I agree with the author that the real estate agent described something most people want, and not necessarily what the author himself wanted. I think it's unfortunate that the agent didn't hear what the author wanted and just pointed him to the general public's preference anyway.
However, I disagree with his take that America's housing development model is to develop into outskirt suburbs, let middle class move in, let it deteriorate in 30 years, and build more outskirts.
Now, maybe I live in California and things are different. In the bay area even old areas with very old houses rise in values, and in fact, they rise more than newer developments. Demand for housing everywhere in the bay area + surrounding areas are high regardless of how new they are and how deep in town or out in the outskirts they are. Areas developed 30+ years ago continue to have high demand from middle to wealthy families. These areas didn't just not deteriorate but have grown into larger and more modern areas and in some cases developed their own downtown.
Admittedly California and bay area specifically is probably a bubble and behaves differently than much of America. But I have a feeling more than a few popular cities are going through something similar. Appleton might not be, and maybe he's right that the new development outskirts will deteriorate in 30 years, but I doubt that'll be the case in new developments around Phoenix or Denver.
Yes, this is different. Not because you live in California but because you live in the bay area. Urbanization has been so intense that a lot of large metro areas have avoided this fate. The land values rise so high that it becomes "worth it" to fix up the houses. The author alludes to this when talking about how some downtown lots with high enough real estate value are refurbished while those without it are dozed.
But this is not the case throughout the vast spread of rural towns in America. Some are shrinking, some are stagnant and some are growing but still not sustaining land prices that unlock the capital necessary to significantly overhaul structures.
I have family in rural Texas so I drive through lots of rural towns a couple times a year. I can confirm that the OP's story of urban decay sounds very familiar (though in many of the ones that I see, there is no up-and-coming suburban edge).
Interestingly, a similar pattern can be found in places like Dallas. You very much get that layering of suburbs where the outermost is all new and shiny, and the further inwards you go the more decayed it is. But of course it's Dallas, so towards the center you don't get a ghost town, you get a concrete jungle with grass poking through the cracks in the pavement, where everyone wants to work in the high-rises there but nobody wants to actually live there. This is the type of "decay" that gradually expands outward into the formerly-desirable suburbs.
Yes, it's a different story in the metros that are constrained by geography. Everywhere around the urban core basically is being refurbished. All the small towns that used to sit the edge of the Seattle urban area have redone their sidewalks, added community centers etc. The homes are restored. Even working class neighborhoods have landscaping on most lots.
Seattle basically has a couple areas that are considered bad and you can buy some affordable land there. Everywhere else is getting tons of private and public money dumped into it.
High land prices don't "unlock" capital, they drain it away from productive use. All other things being equal, it would be far more preferable to have cheaper land - in fact, urban renewal often occurs in cheaper areas, with negative gentrification setting in later as land prices spike upwards due to speculation.
High land prices don't happen in a vacuum and then just magically drain productivity, they reflect demand. And demand from people with lots money generally means an area that is already currently productive - so wishing a productive area could have lower land prices is a bit of a non-starter. The limiting factor for the prices isn't policy, it's the availability of land (here Texas cities have a big advantage over coastal California ones that have to deal with mountains and oceans). DFW airport is over half the size of the whole city of SF, and larger than Manhattan. That sort of excess of availability is how you end up with cheaper land.
They unlock capital for homeowners by giving them something to borrow against.
In my 1980 built neighborhood there are three kinds of homeowners.
1) Low income longtime owners who can't renovate and are being replaced
2) Long time middle income residents who can't cash flow remodel but who can afford to borrow thanks to high appreciation.
3) New, affluent owners who buy houses that have been renovated or buy a house and cash flow renovation or take a massive mortgage (again largely backed by the high land value) and renovate.
If your community's land prices haven't appreciated significantly then a lot of the capital you would access for refurbishment isn't available. That removes in place renovators and your community faces two fates. Slow blight as original owners exceed their most productive years or replacement as affluent buyers move in.
It might be a thriving city vs smaller town thing. Thriving cities outside of California (say Atlanta or Dallas) have valuable real estate in central locations just like in California cities. Nobody wants to be on the furthest outskirts with the furthest commute - it's more just an exhaust valve for growth so you don't get the same absolutely insane prices and resulting problems like homelessness to the same level.
> Thriving cities outside of California (say Atlanta or Dallas) have valuable real estate in central locations just like in California cities.
Unless things have really changed recently, this isn't true of, say Houston. It was mostly sprawl for most people, and no real functional inner core. There is the inner-loop vs outside, but it really isn't the same dynamic as other big metros (NB LA is it's own weirdness).
I'm not as familiar with Houston in particular, but I think the important note for most of these places is that while there are expensive "central locations" that isn't the same as saying prices are centered in downtown (which in many cities comes from a legacy of racist policy/actions, though this is rather aside from the point of them being different from what the article linked here describes about a constant outward-migration and abandonment cycle, vs a particular moment in history). In Dallas and Atlanta, those areas are largely north of downtown. In LA, they're largely west. IIRC Austin and San Antonio had hot spots in the northern parts of the city too, but I'm less up to date there.
To me "expensive suburb/exurb" is really not comparable to urban density. If all you are talking about are fancy HOAs and gated communities then I think it's a different beast.
> Now, maybe I live in California and things are different.
You live in California and things are different. You live there because you want to be in a specific location and near a some-what-specific crowd of people for work reasons.
In the rest of the country, (most of it), that is not the consideration people have.
| All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn.
Planning prior to 1990s was predicated on the assumption of continued upward mobility, middle class persistence and strength of US production of goods and services (a/k/a wealth).
Instead, the US exported all of that to China, and praised its new service-led, consumer-based, greener economy. Of all the self-inflicted (likely fatal) wounds inflicted upon great societies throughout history, the civic ignorance (and arrogance) of our body politic is the greatest.
This is such a dumb quote, because obviously they are creating a lot of value for customers as well. It's easy to blame "rich shareholders" and ignore our own impact via consumerism. Especially when many Americans themselves are shareholders through retirement plans.
"obviously they are creating a lot of value for customers as well"
Or not. It's been well over a decade (more or less since I've been economically independent) that I've been trying to avoid cheap, made in a death camp consumer goods, but they generally don't exist. What little does exist is geared towards the super wealthy.
I don't want a cheap fridge with WiFi. I want a good one
I don't want fast fashion. I want timeless
I don't want a new cellphone every other year. My SE works fine
There's no escaping it though. Not only have the blue collar middle class jobs disappeared. The middle class quality goods have gone too - there is no Kenmore no more.
"Shareholder value" seems to be concentrated in industries that serve wants rather that needs.
Basic clothing, food & shelter might have large cash flows, but they don't have the profit potential needed to have "shareholder value" compared with consumerist industries.
To put it another way, we could satisfy most human needs with little associated "shareholder value" by meeting those needs efficiently.
Let them eat cake was a monarch's response to being told the starving poor had no bread. She offered to let them eat cake, as that's what she had been eating.
Your version would only make sense if the rich were previously serving lattes.
I'm pretty sure it was a silly joke. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" (brioche is a light pastry bread) is unlikely to have actually been said by Mme Antoinette anyways.
"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", said to have been spoken in the 17th or 18th century by "a great princess" upon being told that the peasants had no bread.
I'm not sure what your point is exactly. You italicize peasants as if that's a meaningful distinction from what I stated. I used the term "starving poor" in place of peasants.
Can anyone explain the "We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship" expression? I understand the overall point of the article, but I'm having trouble parsing the last paragraph, where he seems to assume that one reading of that expression is somehow obvious. Is it the ship that's ephemeral, or the iceberg? (It seems like a reference to the Titanic, and at least in my mind, both the Titanic and the iceberg were ephemeral.)
The author isn't going for direct metaphor. But it appears to be around the concept that icebergs eventually melt. So if you were traveling/floating on an iceberg it would eventually go away. A well built ship on the other hand could last indefinitely or much longer at least.
I think you've nailed it - I was racking my brain connecting the article with any interpretation of the poem, rather than the literal text. This feels closer to using Mending Wall to justify a taller border fence.
Yeah, it’s not very clear to me either. From my reading, the poem is comparing the overwhelming majesty and elegance of the natural iceberg to the comparatively shoddy man-made vessel. But it’s open to interpretation.
The author definitely doesn’t do themselves any favors, though, by making an analogy with a fairly obscure poem and not even bothering to explain it.
After reading the poem, I agree that it's open to interpretation, but I also wonder whether the author of the linked article has really thought about what the poem means.
As far as I can tell, the poem seems to be about how icebergs exist in some majestic perpetual space of recurrence. The first stanza talks about how icebergs are impermanent, melt and eventually turn into rain ("Are you aware an iceberg takes repose / With you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?") but then the last stanza talks about how they perpetually arise again ("Like jewelry from a grave / It saves itself perpetually").
If anything, the poem seems like it would be perfect for referring to America's perpetual capacity to reinvent itself -- i.e., areas may fall into decay but then are rebuilt, much like urban Detroit is enjoying a revival -- not the more pessimistic take of the author of the piece.
> All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn. Crank out new stuff, sell it fast, cash out, and move on to the next project. Blighted neighborhoods aren’t an accident. They’re baked in to every facet of how we do everything.
I'm surprised there isn't more pushback here about the author's central premise, which is very flawed in my view.
I've never found what he is saying to be true at all, even in the real estate market. I live in a 40-year-old house that I bought 5 years ago, and its value has only increased. Before that I lived in another 40-year-old house in a thriving and busy market. Some of the most expensive places to live in my area date to the 1930's-1960's - I know, because my realtor showed them to me last time we moved.
The author states that this is some kind of universal truth about America, but it's not.
I'm in Canada so with a grain of salt. My house is 45y old, and it was a cheap house to begin with. All the maintenance is done, roof replaced, stucco redone, we've done renos, elec is up to code. However when you look at the yearly appraisal, the house value keeps dropping year by year. They add a little line here and there to keep into account the renos done in the last 5 years. The only thing that grows is land value, which more than makes up for the house.
