Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build
darrellowens.substack.com
darrellowens.substack.com
And it turns out that some of that process doesn't actually help the more vulnerable groups it was intended to help, but gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood.
Everything for inducing the demand and reducing the supply. The invisible hand of extracting values at all cost.
The neighborhood was nice, low traffic, never lock your doors(so to speak). In comes 'low income housing', ie jamming as many terrible apartment complexes as they could wherever they could.
Traffic shot way up, too much for the roads. Why would the developer care. Noise also shot up, constant noises of bass from cars at all hours. Lastly, crime shot up. I went from living almost in the middle of nowhere to having my car broken into twice in my own driveway.
Sorry all, I agree that housing is a crisis, but I no longer want dense housing anywhere near me.
Also, low-income housing sort of sucks. For example, in my area, some low-income apartments were recently constructed, but they do not have washer and dryer receptacles. It's not that they aren't included. You cannot even bring your own, because you won't have anything to hook them up to. Apparently, you are supposed to use the laundromat only.
But now that people with low income can live there, suddenly my complex no longer has to worry about those people, because the availability of the low-income apartments reduces the amount of people who would even consider living here. Suddenly, you're not losing potential customers by raising the price, because all the customers that you would have been losing are now all living in the low-income apartments instead.
That hurts people like me who have a higher standard of living (such as owning a washer and dryer) but still don't exactly make enough money to justify spending $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment (ours is currently around $1,800). I suppose I'm the customer they'd be losing by raising the price, but the risk to them is probably still far lower now.
That just doesn't exist much today. You either spend more than you can afford to live with upper middle class in a house two sizes too big, or you live in shared low income apartments. They just don't build small SFH neighborhoods anymore, apparently.
I know many midwest cities with newly built small houses. Maybe not <900 sq feet. But 3-4 family bedroom houses at around 1500 sq feet. These houses are basic and inexpensive. You won't get much land either but may get a neighborhood park.
there are other constraints of course (such as isp), but right now the biggest one is that we don't have millions to spend on a single bedroom.
I was able to have a 3bd/2.5ba 1,200sqft townhome for only $1,200/month. I think there was only 1 shooting in the 3 years I lived there. Yeah there was noise, but it was also a college town so that's unavoidable in the area.
It's an idea that I felt worked very well, and I really wish more cities would try it out for semi-dense housing solutions.
North Charleston (in general) is considered an unsafe area, but this community was built to battle the stigma against Section 8 housing that is very prevalent in the Charleston area. After I moved out they've continued to build out more privately-owned homes in the community. Back in 2018 rents were around $1,200 for a 3bd, but the privately-owned homes are now renting for over $3k for 3bd, and starting around $400k for sale. While the Section 8 housing is still operating as it normally does for the area with reduced costs.
It's helped to revitalize the area (take a look at Park Circle just north of the community), while ensuring that further gentrification and displacement doesn't occur like it did in the downtown Charleston Westside neighborhood.
1. When you save your whole life for a downpayment and buy a house, you want it to at least KEEP it's value, nobody wants to buy a house and lose money. That is common sense.
2. People generally move to areas they desire for reasons. They want to also keep this the same or improve. They don't want it to deteriorate.
So now we can debate what lowers values (nominal terms) and what causes areas to be undesirable and how they get there.
What I can think of: Increases in crime, Dropping maintenance/services, increased pollution, increased noise, increased traffic etc...
Nowhere above has anything to do with "poors".
Value doesn't only mean monetary value. Social prestige is one of the values too. And sometimes they are transferable. The invisible hand is not just about the literal money
.. which they will literally state in terms of property value.
It's polite to be concerned about money and impolite to be concerned about crime?
You can't really talk about those things in polite company, so house prices are the euphemism used instead.
Now, make each one of those properties dual family housing, and suddenly you’ve got twice as many people to evacuate, but you haven’t upgraded the roads or any of the other utilities. And that’s very bad news. Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that the Austin city council has created.
Property values are certainly going to go down as they cram more and more housing into this space. But the cost will be in human lives when the wildfires do hit.
Can we prosecute our city council for manslaughter? Or even murder? How long do we have to wait for these deaths to occur, so that we can finally prosecute for them?
