
Who’s Afraid of a Transit Desert? - luu
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/realestate/whos-afraid-of-a-transit-desert.html
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osdiab
It’s too bad that the potential to do the obvious thing - build trains to the
transit deserts - is not an option even worth mentioning. This is the state of
US infrastructure.

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sokoloff
Someone owns the land on which that rail must run and the stations built. They
may not want to sell. Eminent domain taking is time-consuming and expensive
(probably should be more expensive).

In a most of these cases, this land is in neighborhoods that already have a
housing shortage. If you’re going to take the land of groups of people to
build transit, you’ll displace many households at once and into a market with
reduced supply and increased demand. Anyone want to wager whether those
property owners will be truly properly compensated? Anyone want to wager
whether tenants displaced will be compensated at all, let alone enough to find
a comparable place?

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FearNotDaniel
Someone once owned the land on which all of Europe's railways are currently
running quite nicely, thank you. It's not really a convincing argument against
building railways in general. Public service or private enterprise, it's
pretty much guaranteed that existing occupants of the land will get shat on by
whatever interests stand to profit from doing so, but that doesn't mean that
building the thing doesn't benefit the community as a whole.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/Hdi1H](http://archive.is/Hdi1H)

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jelliclesfarm
Question: would it make more sense to have mobile housing?

Not RV living or tiny homes or tent cities, but actual moveable homes and
large plots.

When planning new cities and townships, wouldn’t it be cheaper to rent out a
5k-10k sq ft plot and keep moving with the job.

The idea tickles me especially because we started out as hunter gatherers and
then nomadic tribes and pastoralists to urbanists. It will come a full circle.

Homes as shells and land with infrastructure. Of course, this means other
changes too with city designs and roads and public transport etc, but as a
thought experiment..would it work?

There may not be as many jobs in the future with automation, but we would
still community spaces and living spaces. So cities can’t be designed with
transit and commute in mind.

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mindslight
Every time I see some architectural experiment talking about "shipping
containers" yet destroying the main quality that makes them shipping
containers, I weep.

Having said that, the problem with more "agile" housing is that lower cost
inevitably gets taken over by the low end of the market. A large part of
"having a house" appears to be the conspicuous consumption itself - imposing
your presence on the surrounding area, subjecting yourself to a lot of
property taxes, and being "part of the community". This makes sense if you
flip from analyzing in terms of optimizing cost and think in terms of
monkeysphere dominance. It's similar to why large companies are happy to hire
as many unproductive seat warmers as they can regardless of the cost - the
true measure of power is the army they command.

FWIW the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a good exhibit on
mobile homes, back when mobile homes were new and hadn't yet been associated
with poverty living. The idea certainly wasn't just a hack to skirt zoning
regulations!

But yes it is interesting to think about how the regulatory landscape would
change if topology could be easily reconfigured. One of the ideas of
seasteading is that you could lower a section and float it under the others to
move it out to a different group.

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jelliclesfarm
This concerns me because they would be using open spaces and displacing
habitat when they go for the ‘untapped fringe’. Even deserts have habitat and
an eco system.

Revitalizing existing cities is a much better option. The roadblock..as it
were..would be governments. We have fundamental design weaknesses with
utilities..water/power/sewer etc.

Cities need fresh perspectives. We need different kind of cities. New cities.

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closeparen
Thirty minutes is a transit desert? Thirty minute walk to BART was considered
central, urban, and transit-oriented by developers and planners alike in my
old Berkeley neighborhood.

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gpvos
_> farther from the train — at least a 15-minute walk_

That's nearby, only 5 minutes by bicycle. Just make sure there are some
reasonable bike routes to the train halts.

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lonelappde
Always amusing when young smug Californians tell everyone else of varying
health, ability and weather how to live.

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gpvos
I'm not even American, and just getting used to not calling myself young
anymore (but intend to keep cycling for many more years).

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spodek
Calling a space a "transit desert" implies the problem is too little transit
and pushes for more transit.

How about overdevelopment?

I'm all for public transit, but building and then calling for the public to
provide transit service is externalizing costs to raise property value. In an
overpopulated world, we don't need more growth but de-growth, at the city,
national, and global level.

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melling
You think it’s better to move out of cities, build highways and own cars?

The earth likes it better when we don’t sprawl.

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branweb
It's perhaps a little ambiguous, but I understood the comment as arguing the
exact opposite. I interpreted "overdevelopment" to basically mean the kind of
sprawl explainted here: [https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-
real-reason...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-
your-city-has-no-money) ...where cities expand horizontally for short-term tax
revenue gains/federal grants while accruing long-term infrastructure costs
that their tax bases can't pay.

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melling
“ In an overpopulated world, we don't need more growth but de-growth, at the
city,...”

Perhaps it is a little ambiguous. However, the story is about New York City.
There’s not much room to grow outwards.

More mass transit in and around the city would reduce the need to own a car.