I can totally see that were we not in a pressured market, value would go done; and America is not at a saturation point where land is a big concern as a rule.
> I've never found what he is saying to be true at all, even in the real estate market. I live in a 40-year-old house that I bought 5 years ago, and its value has only increased. Before that I lived in another 40-year-old house in a thriving and busy market. Some of the most expensive places to live in my area date to the 1930's-1960's - I know, because my realtor showed them to me last time we moved.
There's no contradiction between an area being blighted and expensive. I've seen incredibly crappy neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York that were extremely expensive and clearly was in need of work.
> There's no contradiction between an area being blighted and expensive.
I'm not sure what kind of "blight" you are talking about, but the author was focused on real estate values for older locations being very low:
>Half the original structures were so devalued that they were torn down and replaced with surface parking lots
>The building had been on the market for a very long time with no bids. It eventually sold a few months ago for $65,000. For comparison, here’s a review of a $65,000 luxury 2021 Ram pickup truck.
Yeah, if you define "blight" as "I don't like how the place looks," then there are probably a lot of "extremely expensive" places that are "blighted." But I don't think that's what the author was talking about.
My previous house was built in 1902. It had lots of issues. We lived in it for almost six years, loved the place and its character. I sold it for 50% more than I bought it. It never made it on the market before the contract was signed.
I agree with you, taking rural Wisconsin as somehow exemplary, I think the author is really just observing the 80 year slow decline of small town America. I live in a bigger metro of around 1M and though we have never succeeded in bringing downtown back to what it was there are at least 4 distinct layers of neighborhoods- the 1900s streetcar neighborhoods, the postwar suburbs, the 80s developments, and the contemporary (post 2000) redevelopment of the postwar areas. These areas are all being bought up and rennovated rapidly. I would have loved to restore an old bungalow type house but they essentially all are rennovated and sell for a much higher price. There was a lot of development of suburbs and exburbs around the 2000s that has virtually come to a halt. Its all infill developmemt and rennovation now. I live in a 50s house and my sister in a 1910s house and both are fine.
Maybe he's being inaccurately hyperbolic by saying "all" and "exclusively". I'd agree that your disagreement there is reasonable. But I wonder, if he said "90% of our institutions" instead, how would you feel about his claims?
It seems that core areas sometimes go the way you're describing, but no peripheral areas do, and we're building a lot more of them, but no more cores.
As a non-American... this model is crazy in my mind.
How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Is it entirely driven by the fact that local taxes decline on the outskirts? If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps? Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable, and owners have to build for 100 years in greenfields?
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City).
That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper.
1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars.
2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you.
3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state.
4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities.
5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.
I agree with all of your points in general, but I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.
I love density and urban living. I've lived in lots of apartments over the years. I currently live in a single family home. Having a house and a yard is absolutely awesome:
1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.
2. I have green space that I have autonomy over. Shared parks are nice for being a passive consumer of green space. But a personal yard means I get to be an active participant in its horticulture. I can garden, which has shown repeatedly over the years to be good for mental health.
3. I have more windows that let in more natural light when I'm inside. My living space is more seamlessly connected to the outdoors. I get natural light on all sides of the structure.
4. It's easier and more efficient to let my dog out in my own fenced yard.
I don't think people need huge sprawling yards to get most of this benefit. The UK model where everyone has a little garden behind the house is probably sufficient. But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.
Having loved high-density cosmopolitan places, I confirm it’s not baked in American values but it’s based on actual benefits:
- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.
- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.
- Also, the costs.
So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.
> Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization.
So are suburbs, but they just represent a more exclusive collectivism. Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools. In prosperous suburbs, it's just collectivism with a minimum net worth or income requirement.
> “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble).
Sounds like you had a bad urban experience with people "different" than you. That sucks, but it doesn't speak for everyone's urban experience.
> Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools.
Sure. But depending on where you land, you can avoid HOAs, architectural design review boards, neighbor comment periods, 24-month permit delays, EIRs, etc. The red tape ("community involvement", if you prefer) involved in living in a city like SF is nothing like what it is in the suburbs, not even the crazy Stepford ones like Irvine.
> 1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.
This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!
The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.
Oh, I like SFHs too, but my new-build home in London was sound-proofed to the gills. I ran into the neighbours at the lifts one day and they apologized for their kids shrieking "they've been awful this weekend, I'm sorry". I hadn't heard a thing. I could hear the river boats and everything with my window open (faced the Thames) but I never heard a peep out of a neighbour.
American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.
Of course. But having done multiple iterations of both, I will never, ever share walls again. With neighbors I can plant a hedge or close the facing windows. It’s not even close.
I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment.
A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.
Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.
I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing.
Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.
> But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.
Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.
The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed. So, you need a garage. And probably enough space for two cars, not one.
You want to walk? Great! Except that you have to cross several 4 lane highways because we have to accommodate all those cars. And, that's assuming you have somewhere you want to walk to within a reasonable distance.
You don't have a car so you want some big thing delivered? Hope you can wait 2 months and can take off an entire day from work.
> Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.
It's definitely hard to untangle the affects of cars on city planning from single family homes, but I don't think the two are inextricably intertwined. There are many places and have been many time periods with plenty of both single family homes and public transit use.
> The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed.
I live in a single family home in a very walkable city with plenty of public transit. I park on the street and have never been towed or had my truck broken into. These days because of COVID, I rarely drive more than once a month. Even before the pandemic, I usually biked to work and left my truck parked on the street for weeks without using it.
I think you're exaggerating to say that single family homes push towards giant two-car garages. There are lots and lots of single family homes that are not in sprawling suburbia.
of course Americans like single family homes. I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. They are appealing by definition. But are single family homes good for society? They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country. It's not that some "nefarious organization" hoodwinked people - they are a devil's bargain that nobody had the foreknowledge to contain.
> I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. ... But are single family homes good for society?
Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?
> They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country.
Efficiency is not a first-order goal of society. The maximally efficient society would kill all of its citizens. Everyone walks into the oceans. Plenty of free food for the fish and no human consumption whatsoever.
The goal of society is to provide meaningful happiness to its members efficiently. It doesn't strictly increase efficiency to simply take away things people want.
Drunk driving hurts innocent people, thus preventing them from attaining what they love.
If heroin use leads to crime then maybe it could be forbidden for similar reasons. Or if the government can determine that people don't love heroin and instead only use it as an escape or due to addiction, then forbidding it might help those people to attain what they actually love.
if everyone in the world was living in a single family home, American style, we'd be completely doomed. There's no justifying the waste of our lifestyles. Is there any evidence people in Asia or Europe, where single family homes were not allowed to run rampant, are less "meaningfully happy" than Americans?
Our inefficiency is unsustainable and is on pace to destroy the climate, how can that possibly be construed as providing maximal happiness? Short-term happiness for lucky US citizens, maybe.
> I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.
People have agency over their preferences? Then why do people ever have trouble dieting? Wouldn't it be easier to just want to eat canned beans/spam/nutritious mush to keep you healthy? Why are they sad when they cannot afford something? Why don't they just stop wanting it?
I think there's one other major factor you're entirely overlooking here: cost. NIMBYism and bad zoning lead to that a lot of US cities with housing far, far more expensive than similar places in many other countries.
Mostly agree, but disagree slightly with number 5. In most places, it is illegal to build any denser. Town zoning laws are notoriously slow to change such that they do not keep up with the market and actually codify a lot of these problems in their regulations.
The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
So when you get densification in US cities, it happens in districts that were formerly industrial/commercial only - where people aren't giving up the form of their existing neighborhoods - or in poor areas with little political organization.
(There's also a TON of underutilized land in industrial/commerical only districts in most US cities, so the focus on single family home zoning when all those lots are already there and similarly "underutilized" is foolish. Even if you abolished zoning overnight, a big industrial or commercial property is going to be much easier to acquire than a bunch of individual home lots.)
> The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
This doesn't make sense to me. If single-family homes are what most people want, why would a developer bother to buy up land and build something denser if people don't want to live somewhere denser? That sounds like a dumb business decision.
Nearly the entire country is zoned for single-family housing. Someone who wants to live in a SFH has no shortage of options. Meanwhile, someone who wants to live somewhere denser has very few options; we've almost entirely banned building new ones, so what dense places do exist are mostly the ones built prior to modern zoning codes.
Not sure where you're living, but here in central NC we've got a record number of huge apartment complexes being built left and right over the last 4-6 years. Cheap too. It's never been easier to live "somewhere denser".
I think this is covered by (3), the anti-city sentiment.
This is why there are so few cities (in the European sense) in the US, and many of the largest 'cities' are just small downtowns in an ocean of suburban neighborhoods.
In Europe cities like this would be planned much more, and as this kind of city development would be seen as undesirable, the plans just wouldn't allow it. In the US it just sort of happens because of a mass of choices by individuals.
The best cities I've visited in America have been planned, ironically. New York City follows century-old grids. Savannah maintains park squares first laid out in the early 18th century. Washington DC was designed and built from nothing. Perhaps these don't match the definition of Euro-style central planning however.
I don't think it's ironic at all. I think the poster you are responding to is making the point that better city planning leads to better cities, but that America is opposed to central planning. You're pointing out the planned cities that made it in are great.
> Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states.
Overall a great answer, but I'm not so sure of #3. Yes, there are people who want big cities to fail, but AFAICT not many of them are rural themselves. They're in smaller cities or outer suburbs ("exurbs") of big ones. They play to a rural image or ethos, but typically neither know nor care about anyone truly living a rural life.
Also (6) higher level/quality of municipal services, because those are (mostly) funded from local taxes. This is most obvious in schools but you can also see it in the personnel, equipment, and training of the local police and fire departments, the number and maintenance level of parks, etc.
It's worth noting that Japan also has a depreciation-based model of housing construction, but in Japan they don't endlessly sprawl outwards - isntead they knock down the old depreciated homes and rebuild in-place. Their permissive zoning model allows this to provide intensification naturally without the kind of protracted legal and PR battles required for intensification redevelopment here we have here in North America.