Now I do have to say as a semi-libertarian I support YIMBY, building up everything and making most zoning illegal. Sorta against my self-interest.
But at the same time, I strongly dislike US poor. It's almost an oxymoron that the more meritocratic the society, the better the sorting, and thus the worse an average non-immigrant poor people are. US, compared to most places, is pretty meritocratic. An average person at the same percentile poverty level in Russia (or, I bet, Mexico or China or Nigeria or whatever) is a much better human being than a corresponding non-immigrant in the US (any race). If the way to keep the latter out is to keep local property unaffordable, so be it. I don't really care about broad property values otherwise - I don't want to move and if I do I'd probably buy a similar house.. in fact given the transaction costs, cheaper housing may make moving cheaper.
Such a perfect example.
Welcome to London, UK
There are council houses spread throughout London with no real "slums" like Chicago used to have with it's public housing.
This is complicated by a property tax law similar to rent control, where your taxes are frozen at the time of purchase. This results in a market where few people are willing to sell and most people are unable to build. Thus rental prices in the region are dirt cheap relative to home prices, versus an appalachian town where the opposite is true.
For me, this is an example of red light cameras causing MORE accidents than without the camera because it interferes with human behavior. Specifically, the painfully slow permit process causes most building to be done unpermitted and therefore at risk of harm to human life (the purpose of the permit is to assure safety). As we know, the unspoken purpose of the red light camera is revenue, thus representing a conflict of interest between true safety and revenue, and I think a similar conflict is rotting California's real estate situation as well, in service to wealth building more than it's in service to the common man.
Not to defend urban renewal, but if it had focused on railways instead of highways, I wonder if we'd be as negative today. For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.
And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people.
This is especially true for interchanges, highway interchanges are freaking gigantic. Railway interchanges are cooperatively tiny.
For railway you wouldn't need nearly as much removal, and a railway is far, far easier to cross then a highway. You can start with at grade crossings early on and then overtime add grade separation. Grade separation is much cheaper for a railway.
Or you can build the whole railway above or below grade quite reasonably.
This rail line here can beat most giant US urban highways, Zürich Switzerland: https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK
With cut and cover, you can pretty cheaply build a railway and then build new building above, where the same people who live there before can live.
> For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.
So by that logic it good to build highways, as long as the government also makes sure that everybody has a car?
If everybody can use the least space and energy efficient method to get around, surely we have great solution.
I'd also like to note that overall capacity is sensitive to how big each train is and how fast it moves etc.
There are certain lingering, er, unserious yet overhyped proposals out there for systems using many low-capacity pods, but because you need some sort of safe separation between them it tanks the capacity. (Unless you run them in an unsafe way that will eventually kill thousands of people in compound pile-ups.)
The point is a railline can handle lots of people. If it does depends on it being used in a reasonable way.
Assuming everyone is going the same place at the same time.
Commuting.
It’s how nearly all of my coworkers commute, even though we live in different cities and leave at vastly different times
The train stations should be connected by walking, biking, trams (basically trains), subways (also trains) and buses. And car dropoff too. Maybe some parking.
Hirarchy, that how you create an efficent system from anywhere to anywhere. Fast intercity trains, regional trains, S-Bahn, Trams and so on.
It works great an I assure you not everybody works in the same place, and somehow trains are still very well used.
Today on my day off into the mountains Im gone take an trolly bus, then an electric regional train and then a disel bus into the mointains. With lots of stuff I have to carry. Its perfectly fine.
At anytime I can check an app, tell it where I want to go and I almost certainly have reasonable connection within the next 15 min.
So maybe instead of snark, you could actually learn something about tansportation engineering.
If you want to see what single rail corridor can do in a city, check out Münich S-Bahn for example. And then do the math on how large a highway would have to be.
Tomorrow I have a flight at 12:00. If I want to get there (~200km) with a car it's 2-3 hours depending on traffic. If I want to get there with train+bus it's 5h11m minimum, if I go right now it's 8h26m, if I want to catch my flight tomorrow it's 9h10m (and I'll be there at 8:40 instead of 11:00). It's also more expensive than driving there and leaving my car at one of the airport's parking lots for a week. I'll save ~50 euros by driving and set off at 8 tomorrow instead of 23:30 today.
