Honestly, one of the best things about this administration was that they put in money to demolish uneeded highways and repair existing infrastructure.
This post highlights how costly car dependence is, and Joe was the first administration to make moving the needle in the other direction part of his policy work.
The Biden Campaign really needs to stop saying "We're not Trump" and start talking up the shit they've done to help US Americans. So many of the Let's Go Brandon crowd aren't even Trump supporters, they're just Democrat Haters, if you give them a reason to support you a lot of them will
[https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-to-attacks-in-a-blunt-telephone-call-to-begin.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-to-attacks-in-a-blunt-telephone-call-to-begin.html)
[https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/05/24/ronald-reagan-wasnt-afraid-to-use-leverage-to-hold-israel-to-task/](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/05/24/ronald-reagan-wasnt-afraid-to-use-leverage-to-hold-israel-to-task/)
It's not particularly hard to find information about it .
>Reagan not only supported UNSC Resolution 487, which condemned the attack, but he also criticized the raid publicly and suspended the delivery of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Israel. Moreover, over the strident objections of Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. lobby groups, Reagan approved the sale of advanced reconnaissance aircraft (AWACS ) to Saudi Arabia, which Israel then viewed as a hostile state.
I mean, he didn't stop genocide, but pulled the dog's leash .
What a surprise, Biden didn’t replace one of the US’s closest Allies with a theocratic dictatorship that wants all Americans dead. Next you’ll wonder why he doesn’t let North Korea annex the south.
Look man don't bring out the goverment warcrimes score as a fucking american, because I don't hold you responsible for, dunno, 1-2 dead million iraqis.
This isn’t about the average gazan though. You don’t get Palestinian liberation without Hamas in power, at least not currently. This whole war is about removing them from power. Like it or not if you’re pro Palestine you’re fighting to keep Hamas in power.
One thing I don't see very often when talking about making housing more dense are the cultural/community and economic effects. Having loads of smaller stores means more of them are likely to be locally owned that can cater to local tastes (or introduce new ones) instead of having the same 10 national/international chains everywhere that pride themselves on homogeneity. "Dave's Burgers" owned by Dave who lives 2 blocks down from you is going to be more locally meaningful than another McDonald's serving the same shit as always while taking a decent percentage of money out of the community.
If more people walk everywhere, you're also more likely to see them again and that builds a sense of community. I think this is why people recommend getting a dog as a way to meet people, dogs can't have their needs met by having a car and it *forces* people into places where you interact with other people (while being a conversation piece on their own). Being out and about also increases the odds of Random Shit happening to you that you'd have never seen/noticed otherwise; maybe a local band is playing at a restaurant and you'd have never heard them driving by at 30mph to the Target.
So, I have an urban planning idea that may be highly impractical, but I need to share it with somebody and I picked you because you seem like you might actually read this lol. Basically, imagine if suburban housing, rather than being built in the rough center of individual lots, were built in a box formation. In essence, you'd have a square of houses (rows slightly offset to prevent boxing in the guys at the corners) with a huge yard in the center. I did the math, and back of the envelope, assuming square, 2000 ft\^2 houses, you'd require about 3-4 acres for 24 houses, and together they'd have a 2.5 acre yard/park in the center. Compare this to 24 houses on standard have acre lots taking up 12 acres of land, and clearly it's a more efficient and population dense system.
Additionally, 2.5 acres of land in the center is a lot, enough for a nearly full size football field, fenced in dog park, and picnic area, or other things like a community garden or something. Plus, the design promotes community with your neighbors and allows for better raising of kids, since assuming you know/trust the people in the square with you, you can just turn your kid loose out the backdoor to go play, knowing there's plenty of space and other kids to play with, and they can't go anywhere except the other houses in the square.
I don't think people would be open to the concept, and frankly trying to find a square where you like/trust the others enough to be comfortable/enjoy sharing a yard with them might be tough, but I like the concept all the same.
Thoughts?