I am a fan of city building games, and one thing that greatly annoys me is the fact that all of them use the USA-only model of "Euclidean" zoning (named after Euclid, Ohio, that sued on the supreme court to be allowed to implement that kind of zoning now popular in USA).
These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp. Some guy bought the swamp, and started to build offices on it, a ton of them. The construction workers then started to build their homes on the farm, back then intended to be temporary homes while they built the offices, but today the ex-farm is a full blown dense residential neighbourhood in the middle of downtown, and the swamp is a place full of towering glassy high-rises. Meanwhile in another area, a neighbourhood that was USA suburb-style full of big houses, that formerly belonged to wealthy farmers of the region, people realized that place was very easy to reach compared to some others, so perfect for offices, slowly the houses became offices, then torn down to have proper office buildings, then those got torn down and turned into towers, and then some towers had residential apartments built on them so people could live closer to work.
This probably has more to do with gameplay mechanics and the influence of the original sim city than anything else.
This style of zoning allows a good middle ground where the player has input into the usage of the city without having to micromanage every building.
A city builder that lacked that concept entirely would be interesting, but you'd have to come up with some other abstraction that feels vaguely reminiscent of city planning and also is engaging from a gameplay perspective.
If I ever retire early to build city building games, I think it’d be nice to step back from the “series of rectangular lots” model and instead model the house, garage, driveways, and the like, as objects that a constraint solver can place. Then zoning becomes a series of specific rules: setbacks, fire codes, parking, accessibility, and the like. Bundle up zoning rules and apply them as you will. Make your agents look for a place that meets their needs, or renovate their own property. Have actual landlords, offer rent control if you dare… build civic capital with community organizations so that displacing people or gentrifying the neighborhood too quickly means a loss of stability, and urban conflict …
I would absolutely love to work on building a simulation at this level of fidelity, but I feel like making it actually fun to play would be the largest challenge. Maybe if the scale of it was at a neighborhood scope it would be possible to make it engaging - somewhere between The Sims and Sim City in scale and granularity
> These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp.
The neighborhood I grew up in in Louisiana used to be a swamp before it was landfilled. My current neighborhood used to be a public dump. Most of Silicon Valley used to be farmland.
I'm not sure where the claim that changing zoning or use is completely impossible in the US comes from.
That's more Texas-marketing than anything else. It has a lot of things that smell a lot like zoning, they just don't call it that.
Deed restrictions to a lot of the work. There are also density restrictions.The city steers where it wants things with tax policy, a big chunk of the city is governed by airport (federal) rules, and then add in historic preservation, buffering ordinances, lot size restrictions and so on, and there is little surprise Houston looks just like everywhere else in the US.
In some parts of the country - dunno about Houston specifically - a high percentage of the housing stock is governed by HOAs which make zoning boards look like anarchists by comparison.
The attitude to homes there makes an interesting contrast with Western perceptions of a home as an appreciating asset. As I understand it they treat houses more like cars - a valuable but depreciating purchase that will be replaced within 2-3 decades.
(Also I find the conversation-framing interesting here - when discussing a U.S. neighbourhood a "diverse profile" is presented as self-evidently ideal, whereas when discussing a Japanese neighbourhood it's never mentioned.)
In the United States, 75-90% of all land is zoned for single family residences with maximum densities of 4-5 households per acre. This is a legacy from the era of integration of non-white Americans called "White Flight." White Americans, seeking to avoid living next to non-whites left urban centers and populated suburban centers which had been engineered to be unaffordable or inaccessible to black and non-white Americans.
Houses were large and separated by lawns. They also required financing to purchase. Financing which was usually denied to non-whites by red-lining. In addition these neighborhoods were usually walled off and mazed to prevent people from walking through them. This made families depend on expensive cars to get where they were going, further increasing the burden on those living within and excluding poor and lower middle class Americans.
Now we have these pointless laws that are slowly strangling us to death with expensive car infrastructure that is insanely expensive and deteriorating fast. Small businesses can't survive because of poor walkability, parking minimums and outside investors jacking up rent costs. People can't find homes because they are all too expensive.
The legacy of racism is a death pact for America. I hope we can escape it.
To blame this all on racism is to miss the true motivation which is safety of person and property. It is something I never truly understood until last year's protests/riots, which I think are also at least a factor in people moving out of urban areas again (though few will admit it). When there's unrest which results in arson, looting, and vandalism, those with means will seek safer locales and erect physical and institutional barriers to keep out potential threats. Venice is a historical example of this, built on the water for protection from barbarians.
There are knock on effects such as dimmer prospects for those left than in the more integrated communities that proceeded as investment flees. People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
To be clear, where such barriers manifest in ways where people are judged or treated differently based on immutable characteristics or group identity instead of their individual character, this is wrong.
You portray this as a one-way relationship, but it's a cycle. Yes, perceptions of safety are part of the reason why people flee to the suburbs, but that flight is itself part of the reason so many inner cities are destitute and unsafe. Why put all of the blame on the people most negatively affected by this dynamic and least able to change it?
> People rightfully don't want to invest in areas deemed unsafe, where those investments would be at risk.
That's exactly the rationale behind redlining, food deserts, infrastructure funding (especially schools) and other kinds of systemic racism. I suggest you read up on what that term means. It does not mean that everyone participating in the system is racist. It means that our institutions and economy themselves perpetuate racial injustice even without further racist intent. Framing this entirely in terms of "rational" choices by those who flee, as if those who stay don't exist or don't matter, is perpetuating a false narrative. So, again, why?
The proper name for "perpetuate injustice without racist intent" is "classism". It can happen in homogeneous countries just as well.. in fact, I grew up in Russia surrounded 99% by other white slavs, and I'm super culture-classist based on that experience. I've also heard from other Eastern European immigrants how it's awesome that in America (compared to at home) it's easy to live not being surrounded by gopniks (chavs in Britain), bydlo (lit. cattle - kinda like urban white trash), and alcoholics, and how they wish Moscow/Warsaw/whatever had more class segregation accessible to an average person, instead of just the very rich. It's a bummer that in America class is so tied to race.
I agree that there's absolutely a cycle and don't intend to diminish that or imply that those left behind don't matter or are to blame for their situation. There's clearly reasons why people decide to riot or protest, even if it doesn't necessarily bring about the desired outcomes.
White flight and red lining tend to get thrown around without any attempt to tackle reasons why these things happened beyond some surface level talk of not liking people that are different.
> To blame this all on racism is to miss the true motivation which is safety of person and property.
I think this sentence is much closer to the mark if you say: "the true motivation which is perceived safety of person and property."
I think you are right that people seek out less density and more personal space when they feel insecure or under threat. But in the modern journalistic landscape that sensation can be quite decoupled from the reality of their actual risk of harm.
Sure, racism could be an/the underlying cause. But this perspective is very different from the normal perspective (which foxyv seemed to be promoting).
The usual perspective is that white people fleeing during white flight are racist themselves.
What you are saying is that racism causes violence, and rich white people who are victims of violence flee that violence. So they're not racist themselves but rather second-order victims of racism.
To add to this, in 1950s the low density was seen as a protective measure against bombing, including nuclear. Dense cities like Dresden or Nagasaki were famously destroyed by firestorms from powerful bombing. Population of areas with semi-rural density had much better chances to survive a nuclear blast, hiding in a basement shelter.
It is possible to decentralize without making a population car dependent. Just add walking paths, alleys, and local shopping.
I think a major part of why people built mazes and fences around their neighborhoods is a bit of mild xenophobia. The idea of never having to meet anyone other than your immediate neighbors and chosen associates makes a great deal of sense. If your neighborhood is walkable then you could have unsavory elements on the sidewalks. Outsiders in your neighborhood!
If you can only travel by car, you can isolate yourself and your family and choose who you associate with. You are protected from the general public by your car until you arrive at a "Safe" place like a soccer meetup, church, or a Boy Scout meeting. This is much harder to do in a walk-up apartment where you may meet someone who threatens you physically, racially, or ideologically.
75-90% of what land? the federal government owns 28% of the entire land area in the US, and that land is not "zoned" for any type of private residence.
The answer to that varies from person to person, and it has varied in aggregate over time, but the effect on those who remain has been the same. It doesn't matter whether those who left were/are fleeing actual danger, race-based perception of danger, or pure economic rationality. If you tip a marble on to a sloped ramp, it will continue rolling down even without further impulse. The fact that at one time race and racism were significant drivers of this effect is sufficient to justify their consideration in any present discussion of causes and/or remedies.
I think a lot of white Americans feared retribution and competition from minorities. Before integration, they had treated minorities very poorly to say the LEAST. I think it's pretty normal to be afraid when someone you beat with a horse whip last tuesday suddenly gets to own guns and businesses in your neighborhood.
In addition, propaganda from racist organizations was running wild. Stuff like "White Genocide" and "Race Riots" were predicted by racist organizations who still profit from this fear today.
But naturally the answer is that they were fleeing minorities, violence, AND landlords. In most people's minds all three were mixed up. In the end, the makeup of the neighborhoods they fled to were built around isolation enabled by cars.
The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes [1] explores this in a short series [2]. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but what he discusses rings true for my city at least.
The episode that mentions the experience of walking 800m in Houston from a hotel to a shop reminds me of an experience where a group of us (drunken Europeans) were trying to get from a bar in one hotel to another bar in another hotel in that city... I'm surprised we weren't arrested.
A good book to read on the subject is Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's 60 years old now, and is concentrating on cities rather than towns, but you can see the points she is making play out in scenes like the article mentions.
Because the driving philosophy is to make a profit. Not to build a liveable place or a sustainable community, not to improve the standard of living for people, not even to build something great. Only to squeeze most dollars out of an invested sum.
Once you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense. Depressing, self-destructive, short-sighted, awful, but logical.
Now let's think about ways to make sustainable communities and higher standards of living a better investment! They are valuable, we just need to be able to share some of that value with the investors who decide what to build and how.