Its of course also the case that the Western world after WW2 fully embraced the car and made sure its the most efficent while basically making sure street space was cleared of anything else. Before that street space was full of different uses.
Its only more expensive if you assume you already have a car, and a garage and so on.
And for a society, every single study shows that overall for society, private car travel is the most costly and the worst for the envoirment. You arent actually paying for all those costs.
From where I live airport is 1h by car and 1h 10min by train. Combined with parking and everything you will likely be faster with the train.
Yes, I’m aware of this. And if you have enough population density, which most of Europe does, you can have frequent train service because enough people will have overlapping trips at the same time that they can share a rail line.
The advantage of a highway network is that a single vehicle can simply take the fastest route from point to point all by itself even if relatively few people are traveling that route. Germany is about the same land area as Montana or New Mexico. Those states have populations of about 1 and 2 million, respectively. Germany has 84 million. Texas has twice the land area of Germany and a population of 30 million. So yeah, if you’re going just about anywhere in Germany there are probably enough people going the same way at about the same time to make a train a reasonable solution. That’s not going to be true in the United States. And even Germany has the Autobahn, which was decades ahead of the American highway network in sophistication.
> At anytime I can check an app, tell it where I want to go and I almost certainly have reasonable connection within the next 15 min.
I live within a 15 minute drive of just about everywhere I need to go on a regular basis. Why would I wait that long for the train when I could just be there already?
> If you want to see what single rail corridor can do in a city, check out Münich S-Bahn for example.
I’ve ridden the Munich S-Bahn, it was great!
High speed roads should be limited to rural area and no more than two lane, one for each direction.
Because no freight moves by road, only people. And even those people mostly shouldn't.
That is, your "should" doesn't actually work in the actual world. Trucks carry something like 60% of the freight in the US. You could say that rail should carry more of it, and that works for longer distance, but regional traffic is usually more efficiently handled by truck. So unless your vision of the future is people living in their cities, with nothing in their apartments, and not eating, you need better roads than that.
And then, you run into human nature. Some of us like going places, and more of us want to do so than you seem to like. Your "should" becomes "you should live your life the way I want you to, not the way you want to". You should expect a rather hostile response for that...
I didn't say we should get rid of roads, I said that high speed road should be limited to 2 lanes...in rural area, exactly the area that don't need high capacity roads.
You're trying to get to the world that you want (aren't we all?), but you're not starting with the world as it is, but with a world that exists in your head. As a result, your "solution" is completely unworkable in reality.
What about Interstate 80 that makes it special? Is it about freight carrying capacity? Can that be substituted by trains? Why does it have to be in that particular way?
You can say that a solution is 'unworkable', but you haven't explained your model of the world state well enough to convince someone. You haven't explained even "human nature".
Is my proposed "solution" politically unworkable? Yes, based on prevailing political opinions, society mores, cultural expectation and preferences. But perhaps you mean something else.
The traffic is there. It's not going to fit on one lane each way. What are you going to do with it?
Try to fit it on railroads? Can you show that railroads can realistically handle 250% of current freight traffic, and 100000% of current passenger traffic? My gut feel is that they can't. If you have evidence that they can, then let's see it.
Or are you just going to tell the traffic to go away? Tell people to buy less stuff, so that less freight moves? Tell people to not go places, so that there's less passenger traffic on roads? The answer to that is going to be middle fingers from a huge number of people.
This is pretty much the stated aim of my local council in London - they have a target to reduce car journeys by x% by 2030 or so. They want to achieve this by basically increasing journey times by adding congestion, removing lanes etc.
I find it incredibly dystopian.
"Reducing car use and increasing cycling levels will help address many of the challenges we face, including the climate crisis, air pollution, health and inactivity, road danger, congested roads, and fairer access to amenities, jobs and services. It will enable children to travel independently, create more pleasant streets and strengthen the economic recovery of our town centres and high streets. As we emerge from the pandemic, cycling, walking, wheeling* and public transport will help us achieve the goals that will ensure London’s success."