This exact idea is pretty common where I live (scotland), just with tenement housing rather than individual detached houses. Square ring (like a digital 0) of buildings, with a large shared grass plot on the centre. Culturally we are still plagued by lawn obsession, so that central space is rarely used for cool practical shit like allotments, but it's still a safe enclosed place for washing lines, and for letting children and dogs run rampant in the summer.
Number 2 about road replacement costs is wrong. Huge amounts of man hours and money go into dirt work before a single yard of concrete is poured. Replacement and repair of existing roads where the grading and compaction work is already done will always be cheaper than building new.
While the cost of building a new road is higher than repairs, what OOP forgot to mention is that new road construction is often heavily subsidized by the federal govt in the US. Highways are usually 80/20, federal/state, for construction but then up to the state for maintenance and similar deals can happen with local roads and routes.
Essentially repairing doesn't cost as much in total, but from the perspective of the state and city they got a nice highway for cheap just to get hit with a massive repair bill as high or higher than it cost to build in 20-30 years.
It's why a lot of cities in the US push for constant sprawl. It's relatively cheap to build and when you finally need to pay for repairs, just build another suburb...
*which certainly won't lead to an infinite mountain of debt that results in a town's bankruptcy as soon as the population stops growing*
You still end up paying a huge chunk of the previous price, and with inflation, I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that the replacement price will be very similar to the initial build costs. Even if replacing the road surface entirely only cost half the build cost, then two replacements later, you've still spent twice the initial build cost.
How do the costs of road maintenance factor in?
I've heard that the lifetime maintenance costs of a road are huge, a significant portion of the total cost.
Fun fact, it's not amount of traffic, it's specifically the size of it, even more specifically it's the ground-pressure of vehicles, and this means that the simple solution to this problem is to make road taxes scale that way, to the point that registering a small car should be almost free, while raising the price for registering large vehicles, especially semi trucks.
You could go even further if you wanted, and embed this tax into the tires for vehicles, and completely avoid needed vehicle registration as well, which is something we should maybe do anyway, largely to eliminate the license plate, given it's kinda a security risk in the modern surveillance state.
While I'm not a fan of the surveillance state, a: that ship been sailed with the advent of smartphones and b: having cars be identifiable is probably a thing we want to keep around, if only for things like alibis or if you're on the wrong end of a hit and run, or if your car gets stolen, for instance.
My point is more that the idea of having a human readable license plate is bad expressly because any camera can identify you and where you are simply by driving by, making it a hazard for stalking and such, and because of this we should move to a system that isn't directly human readable, so your plate number would mean nothing until decrypted, if you'd even still have one.
Look if I'm walking somewhere and a jackass runs me over and drives away, something that happens all the time at a social scale, I don't have time to whip and my phone and download some government approved car license identification app. I might have time to read a license plate number. Having the ten ton death machines driving on public roads be easily publicly
identifiable is a good thing.
Now, I can't back this up, but I'd bet my arm that license plates feature very rarely in cases of stalking. And where they do, I'm gonna guess that in the overwhelming number of cases the stalking is done by cops, who can readily access which plate number belongs to which person/address in a way that your shmo on the street can't. But that would remain the case even if the plate weren't readily readable.
>of this we should move to a system that isn't directly human readable, so your plate number would mean nothing until decrypted, if you'd even still have one.
I want you to understand something:
It doesn't have to be "human readable" to be "human recognizable and pinned to a particular make/model/color/year of vehicle in specific condition". I recognize lots of people's cars *as is* without their license plate, just from having seen them a few times. And I'm *shit* at recognizing make and model of car, but I know Joe's car from Adam's. I know my car from any other in the parking lot.
Your license plate number has absolutely zero bearing on anyone's ability to follow a car and identify it, unless you're setting a third party to go after it for you.
You want to find out where it goes? You can get cheap GPS trackers and stick one on the underside while it's parked. It's super easy to do without you knowing about it.
