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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that cities needed to focus on redevelopment as a much broader, city-wide strategy. Instead of following trends of what the next "up and coming" neighborhood is, actually revitalize all areas of the city.

Right now, Chicago has maybe 6 neighborhoods that people from outside of the city consider moving to. This puts a ton of pressure on the rents in those few neighborhoods and their surrounding areas.

But if the whole city had proper services, transportation, properly maintained housing units and relatively low crime, that should ease the demand on those few neighborhoods.

Instead, people just move into one area until it's too expensive to live there, then get pushed into another area until it's too expensive to live there, and so on and so forth.

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This doesn't work in practice. Places like Switzerland have all around good city strategies, yet finding a place to live is still super hard and super expensive. You can't even run off to the ghetto for cheaper options.

There are always geographic considerations that limit market availability, of course.

Its not even that really. They just do well overall. Even Renens outside of Lausanne, inconvenient in its location, is a nice place to live with decent public transit links. I guess you could try living farther away, but the train system even makes that viable. There is nowhere to get a good deal, except maybe France, but I doubt Evian is much of a deal, and that ferry ride across Lake Geneva is bound to get old eventually.

In that sense, it's the evidence of a strong economy. There's a lot of factors in play, like Switzerland having double the population density, but half of the income gap disparity. The United States has twice as many people living in poverty than Switzerland.

There's also the issue of how tourism affects local economies.

So yeah, it's a complicated issue.

> like Switzerland having double the population density, but half of the income gap disparity.

If you build evenly gentrified cities, isn't that going to be the results anyways? (also, I'm sure the US has way more than twice the number of people living in property, perhaps you meant per capita)

But when I was living there, it was fairly stressful. I guess if I was a poorer resident rather than a relatively more well off post-doc, it would actually be easier to find housing since there would be some assistance at least.

> perhaps you meant per capita

Percentage of population, yes. 7% in Switzerland, 14.5% in the US.

> But when I was living there

Do you mean living in Switzerland or the United States?

Switzerland

> But if the whole city had proper services, transportation, properly maintained housing units and relatively low crime, that should ease the demand on those few neighborhoods.

The problem is that this is what everyone is already trying everywhere, and it simply doesn't work.

The minute you improve any previously-bad neighborhood with any of the things you just mentioned, you immediately price it out of any person who previously wanted to / could have lived there. The act of improving anything is itself one major cause of the un-affordability.

Chicago is the textbook example of this - https://local.theonion.com/neighborhood-starting-to-get-too-... is 'satire', but basically 100% true.

There is a possibility that the trend we've seen in improvements resulting in high rent prices would bear out even if Chicago did revitalize the whole city and not just select areas. That'd be due to good old fashioned irrationality and greed on the part of local landlords who would see fit to raise their rents on par with the "gilded" neighborhoods that came before them.

This is a whole other issue, which is that once rents go up, they really don't go down, even in the event of a major market crash. I'm not sure if there is a market-based solution for that.

That's just inflation, though. Everything goes up over the long term. The important part is if rents go up slower than income does.

Rent has outpaced inflation for decades now. And median income has lagged behind inflation for the same period.

So it is an issue beyond normal economic inflation.

> I've always thought that cities needed to focus on redevelopment as a much broader, city-wide strategy. Instead of following trends of what the next "up and coming" neighborhood is, actually revitalize all areas of the city.

Actually I think developers would very much prefer to do this, but rich neighborhoods tend to have by far the most organized opposition, and opposition causes delays, which tend to add substantially to the cost, so poorer or less populated areas tend to be preferred instead.

Conversely, If half the city wasn’t a dump, rent would be high everywhere.

Neighborhoods evolve as time moves on. Both waxing and waning. If you are familiar with NYC, places like Bushwick and parts of the Bronx off of the Degan Expressway were bombed out, full of crackheads and squats in the early 80s. Today they are vital neighborhoods. Conversely, many parts of Long Island and the Hudson Valley have declined.

Conversely, If half the city wasn’t a dump, rent would be high everywhere

Yes, if other factors aren't taken into consideration. Speculative investment for instance. If we accept that there is a market limit on the number of people willing to pay to live in Chicago, then we can say increasing the number of viable units and neighborhoods should reduce the market rental rate.

But if people are willing to purchase properties without using them, then that throws that expectation out the window.

That kind of thing is why I support substantial punitive taxes on housing units in high-density areas left empty for more than X period of time.

I agree, but I think the situation is going to have to get even more untenable before that becomes an option, politically.

I don't disagree with you, but there is zero chance of any meaningful improvement in that situation.

You may see reductions in the use of opaque LLCs and other structures for laundering money via real property, but even excluding that, most urban centers land markets are controlled by a small group of property owners.

These folks are very politically powerful. I can't think of a city where the city administration isn't dependent on the local property bigwigs.

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