"The UK must significantly reduce its carbon emissions to meet its legally binding goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and avoid the worst effects of climate change. The Mayor has set an ambitious goal for London to become carbon neutral by 2030. Transport is responsible for more than a quarter of London’s carbon emissions, although this proportion is increasing as other sectors decarbonise more quickly The electrification of London’s buses, now the greenest fleet in Europe, and the rollout of charging points will help reduce emissions, but this will not be enough. Even if all new vehicles are electric by 2030, transport emissions are still likely to exceed what is needed to limit global warming by 1.5°C without substantial traffic reduction. Swapping private cars for sustainable modes is therefore essential."
I don't know where you got your percentages from, but here's a graph of passenger capacity across different modes of transport: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Passenge...
By the way, wanna see something embarrassing? https://youtu.be/T3LLgzO_PrI?t=234. Japan had 100% safe, 100% punctual, high speed and throughput trains figured out in 1964.
"Over the Shinkansen's 50-plus year history, carrying over 10 billion passengers, there have been no passenger fatalities due to train accidents such as derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons."
Like I said, embarrassing.
Looking at states is stupid, because 'states' don't limit where people live.
If you look at regions where people live, the US is brilliant for trains and high speed trains.
The system that has barley seen any investment for 100+ years and is disadvantaged by every possible regulatory and legal mechanism can't currently do it, therefore it is unworkable.
Of course if you don't invest in a capability your not gone have it. The highway system has seen an absurd amount of investment and thus is currently handling these things.
Nobody claims that you can't change it tomorrow. But the question is what is possible if you do things like proper land use and transportation planning.
And we have very good evidence that highways are inefficient and unhealthy.
Interestingly, the US carries a higher proportion of freight by rail than Europe does.
Because the US has basically no passengers on the rails, its of course far easier to get things on the rails. Given that the US basically doesn't have passenger, the number are not that great.
Plus, Europe has ocean on 3 sides and generally a much longer coastline so lots of stuff that in the US uses rail, in Europe simply uses water transport.
In general a lot more things simply use local resources, for historical and political reasons.
Switzerland for example matches the US in terms of cargo modal share. But if you look what we had to do to achieve this high % while still having very large passenger numbers its incredibly hard. Basically it requires a concerted effort by government to prevent road use and to have a concert policy of all government and private institutions working together to enable it.
If you compare the US freight system to a actual peer competitor, the Soviet Union, the US doesn't look that great:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/RailUSAv...
If the US actually had a concert policy of increasing modal share of rail compared to road freight transport, the US could do so, so much more. It would be a great thing for the environment and everybody in the US.
The advantages of road networks as efficient means of point-to-point transportation disappear very quickly as the rate of non-point-to-point trips increases. Static routes like commuting and grocery shopping account for most traffic and are incredibly wasteful. You aren't stuck in traffic because of bespoke trips that necessitate a car, you're stuck because people make the exact same trip from A to B and back every single day.
If you are in a low density place you don't need high frequency to have a useful system.
I used to live in a place that had only villages of a few 1000 people with lots of farmers around. Having a 1hly small rural train is perfectly useful and a great thing to have.
And you only basically need a single rail line with a few crossing places to provide that kind of frequency.
The idea that trains are only useful in a super dense place is just one of those myths the US population has been brainwashed into.
> The advantage of a highway network is that a single vehicle can simply take the fastest route from point to point all by itself even if relatively few people are traveling that route.
Wrong. Highways has intersections that are spaced out. Each intersection requires a huge amount of cost to set up.
Highway intersections also take up a gigantic amount of space and are horrible places for humanity.
Train stops and intersection on the other hand can be small and efficient. They are often beautiful places and you can even have shops and development there.
New towns pop up on important rail intersections and stations, but not near highway intersections.
> Germany is about the same land area as Montana or New Mexico. Those states have populations of about 1 and 2 million, respectively. Germany has 84 million. Texas has twice the land area of Germany and a population of 30 million.
Now you are just making ridiculous arguments. I can't actually believe that you are making those arguments in good faith. But I am going are as if you were in good faith.
Nobody is making the argument that Montana or New Mexico should have a train system like Germany. Literally nobody. But they also don't even need full highway either. Normal roads of maximum 1-2 per direction and normal intersections should be perfectly enough for that kind of density. You can then still have excellent public transport with buses for much of the state.
