
Urbanism and Standards of Respectability - apsec112
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/03/03/urbanism-and-standards-of-respectability/
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I found most insightful the following comment by David Edmondson

> Something drilled home to me at my Cornell planning program was the American
> idea of rural as utopia, urban as dystopia. As my professor would put it,
> our culture strives for a return to the Garden of Eden – it’s seen in our
> art, our land-use patterns (pre- and post-independence), our mythology, and
> our politics. Even Philadelphia was laid out with that idea in mind.

I think that is one of the core issues. The idea of having your own home on
your own plot of land is something that is deep in the American psyche.

And it is something that can be accomplished. Why is there not more remote
work even at the big tech companies? If everybody was not forced to crowd into
Silicon Valley in order to work for the large tech companies, Silicon Valley
and San Francisco home prices would get much better quickly.

Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because
they want to, but because they have to for their job. If we promoted a culture
of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would
get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and
Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.

~~~
electricslpnsld
> Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because
> they want to, but because they have to for their job.

Is this true? I work in a suburbanish portion of the bay area, and 90% of my
coworkers commute in from San Francisco and Western Oakland. San Francisco is
more expensive and is further away, but the advantages of urban living are
multi-fold. Walkable neighborhoods, access to more restaurants, bars, and
nightlife, access to more culture (museums, openings, concerts, etc), more
people to meet and talk to, etc. Given the choice I would almost certainly
choose to live in a city vs. a suburb or rural area.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
What is your coworkers' age range. In the past, young people would start in
the city. Once they married/had children, they would move out the suburbs.

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refurb
That's the trend I've noticed. Lots of 20 and 30 year old live in SF. Once the
family expands, the first question is "when do we move out of the city?".

When you've got kids, things like bars and restaurants take a back seat to
good schools and family-friendly neighborhoods.

Of all my coworkers with children, maybe 10% chose to stick it out in SF and
they seem to bitch non-stop about the schools.

~~~
xxpor
It's not predetermined that neighborhoods in the city aren't "family friendly"
though, that's a choice we've made though policy.

~~~
michaelt
Well, part of the family-unfriendliness is competition for cities' limited
housing supply.

If a family with two adults and three children wants a 3-bedroom property,
their budget depends on two adults' salaries minus the costs of three
children.

On the other hand, if it's house-shared by four childless adults in their mid
20s, their budget is four adults' salaries, with none of the costs of
children.

~~~
bobthepanda
Lots of cities manage to do well with children; New York is an above-average
performing urban school district with a million kids enrolled.

The problem is that with the rise of housing as an investment vehicle, cities
have rapidly increased in price. In most countries housing is not a high-yield
investment like stocks, it's a safer, low-yield investment like bonds. REITs
have managed to destroy the goal of affordable housing for most people.

~~~
xapata
I wouldn't blame it on REITs but the vastly greater real lifetime income of
the previous generations. Wages have been declining since the 70s.

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politician
> A long-forgotten, under-appreciated aspect of encouraging widely dispersed
> suburbs was rooted in Cold War defense against nuclear attack.

[https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-
defense-07-10....](https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-
defense-07-10.html)