Because nobody wants to live there. Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's. Sanphillippo wants a return to this 1940s idea of dense small towns, walkable towns with a population of ten thousand. He doesn't get that those towns weren't that way because everyone liked it; they were like that because they had to be. People were too poor to have a personal vehicle. Everybody either farmed and only came into town when they had to, or worked in the same factory, or worked in a store where the factory workers spent their money. Then when the industry changed the factory closed and the town died almost overnight.
>> Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's
The majority of Americans live in an area they describe as suburban.
Then don't. Live somewhere with good public transportation. Just don't think that you're ever going to live in a small town and be completely satisfied with not having one. Most people who don't want to live in a concrete jungle simply don't like having everything crammed together like that. I certainly don't.
I'm in the Dallas "metroplex," and it understood here that you get more value for your money the farther out you go. There's the inner loop (Loop 12) and outer loop (I-635) inside Dallas city limits, and then there are suburbs which again can be described (at least in the north) as "inside TX-121" and "inside US-380." As you cross each "boundary," your choices provde more value--defined as less money for more space, or newer construction, or both.
I grew up in San Diego, which is naturally constrained by mountains, ocean, an international border, and a military base, even before you add state and local laws. The Dallas area has no such constraints anywhere, nothing to keep it from sprawling until it reaches the state border to the north--and really, nothing to keep it from sprawling beyond that, either.
Americans tend to value square footage over their commute time. So the cycle goes:
1. Hmm, I can get 2000 sqft inside the loop and 5000 sqft in the outer suburbs. Outer suburb for me!
2. Everyone else does the same thing and the area grows
3. The people in the outer suburbs starts loudly complaining about how horrible traffic has become (because they moved there when relatively few other people lived at and beyond the edge)
4. Roads are widened and new roads are built to ease traffic.
5. Now that there's road capacity, developers start building out even further.
6. Repeat step one with different people another layer out and the cycle continues.
It is a relic of slavery. As former slaves moved into the cities to find work in the reconstruction era and beyond the white residents fled to the suburbs and took their money with them. This lead to a decay of the inner cities which sets up a viscous cycle of poverty and neglect.
There's a second problem where people who might have good intentions and try to revitalize the inner city are instead considered to be gentrifiers. Basically in an attempt to break the cycle of poverty they cause the rents to increase and end up pushing out the poor people instead of uplifting them.
Good keywords and historical moments to Google here are "The Great Northward Migration" and anything related to the founding, population, and history of 19th/20th century Chicago. I believe there was a Chicago newspaper (Tribune, maybe?) that circulated special edition pamphlets to the Deep South with instructions and guidance on how to successfully migrate North. Black supporters caught circulating documents like this could be killed in retaliation -- it was a wild time.
Edit: it was the Chicago Defender.
>Chicago's African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, made the city well known to southerners. It sent bundles of papers south on the Illinois Central trains, and African-American Pullman Porters would drop them off in Black towns. "Chicago was the most accessible northern city for African Americans in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas." They took the trains north. "Then between 1916 and 1919, 50,000 blacks came to crowd into the burgeoning black belt, to make new demands upon the institutional structure of the South Side."
If a recall correctly, they also circulated imagery and content about the Black experience abroad; for example, in Paris. Arguing that if the condition for Black people was comparatively better abroad, then there was no reason for conditions to remain so dire in the US. This sort of content was particularly enlightening.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
How do you do that?
The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments.
- In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country).
- There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc.
- Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price.
- When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation.
If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.
It is subsidizing inefficient cities and land use, causes massive environmental harm, and the people that benefit the least from subsidized driving are the poorest people. If it is such a universal good that benefits everyone and people are already paying for it through their taxes, then why would people be upset about not having to pay for it through their taxes and just pay for it directly?
If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
In areas where there is high demand for a particular reason (ex. NYC or the Bay Area because of the job market) I think it makes sense to intensify. But in cities where it isn't important for a lot of people to live close to the center, I don't really see a problem with just building more houses. Having a backyard is nice.
If you ever go to Phoenix, all you see is miles of suburbs. And then you drive out of the city, and all you see is miles of open land that they can expand into. I say just keep building them, clearly they are pretty popular.
>If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
1. The main complaint you hear is R1 zoning, which doesn't just permit single family homes but MANDATES single family homes. This is wasteful lunacy.
2. If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy, then by all means. If they can't pay and expect others to pay for them, then we need to have a conversation on the topic.
> If single family homes can pay for their requisite infrastructure without external subsidy
...and they basically don't, over time. The initial boost in property-tax revenue is eventually overwhelmed by the maintenance costs for all that sprawling infrastructure. It's one of the drivers behind the churn that OP is all about. A fuller exposition was discussed here recently.
In principle I agree, but I think that in many cases these developments are not well thought out.
Any time the housing values in an area significantly drop or the population largely leaves, what gets left behind is a poor and poorly maintained neighborhood that creates a ton of negative externalities for surrounding areas. When you build an entirely new development on undeveloped land this is almost guaranteed to happen as all of the buildings and infrastructure will need to be replaced at the same time.
> If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.
Because the federal government often foots the bill for new suburban expansion. If the suburbs will foot the bill for road, sewer, and electricity expansion then they should be left to do so.
the larger cities have been on a trajectory like what you describe - it’s difficult to increase density, home owners are resistant to it, but it happens gradually anyway.
but in small cities, there’s just too much empty space available. people just build further and further out from the old city center, so they can have their giant houses and enormous yards.
my state, Oregon, has a concept of an “Urban Growth Boundary” which is a zoning rule meant to reduce sprawl, and it helps somewhat. But generally people in the smaller cities vote to keep density very low.
It's probably difficult for a non-American to understand just how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime.
If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it, although I'd still get itchy at having that many people around. But that's not a reality anywhere in the US that you have that kind of density.
> how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime.
> If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it
You made me chuckle. Berlin is heavily associated with crime. There's multiple better and safer cities to live in Germany.
Associated I can believe, but it doesn’t feel bad to be in it.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was in a tiny quiet village in the UK I once came back from the local grocery shop to find my front door had bounced open instead of locking itself when I’d left and absolutely nothing happened as a result of this mistake, and I don’t expect the same here; and sure, Berlin has a lot of graffiti, but I don’t feel fundamentally unsafe in even the most loudly afearing places like Görlitzer Park or Alexanderplatz — I don’t even get why the latter is on the list of places people talk about when suggesting danger.
Really, the worst I experience here is the fire brigade and ambulance sirens (and, confusingly, one time where the sirens were on a van marked “Netzgesellschaft entstörungsdienst”, which both Google and my own limited German think is something close to “Network company anti-jamming service”, which feels implausible).
Netzgesellschaft Entstörungsdienst: It's an emergency service for gas leaks[1] - it may feel implausible but it's totally common in Germany to have a "Netzgesellschaft" or some other very generic name like "Wasserverband" (water organization).
Can't find 2020 numbers, but all of Germany had 720 murders in 2019. Last year Chicago, which is the main city in one metro area of one state in the US had 774.
Chicago is around 2.5 million people, Germany is 84 million people. From an inner-city US perspective, violent crime in Germany basically does not exist.
>deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime
It's true that people think this, but it's not true in reality. Many people who don't live in cities believe in the 1980s TV and movie version of cities because they're afraid of anything new or diverse.
I moved from a semi rural area about 30 miles outside of Medford OR to an apartment in a reasonably nice area inside the city about 2 years ago while I am developing and building a house on a piece of property. Compared to the area that I moved from and will be moving back to the level of random violence and crime in this area is much worse and completely offsets any other benefits such as being close to work, city infrastructure (water sewer power and fast internet) and easier access to shopping and dining. Crime and violence thrives in densely populated areas because there is more opportunities for such per square mile. So yeah people think this because unless you live in a dream world that’s reality.
The thing to look for is evidence of protections against crime - barred windows and high walls, locked garages vs street parking, hotels and businesses with security vs everything just open, having to get a key for the bathroom vs it just being there, etc.
It’s like COVID-19- there’s no use in pretending it doesn’t exist because I nor anyone I know well has had it.
You do wonder about all these walled communities in places like Richardson and Plano, TX. What are they defending against? When you walk around the area there was no evidence of crime or disorderly behaviour, yet they still had that strange architecture. So what are they defending against?
Yes. Aside from what I consider nuisance encounters I was walking my dog by my apartment one evening and I had a very close encounter with someone who was vandalizing a neighbors vehicle. I was able to get enough video evidence of the act in progress to assist the Police with identifying and charge the perp. I had to testify in Grand Jury for my troubles.
We do in some places! Actual cities have exactly that profile, and have the opposite problem of this article; a dense city core that is so expensive that it can be hard to live in.
This article is really describing the failures of suburbia, that soulless monstrosity. By all rights, no matter what is legally true, this 'Appleton' is not a city, or a town or a village, it's just the vestigial growth of people who all want to live in suburbia.
>How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
More houses = more taxes. Development is promoted in less dense areas because it creates jobs and brings in money. New constructions are profitable, and the industry is basically dictated by builders that throw up cheap houses on plots of land they bought for 10k.
Has any western nation achieved dense middle class inner city neighborhoods post WWII? The anglosphere cities that rose after the ubiquity of the automobile are all sprawling. The outer run suburbs of all western major cities are sprawling.
The cities with dense middle class inner city neighborhoods mostly developed without cars.
Check out Amsterdam. You don't need to ban cars, you just need to make bikes a preferable alternative. And as has been mentioned all over this thread, check out the YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes, for a ton of good videos on the subject.
Amsterdam is my point. If it were founded in 1906 instead of 1306 it would look more Los Angles.
It's very hard take an area developed around a car (everywhere in America since 1920s) and make it bike preferable.
You basically need for the area to be so run down that you can start from scratch. Like a taking a formerly industrial area and then only zoning it for mixed use, high density residential/commercial use.
From scratch? What starting point are you looking for? I don't think enough time has passed for a classical organic urban core to have developed from nothing. I guess for walkable postwar communities, I would look at college towns.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
Nope! Not sure who said it first, but...
