to come if people consciously make efforts to make them happen.
See also Zero to One (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-an...).
For those not familiar with the VTA, I'll just say that it's the kind of light rail system that passes by the airport, but the closest stop to the terminal is more than a mile's walk away.