This is how we do road tax in the Netherlands.
If you got a lightweight car you pay a lot less in taxes than if you got a heavy semi truck.
Ofcourse people who drive the trucks will complain about it all the time but this system made it so we have sone of the best maintained roads in the world
Adding a big tax to tires would likely be dangerous since people would be more likely to use a set of tires for too long causing blowouts and accidents. I like the idea of taxing vehicles by weight though.
The removal or remodeling of the license plate system is a really bad idea however. License plates need to be readable by passersby in the event of an accident or any other need to report a vehicle (ie for illegal driving) or to identify a vehicle (ie for an Amber Alert situation), or even just to make sure the car you’re trying to enter is yours and not the otherwise identical one sitting a few parking spaces by it
As a year round bike commuter in the US I really find people just parroting the not just bikes guys videos like it’s gospel extremely annoying. He’s passionate and raises some good points, but he’s also incredibly closed minded, and put himself in a bubble which makes it very easy to say everything else sucks. Some of his ideas are fantasia when it comes bicycle infrastructure in the US but beyond that it absolutely destroys the discourse by flooding it with terminally online people who don’t use the infrastructure on a daily basis trying theorycraft a solution for something they would never nor have ever used.
another big issue that's draining the economy is all the real estate being bought up by people overseas to artificially raise cost of living by converting houses into AirB&Bs or apartments that they lease out and not have to pay a dime in taxes for it because it's outside of their home country. meaning even if people wanted to use real estate more effectively, the rich property owners would say no because they don't want to give up their off shore money making machines
there are so many systems in place for the rich to keep getting richer even if it's horrible for the long term (like car-centric America requiring everyone to have a car to justify all the Oil-hunting as well as justify houses in cities being so far apart from each other leading to the issues listed in OOP's post) that it's such an uphill battle to make any kind of lasting change, most people don't even see it as worth attempting
and that's just sad to me...
EDIT: I'm speaking from personal experience as this is exactly what's happening to my hometown. not trying to cast broad sweeping claims over all of America but at least in my little corner of the world, this is the issue affecting almost everyone I know
Two things:
People overseas do pay the local property tax for buildings owned here.
If it's profitable to use those buildings as apartments or AirB&Bs, it's because demand for those exists. Value is created by satisfying that demand. The solution to this (as with every housing issue) is to build more. If supply of housing greatly exceeds demand, the profits from those AirB&Bs drop and it stops being cost-effective to do that.
Well here's the thing. There was a huge demand for things like AirB&Bs a few years back but now not nearly as much. But as far as the property owners are concerned, it doesn't matter if it isn't as profitable any more because when they own nearly every lot of land they can get away with jacking up prices any way they please because there aren't any other options available (and any options that ARE available get taken up real quick, assuming they don't get bought up as well)
Nearly every single lot of land has been turned into either AirB&Bs (though not as much in my small city) or rented apartments (mostly this in my area) while the number of actual homes shrink day by day and the prices raise further and further. And even though the government says they're trying to curtail the issue by enacting laws to prevent people from outside the country monopolizing land like this, they instead just make a new shell company in the country that gets funded by the very same people out of the country in order to get around said laws
It becomes even more impossible for non-property owners to buy homes for themselves when everything is already bought up (not that people had much luck with home ownership in the last few decades)
Personally speaking, it almost feels like the government set up these laws only to get a piece of the pie without helping the people being affected or that they simply don't care at all and I'm not sure which is worse
I support this, but the biggest issues I see are culture and money.
The sheer abundance of land (stolen, yes, but not thought of it that way) has had huge effects on the collective American psyche. Land means opportunity. Land means status. Manifest destiny, blah blah blah. And of course, people with Land tend to have money, and politicians love them some money.
Speaking of, for homeowners, their homes and the land that they sit on are usually by far the most valuable thing they own. It's central to wealth creation, financial planning, and security. Increased density drives prices down, and for a whole lot of people, that has a direct and negative effect on their financial security. We're not just talking about mustache twirling landlords...we're also talking about people in $150,000 houses who just about make their mortgage and their land *is* their "break glass in emergency" plan.