If you don't know why some fucked up thing in America is the way it is, the answer is probably racism.
In this case, it's white flight from city centers -> suburbs and racist real-estate practices.
You can see it in what the author was told about Appleton, if you read between the lines:
> he schools are much better in the newer areas, and people shop for school districts more than they shop for a house itself. While Appleton is a very safe little city, crime is always a bigger problem at the core compared to the edges. You have to think of the children.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
They do promote it. Every city in the US is promoting inner-city neighborhood development (commonly called "gentrification" here). It's just not usually a great for actual citizens.
Dense construction is always more expensive, so anytime density goes up, your immediately paying a lot more money for a lot less housing. And property in the US is valued exclusively by it's density (what realtors will call "location, location, location", but really just means "how much stuff is around it -- how dense is the area"). Living near density (even if your own property is not dense) always costs a lot more money, which means your again paying a lot more cash for a lot less housing. Alternative public transit options are poor in most places, but simultaneously, most inner-cities are actively hostile to our current universal public transit (cars), so the closer you live to the center of town, the harder it will be for you as a resident to get anywhere regularly, and you'll be transportation-disadvantaged compared to any of your friends in the suburbs. And because it's more expensive to live there, the taxes there are almost always much higher (since the tax you pay is based in large part on the value of your home, and houses near the city cost more, so you also get to pay more in taxes).
And, since families generally don't have lots of money to spend, they are in the same boat as you, and almost entirely pick suburbs (to save lots of cash and get better transport), so their kids all enroll in schools out there, so the quality of the schools out there is a lot higher, which makes future families more likely to make the same decision.
And if you have anything "tricky" happen to you (perhaps a elderly family member needs support, or you get divorced, or your kid becomes disabled, or similar), any and all of the assistance you might want or need to help deal with that, is also easier to get out in the suburbs. And since your cost of living is lower out there, if you need extra cash to handle a problem, it's easier to financially float that in the suburbs.
The model is crazy, but it's not crazy at the person-level. It's mostly crazy at the federal level. The government could let properties actually depreciate, so that renovating old properties inside the city is cheaper than building new out in the suburbs. But that would require them to let property values fall in urban areas so that housing can become affordable, and cities as well as all rich people are always 100% against that idea. So instead, federal policies prop up artificially high property values in urban areas, with the net effect being a semi-explicit policy that cities are not for most people. The goal is that anyone not single/20-something/wealthy, should not ever actually live there, and these policies are mostly successful at doing that.
> If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it help
Probably not. The problem with local taxes is not usually that the rate is much higher, it's that the cost of living in a city is much higher, so your property itself costs way more, and that means you pay way more in taxes (even if the rate were hypothetically exactly identical in both, you'd still be paying way more in taxes city-vs-suburbs, because urban housing tends to cost way more to buy, and the taxes you pay are based on the sale price of the property itself)
> Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable
This is a good idea, but it would actually help the suburban sprawl far more than it would help the city (since lower density is more affordable), it would encourage people to stay in suburban sprawl longer, since those properties would still always be cheaper, but now (under this new rule) would also would be better built and last longer.
It's just a theory, but I'm somewhat convinced that half the reason Americans hate taxes is because of how inconvenient and in your face they are in the US: IRS requires you to fill in a complex form with no help and punishes you if you get it wrong, and sales tax is not part of the advertised price of goods. I reckon if you got rid of that then people would care about taxes a lot less.
There are certain actors in the US political system who definitely believe the complexity/pain of filing is a feature, not a bug, as it leads people to associate taxes with pain instead of the benefits of living in a successful modern industrial democratic state.
Combine that with a tax prep lobby whose incentives are to sell you a solution.
The IRS could have made things as easy for most Americans as places like New Zealand did two decades ago.
Property tax payment is very easy in the US, because it is usually done as part of your regular mortgage payment - people still dislike paying it.
The IRS is also a lot more helpful than commonly advertised - I once had a several thousand dollar expense reimbursement from work that my employer wrongly classified a miscellaneous untaxed payment to me. They didn’t attach any penalties, just sent a letter essentially saying “we think you forgot to include this in your income for YEAR, we think you owe $X + $Y interest.”(and the interest amount was very reasonable, like 3-4%)
I just emailed them a copy of the receipts and email I had sent to my employer when claiming reimbursement, and noted that I had not claimed those expenses on my tax return, if I had done , then it would have exactly matched the tax owed.
They replied a few weeks later telling me thanks and that I owed nothing extra.
I do worry about arbitrary abuse of government power in the US, particularly against those guilty of WRONGTHINK, but my personal experience was exactly what I would hope for as a citizen, professional, clear and timely.
I still would still like taxes to be lower - but if you told me I had to make a mandatory charitable donation of the same amount every year to a real charity, I would be fine with that. So in my case at least, it’s that I expect the unionized middle class government workers to get most of the benefit of my extra tax, not the poorest people in society who need it most (and who are usually presented as the need for such increased taxes)
Absolutely, and it's set up this way on purpose by people who believe that filing taxes should be as painful and difficult as possible so people associate the idea of taxes with the artificially difficult process. It doesn't have to be this way, the rest of us are just held hostage by anti-tax zealots.
You seriously think that people want less taxes just because they are difficult to file?
Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it?
The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k.
Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k.
Gas is double the price solely because of taxes
Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10%
Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month.
I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience.
By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.
From what I've read, US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs, you just get less for it. Property prices are the main thing that seems much worse in Europe, but that doesn't have anything to do with taxes.
Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.
> US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs
The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)
There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.
For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc
> The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat.
Drivel.
Here in Norway (widely reputed to be heavily taxed) a single person earning 30 kUSD and having neither debts nor savings would pay 4752 USD in tax, about 15%. You would then pay up to 25% VAT on things you buy (less on food and rent).
Sure, it's "VAT" - but it's essentially the same thing. You pay it for almost everything you buy. There are some lower rates for food in some places. But guess what, US has that too.
Thanks for the link, but again you're taking the exception as the rule. Most countries don't work like that.
(it's also possible that social security is deductible before income tax is levied as per this site but I'm not looking too deeply into it: https://expatcenter.ro/tax-guide/ )
Romania also don't work like that, in principle. They are simply much poorer country than Norway. 30k EUR salary in Romania is upper middle class income, so it is heavily taxed. People making average wage pay much lower taxes.
Also, if I get the linked calculator right, then it expects you to put MONTHLY salary, in RONs, not EUR. So, just putting 30000 there you get a monthly salary of over 6000 EUR, or 72k per year. And that's taxed at 41%.
Romania is much poorer than Norway, but the tax is the same - it's a flat tax rate. Play with the calculator and you'll see. The numbers are in RON - which is 5 times smaller than the dollar, and the value is implied to be monthly - but it makes no difference because of the flat rate.
In other countries you might have tax brackets, but I know from experience that it's very easy to reach 45% total tax rate (not marginal).
Tax hate didn't really begin in it's current form till Reagan as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. When black Americans were excluded from the programs that taxes paid for, resistance was minimal.
The Boston Tea Party happened because the British got rid of a tax, I wouldn't call that tax hate. Some locals were ticked off because the British screwed up their smuggling operation.
That's the point, every year you are aware of how much the government is taking from you. If citizens weren't aware of exactly how much taxes they paid they would be more inclined to want more tax increases
People should care about taxes a lot more. I want to know exactly how much money the government is taking from me by force. It's a good reminder that we need to be vigilant against uncontrolled government growth, and vote accordingly.
Americans hate taxes because we see little benefit from them. Federal taxes make up the brunt, and they mainly go to the military and corporate welfare. The biggest federal benefit is social security, and people don't see that until they retire. Even the benefits that do trickle back locally (eg highways, schools) are more of an end-run around state sovereignty rather than a respected benefit.
Local taxes mainly go to the domestic military and schools. You only see the main benefit if you have kids in public school.
State taxes are the most useful - large enough scale to accomplish things, but small enough scale to remain somewhat accountable. But since people can easily move between states, these become subject to intense politicking. For example, "Taxachusetts" even though its overall income tax rate is only 1.2x that of New Hampshire (32% vs 27%, for incomes $22k-$52k).
I'd personally love to see a flip of the magnitude of state and federal tax rates, money flowing between the two in the opposite direction, and a way for individuals to earmark what their tax money goes to. Some ability to steer taxes towards things they value would go a long way to making people feel enfranchised.
edit: lots of downvotes, but no counterpoints. While there are many things government does that I do value, I don't think their costs add up to anywhere near what is being paid in. What value do you feel you personally get from your taxes, apart from longing for some sort of social contract?
Is that really the general consensus? If anything, so much of taxation goes to waste on bureaucracy and inane or downright criminal nonsense in the US. I live in Canada, and I basically consider it to be theft that my taxes that are taken from me forcefully go to places such as giant corporations, and military applications that I do not want to happen.
OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example.
My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such
It's your money like it's your water and your oxygen. Build some big tanks on your "property" and put machine gun nests around it to defend it.
Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.
But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.
We can "choose to include them" until we discover that it is unviable to fund the necessary services and find out society is completely dysfunctional without them.
As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
I'm not against taxes. There are things that can only be executed as a group.
What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.
It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.
We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.
I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
>What I am against is the notion that it's not mine.
Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?
The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.
I don't think any reasonable philosophy of taxes tries to claim that your money "belongs to the government" and "they let you keep some".
We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.
It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.
"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".
I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.
It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.
If you don't have enough to pay your taxes, then you're in a very unusual position, because the average American gets their taxes withheld from their paycheck regularly. It must mean that you own your own business, or are doing something fairly unusual, and have failed to properly budget with taxes in mind. No one "doesn't have enough to pay taxes" just because they don't make enough money, because income tax is progressive specifically to avoid that type of problem.
As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.
That's like saying it's only their house because we allow them to own a house. Or, those are their children because we allow them to keep their children and not assign them to the state.
