Austin city council member Leslie Pool, pictured and quoted in this article, is a notorious pseudo-progressive NIMBY. When she speaks in generalities, everything that comes out of her mouth aligns with my political ideals and my concerns about growth in Austin, but at the same time, she fights tooth and nail against anything that might help.
She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing her best to prevent any new housing from being constructed. She wrings her hands over lack of transit (her favorite excuse for opposing density) and supports transit as an idea while always finding an excuse to oppose any specific proposal for improving it.
I have fears about Amazon as well (it could be fine, but it also could be horrible, and I know Austin will be fine without it) and they're the same as the ones she articulates, but to me they mean nothing coming out of her mouth when I know her only agenda is protecting her single-family-with-yard-and-three-cars constituents from sharing space with apartment dwellers and public transit users.
How I wish we could build European block housing (is this the correct term?) in this country. The buildings are shoulder to shoulder and take up the whole block.
I grew up in terraced housing in the biggest social housing scheme outside the Warsaw Pact, under the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
You never have privacy. I could hear my neighbour having sex. Party music vibrated through the floors regardless of dampening in the walls ( we tried cork sheets ). The back gardens were all overlooked. Everything you did was known. It was like growing up in a commune.
When I see new terraced developments I am angry at the human cost being paid just so a contractor can save the cost of one wall and a metre of land per house.
Modern construction methods have largely solved these acoustic/privacy issues.
Building codes throughout the United States require a measure of sound insulation between floors of multi-family dwellings. They specify a minimum architectural design standard of privacy of 50 STC (Sound Transmission Class) and a 50 IIC (Impact Isolation Class). The codes also state that validation of the minimum noise criteria can be field measured and the field measurements shall not be less than a 45 FSTC or a 45 FIIC.
Of course, contractors sometimes find ways to cut corners. But in general, neighbor-noise is a solved problem.
Given the conflation with development style and architecture style, I’m not sure which term you’re looking for. Development-wise, I think we would just call this 18th/19th century urban apartment buildings. The architecture style could be mixed. But, what would you say the differences between this and older apartment buildings in NYC? Urban development typically has a bias for ground-level storefronts these days.
There are elements in the architecture which make the original European implementations especially livable. These are details that are entirely lost on average Americans who have never lived in these buildings. It seems to be a moot effort to communicate the luxury of lifestyle that can be found in these buildings, with their cozy crooks and jagged crannys, if you will. Popular thought is that this is outdated. It really takes living in them to appreciate the lifestyle French windows afford, for example.
Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’ is some reading that I think speaks directly for the psychological value in this attention to detail.
I think they are referring to post-war social housing common in Europe. The concrete exteriors were meant to convey stability in a society wrought with precarity. Those raised in these buildings generally express this exact sense of appreciation. An architecture nerd, I find these buildings simply marvelous. The style is termed ‘Brutalist’ architecture.
EDIT: I didn’t see their link before but, after following it, I guess it’s not what they meant.
You can. The large older water-locked cities are built this way. They're also coincidentally the cities with public mass transit rail systems. See: NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago
I can understand some of the fears of her constituents who purchased houses on large lots and have seen houses in those neighborhoods torn down for multi-family dwellings.
More density is something Austin requires but that of course involves transforming the nature of neighborhoods and whether that's gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods or tasteful (imo) multi-family residences in traditionally genteel white suburban neighborhoods, it's something out of everyone's hands.
People in Austin and other cities are resistant to change for a host of reasons both legitimate and not. Change is inevitable though. Fortunately I'm not a native and I don't have strong ties to the area so I'm preparing to move back home before the next 1.5 million people move here in the next decade. I'm planning to hold onto my relatively large lot and house and rent it for entirely selfish reasons, though.
It's the pace of change that locals can't handle, and part of it is all the outside money transforming the city for its own profit, the city and its neighborhoods and people be-damned.
gentrification of the East Side with yuppie condos replacing traditional black and hispanic neighborhoods
It's these kinds of bogus characterizations that NIMBYs subsist on.
In truth the well-off professionals are gentrifying the single-family neighborhoods by renovating houses, buying tear-downs, and buying new houses on lots where the existing properties have been demolished. This kind of gentrification would have (and still could) gentrify the entire neighborhood without any change in density, and the NIMBYs don't have any problem with it.