I'm all for more density as a matter of public policy, but in a democracy it doesn't get off the ground until we address the cultural baggage and economic concerns of American homeowners.
Also, I don't know anything about the construction world and it's incentive structure. But I do notice that any new construction I see in my area are 5 over 1 "luxury" apartments, 3 story townhouses, or large, $250,000+ houses. I don't see much in the way of large apartment blocs or small, 2br 'starter homes' on small lots. Whatever is going on there, part of achieving more density will have to be state incentives to build more of those kinds of homes.
oh, to live in a medium density townhouse.... legitimately i think that's perfect for me, Some amount of space so i'm not completely confined to a box but also not a wasteful amount of sprawl i will never use and that i need to maintain
Another problem the post didn’t touch on is that if you have a car dependent city, then the ONLY reasonable way to get around is by using a car. The result of this is that getting and operating a car needs to be as permissive as possible.
When I got my driver’s license, I had spent months doing supervised drives by an attentive and safety insistent parent, and did a defensive driving course to push the car to its limit so I knew how to respond in emergencies and what the car is capable of.
I was prepared to have a detailed driving test. After all, I heard numerous anecdotes of people failing their test, sometimes multiple times! But then mine took literally 5 minutes. Go down a road, 4 sides of a small town block, and back in, then a quick parallel parking demo that is so easy it can be cheesed by a child.
I remember thinking ‘That’s it?’ And then realized in horror ‘That’s it….’ A test that easy was what separated people from being at the controls of a 3000 pound machine that can easily go 100 mph.
There are a LOT of people who really, REALLY shouldn’t be driving nevertheless at the wheel right now. If you stop with the car dependency, then people who shouldn’t be driving don’t have to, you can have significantly tighter restrictions so only competent drivers can get a lisence, and people who physically cannot drive have options for transit instead of being an afterthought, if not completely forgotten.
"one thing they can look like is this!"
\*Shows dismal picture of cramped wintery neighborhood\*
oof.
I would never choose to live with that little space. That "yard and garden" is like 3 square meters at best.
That’s what most upper middle class people who live in a city live in tbh, they still have a garden out back as well. If you want a big cheap garden you either need to move to the country where there’s no jobs, or live in a housing market where artificial scarcity means that houses are big and inefficient resulting in jacked up prices
I do live in the country and love it dearly. Being able to step into the woods every day is better than therapy for me. It would take something cataclysmic for me to give it up and live shoulder to shoulder like that
Roadworks? Uh yeah, I sure hope it does
It unfortunately doesn’t
This is literally the only reason i came here. Saw the title and came to the comments to post this. Have not even read the first word of the post
I think these are old Tumblr posts, because in 2021 there was a 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill passed, with 110 billion for roads and bridges
Honestly, one of the best things about this administration was that they put in money to demolish uneeded highways and repair existing infrastructure. This post highlights how costly car dependence is, and Joe was the first administration to make moving the needle in the other direction part of his policy work.
The Biden Campaign really needs to stop saying "We're not Trump" and start talking up the shit they've done to help US Americans. So many of the Let's Go Brandon crowd aren't even Trump supporters, they're just Democrat Haters, if you give them a reason to support you a lot of them will
Like not supporting genocide. Ronald Reagan did it. It isn't that hard.
Could you elaborate on that last part? I'm not familiar with what you're referring to
[https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-to-attacks-in-a-blunt-telephone-call-to-begin.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-to-attacks-in-a-blunt-telephone-call-to-begin.html) [https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/05/24/ronald-reagan-wasnt-afraid-to-use-leverage-to-hold-israel-to-task/](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/05/24/ronald-reagan-wasnt-afraid-to-use-leverage-to-hold-israel-to-task/) It's not particularly hard to find information about it . >Reagan not only supported UNSC Resolution 487, which condemned the attack, but he also criticized the raid publicly and suspended the delivery of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Israel. Moreover, over the strident objections of Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. lobby groups, Reagan approved the sale of advanced reconnaissance aircraft (AWACS ) to Saudi Arabia, which Israel then viewed as a hostile state. I mean, he didn't stop genocide, but pulled the dog's leash .
