Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can't really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I'm not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don't understand how you're gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn't live there, it's too impersonal.
People don't really connect outside of echo chambers and then claim they believe in voter fraud because they encountered a different-looking persin at the polls...
I doubt it.
Housing is expensive near city centers partly because that's where people want to live. Even if I could 100% WFH I wouldn't move out of the city to save money. But I suppose that doesn't apply to everyone.
I understand what's trying to be said here but I'd pass on that.
I've lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can't hear what my neighbors are saying, don't need to pay for laundry, don't need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don't have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I'm not going back to an apartment.
I can't hear my neighbors, don't need an elevator, and don't need a garage because I don't need a car. I don't have a back yard but I'm pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
You (or whoever) can opt to live in a cute neighborhood, I would. But you cannot opt to live in a cute neighborhood in the middle of a massive city. I think that's the key piece here.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it's just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother's apartment I can hear his neighbor's coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit's got tissues for walls I swear.
You could meet all of your apartment complaints with some decently designed medium density projects. I agree though that not everyone needs to live in a towering skyscraper
You are still paying for laundry. As a homeowner the full cost of replacing and maintaining the machines is on you. You also have to pay for the electricty and the water usage.
I think you're making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can't have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.
Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you've made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there's less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don't need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.
The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You've got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won't put them a plane ride away from home. And you've got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.
Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I'm saying? You don't have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.
YEP. Same here. It's a world of difference, having room to do whatever you want in peace and privacy.
When I lived in apartments back in the 2000s I couldn't even leave anything of value on my porch or doorstep without fear of it being stolen. My girlfriend's bike was stolen from the 2nd floor where it was parked right in front of our apartment door. At my apartment before that a drunk stole a wooden pallet that I had on the porch. They stole fucking wood!
But out here at my rural home, I have land and a garden and we can leave our cars unlocked and bikes or whatever outdoors and nobody messes with it.
So y'all can keep all that urban density and I will stay far away from it most of the time.
Could easily fix "LISA" in the last panel to "USA", and remove California from the first panel, and boom, you got a meme for the whole country
Yeah, right synae, A single, relevant meme.
I'm not american and have never even been there but doesn't New York city have the same problems? And AFAIK NYC is very vertical.
NYC doesn't have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
But NYC is also an extremely expensive place to live, and built vertically due to a lack of space for outward expansion.
Might also be good to point out that NYC has a lot more commercial office and high-end condo development than high-density housing.
But that also has a lot to do with how expensive land is, which is mostly due to it being land-locked as mentioned.
This is anecdotal from browsing vagabond sources, but there's a lot of reasons NYC might have fewer homeless.
A) The pigs and rules on the east coast are a lot more brutal towards the homeless than the west coast. This both leads to migration away from the east coast and for the homeless that are there to be much more invisible.
B) The west coast has a history of being relatively welcoming to the houseless / a lot of lore built up around it, so people tend to gravitate towards it.
C) The west coast has a much more survivable climate than the east coast - this is the reason I hear the most.
Not sure how you're defining "bad," but NYC has an estimated 100k homeless while LA has an estimated 46k.
https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/#:~:text=In a city of more,one of the other boroughs.
NYC doesn't have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
Because you'll literally die the very first winter night you're homeless without shelter in NYC. They have a bunch of shelters, so the problem is less visible, and when they run out of space they bus them to L.A.. Those that remain are found frozen to death in the morning.
In addition to the other replies, it can also matter where in NYC you're talking about
https://metropolismoving.com/blog/housing-costs-nyc/
Bronx has a median rent to income ratio of 45%, while Manhattan is 30%. This is primarily due to the fact that median income for Manhattan renters is double what it is in the Bronx, but rent doesn't scale up the same. Against my own expectation, this makes Manhattan a reasonable-ish place to live, at least if we're just talking about rent and income.
The only thing I don't see is how it would fix people being homeless. Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc. If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment. You can't solve their problems with just providing housing.
There's multiple groups of homeless people.
