
We need ‘Goldilocks,’ not ‘voodoo,’ urbanism - pseudolus
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2019/01/16/we-need-%E2%80%98goldilocks%E2%80%99-not-%E2%80%98voodoo%E2%80%99-urbanism
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bilbo0s
Frankly I'm not certain how his proposed system is any better than the one
where all the cool kids move to San Fran?

I mean, there are just some realities about _people_ that, I think, are
oftentimes overlooked. He calls them "social networks", but at their root,
it's the manifestation of the tendency for humans to be tribal. You can try to
move San Fran to Omaha Nebraska if you like, but it won't work. People are
tribal. The cool kids will still want to hang with the cool kids. In fact,
it's extremely probable that the cool kids would just not move.

I'll even go one step further and say that not only will the new proposal fail
to elicit the desired behavior from the cool kids, but I'll go ahead and
predict that this proposed change would also do nothing to better the lot of,
say, impoverished minorities. It's just a fact of life that the human
proclivity for tribalism will work against them. It worked against them in the
post war "urban sprawl" model, it's working against them in the current "urban
revival" model, and it will work against them in the "goldilocks" model. Why
has it worked against them so consistently over time? Because we're not
changing the people, we're just changing the model.

And so much of what is happening is due to people, and how people think and
behave.

~~~
zwayhowder
Rather than look at moving San Fran to Omaha, think of it as making San Fran,
San Jose, Sacramento & a number of the cities/towns in between "one place".

If I take Tokyo as an example there is no denying it is huge, probably too big
at 10m in the urban area and a further 15m in the outer urban areas. But the
important thing is that for a relatively low cost you can get from anywhere to
anywhere else in 30-60 minutes. And even a short walk from the busiest train
station in the world (Shinjuku, close to 4m people a day) you can own a semi-
detached house of your own for less than $1m (roughly).

One of the big moves here in Australia is to make Sydney & Melbourne 30 minute
cities. The idea being that people generally only travel 30 minutes each way
to work every day. It's based on the idea of the city having multiple CBDs
(Central Business Districts/Downtown areas) so someone who works in the Sydney
based one can live within 30 minutes of it, while someone who works in the
Parramatta based CBD can live further away from Sydney.

In principle it's a great idea, in practice I know a lot of people who commute
for well over an hour each way to work in the Sydney CBD and my wife commutes
the other way from our inner city residence to her job in the third (and
furthest inland) CBD area and is considering quitting after just a few months.

My personal feeling (and I should add that while I do haThe same as the
Portland/Vancouver/The same as the Portland/Vancouver/ve extensive local
government experience I am not a town/traffic/transit planner, engineer or
anything similar) is that the largest problem is that currently virtually all
major transport routes are predicated on getting to the original Sydney CBD.
Want to get from Cronulla to Parramatta by train, well you get a train to the
Sydney CBD and then get one out to Parramatta, a trip that takes almost 2
hours. There is no option by bus, so you drive and travel less than half the
distance in 1/3 the time (except for traffic); now the roads from Cronulla to
Parramatta are not large freeways designed to move thousands of cars per hour
so it's stop start at traffic lights and a generally sub-par experience. So in
reality you are most likely to decide to work in the Sydney CBD.

Tokyo & other mega-cities tend to have a lot of crisscrossing or overlapping
mass transit systems and roads to make it easier to get from A to B,
regardless of their orientation to the historic spot where the first GPO was
built.

Personal Story Time, feel free to stop reading here:

Last night I attended the birthday drinks of an old friend. Our friendship is
old enough to legally drink in any state of America now. It was the first time
I'd seen him in years, despite the fact we live relatively close (as the crow
flies) because of that CBD centric transit system, we go out and socialise in
different areas. I caught up with a lot of friends last night including an ex
girlfriend and another very very dear friend who again I don't see because for
either of us to visit requires an hour or more on a train or in a car.

Surprisingly it is Uber that has actually improved my attendance at events
like this. Now I can for a relatively low cost go home on the shorter third
side of the triangle and not have to worry about changing trains/buses or
staying sober to drive home (and hoping every other road user stays sober
too).

~~~
bilbo0s
But none of that solves the fundamental problem. ie - the cool kids still want
to hang out with the cool kids.

Where do those losing to income inequality come in? You haven't changed the
nature of the jobs. They still require a level of education and training that
the people you're not thinking about don't have.

Think of it this way, you had a nice party with all of your old friends.
Awesome. But how does the lady living in the trailer park, or the guy living
in the ghetto start making connections among your friend group? How do they
start launching businesses with you guys in the hypothetical urban model that
you've put forth? Those answers are not so easy, because they have a lot to do
with people.