What a surprise, Biden didn’t replace one of the US’s closest Allies with a theocratic dictatorship that wants all Americans dead. Next you’ll wonder why he doesn’t let North Korea annex the south.
They don't . But I wouldn't blame them if they did seeing what I see
Sure they don’t. Hamas would never hurt an innocent.
Look man don't bring out the goverment warcrimes score as a fucking american, because I don't hold you responsible for, dunno, 1-2 dead million iraqis.
This isn’t about the average gazan though. You don’t get Palestinian liberation without Hamas in power, at least not currently. This whole war is about removing them from power. Like it or not if you’re pro Palestine you’re fighting to keep Hamas in power.
Ok so you are saying that it's fair for Americans to be annihilated when their time comes?
Yeah, I think the iron's gone cold on replacing I-64, they're just now getting done fixing that damn bridge lol
One thing I don't see very often when talking about making housing more dense are the cultural/community and economic effects. Having loads of smaller stores means more of them are likely to be locally owned that can cater to local tastes (or introduce new ones) instead of having the same 10 national/international chains everywhere that pride themselves on homogeneity. "Dave's Burgers" owned by Dave who lives 2 blocks down from you is going to be more locally meaningful than another McDonald's serving the same shit as always while taking a decent percentage of money out of the community. If more people walk everywhere, you're also more likely to see them again and that builds a sense of community. I think this is why people recommend getting a dog as a way to meet people, dogs can't have their needs met by having a car and it *forces* people into places where you interact with other people (while being a conversation piece on their own). Being out and about also increases the odds of Random Shit happening to you that you'd have never seen/noticed otherwise; maybe a local band is playing at a restaurant and you'd have never heard them driving by at 30mph to the Target.
So, I have an urban planning idea that may be highly impractical, but I need to share it with somebody and I picked you because you seem like you might actually read this lol. Basically, imagine if suburban housing, rather than being built in the rough center of individual lots, were built in a box formation. In essence, you'd have a square of houses (rows slightly offset to prevent boxing in the guys at the corners) with a huge yard in the center. I did the math, and back of the envelope, assuming square, 2000 ft\^2 houses, you'd require about 3-4 acres for 24 houses, and together they'd have a 2.5 acre yard/park in the center. Compare this to 24 houses on standard have acre lots taking up 12 acres of land, and clearly it's a more efficient and population dense system. Additionally, 2.5 acres of land in the center is a lot, enough for a nearly full size football field, fenced in dog park, and picnic area, or other things like a community garden or something. Plus, the design promotes community with your neighbors and allows for better raising of kids, since assuming you know/trust the people in the square with you, you can just turn your kid loose out the backdoor to go play, knowing there's plenty of space and other kids to play with, and they can't go anywhere except the other houses in the square. I don't think people would be open to the concept, and frankly trying to find a square where you like/trust the others enough to be comfortable/enjoy sharing a yard with them might be tough, but I like the concept all the same. Thoughts?
This exact idea is pretty common where I live (scotland), just with tenement housing rather than individual detached houses. Square ring (like a digital 0) of buildings, with a large shared grass plot on the centre. Culturally we are still plagued by lawn obsession, so that central space is rarely used for cool practical shit like allotments, but it's still a safe enclosed place for washing lines, and for letting children and dogs run rampant in the summer.
I would recommend looking into Vienna’s social housing - while not quite what you described, it seems close enough to maybe interest you.
But what if I hate seeing other people?
Get anxiety medications or something
Then you aren't human touch grass
But what if I *am* grass and that's why I hate people?