It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.
yes true. property, especially real estate, is a legal construct created by the state. In older eras this was more explicit, property existed “at the pleasure of the Queen” or whatever. Now we rely on a nebulous social consensus reinforced by the courts and legislature.
Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.
But that's true for any rights. The right to feel safe, the right to safety and not be harmed, raped or killed. Without society, sure, real-estate, personal safety are out the window and we could expect expropriation, rape and death.
You have "Castle doctrine" because it was deemed politically beneficial to a politician at some point. That same politician that would happily turn your neighborhood into a strip mall through eminent domain if that was beneficial for them. You have banks literally foreclosing on the wrong homes, or through simple errors, making people homeless in the process, and those same politicians are "so sad".
If you're in a Western nation and you "make" money, it is very much a partnership with the state, and your ability to "make" money would very likely disappear without the state. For someone to go on about "their" money has no correlation with actual reality, and I'd encourage them to ply their trade in Somalia. I'm sure the income tax rates are great.
Children are a bit different because they are actually created by the parents (and the personal relationship is of course super-important for the child's development).
But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.
I think that property-children is on a continuum. When you have raiding parties and tribal warfare, children were taken as slaves. From that PoV then children are in the same basket where they are protected by the norms of society, same as property.
Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?
Maybe a lot of people are struggling to get by? "Their money" represents the ability to pay for food and housing so I'm not sure it's only about wanting others to suffer, as you imply. I think it's at least partially about their own sense of security.
>the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.
If these downtown areas were suddenly cleaned up, packed full of operating businesses, and had bicycle lanes and everything added overnight, would any customers even show up? I'm not sure how much demand there even is for such a thing outside the online urban development enthusiast crowd.
I got a sense that the "themed strip mall" was put forward with derision but I think people are increasingly going to need more of an incentive to go to these kinds of areas beyond shopping. A historically preserved area that's neat to look at with educational placards/statues, a nice waterfront, an amusement park, really good food, some reason to make the trip. Otherwise personally I'll just order something online or go to a big box store.
It's politically hard, but otherwise quite possible to redevelop older areas. Old Town in Pasadena, CA is a great example. Old Town was a largely uninhabited and unprosperous commercial area. Mostly through simple policy changes re: urban development, it was completely revitalized. Today, Old Town is pretty much endlessly packed with people and the commercial rents are sky high. It's bustling with shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, luxury apartments, and office spaces.
It doesn't have a water front. There are plenty of older (historic?) brick buildings, which IMHO look much nicer than modern buildings, but the buildings are hardly unique; buildings of this type can be found all over Los Angeles County. It does have lots of excellent restaurants, but I don't see any reason why that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. The restaurants came as a result of the redevelopment, not the other way around.
If we’re talking about a medium density mixed residential / commercial suburbs with walkable streets & a varied housing mix, including local schools and shops then those are usually pretty popular places to live.
The YT channel Not Just Bikes talks about Riverdale in Toronto, Canada here as an example: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?t=521 It has some of the highest house prices in Toronto & that reflects people’s desire to live there.
Zoning into sidely dispersed commercial / residential areas where the only way to get from one to the other is by car is a curse on society.
There are multiple in Toronto, all of which were not expensive post-WW2 since downtown was mostly considered 'for immigrants' and all the WASPs moved to the car-centric suburbs. Urban living became cool again in the post-1990s, and now Old Toronto is quite pricey.
I don't know about other places, but historic downtown areas in Oregon are pretty consistently packed, especially now. My family just took a trip to a small town mid-week, which is when you can usually get a seat at a restaurant on the "strip". We had to wait nearly two hours for lunch this time. Walking between shops was bordering on bothersome because of the crowds. I can't even fathom how it is on the weekend.
I think it's the 'historic' that matters, healthy downtowns seem to require some specificity and coevolution with the people there. The original comment as I understood it was speculating what would happen if something resembling a healthy downtown was simply dropped into place one day.
It's fun for the people in San Jose who don't have many buildings in their city more historic than the 1970s. I just despise San Jose so please disregard my biased statements if I'm off base here. While Santana Row may be fun, it has zero charm to it. Coming from someone who grew up on cobblestone city streets built in the 1700s...
If US cities could remove the collective "no mixed zoning" stick from their asses, that might be possible.
Small businesses are only convenient if they're close. Nobody (within reason) minds if food is 10% more when you can get it last minute just crossing the street. But if it needs to be a "trip" to get there, it's not a survivable approach.
There's only so much you can do with an area like this as a "destination", without being embedded in a healthy community.
However attractive the area is, if you have to make a trip you'll only go there infrequently. Large parts will be dedicated to parking. Transit may be a pain to get there.
Not to say it can't have value - it can be a central point to bring together a larger low density community. But there's only so much need for something like this.
Compare with what is usually meant by a "walkable" area. Medium or high density housing mixed with local businesses. Enough residents within walking distance to support local restaurants and shops even during the week, not only on weekends.
Not a common model in North America unfortunately, the trend is either low density residential housing, or high density condo areas without much commercial or public spaces.
A tangent: Granola Shotgun is one of my favorite blogs and Johnny has a unique viewpoint on many issues like urbanism, homesteads, town planning, etc. A quote from him that summarizes his writing to me: "So this is what America is actually like. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Look out your window. Take a drive down to your local big box store. Walk around your neighborhood. This is reality. Just sayin’."
I have little specific interest in these topics but love his storytelling and detailed posts.
Not Just Bikes is a great channel on urban development, and he did a series on Strong Towns' ideas specifically. I like this one, "How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer".
I always laugh when watching his videos because it feels like his go to bad example is London Ontario. I recognize it in all the bad example B roll he uses.
Granola Shotgun reminds me of blogging in its prime. Maybe 15 years ago? I had a big RSS feed of several blogs like this that I really loved. Over the years I’ve either gotten worse at finding them or the average blog has gotten much worse.
Yes, I miss the days where independent blogs ruled the web. Everything has transitioned to social platforms optimized for instant gratification where there is no room for deeper thoughts. Or lives on a 3rd party like Medium. Most of the blogs I used to read daily have transitioned to being people who tweet a lot and rarely write longer content.
Glad to see there are other fans of Granola Shotgun on HN. Most of the titles Johnny uses are probably too vague to capture interest here, but a few submissions have made the front page:
The guy comes off as a somewhat of a jerk in those examples, I don't think I will be subscribing to his RSS feed.
In the first one, he seems to keep getting in conflicts with people about his photography of their property or community, over and over. I'm reminded of the phrase "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole".
In the second one, he starts off with, "I visited friends" and then proceeds to go on a rant against those purported friends, criticizing the fact that they bought a bunch of stuff from Julia Child's estate and display it as artwork on the wall rather than I don't know....baking stuff with it or something? Not a friend I would want. I'm starting to see a pattern here.
The third one is just "Levittown sucks revisited", not a very good introduction to Levittown. The pictures emphasize "all of these houses look the same", which well duh. They were one of the first examples of mass produced housing in the US so of course they were built off the same blueprint. More interesting takes on Levittown look at what happened to the houses and neighborhoods as the place got older.
But yeah, I guess I've got to agree with the "this is America take a look" part. I'm a fan, he's not.
Off topic, but looking through the comments, so many people seem to believe that any multi-family housing is noisy. That has literally never been my experience despite living exclusively in multi-family housing for the past 15 years. Sometimes I can hear my neighbor's kid when they're directly outside my front door. That's it.
Have the folks who think that apartments are noisy just never lived in apartment? Or is my experience the skewed one?
Every apartment or condo I’ve lived in in the US (and it’s been at least 10) has had terrible problems with noise from neighbor units, except 2, and one of those was the top floor. The other was actually a concrete high-rise built as condos so I suspect that solid construction helped. Voices, TV, footsteps, sex, arguments, domestic violence, parties, demo/remodeling, noisy pets; you name it, I’ve heard it in excruciating detail. It’s not been my experience that “niceness” of the building makes any difference either, just height, as wood frame construction becomes impractical over a certain number of stories—but that’s getting higher every few years.
I understand there are construction techniques to mitigate this even in low-rise wood frame buildings, but I’ll eat my hat if any designer or builder in the US bothers unless forced by regulation.
The "modern" apartments I've lived in have been relatively quiet, but the one 50's era apartment was terribly noisy. It was a two story with an attic appt and a basement appt wedged in-between the main floors.
I lived on the second floor, and loved the hardwood floors and french doors etc. Then someone moved in above me, and another across the hall. I could hear the guy across the hall every time he opened or closed the door. The guy who moved into the attic above me must have been related to Sting. His lovemaking sessions lasted for what felt like weeks.
I think this is a key point of customer discrimination. It would be really helpful for housing to have a required and standardized "sound-proof" rating. If customers could be informed and builders incentivized, then what is build and bought could change.
That being said most apts I've lived have been pretty quiet, but I'm not sure how much that is from materials or luck with neighbors.
Most US stock of multi-family housing in low and mid-rise apartments were not built with modern building code with STC above 45 (hotel framing AKA staggered studs). Furthermore, between floors sound can carry, and even older homes can drop in STC over time depending upon the material used in insulation as well as deterioration of materials over time. My friends that lived in only high rise buildings haven't had noise issues like myself and many others where we could hear conversations on the other side of walls of neighbors similar to the extent parodied in the movie Office Space with the main character's neighbor.
I've lived in a variety of multi-family units, some have _definitely_ been far too noisy. I'm still trying to work out what some upstairs neighbors I had a few years ago were up to regularly that sounded just like bowling but with office furniture.
But for the most part as long as the unit isn't facing a major road/rail and the neighbors aren't the college-frat sort, they're usually not too noisy at all.
Most apartment buildings in America have a quite bad sound insulation in my experience, and although I've seen some modern apartment towers with a solid soundproofing, those are usually not affordable to most people and so everyone just believes that apartments = noise.
In Canada they certainly are. In Germany the isolation tends to be significantly better.
In Canada I could follow the hockey score through the wall. In Germany I've literally never heard my next door neighbour. Newer buildings are even quieter.