So if you like this model better, then by all means implement it, just don't
expect it to help those at the bottom. A little honesty, and an
acknowledgement that it's a model that's better only for some group of the
people at the top, basically only for their convenience, would be appreciated.
Society at large would still have the inequality problems it has now after the
changes are made. In fact, the problems would be worse, because right now
we're only pushing inner-city people out, under the proposed changes, people
in suburban and rural areas would be pushed out too.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

~~~
zwayhowder
I think I wasn't clear enough. By making transport and movement accessible you
can get that mix. I went to high school in a low socio-economic area and most
of my school friends (myself included) were parents by 21 or younger. Most
still live on the fringes of Sydney and don't get to mix with opportunities.
Last night was a mix like that, people like me who were lucky enough to get
the opportunities to move up (and driven enough to take them when they
appeared) and many who didn't. I was able to offer two people last night
referrals to opportunities they wouldn't have otherwise had.

All because transport became easier.

I'm pretty far left, I think public transport should be free for anyone
earning less than lets say $50,000pa, I think that entry to cultural
institutions should likewise be free for the same demographic. The idea that
some of my high school peers have never seen a play or gone to the museum
because the cost is too high upsets me.

I have very vivid memories of the anger & shame I felt when my power was cut
off because I couldn't pay the bill with a child under 6 months in the house.
I couldn't pay the bill because I hadn't received my unemployment benefit that
fortnight, because I couldn't afford the $2.50 for a bus into town to hand in
my compulsory forms. I didn't have a job because I was still very much in the
youthful stage of my life when I thought everyone should accept me for the way
I am, instead of to paraphrase George Thorogood, getting a hair cut and
getting any job.

In the last month I've been binge reading books on closing the gaps such as
Richard Florida's new book "The New Urban Crisis", "How Children Succeed" by
Paul Tough, "Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on it" by
Ian Leslie and more. I acknowledge there is no silver bullet that makes
everything better. But there are a lot of things that could be changed to make
things easier. There are also a lot of things we just don't know, and to be
sure a lot of unintended consequences for the changes we are trying to make
now.

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temp-dude-87844
This "just right" kind of balance is sensible on its face, but in the real
world it manifests as mediocrity, when hundreds of other destinations exist
for those most willing and able to relocate, inevitably leaving behind those
who are equipped the least. Over time, everyone will self-select to the level
their resources bear.

Competition between jurisdictions is real. Suburbs capitalized on the
proximity to a city without having to bear the costs of legacy infrastructure
and social services. Today, towns in mid-tier regions fight over the same
trickle-down scraps, offering enormous incentives that aren't likely to be
recouped, in a desperate act to attract an income stream. They do this because
others do it too, and no one wants to lose out for not having been persistent.
Meanwhile, budgets for infrastructure and social services are tight
everywhere, unless the relevant jurisdiction has an enormous wealth fund,
typically from resource extraction.

The functioning of cities are barely economically sustainable, in our economic
system largely based around capital and competition. Is it any wonder why
their leaders strive so hard to attract wealth and forces that further attract
that wealth?

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closeparen
The Congress of the New Urbanism is famous for advocating that our current
built environment is _not_ Goldilocks, and that the scales are tipped heavily
towards sprawl and away from good urbanism. So it’s weird to see it publish
the viewpoint it essentially formed to oppose (urban agglomerations are social
problems to be solved by decentralizing and spreading out). It has a slightly
different view of the nature of that social problem, but is overall aligned
with the original postwar purveyors of sprawl.

More to the point, it doesn’t make any argument that the current level of
growth _is_ the Goldilocks zone. A YIMBY may read all this and agree that
there’s such a thing as too much, while still thinking of the optimum as much
higher than the status quo.

------
ttonkytonk
I think it's easy for people who have the benefit of being in the favored
areas to poo-poo this article, but for those of us who are less fortunate,
it's nice to see that someone "gets it".

Also it's interesting that a society that prides itself on strength finds
itself all but helpless to address these issues.

------
heurist
We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration of
wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense
housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from. The wealth
concentration only allows large capital investors to develop housing projects
and they like feeling big so they build big things that the average (up to
90-99%) American has no chance of ever owning. When the middle class can't own
or develop productive real estate they have to pay rent, move more frequently,
and more easily lose touch with their community. When real estate is forced
into the boom-bust cycle of the capital markets everything gets built in waves
and then later falls apart all at the same time, straining local economies.
Small, organic development spaced across decades is still the best option.

~~~
maxsilver
> We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration
> of wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense
> housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from.

Agree with 99% of your post, but these two ideas contradict each other.

Zoning/land use restrictions are things that lower the concentration of wealth
(they literally cap the wealth of a parcel of land).

When you reduce/eliminate zoning controls, you will _increase_ concentration
of wealth, because the value of that land is now allowed to rise as high as
private capital will allow it -- higher than it could have ever risen before.
(This can be seen by the cities in the US currently reducing/eliminating their
zoning).

~~~
ItsDeathball
Part of the argument in the article, I think, is that cities are only relaxing
zoning restrictions in a limited area, in their dense urban cores. If the
entire city is under a high level of demand, but the ability to meet that
demand is concentrated only on a small area where zoning has been liberalized,
then that leads to a situation where reducing zoning (in a small area) leads
to increased concentration of wealth.

If the entire urban area were allowed to incrementally and organically build
to market demand, then land value would not be so concentrated in the core.

~~~
maxsilver
> , is that cities are only relaxing zoning restrictions in a limited area, in
> their dense urban cores.

That's also a thing too, but I'm referring to the trend of cities to remove
zoning _city-wide_ , all at once.