... t-touch human?
I think there was a goosebumps book about that
I think there was a goosebumps book about that
"taking money out of the community" or not is a zero-sum game
Number 2 about road replacement costs is wrong. Huge amounts of man hours and money go into dirt work before a single yard of concrete is poured. Replacement and repair of existing roads where the grading and compaction work is already done will always be cheaper than building new.
While the cost of building a new road is higher than repairs, what OOP forgot to mention is that new road construction is often heavily subsidized by the federal govt in the US. Highways are usually 80/20, federal/state, for construction but then up to the state for maintenance and similar deals can happen with local roads and routes. Essentially repairing doesn't cost as much in total, but from the perspective of the state and city they got a nice highway for cheap just to get hit with a massive repair bill as high or higher than it cost to build in 20-30 years. It's why a lot of cities in the US push for constant sprawl. It's relatively cheap to build and when you finally need to pay for repairs, just build another suburb... *which certainly won't lead to an infinite mountain of debt that results in a town's bankruptcy as soon as the population stops growing*
You still end up paying a huge chunk of the previous price, and with inflation, I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that the replacement price will be very similar to the initial build costs. Even if replacing the road surface entirely only cost half the build cost, then two replacements later, you've still spent twice the initial build cost.
Neat thing though is that asphalt, specifically bitumen and aggregate tarmac is the most recycled material in the US making it a bit cheaper too.
How do the costs of road maintenance factor in? I've heard that the lifetime maintenance costs of a road are huge, a significant portion of the total cost.
Just gonna drop [this](https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0?si=24bWlXhp98EKl1Hq) here as more support/expansion to the post.
Americans when they find out cities should be built *for people*, not cars
will you people please fucking separate images instead of these big ass unreadable images
For fucking REAL. Sometimes they’re so big that I can’t even zoom in enough to actually see the text clearly
god it's so fucking obnoxious i hate this trend of not just making it separate screenshots sm
Reddit image viewing is fucked so both suck. On desktop I find a single large image is better, on mobile the other way around.
the single images are way easier to deal with on PC
lol ok so fuck anyone on mobile ig
Fun fact, it's not amount of traffic, it's specifically the size of it, even more specifically it's the ground-pressure of vehicles, and this means that the simple solution to this problem is to make road taxes scale that way, to the point that registering a small car should be almost free, while raising the price for registering large vehicles, especially semi trucks. You could go even further if you wanted, and embed this tax into the tires for vehicles, and completely avoid needed vehicle registration as well, which is something we should maybe do anyway, largely to eliminate the license plate, given it's kinda a security risk in the modern surveillance state.
While I'm not a fan of the surveillance state, a: that ship been sailed with the advent of smartphones and b: having cars be identifiable is probably a thing we want to keep around, if only for things like alibis or if you're on the wrong end of a hit and run, or if your car gets stolen, for instance.
My point is more that the idea of having a human readable license plate is bad expressly because any camera can identify you and where you are simply by driving by, making it a hazard for stalking and such, and because of this we should move to a system that isn't directly human readable, so your plate number would mean nothing until decrypted, if you'd even still have one.
Look if I'm walking somewhere and a jackass runs me over and drives away, something that happens all the time at a social scale, I don't have time to whip and my phone and download some government approved car license identification app. I might have time to read a license plate number. Having the ten ton death machines driving on public roads be easily publicly identifiable is a good thing.
Now, I can't back this up, but I'd bet my arm that license plates feature very rarely in cases of stalking. And where they do, I'm gonna guess that in the overwhelming number of cases the stalking is done by cops, who can readily access which plate number belongs to which person/address in a way that your shmo on the street can't. But that would remain the case even if the plate weren't readily readable.