But even in a place like Montana trains still make sense. There are still town like Billings or Bozeman and friends that are easily large enough for a train. Maybe not a high speed train. Where I live having a single village of 1000 people not be connected by regular trains is considered strange. Billings is significantly larger then the largest regional city here and that city has an S-Bahn system with multiple lines of 15-min interval trains.
So while Montana as a whole doesn't need a huge system, each town still can use trains and trams in a number of ways.
That said, and the reason why I think you are arguing in bad faith, is that if you actually look at a density map of the US. You comparison fall completely on its face.
The reality is, the US actually has very nice locations for trains. You brought up Texas. Yeah Eastern Texas is mostly empty, but Western Texas isn't. So instead of just taking arbitrary political boarders, you need to actually look at the regions where people actually live.
https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us...
And when you actually do that, you realize that the US has a number of urban mega clusters that are actually perfectly placed for trains.
Basically, Bay Area, Southern California, Great Lakes, Texas Triangle, Northeast Coast, Florida. Are the most important ones, there are few other depending on how you look at it. If you do your density analysis based on those actual regions were people actually live, you will see that your 'density' argument falls flat on its face. And those regions actually mater, not arbitrary state borders.
For example, the very successful train line from Paris to Lyon. Turns out that Dallas to Houston is actually about the same distance. Oklahoma City, Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston have plenty of population and are in optimal distance for a rail network.
The Great Lakes region has more population THEN LITERALLY ALL OF FRANCE and isn't much bigger. Arguable its actually better for rail then France is.
So please for the love of god spare me the 'its all about density argument'.
Basically 80% of US population will live in such a urban region soon. So your argument is simply wrong. Local density does matter for ridership and things like that, but that is very much a DELIBERATE DESIGN and has NOTHING to do with overall density of a the US or individual states.
This is a video that goes threw the US and shows them visually:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lupWYQdDgQ
> I live within a 15 minute drive of just about everywhere I need to go on a regular basis. Why would I wait that long for the train when I could just be there already?
Of course, for places you go regularly, you don't need a train or a car. I live in a place I can walk everywhere in 10 min or less. And with 15 min on my bike I can literally be on an actual mountain/natural trail.
Have you considered that trains are also useful if you don't use them regularly? Do you never want to drink or smoke weed? Do you never go to another place where you don't have a car available. Do you understand that there are people in the world who can't drive for various reasons.
And you don't actually wait for a train for 15min, you just do literally 5s of planning by looking at the clock. Even with 0 planning the majority of the time you would wait 7min or less.
If railways were in place, people would have built around the railway destinations, just like cities throughout history were typically built on waterways for easy transport of goods.
The flexibility of the car encourages sprawl which gets you into a situation exactly like what you're describing, where it just seems obvious that trains aren't good enough. The same sort of sprawl just wouldn't exist in a train-dominated transport system.
But you need to force people go to the same destination. And quit shopping or getting their children to school or do sightseeing.
Also, the expression “getting railroaded” was coined by farmers to refer to the low prices they were getting paid for their produce by the railroads, who had established themselves as a monopsony by dominating freight. The construction of highways led to competition from trucks, which took away the ability of railroads to dictate low prices to farmers.
But setting aside old idioms, American cities were already shaped by the construction of railroads in the 19th century. They were certainly reshaped by the interstate highways but that was always going to be more disruptive than any sort of growth or improvement to the railroad network because it was a newer mode of infrastructure.
Not through the middle of them.
> people will always prefer single family homes.
Millenials and genZ prefer walkable neighborhoods and public transit.
edit: pre-50s america had much more dense walkable urbanism. Just more distributed. There were many more '2nd cities'
You're just running in the wrong circles.
If you're arguing that there's an abundance of space, this is true in many countries (and was certainly true prior to the Federal-Aid Highway Act or Levittown).
> We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes
Why? There are plenty of locales in the US where this very much isn't the case.
> Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute.
If we're simply talking about the average daily commute for the average person, why? There are still plenty of cities in the US that have effective public transportation.