It is related to the cost of construction. I paid 600k+ for a nice condo with concrete slab between floors. I never heard anything from my neighbors. Wood construction might be a different story.
Looking at those older houses, I would rather have on of those than a soleless suburban cardboard home. But then I never buy stuff with an eye on resell value, I am not a broker or trader after all.
There are a few larger houses left with character in my town. Left, because starting in the 60's people left the city for the suburbs, and the houses fell into disrepair, burned down, etc.
I thought about buying one. Twice as big of a house that I have now, for half the price. However, you have a boiler system, no central AC, basically non-existant insulation, more wallpaper than you would ever want to remove, ancient electrical systems, and 125 years of shadetree repairs to every part of the house.
You'd spend a quarter million dollars upgrading the house to today's standards, like you see on an episode of This Old House. And then what? You have to deal with the crime and nuisances of the city, alley or a horse stall to park in, you get to pay city income tax, city water and trash which are 3X what I pay in my township, and then you have to figure out where you're going to send your kids to school. The city public schools are bottom 5% in the state so you have to go private or drive them to another district.
It's almost funny how, besides parking and renovation costs, I never heard of any of the other issues over here. Schools are all public (except for rich parents kids unable to make in a school daddy isn't paying for), crime is hardly a real problem (at least where the nice houses are), taxes are everywhere the same (for employees, if you have a company communities can set their own percentage). Waste removal differs, but not by much.
Maybe part of the reason why this kind of houses tend to be twice as expensive as a similar sized one in suburbia.
In 2019, we began a home addition. Every contractor who looked at our plan told us to make a tradeoff to allow for a fourth bedroom. We persisted, as we were doing this for ourselves rather than future buyers.
In 2020 and 2021, we're absolutely loving that we went for our home office plan instead of that bedroom. We knew we wanted it but had no idea how much we would need it!
Sometimes the trade off is as simple as making sure an office could “legally” be considered a bedroom - usually an egress window and/or something that’s arguably a closet (in some areas).
It can be worth doing those (or leaving them able to be done) for sale and valuation purposes.
Alternatively, when buying, look for those things that can’t be counted as a bedroom for bonus value (basement office, etc).
In our case, it was hallway access and layout but you're missing the larger point: there is no resale in our future here. If this house is being sold, it's because we're both dead and at that point, I don't care. Inflating value could only increase our prop taxes, why do that?
And just for a funny addendum, right now, Boston home buyers have only one requirement: a home to buy. The market is insane on a level never heard of before. All contingencies are waived. No home inspection is allowed. During Covid, you had 15 minutes to look over a house and you needed to make an offer that day or tomorrow at the latest. Your offer also needs to be $50-100k over asking to be taken seriously.
> Boston home buyers have only one requirement: a home to buy.
Not in my experience. In my building 4 of 6 units have been sold in the past year. All of them sold below or at original purchase price 2 years ago when it was new construction.
From what I hear things are different outside Boston, but in Boston it seems like a lot of new construction is going unsold and units are staying on the market for months.
I've bought two houses in my life. My second one is the youngster at around 100 years old now. The first one is of unknown age, but based on old town maps was between 186 and 199 years old when I bought it (it was on the later map and not the previous).
Both were great experiences, indeed with some maintenance needed (just like any structure). Both appreciated significantly during my ownership, in addition to providing shelter.
I'm glad that people generally don't want older houses. It means I can get a lot more of what I want for less money; I'm perfectly happy to have 1.5% annual maintenance (and worse insulation) instead of 1.0% when the place sells for 25% less than a comparable structure (and often has more land around it and land that's quality soil often with established/re-established trees).
As long as you don’t end up on the register of historic places - then you have costs and restrictions applied to “keep it as it was” and the hassle of proving that your fixes/changes don’t damage the historicity.
Where I live, Bavaria, you cna get all kinds of subsidies to refurbish and maintain historic places. You also need them due all the restrictions and general age. Also, work tends be quite expensive. Overall so, it is affordable. As long as you don't go into castles, bit then, if you can afford to buy, money probably isn't your problem anyway.
That being said, these places have. alot of charm and character. I am kind of sad to not have taken that one apartment with a Renessaince wall painting back the day.
Yeah, in the US you often get declared historic but there’s a fund to help pay for things but it’s entirely underfunded and so you’re stuck with the costs or ignoring the problem or just jury-rigging something unofficial.
Lead-based paint is a legitimate concern for older houses (built before 1979/1980), especially if you have children staying in the home, or if you want to do any remodeling/repainting
Great post, and agree with pretty much everything.
Solutions? It's going to be hard, for sure, to find anything.
Maybe:
1) Move to Italy, or equivalent (I'm in Italy at the moment and I'm Italian, so why not some free advertising for my own nice country?). Not in a big city, but pick a small town. E.g. Montalcino, in Tuscany, is home of the best Brunello wine, amazing food, lots of history, etc, and they're bringing fiber internet to every home as we speak (yes, I saw the temporary cables this morning, running from one place to another. The entire town will have high speed internet in a few weeks).
2) Build a new city. I've dreamed about doing this for the past ~30 years or so. I think I know how a city like this should be, and it would be a mix of something like Montalcino, and something like the modern world. But I have failed to find a way to do it that doesn't require having a few Billion dollars of disposable money.
Do most small-town Italians speak English, and would they actually want a bunch of expat Americans showing up in their neighborhoods one day? You may be Italian, but for others...
I can't describe now baldly I'd love to live above that former Chinese restaurant and operate some kind of eclectic low effort business out of the front. For only the price of one of those gaudy new pickups.
Yeah, I enjoyed this and the WTYP podcast. I disagree with Justin a bit on his favored idea of "De-commodification of housing", making it some type of individual right rather than a form of tradeable property, versus leaving the capitalist framework by which we allocate individual housing in place, and just aggressively intervening by changing infrastructure, zoning, taxation, and development to create market conditions amenable to the population's interests.
I respect his POV, but I see the latter as more achievable. I think he sees a pernicious influence from local developers, and believes any government-led change that leaves them intact will necessarily be corrupted by them.
“These older places (the homes being built today) will then be populated by lower class people with fewer resources and less status thereby reinforcing the perception that it’s best to move on if at all possible. These are fungible, forgettable, disposable places that rapidly age and are then left to quietly decay.“
Sort of an aside: this reminds me of a presentation I saw years ago by an architect(?) talking about architectural anti-patterns. My favorite comment was how planters are added around buildings as an afterthought as "green band aids".
Unfortunately for me I have no idea who the presenter was nor the venue. It was maybe a TED Talk but this was back when YouTube's only content was ripped off Newgrounds animations and clips from The Daily Show. It must have been over ten years ago because the Iraq war was mentioned as being a contemporaneous event. I'd love it if someone knows the presentation I'm talking about.
I think a lot of the points (as I remember them) are germane to this article.
I'll never understand it. If you look at the places that suburbanites visit - the vacations they take, none of those places look like the ones they live in. Paris. Manhattan. Smaller locations like Niagara Falls still represents a level of age and density far beyond suburbia.
Heck, even Vegas represents a level of density when you think about the fact that nobody's visiting the sprawl.
It's like we know what nice places look and feel like, but choose to build the exact opposite because of parking convenience.
People like having yards for their kids to play in and not sharing walls with neighbors. And people visit campsites with no running water, but obviously it would be bad to live somewhere with no running water.
This is one of those truths that is so obvious to me and simultaneously puzzling that others don't see it as obviously the preference of many people.
I have hated every shared-wall/ceiling/floor accommodation I've ever lived in, even fairly high-end newish construction. (I hated the idea that my noise was annoying others almost as much as the times when their noise annoyed me. In my house, if I want to do a woodworking project, listen to Van Halen, or watch a movie at 10:30 PM, I'm free to do that.)
I love having outdoor space that's "just ours". If we want to plant a garden, we plant a garden. If we want flowers, we plant flowers. If we want a trampoline, we buy a trampoline.
One thing to remember is that houses in dense older cities in Europe are often built of stone or brick or concrete (even the newer ones) which results in a building with different properties than what we’re used to with out stick built apartments.
And they often have a garden/yard area. What’s sad is that we don’t really even have the option in the USA for that style.
That makes sense. Different people have different preferences. What's nuts to me is that land use laws take the preferences from one set of people and impose them on vast swathes of a city. It seems weird to me, for example, that you can only build single family homes in 70% of San Francisco, one of the densest cities in the US.
It's really strange seeing the anti-suburban attitudes right after we got a lesson in why relying on communal urban amenities doesn't always work.
We moved to a nice town in walking distance of several parks and small shopping districts in winter 2019. Six months later the shops were all shut or closed for good, and the parks had caution tape all over the playground equipment. They took the swings off the swingsets so the kids couldn't play.
Suburbia is made of families. People want big houses with big yards for their kids. They’re often not bringing their kids on those same vacations. And on top of that, where people vacation is very different from where they’d want to live long term.
I'd rather have a medium house with big safe parks. Growing up out in the woods is great, but having kids who are trapped with no autonomy hurts kids in a way I'd like to avoid.
There's actually a perverse impact, because young people can't drive. So moving to suburbia for "the kids" results in kids being isolated from their community. And remember, vehicular traffic is the 2nd highest cause of death in children in the USA, after birth defects.
Look at tourists attitudes of many of those areas; they glamorize them to an extent, but they'll also warn you to watch out for pickpockets and wear security wallets. They don't want to live there, it's an amusement park.
That was a really good read. I see this happening all over the Tampa Bay area. But I also see the opposite, where once-blighted structures are transformed into beautiful establishments. Grand Cathedral Cigars [1] is one I like to mention, as I have close ties to the area that's been an extremely high crime area for decades. It's turned around quite a bit recently, and seemingly abandoned structures like the old church which Grand Cathedral occupies, are being repurposed rather than torn asunder. There's a running joke about "up and coming neighborhoods" in the Tampa Bay area, but there is visible progress and fewer parking lots being created in place of structure.