There's the long term homeless, who often suffer from issues like mental illness, and short term homeless, who usually don't.
High housing prices absolutely causes people to become homeless when they lose their job, become addicted to drugs, etc.
Being homeless is itself traumatic, and exacerbates most issues homeless people have. Affordable housing and giving homeless people an apartment aren't a panacea, but it does prevent a ton of issues for newly homeless people.
I don't know if they're included in the groups you mentioned, but there is also a vehicle dwelling homeless as well. Last I checked, there are over 3 million Americans living full time in a vehicle, whether it be a car, a bus, a van, an RV, or another type of vehicle. Some of them, it's by choice, but for some of them, that's all they can afford because housing prices have skyrocketed in so many places.
Are you familiar with the "Housing first" model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.
A big issue with different social workers and such trying to reach and help homeless people is trying to find them. If they have a fixed address, you know where they will likely be. This makes services to take them to doctor appointments, get them welfare cheques, disability service notifications etc. all become reliable.
Yes I know. And all housing projects I know about pre-select the people they give a home to, often only take in those who are already in the welfare system and all these projects offer extensive additional help.
I feel like some people deliberately interpret stuff into my post just so that they can get angry (not you but, I got some really angry messages).
So to make it extra clear: Giving people a home is great! There definitely should be a home for everyone, it's a human right!
But just giving people a home will not solve the problem with homeless! Putting people with severe mental illnesses, debt, etc. simply into a home does not work.
I don't think it's fair to paint homelessness as an urban planning issue just because housing is a part of the solution to both problems.
is that truly the case, or just a pervasive urban legend?
which studies support this theory?
I think between their argument and your own, yours is the one in more need of citation. Which is more likely, that giving a house to everyone will solve homelessness or that some people have problems beyond just being homeless? He's not saying that it wouldn't help some people, he's just saying that there would still be some number of people who need help beyond this.
No, there aren't statistics about these people. Just experiences and the experiences of others who work with them.
Many homeless people refuse to take up help like housing because they do not want to cooperate with helper organisations. And they also don't want to get interviewed: https://idw-online.de/de/news765112
We don't even really know how many there are because there are no reliable statistics. How would you count them anyway?
All housing first projects pre-select the people they give a home to. The reason is clear. They don't have homes for everyone, so they take those which will give the best results. In Berlin, Germany they literally have to write applications for the project: https://www.berlin.de/sen/soziales/besondere-lebenssituationen/wohnungslose/wohnen/housing-first-1293115.php
https://housingfirst.berlin/aufnahme
And they need to already be in the welfare system!
The same goes for Finland, which is the model country for a housing first approach. Putting people who already are in the welfare system in homes with help offers has the best results. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol22num2/ch4.pdf
Best results means it works for about half of homeless people.
For the other half, they need a step-by-step approach to have them able living in a home again (or for the first time in a long time). You can't just put them in an apartment with an address for counseling and that will work out.
Source: you can read about that in the PDF above, for example. Or any other study about the homeless which usually mentions at least the many who fall through the cracks.
These are migrants without refugee status and people with severe drug and alcohol abuse issues or other mental illness. It won't work to "put them out of sight out of mind".
Homeless people aren't a homogeneous group of people. And while it works for some, housing first is not the solution. Because it leaves an estimated half of them behind. It also omits that there a still a lot of help going on in the background. It's not just give them a home and that magically solves all their problems. Far from it ...
You can't solve all their problems with just providing housing, but it would some.
One thing I think people fail to see often when considering programs like this is the generational effect. A program to provide people housing might be considered a failure to some people because many may still choose to do drugs, will ruin their apartment, be violent to their neighbors, etc., some honestly valid concerns. But consider the shockwave 60 years down the line, for the next generations.
Homelessness and drug abuse are generational. Think of a person who would have been homeless who has a child. Was mentally ill and didn't take very good of the apartment, but not enough to not raise the child. Despite this, that child now has astronomically better chances at a decent life than if they had been raised on the streets or put into foster care just because they had housing and stability
You continue generation after generation, and though many people will be considered "failures" of programs like this, the rate of them continues to decrease because the success stories are now out of the system, out of the cycle.