No there arent. Even NYC is full of SFHs
That is generally the case when the zoning code forbids the construction of anything else; otherwise, density would increase progressively, largely via conversion/addition, and you would never see neighborhoods of single-family homes abutting commercial/multifamily neighborhoods, with a sharp line dividing them, as frequently occurs in modern American development. Anytime you see such a dramatic transition, you are looking at an artificial boundary created by zoning, and that means the properties just over the line on the single-family side will be simultaneously overcosted (because they are close to an area of high demand) and undervalued (because they cannot be developed to meet the demand).
The preference is so consistently overwhelming that we needed to make it illegal to build large apartment buildings in most major cities to enforce it.
So you can't afford a car but you can afford a house?
Seems plausible for 1k a month to be the tipping point.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
Why are there "nail houses" (see https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...) in China but not the US? In almost all of those examples, a similar property owner in the US would have been forced to give up their property under imminent domain.
Either this article is misinformed or I am. The housing bubble was a bubble in asset values not inventory, right? I don't seem to recall that there was an abundance of excess housing even then.
Of course, people did not have money to pay, and were under. There were forced liquidations.
And the parent comment was talking about the bubble, not the aftermath which is what you are talking about.
One of the big problems was that the federal government was handing out free money (as much as 90% for people to do highways). So of course all the states jump on that.
But of course city officials also want to be part of the gravy train and demand projects in their area to. And of course that doesn't make sense in a city. But politically you can't just tell a city no.
And if you are going to have a project, of course they have to build it where it is politically possible.
So its basically dumb politics all around.
Those are the folks who benefit the most and who also control the process.
How are home owners "rent seekers"?
The root cause of what you're talking about is demand is exceeding supply, by quite a long way. The population is growing - through various means - faster than homes are being created. That means a few home owners will do what you describe.
First, why didn't other countries become too scare to build? The neighborhood I grew up at in Moscow was built in bulk in place of a village of the same name in the early 80ies. Nobody cared about the village; in fact it wasn't even replaced by housing - it was demolished to build a stadium and other assorted sporting venues; the housing was added shortly after. Did it make Russia too scared to build? No, it didn't. During the aughts oil boom, they demolished some 5-story flats to replace them with 20+-story flats, giving the residents better flats in more remote neighborhoods, with no real choice to stay in their neighborhood in many cases (like my grand aunt's). They just keep doing things the same way, and that has its own tradeoffs. Nobody is "scared".
The difference in the US is that there's a stronger notion of individual rights, and it was obvious that the bureaucratic nightmare machine was running ramshod over those. So it was great that it was reigned in. The not-so-great part that instead of just respecting those as was the original intent, US has replaced an incompetent bureaucratic nightmare that ran ramshod over the local residents, with an incompetent bureaucratic/legalistic nightmare that tries to protect them instead. Or rather, some perverted collectivist distortion of "individual rights" where frivolous lawsuits from rich neighbors, disgruntled unions, idiot activists or basically anyone can hold up the project forever instead of just individuals negotiating their narrow concerns...
If this thing was done properly, in some cases the weight of many individuals would counterbalance aggressive projects when it makes sense, but loonies would end up like Edith Macefield, with a house surrounded by a mall. As it stands, Edith Macefields of the world can delay and block entire projects forever, other property owners be damned.
If China is winning wars, has more influence on world, has better tech, better infra, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita.
Americans will get their shit together to compete.
The problem with US is that we're too complacent. SF has billions of dollars of VC money pumped in, house prices are astronomic. SF is wildly successful despite the shortcomings. Homelessness, crime, e.t.c doesn't matter. If the wealth of the upper-class is preserved, they are fine with it. They are voting for what they want.
China is the best thing to have happened to US.
I wish the best of prosperity for China and Chinese citizens so we in US have competition and inspiration to what is possible.
Same for Europe, get your A-game together. Bring back a new renaissance period.
A rising tide lifts all boats. It's time to build!
China wins just on attitude and growth, but also has the "cheat code" of authoritarianism where anything can be imposed top-down without much push back.
If anyone is arguing based on lessons learned in Urban Renewal projects they keep very quiet on Hacker News. The situation in the now seems to be short-term economic incentives and a genuine belief that cheap energy shouldn't a low-priority goal for society (you need energy to build things).
There does seem to be a strong argument that there are vetos everywhere, but I think people would just add them in to the law today regardless of the political path over the last half-century.
Apparent efficiencies in public infrastructure works might be short-lived in a centrally directed economy and/or hides deep inefficiences elsewhere in the system.