New England (except some posh suburbs) is filled with old rotting wooden houses. Fit for the 19th century but today they just look like slummy creaky shacks.
Just why wouldn't the cities raze old houses to build new ones?
Cities should just add a deforestation/nature tax to new lots. The market will only have lots that already has a property on it.
It is important for older cities to rejuvenate and when cheaper alternatives don't exist, they will be forced to redevelop. See how large cities redevelop in constrained areas.
This is a similar trend if you were in the metro, except things change right at the spot. Small towns change at a different scale. But I’m not so sure towns get abandoned like that regularly unless it was mismanaged by the economic development centres.
> I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments.
This is possible, but a lot of suburbs are old and quite successful.
Bellevue and Redmond come to mind just from where I live but there are lots of places in America where the periphery is long lived and maintained.
Just speculating here, but is there a possibility that Bellevue & Redmond's success is due in part to Microsoft HQ being located there? I imagine that without that, those suburbs would look quite different...
Not Just Bikes is a great YouTube channel that discusses this repulsive suburban decay and covers a lot of Strong Towns material as well. It's a very upsetting pattern that strips towns of the feeling of community you only really get with walkable and enjoyable neighbourhoods.
These are very much similar between the U.S and Canada, the only difference in my mind being the impression I get from this quote
> So here’s the big picture. All of America’s institutions are focused exclusively on churn. Crank out new stuff, sell it fast, cash out, and move on to the next project. Blighted neighborhoods aren’t an accident. They’re baked in to every facet of how we do everything.
It's my impression that this has wormed it's way into other facets of U.S capitalistic culture. Visiting for the first time, every sign in the airport seemed to be shouting at me "BUY BUY BUY" "BURGERS CHICKEN TACOS IPADS GUNS" etc.. as if I wasn't expected to come back. Massive absurd super Walmarts, Super Targets,(I thought "Super" was just a colloquialism until I saw that in fact they literally have/had it in the name) places to gain as much weight as possible and then lose it instantly with this one easy trick. It was the first time I saw a living blob of a person literally just vibrating on a chair in the damn airport. Not that I have anything against overweight people, but it's symbolic of a level of pure hedonism I'm uncomfortable with. Everything's cheaper and bigger and awful. Not that Canada doesn't have some elements of this, but it's a much much smaller scale of crazy. The cities though are a similar hellscape, with just a few nice walkable exceptions.
This is a monumental issue in how American cities develop.
I'm from the south and am currently moving from one southern city (Durham - which is near Raleigh - NC) to another (Nashville, TN) and it's depressing to see how both places keep making the same mistakes (Nashville is maybe 20 years further down the road to failure than Raleigh, though).
What are those mistakes? Designing all these unwalkable neighborhoods filled with single family dwellings with no cross streets or any retail corridors, then cramming them in along "strips" that connect them to the Old City and accumulate strip malls (eventually, holding so much traffic that they are a nightmare to navigate).
So what you end up with, is the Old City has an actual grid of sorts, with cross streets and some walkability, with commercial near residential, and feels vibrant. But most people simply can't afford those areas, because they're so desirable for the people who recognize the value of this.
Since the old areas are so expensive, most people have to buy into one of the aforementioned crappy new neighborhoods, and suffer all the subtle ill effects of being isolated from most other humans by walls of traffic. When individual developers buy these massive swathes of land in (formerly) rural areas, they optimize for the short term profit they can make from selling the new homes, and nothing else.
As more of those crappy neighborhoods pile up, the traffic gets worse, and getting to/from the core parts of town becomes more and more painful. In this respect Raleigh fares better better, but only because rather than having one city center, the Raleigh area has many (Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and various other small towns). The web of sprawl grows between these places, but in each core is a small grid with retail, which means that as the megalopolis fills in all the gaps (rather than growing outward in ever increasing circles from a single center point) people can remain close to something attractive.
One big issue is that the cookie-cutter neighborhoods have no grid system that connects to their surroundings, and instead there's just limited ingress/egress from the neighborhood onto the main strips. The developers don't own adjacent corridors, so there is no short term incentive to connect to them. This creates vast areas where no retail could ever exist, because they're along dead-end cul-de-sacs which "belong" to individual neighborhoods.
I don't really know what the solution is. I don't really think humans want to live in these places, but there are no incentives to do better for builders, and real estate is treated as a valuable commodity, so here we are. In the south, where rural land is cheap, it all feels depressingly inevitable.
I'd love to see a counterpoint of a city (especially a Southern city, in a red state) that has taken a different approach to development, which has managed to prioritize connectivity and walkability in a successful manner.
>But aside from the fact that I didn’t care for any of these homes and was never going to buy in these locations, I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments.
Capitalism consumes limited resources (land) for temporary gains (poorly built structures that nobody wants after just one generation). This is not a sustainable model to build a strong society.
Suburbia is centrally planned in extreme detail. American voters understand that when it comes to housing, capitalism must be marginalized to a small box, otherwise the places we live would be “too crowded” with “the wrong kind of people” and “not enough parking.” So it is. And we get out parking, and our open space, and our socioeconomic segregation. And this is what it looks like.
I'm convinced that suburbia is popular enough that it would survive pretty well without government intervention, just not indefinitely in the same locations.
Strong Towns is just one perspective with a strong agenda. I began doubting everything they publish when they got all the important details completely wrong in a story about my home town.
The money that goes to cities is paid by the employers of people who commute from suburbs, and the businesses those commuters buy from. The mental and physical space of living outside the city is essential to maintain the productivity and sanity of the urban workforce. Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.
A false dichotomy that persists because typical US zoning encourages only those two outcomes: single family homes until the pressure bursts, leading to a high rise apartment some place.
>Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.
It's really hard to take your post seriously when you diverge into paranoid conspiracy theories like this one.
Nobody is being forced to live in an apartment. Nobody is even being asked to live in an apartment (except by a few politically inert eco-activists). We merely want people to be allowed to live in apartments! In many areas, families compete for houses with groups of adult renters, the latter having 3-4 incomes, because apartments are so underprovisioned. This of course is no good for people's ability to raise children, but my faction isn't loony enough to pretend it's a secret genocide.
Meanwhile, urbanists are in fact aware of and regularly lament[1, 2] the low standards for sound insulation and build-to-code reality of contemporary multi-family construction. But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).
> But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).
The free market approach would rely on drastically looser zoning and other land use restrictions so that tons more housing gets built resulting landlords actually have to compete and thus start caring about a wider range of issues.
Capitalism tends to produce more of the thing that people demand. I would wonder why people want this kind of home. I myself am not a US person, don't understand why.
These places offer a level of perceived safety [0] and measured public school performance that are somewhere between outrageously expensive and impossible to replicate in an urban setting. Not many people are excited* about living here and don’t choose it in their 20s, but in your 30s it’s understood that you’re not going to walk your child past needles and homeless encampments to a 2/10 school. It’s also understood that doing anything about the needles and homeless encampments would be a human rights violation, even if somehow the money were available, which it’s not. Mechanisms which once allowed upper-middle-class urban families to put their kids in good* public schools, like testing-based admissions, are also being recognized as unjust and dismantled.
[0] The absence of threatening humans makes them feel safe, but what we should really be worried about are all the vehicle miles traveled.
> in your 30s it’s understood that you’re not going to walk your child past needles and homeless encampments to a 2/10 school.
You don't need to live in suburbs to achieve that, really. And in suburbs you dont walk child to school all that often, you drive them anyway.
> It’s also understood that doing anything about the needles and homeless encampments would be a human rights violation, even if somehow the money were available, which it’s not.
I mean this 100% seriously: you can actually do things about homelessness that are not human rights violations. Big amount of homelessness is literally consequence of policies - and not the ones that seek to help people.
We can surely do a lot more to mitigate the suffering that is mostly invisible to begin with.
But as long as there exists a right to decline drug treatment or behave unacceptably in shared housing, then go camp out in the main pedestrian thoroughfare, at least a few people are going to do it, and the city will feel like that kind of place.
Even in SF with a massive homeless population, it’s fewer than 10 faces I see over and over. I still want to help the thousands living in their cars, crashing on friends couches, or sleeping in out of the way places. But it’s the 10 dudes being aggressive in very public places who are why it’s unpopular to raise kids here.
Communism is even better at doing that: Khrushchyovkas. At any rate, extrapolating a trend from a single society to be an indelible part of an economic system is specious.
Transitioning from a property tax model to a Land Value Tax model would encourage rather than discourage development, and ensure society is compensated for granting someone a monopoly on an area of land.
Capitalism wants to build high density in city centers that lasts hundreds of years. Zoning is collusion between landowners to stop other landowners from producing housing - it’s a legal (sadly) monopolist practice that requires government.
This is probably off tangent but who shops for a home like this? My wife and I are looking right now and we told our agent what we want and then proceeded to spend time on Redfin trying to find a house. We find something we want and then ask our agent to get us inside of it.
Our agent has suggested a couple of places but she's also had us point out 4 or 5 that we were specifically interested in and - she works in the area that we're looking in.
I can understand that the beginning with an inexperienced buyer being told "how it is" by the experienced agent might be a hook but instead it makes me think the buyer is a bit of a flake. Sorry if that's mean but honestly that's what I thought.
However, I disagree with his take that America's housing development model is to develop into outskirt suburbs, let middle class move in, let it deteriorate in 30 years, and build more outskirts.
Now, maybe I live in California and things are different. In the bay area even old areas with very old houses rise in values, and in fact, they rise more than newer developments. Demand for housing everywhere in the bay area + surrounding areas are high regardless of how new they are and how deep in town or out in the outskirts they are. Areas developed 30+ years ago continue to have high demand from middle to wealthy families. These areas didn't just not deteriorate but have grown into larger and more modern areas and in some cases developed their own downtown.
Admittedly California and bay area specifically is probably a bubble and behaves differently than much of America. But I have a feeling more than a few popular cities are going through something similar. Appleton might not be, and maybe he's right that the new development outskirts will deteriorate in 30 years, but I doubt that'll be the case in new developments around Phoenix or Denver.