~~~
Bensch
It's an interesting paper, but there's no evidence it was ever used in HUD
policy.

~~~
politician
The national dispersion strategy was established in the late 40s and early
50s, almost 20 years before the Department of Housing and Urban Development
was founded [1]. By that time, suburbanization was well advanced.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Housing_and_Urban_Development)

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slr555
The author fundamentally misunderstands some of the economic drivers of family
life in NYC.

In Manhattan only 20% of households have children. This is not driven by
dreams of the suburbs or a love of mega-commutes but dollars. Even good New
York public schools are highly competitive. Assuming you can afford an
apartment in a neighborhood with a good public school, your child still needs
to be able to test into the gifted and talented program to get a good
education. The alternative is to spend 50K to send your child to private
schools which are insanely competitive.

Additionally, you have to have space for those children and adding a bedroom
to your real estate holdings is at least a six if not seven figure
proposition. Virtually all the people I know who have left the city have done
so for at least one of these reasons. No one says, "Hey cool I get to move to
Jersey and look forward to riding a bus into Port Authority". I have lived in
Manhattan for 26 years and know that of which I speak. Can't say anything
about the Bay area.

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jeffreyrogers
I don't understand the tweet early in the article. It seems to imply that
cities aren't accommodating enough of people with alternative lifestyles?
They're more accommodating than anywhere else. Maybe I'm reading what the
author meant backwards.

In any case, we are currently working out as a society how to make cities
livable as more and more people try to move into the same space, but I don't
think bringing up distinctions like straight/gay, liberal/conservative, etc.
is very productive.

And developers don't build single family homes in the suburbs and luxury
highrises downtown for nefarious reasons. They build them there because you
make more money that way.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
I believe (though am not sure) that the tweet is posed in the context of San
Francisco Bay Area. The Sunset neighborhood, which is shown in subsequent
pictures, is a neighborhood with remarkably lower density than the
neighborhoods in SF that lie East of Stanyan. Likewise, the proposal to ensure
that zoning is more permissive around mass transit stops (pushed by Weiner) is
specifically attacking cities that have refused to increase zoning density
despite the inflix of residents.

I also do think bringing up this distinction is important. A conservative,
landed gentry has controlled Bay Area cities and their zoning laws for decades
now and are ferociously resisting a change to their ideas of normal. The
article presents examples with how this gentry specifically casts the pro-
urban Bloc, with a hammer and sickle flag, and hippie clothing, not to mention
the minorities falling out of the buildings. Folks who made those images seem
to explicitly see high density housing as not only an affront to the look of
the neighborhood, but an afront on their values. To deny that this is a war
between 2 different views of the way a city should behave culturally, and to
explicitly ignore the anti-queer and anti-minority imagery, is to be both
intellectually dishonest and inaccurate.

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jeffreyrogers
I don't know anything about San Francisco, so I can't comment on any anti-
queer/anti-minority imagery. The article certainly didn't provide evidence for
it. But is this really a liberal vs. conservative issue? I've heard Berkeley
has similar NIMBYism, and that's a very liberal area, right? Is Sunset really
that conservative?

~~~
Karrot_Kream
You're right, the article didn't provide evidence for it, though it did add
two pictures with anti-minority and anti-hippie imagery (without attribution).

> But is this really a liberal vs. conservative issue?

I wish I could provide you something more than this, but in my anecdotal
experience as a minority in many ways, yes. I don't have the statistical
evidence to agree or disagree though.

> I've heard Berkeley has similar NIMBYism, and that's a very liberal area,
> right?

Berkeley has less of it (again, in my anecdotal experience as a minority) than
most other parts of the Bay. Most of Berkeley's NIMBYism seems to be confined
to parts around North Berkeley.

> Is Sunset really that conservative?

From my time in the neighborhood, yes. It was older and more racially
segregated than other parts of SF for sure. The neighborhood tended to be
split into Chinese (mostly Cantonese) and white sections, and even when
neighbors were of different races, most people stuck to a clique. Residents
were also much older (older than my parents). Again though, this is just my
anecdotal experience.

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gumby
While the essay is about (and contrasting) American urbanism, this point is
not specific to the US:

> Not for nothing, urbanism in the United States tends to disproportionately
> feature people who have other reasons to be dissatisfied with traditional
> culture.

Some cities the author mentions contrast with this (Stockholm, Paris,
Singapore) but plenty of others, even in contemporary Europe, are more
consistent (e.g. Berlin). In general cities are where people have gone to
abandon the entrenched social order for one reason or another (because they
are misfits or because they need financial opportunities not available in the
countryside). Because of this cities have "always" (OK, I don't know about Ur)
challenged the dominant power structure, even when (as in Paris or Rome) they
co-opt it.

There would be no revolutions without cities.

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deltron3030
Self driving mobile homes could become a thing, many advantages of cities and
rural life could be combined this way. The routing of the individual homes
would just happen based on your personal and work shedule and preferences,
including the composition of your neighborhood. basically a decentralization
of cities.

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golergka
> Haredi Jews are notable in being an oppressed minority in Israel

Forgive my french, but what the actual fuck? Haredim are almost dictating the
whole country their religious laws, calling them "oppressed" is as far from
reality as you could get right now.