(It might also be that 1960s stucco houses are preferable to dense apartment living for many people, and that Op misses the forest for the trees in the wider context of why and for whom anything is built anywhere).
I'm not in the USA or China though. Take with grains of salt.
If it was about preference one would think it would result in a lot of diversity (as it has historically), and not 2 pretty strict categories.
We also have evidence that old streetcar subburbs now fetch an insane price. So these kinds of neighborhoods are impossible to build now, but have high demand.
Where I live in Europe, you can still have single family homes but there are also lots of other building types around it. So there is clear evidence that if there are fewer restrictions, people have choices to live in lots of different places. Japan has the same thing as well. It seems pretty consistent, in most of the world that if you give people options, many people choice many different things.
That just outside of all the historical knowledge we have about everything that was done to enforce these patterns. There are to many things to list here but I assure you, there are a lot of them.
Look at China, there are highways and roads and streets filled with cars and traffic congestion.
To say that political and personal freedom indicates why we are stuck in this quagmire is to ignore the role of suffocating zoning regulations and other mechanisms that enforces a car centric worldview of American politicans and planners.
There is just no real analysis here of law, policy, or society. It's just a pile of uncited errata. I'm somewhat sympathetic to some of his conclusions, but there is no reasoning process here.
It's fantastical, and unrealistic, to hope that improved voter education will result in better electoral outcomes and thus better policy outcomes. The root problem is in how elections are financed. Citizens United must be reversed and elections must be financed publicly, with fair financing to candidates based on the number of signatures they obtain, and equal airtime purchased from public funds. Only then will we see YIMBY candidates start to accede to positions of power and start to reverse these landlord-favorable policies.
There is no solution to that problem other than to give up democracy, but the alternatives come with their own set of trade-offs. The wonderful world of people problems.
Our governor here in Oregon, Tina Kotek, is quite YIMBY. As is the mayor of the city I live in.
In the US, the federal level also very much influences things since for example it is federal institutions which buy the most mortgages (and they decide what kinds of homes qualify). For more examples, the federal level regulates interest rates (the main component of mortgage interest rates) and deductibility of housing costs under federal income tax law (higher than state income taxes for many people).
And elections only go so far because voters are not equally distributed among populations. Even renters tend to not vote but be vocal NIMBYes.
Mortgages and interest rates affect prices, but not the decision over whether to build more and how much.
Some serious persecution complex going on in this article. I'm sure there were places where that did happen, but here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg
Sources:
— https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer)
— https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity)
I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad once ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infra...
https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND...
The third avenue El (which was torn down in the 70s) had no real problem being rebuilt over the portion of Third Avenue (the Third Avenue of the Bronx certainly isn’t as flashy as the one in Manhattan, and the Bronx’s Park Avenue is pretty much train tracks on one side) for the 20ish years the two co-existed, at least from my understanding.
Don’t mind me though, because I certainly don’t live about 1/4 mile away from the CBE.
In San Francisco, the "redevelopment" of the Western Addition is a famous example of a public project that targeted certain minorities. The city basically took a wrecking ball to the heart of the black community in San Francisco, and it never really recovered afterwards. https://www.sfpublicpress.org/fillmore-revisited-how-redevel...
What looks like "targeting minority neighborhoods", is actually "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built".
Look at any major city. Are the expensive neighborhoods built near exiting highways or interchanges? Not really, they tend to be built further away.
And if you go back to when highways were being built (50-70's), most middle income families fled cities to the suburbs, and inner city housing prices dropped, which attracted low income minorities.
These were being built for the first time. There was no “where they were normally built” because they were first built in the areas mentioned in the 1950’s, normal hadn’t been defined yet. They targeted the poorer neighborhoods because those also tended to be the less powerful to stop it.
Many highways expanded from major roads. The new segments (built where no major roads existed) had to connect existing major roads.
There were very clearly areas where roads were going to be built and where they were never going to be built.
The city also has to buyout existing homeowners, and hence a part of the decision is going to be “where will buyouts cost us the least”? Hence the lowest cost housing, again often owned by minorities.
This is an opinion that is not factually accurate to what happened. Entire neighborhoods were plowed under for highways that then created impediments to local neighborhood connections. Highways literally destroyed communities.