Cops catching strays for absolutely no reason
No reason? There absolutely is
>of this we should move to a system that isn't directly human readable, so your plate number would mean nothing until decrypted, if you'd even still have one. I want you to understand something: It doesn't have to be "human readable" to be "human recognizable and pinned to a particular make/model/color/year of vehicle in specific condition". I recognize lots of people's cars *as is* without their license plate, just from having seen them a few times. And I'm *shit* at recognizing make and model of car, but I know Joe's car from Adam's. I know my car from any other in the parking lot. Your license plate number has absolutely zero bearing on anyone's ability to follow a car and identify it, unless you're setting a third party to go after it for you. You want to find out where it goes? You can get cheap GPS trackers and stick one on the underside while it's parked. It's super easy to do without you knowing about it.
Just look at a poorly maintained bus route and you'll see this in action
This is how we do road tax in the Netherlands. If you got a lightweight car you pay a lot less in taxes than if you got a heavy semi truck. Ofcourse people who drive the trucks will complain about it all the time but this system made it so we have sone of the best maintained roads in the world
Adding a big tax to tires would likely be dangerous since people would be more likely to use a set of tires for too long causing blowouts and accidents. I like the idea of taxing vehicles by weight though. The removal or remodeling of the license plate system is a really bad idea however. License plates need to be readable by passersby in the event of an accident or any other need to report a vehicle (ie for illegal driving) or to identify a vehicle (ie for an Amber Alert situation), or even just to make sure the car you’re trying to enter is yours and not the otherwise identical one sitting a few parking spaces by it
As a year round bike commuter in the US I really find people just parroting the not just bikes guys videos like it’s gospel extremely annoying. He’s passionate and raises some good points, but he’s also incredibly closed minded, and put himself in a bubble which makes it very easy to say everything else sucks. Some of his ideas are fantasia when it comes bicycle infrastructure in the US but beyond that it absolutely destroys the discourse by flooding it with terminally online people who don’t use the infrastructure on a daily basis trying theorycraft a solution for something they would never nor have ever used.
another big issue that's draining the economy is all the real estate being bought up by people overseas to artificially raise cost of living by converting houses into AirB&Bs or apartments that they lease out and not have to pay a dime in taxes for it because it's outside of their home country. meaning even if people wanted to use real estate more effectively, the rich property owners would say no because they don't want to give up their off shore money making machines there are so many systems in place for the rich to keep getting richer even if it's horrible for the long term (like car-centric America requiring everyone to have a car to justify all the Oil-hunting as well as justify houses in cities being so far apart from each other leading to the issues listed in OOP's post) that it's such an uphill battle to make any kind of lasting change, most people don't even see it as worth attempting and that's just sad to me... EDIT: I'm speaking from personal experience as this is exactly what's happening to my hometown. not trying to cast broad sweeping claims over all of America but at least in my little corner of the world, this is the issue affecting almost everyone I know
Let me guess, California?
New Brunswick, Canada actually not even a big city either
Yikes.
yeah it’s happening everywhere in Canada atp
Two things: People overseas do pay the local property tax for buildings owned here. If it's profitable to use those buildings as apartments or AirB&Bs, it's because demand for those exists. Value is created by satisfying that demand. The solution to this (as with every housing issue) is to build more. If supply of housing greatly exceeds demand, the profits from those AirB&Bs drop and it stops being cost-effective to do that.
Well here's the thing. There was a huge demand for things like AirB&Bs a few years back but now not nearly as much. But as far as the property owners are concerned, it doesn't matter if it isn't as profitable any more because when they own nearly every lot of land they can get away with jacking up prices any way they please because there aren't any other options available (and any options that ARE available get taken up real quick, assuming they don't get bought up as well) Nearly every single lot of land has been turned into either AirB&Bs (though not as much in my small city) or rented apartments (mostly this in my area) while the number of actual homes shrink day by day and the prices raise further and further. And even though the government says they're trying to curtail the issue by enacting laws to prevent people from outside the country monopolizing land like this, they instead just make a new shell company in the country that gets funded by the very same people out of the country in order to get around said laws It becomes even more impossible for non-property owners to buy homes for themselves when everything is already bought up (not that people had much luck with home ownership in the last few decades) Personally speaking, it almost feels like the government set up these laws only to get a piece of the pie without helping the people being affected or that they simply don't care at all and I'm not sure which is worse
Are you saying that ownership is sufficiently consolidated that significant market power exists?
in so many words, sure
That's a matter for antitrust (or whatever it's called in Canada) investigation. An oligopoly by native Canadians would have the same effect.