The high-rise residential units are displacing some single-family homes but just as often former commercial spaces. There are a lot of luxury units, but there are also a lot of units occupied by young people who are cutting hair, tending bar, and working in low-level jobs at tech companies, people who are light-years from being able to afford the kind of single-family housing the NIMBYs want to preserve. East Austin is affordable for them because they can get by without a car and without car insurance. In a pinch (doctor's appointment across town) they can use Uber and Lyft. This new lifestyle and new look to the city is the change that the NIMBYs are opposing, but because they identify as progressive, they have to flip the economics and pretend the single-family homes are for middle-class people and the high-rises are for those obnoxious rich folks.
Hence the NUMTOT meme of "new housing is unaffordable housing." It's a way to square the circle and sound progressive and claim you want affordable housing and green cities while keeping the supply of housing low and forcing sprawl. Every time somebody tries to build high-density housing, you paint it as a luxury amenity for the rich and say we can't have this, we need affordable housing instead.
As for architecture, it's true that most developers don't give a shit about how their buildings look, but if you look around in the older single-family neighborhoods, and even more so the newer single-family neighborhoods sprawling at the edges, you see exactly the same thing, a load of ugly houses built by developers and a few charming or beautiful ones where by some miracle something nice fell through the cracks. As the high rises go up, we'll get a lot of bad and some good here and there, just like we already have.
Don't know Austin, but they way it works most places is that the well off single family home neighborhoods usually have the means to resist apartment buildings, so there is no choice but to build in poorer neighborhoods.
Sure, except Texas has far more moderate and right-leaning sorts in their cities than California and Washington to counteract viewpoints like this. Austin is my favorite frickin' city in the US and I had a blast living there. I hope to return soon.
I respect Toronto's proposal a lot, in light of this: absolutely no specific incentives offered, just an overview of the benefits of working in Toronto/Ontario/Canada from an employee/employer's perspective. I think it was a strong action both in terms of attracting Amazon (there's no other non-US cities being considered, so they are already hugely differentiated) and in terms of reassuring the constituents that the government will not bend over backwards for corporations (especially considering the Google smart city in development).
> Corporations have choices. They could go about their business, and simply choose the best location, the one that makes the greatest business sense, and invest accordingly. Or they can as Amazon, GE, and dozens of others, go through the ritual of pretending to entertain a wide range of proposals, and use the leverage of competing bids to sweat the best possible deal out of their preferred location
Democracy: When you can't tell your citizens what you're up to, you already have a problem.
It is also a very hypocritical example of, speaking generally of these things, business decrying "the nanny state" while actually engaging and encouraging it, full force.
It's just that they want all the nanny's attention and preferential treatment.
My cynical side says that this is a feature, not a bug - a litmus test to see whether or not the selected city will be politically pliable under Amazon's significant financial leverage.
Any city that can't pass (or force through) favorable legislation isn't one that Amazon would want to choose long-term anyway, especially viewed in the context of their relationships with local governments in Seattle [0]. The key point here is that this is a descriptive feature that's hard to ask about, but easy to test for.
Not unlike Apple bullying Cupertino. They got their huge HQ without much alteration.
Speaking of Cupertino, right near there, a huge battle to allow I think 1,000 units replacing a dead shopping mall. All the usual complaints of traffic.
So 1000 apartments would have intolerable traffic, but 25,000 people in one building won't, seemed to be the argument.
The only reason why they would do this is for plausible deniability. If it turns into a disaster, then they can claim they didn't do anything about it. It's pretty disgusting to think we're that stupid, but journalists will just take the lazy way out.
I’ll be stunned if they end up anywhere other than northern Virginia and if nova gives than much more than token incentives. They have a huge presence there already and if they want to negotiate for big government contracts it helps to be nearby.
Same, although I can see some cooperative deal w/ DC and possibly MontCo (MD).
However, I heard the Virginia's governor speak about this broad topic, and given what he'd already indicated the state had done to attract tech and defence sector bis, I pretty much consider NoVA to get something.
He also mentioned that consultants do much of the footwork to feel out which which locales will provide the be$t offers. He indicated that such consulting is actually a billion dollar industry and that to even be a viable contender in such races, cities/states must offer some incentive(s).
What prevents the elected city officials from voting No on the package once it is accepted by Amazon and revealed? Anything with legal teeth or just public pressure?
If it works like in Congress they will have only very limited time to understand the package. And more importantly they won't have had any input during negotiations. There is a lot of pressure so it would be much easier to add their concerns during the process instead of saying "No" at the end. They pretty much have to vote with a gun held against their head.