Look at the before and after pictures of Oakland in this article:
The new highways were clearly connecting existing major roadways?
You're not going to tear down homes in the Oakland Hills to build a freeway not because it's full rich white people, but because it's nowhere close to the existing freeways.
This isn't actually true, historically speaking. When commuting was hard (pre-highway), the wealthy lived where it was most convenient - near street car lines, and close to the productive areas of the city. BUT service workers, laborers, etc still needed to live near-enough to work, so it wasn't 100% any one way. Once society invented a way to travel farther, poor neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, and the wealthy moved farther away, and commuted in.
TODAY, inner-city neighborhoods that are far from highways have wealthy people, but well-connected suburbs have wealthy people. The best example of this is (IMO) Cleveland - Shaker Heights, a nice streetcar suburb was all the rage with the well-off before the highways. They don't really have any highways, because of course the wealthy didn't want its damage. Post-highway, towns like Beachwood and Rocky River continue to gain popularity as the streetcars are decommissioned and removed, and wealthy professionals move to commuter cities.
The inner city neighborhoods that are pricey today were often run down ghettos when these highways were being built (or on their way to it).
This has to be the most cynical and cruel sentence I have read today. If your system mandates uprooting people's lives then its just not a good system, is it? If your normal is to disrupt people who are already downtrodden then its a bad cruel system even in isolation.
It’s not like they don’t get compensation.
Americans are so soft. They admire places like Japan, Singapore, even Europe when it comes to infrastructure.
Do you think those places say “it would be great to have new infrastructure, but we’d need to displace low income people so I guess we won’t”.
No, they say “hey, we’re putting in new infrastructure so you’re going to have to leave. We’ll pay you for it and provide assistance, but you’re going to have to move”.
And you know why they have nice infrastructure? Because they accept it as progress.
Yes! If you can avoid it, yes. Pressure should be applied to areas not already struggling. Just to reiterate my original point, which you didn't address, if your system consistently results in disruption of the lives of the under privileged, it's a bad system.
Also if caring about people is soft, I'm glad I'm soft.
There is always someone who is going to suffer when new infrastructure is built in an urban area. It's 100% unavoidable.
If you say "I'll make sure that never happens", then you just won't build new infrastructure.
I’m sure you all won’t know what to do with this comment and I’ll end up in the grays anyway.
This is a counter-example if you ignore a ton of the impacted neighborhoods. These highways are not particularly innocent examples. Sure, some may be unavoidable (like the south-eastern neighborhoods), but some of the locations are (at least today) pretty busy and core parts of their neighborhood (eg. Irving St. in Inner-Sunset).
The highway (101?) carving up the mission and then dividing the western addition from down-town would be rough if they built it as a limited-access road (which it appears to be based on the interchanges). Even modern-day 101 could have been along the rail-road or coast to avoid blocking the mission and Potrero...
Dumping 80 into the western-addition also seems questionably-motivated as well.
Most of it would have been under ground-level, both tunneled through the hill (emerging near the DMV) then a park-topped subway through the panhandle. Check out what Oak/Fell/Octavia would have looked like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4182283392
The elevated Central Freeway (along the bottom) and the on/off-ramp pair in the center of the image were built. Here's what it used to look like to exit onto Fell westbound before 2002 when they created the most dangerous intersection for pedestrians and cyclists in the entire City (Octavia & Market) by tearing this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGM-crlegA4
The construction companies (and capital) that survived the crash of 2008 were a lot more cautious. They hired and built less through the 2010's as the market recovered. More people got college degrees instead of learning construction trades. When the pandemic hit, and there was something of a boom in construction, I think they finally shook off the fear. Now, a few years later, the market is beginning to slump again due to high interest rates and general inflation.
An efficient market would see an increase in supply to meet demand. This is exactly what happened in Minneapolis, Raleigh, and many cities in Texas, which made it comparatively earlier to get construction permits (in some cases, particularly for multi-family housing).
China built 10,000km of high-speed lines in six to seven years. The USA went to the moon in 1969 too, but hasn’t been back since... Now we can't even build true high-speed rail from NYC to DC, which would take an hour instead of 4.5h.