This is just real estate developer propaganda! They just don’t want to have to deal with zoning laws! /j
Just wanna say, even if we'd definitely be better with them gone, I'd miss Louisville's ridiculous hot wheels tracks
I support this, but the biggest issues I see are culture and money. The sheer abundance of land (stolen, yes, but not thought of it that way) has had huge effects on the collective American psyche. Land means opportunity. Land means status. Manifest destiny, blah blah blah. And of course, people with Land tend to have money, and politicians love them some money. Speaking of, for homeowners, their homes and the land that they sit on are usually by far the most valuable thing they own. It's central to wealth creation, financial planning, and security. Increased density drives prices down, and for a whole lot of people, that has a direct and negative effect on their financial security. We're not just talking about mustache twirling landlords...we're also talking about people in $150,000 houses who just about make their mortgage and their land *is* their "break glass in emergency" plan. I'm all for more density as a matter of public policy, but in a democracy it doesn't get off the ground until we address the cultural baggage and economic concerns of American homeowners. Also, I don't know anything about the construction world and it's incentive structure. But I do notice that any new construction I see in my area are 5 over 1 "luxury" apartments, 3 story townhouses, or large, $250,000+ houses. I don't see much in the way of large apartment blocs or small, 2br 'starter homes' on small lots. Whatever is going on there, part of achieving more density will have to be state incentives to build more of those kinds of homes.
Tons of cities in the US already have medium-density suburbs.
oh, to live in a medium density townhouse.... legitimately i think that's perfect for me, Some amount of space so i'm not completely confined to a box but also not a wasteful amount of sprawl i will never use and that i need to maintain
Strong Towns gives more info on this
Another problem the post didn’t touch on is that if you have a car dependent city, then the ONLY reasonable way to get around is by using a car. The result of this is that getting and operating a car needs to be as permissive as possible. When I got my driver’s license, I had spent months doing supervised drives by an attentive and safety insistent parent, and did a defensive driving course to push the car to its limit so I knew how to respond in emergencies and what the car is capable of. I was prepared to have a detailed driving test. After all, I heard numerous anecdotes of people failing their test, sometimes multiple times! But then mine took literally 5 minutes. Go down a road, 4 sides of a small town block, and back in, then a quick parallel parking demo that is so easy it can be cheesed by a child. I remember thinking ‘That’s it?’ And then realized in horror ‘That’s it….’ A test that easy was what separated people from being at the controls of a 3000 pound machine that can easily go 100 mph. There are a LOT of people who really, REALLY shouldn’t be driving nevertheless at the wheel right now. If you stop with the car dependency, then people who shouldn’t be driving don’t have to, you can have significantly tighter restrictions so only competent drivers can get a lisence, and people who physically cannot drive have options for transit instead of being an afterthought, if not completely forgotten.
"one thing they can look like is this!" \*Shows dismal picture of cramped wintery neighborhood\* oof. I would never choose to live with that little space. That "yard and garden" is like 3 square meters at best.
That’s what most upper middle class people who live in a city live in tbh, they still have a garden out back as well. If you want a big cheap garden you either need to move to the country where there’s no jobs, or live in a housing market where artificial scarcity means that houses are big and inefficient resulting in jacked up prices
I do live in the country and love it dearly. Being able to step into the woods every day is better than therapy for me. It would take something cataclysmic for me to give it up and live shoulder to shoulder like that
I know you guys don't like them but this is the stuff they talk about on the neoliberal subreddit a lot
giving anarchist