Usually tax deals or tax holidays are offered to entice prospective companies but given Amazon's US tax burden is already nearly zero what else can these cities offer, free land, protection from unions?
Amazon seems unlikely to choose a city randomly, its likely to already have decided which city suits it best in terms of logistics, efficiency, cost and available labour pool so this seems to be an elaborate game to squeeze its preferred city.
In 2017 Amazon recorded a $137 million refund for US federal income taxes. However, nationwide it paid $211 million in state corporate income taxes. It also pays property tax and sales tax (on things Amazon itself buys). Reportedly Amazon paid ~$250 million total in taxes to Washington state in 2017. [1]
Maryland's "Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland's Economy (PRIME Act)", signed 4/25/2018, provides credits against all these kinds of taxes [2].
World's richest man is going to rob two cities blind with promises of jobs. Just a massive giveaway to the man who literally has the least need in the world.
Guess they don't want the people actually having any say.
> pitched the idea of Amazon University, with a customized curriculum developed in partnership with Amazon and local universities
Just gonna go full company town I guess.
> added $38 billion to Seattle’s economy from 2010 to 2016.
and made it impossible to get a modest tax passed.
> “They are about ending inequality and creating more inclusive cities,” said Richard Florida, a professor at the School of Cities and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “Now they’re in a game competing with one another to throw money at one of the most powerful companies in the world run by one of the world’s richest men.”
Yup, because they want to be able to say they brought amazon in. It fucks over the people who already lives there, increases inequality, and ultimately doesn't really help that many people other than Jeff.
This comment violates the HN guidelines. We don't want ideological battle here (not to mention low-rent rants). That's not because we're capitalist pigs or socialist moochers; it's because it's all repetitive and therefore boring, and it leads directly to flamewar. All scorched earth is the same.
You've been posting a lot of this for a long time. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended. In the meantime, would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
I don’t have a bone to pick in this back and forth, however there’s something I don’t fully understand from dang’s comment: what does “low-rent rant” mean? Never heard the expression before and I don’t know if it’s a pun to the subject of the article or something else entirely referencing the tone of the OP’s comment.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it reads like a predictable rant to me, the kind of comment that destroys thoughtful discussion rather than supports it. That goes against the kind of website we want HN to be. Of course a good paint-stripping rant can be great fun (or outraging, a variant of the same), and there are other kinds of website for that.
Plenty of kinds of critique don't have this effect, and most HN users have no trouble practicing them—it's mostly just a question of wanting to.
DC should just let Amazon run the city government as Amazon sees fit. I wouldn’t mind living in an Amazon company town, I bet they’d shape things up around here.
Yeah, high-ish salaries. Everyone works until 10pm. Get off work and get drunk. Complain about how Amazon took away your life and cost you your marriage, but hey they offer free marriage counseling now as a result (true story).
Rinse and repeat.
That's what I see around SLU.
Amazon is incredibly efficient, and that's good. But please don't let them take over a city with their work life culture.
In this age, if a spouse dumps you for overworking to secure the future in these increasingly uncertain times, they probably weren't a keeper anyway. There's a lot of magical thinking going around, and I'm not defending Amazon's culture here, but having gone through a divorce for exactly the above reasons, yeah, we were both better off in the long run instead of trying to reconcile our divergent belief systems (and these days we're friends).
If anyone wants Amazon to take over any sort of public space they should come experience the local vitriol towards all things Amazon here in Seattle.
I was interviewing at AWS just last year and one of the interviewers(in a Virginia/remote work setup) went so far as to admit he doesn't wear any amazon branded shirts or swag when he is in town.
That's not Amazon's fault. That's the rage of the incompetent lashing out at the most convenient target rather than focusing on bettering their own situation. And yeah, Amholes are a thing, just stay away from the Amholes (hell I once punched one after he intentionally shoved me and the way he backed down when he realized I was ready to beat him to a pulp was priceless), but I don't personally buy into the current agenda of punishing nerds for being nerds that seems to be in vogue these days.
She talks incessantly about affordable housing while at the same time doing her best to prevent any new housing from being constructed. She wrings her hands over lack of transit (her favorite excuse for opposing density) and supports transit as an idea while always finding an excuse to oppose any specific proposal for improving it.
I have fears about Amazon as well (it could be fine, but it also could be horrible, and I know Austin will be fine without it) and they're the same as the ones she articulates, but to me they mean nothing coming out of her mouth when I know her only agenda is protecting her single-family-with-yard-and-three-cars constituents from sharing space with apartment dwellers and public transit users.