The problem is half measures, which is what we have today. Bandaid fixes that don't get to the root of the issues homeless people deal with, keeping them in the cycle but doing... Something? So they can say look we care...
This assumes you kick them out after putting them into it.
No, you need to provide additional help to keep homeless people off the street. I only have experience with homeless in Germany, though. The reasons for homelessness can be different depending on the country.
I don't understand how the high density housing solves traffic. In lieu of an additional solution (public transit) I think it would make traffic worse.
Edit
The argument seems to be: high density housing would naturally result in public transit infrastructure. I don't think that line of reasoning makes sense, it's certainly not an obvious inevitability that public transit will always, naturally appear.
With density and admitily mixed development, it is pretty simple to live within walking distance of everything around you. A car just needs much more space then a pedestrian and you do not park your body at the site of the street. Other then that the key to good public transport is high frequency. So for a transit connection the more people want to travel the route, the more high frequency makes sense.
The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it....
Public transit works perfectly fine in a low-density situation. Your urban planning needs to accommodate it, though, with walkability being a prime concern.
A car-centric city will never mesh well with public transit no matter how dense it is. The best you can hope for is good subway coverage but that's expensive and can't be done everywhere. Nobody wants to take the bus if they feel they have no safe route to the bus stop.
But if everything is opened up with proper sidewalks and bike lanes and maybe tram tracks, if street lights prioritize pedestrians over cars, if walking to the nearest convenient stop feels safe and effortless even if it's two miles away – then you get public transit that actually works.
It's not terribly difficult. But your urban planning can't be car-centric or you're getting nowhere.
You can't have efficient public transport with low density housing. Also high density housing makes it easier to have things like supermarkets within walking distance of everyone.
It doesn't solve it, but I can see how it would help to solve it. If everyone lives in super low density suburban neighborhoods, public transportation doesn't make any sense. You can't build a train station that would realistically serve a dozen people tops.
Higher density makes public transportation a viable option, which in turn reduces traffic and pollution.
Also high density mixed used means you don't need the car every time you need to go grocery shopping, or to a bar or even to a park. You can go by foot
High density basically makes the case for transit itself.
If you can walk/bike to your job without the threat of being run over, you are one less car on the road.
Thihk of it in levels:
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People will skip work-commuting by car (including students) when there are other viable options that are not made life-threatening by other people in cars. Fewer trips= less traffic
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People will avoid driving for errands when there is decent local public transit that lets them shop where they want. Even fewer trips = even less traffic
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People will stop owning cars when there is decent local public transit and decent regional networks. Fewer cars = less traffic
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Same with homelessness. The last city I lived in offered free housing with 3 meals a day for the homeless, as in they got their own little tiny house basically that was actually kinda nice. But tons of homeless weren't interested. They just stayed on the street. I'm curious how just making dense apartment style buildings would just fix the problem.
That could alleviate those problems, but I doubt it'd actually solve them. Not to mention, they could also get worse:
- Cost of living -> Could actually be driven up. Stuff always tends to be more expensive in dense metropolitan areas. Big corpos and rich assholes would buy up as much real state as possible.
- Traffic -> Without public transportation, this can actually get worse. The distances might be smaller, but the amount of people wanting to get there increases.
- Homelessness -> directly related to cost of living. Having lots of places to live in that you simply cannot afford will force you to live elsewhere
Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.
People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.
Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it's really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.
If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult. If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
Also @[email protected]
This is a "your mileage may vary" case that definitely depends on where you live. Demand can always be artificially inflated
I live within 10km of a very densely populated city (Brazil), zero houses and hundreds of 12+ stories residential apartments. Problem is, the vast majority of apartments are high value. They're also in a very desirable area, so the price of a 24 m² apartment is usually the same of a 140 m² house in a less desirable place within 15km
What about moving within said city? There's plenty of stuff within walking distance, which is great, but the majority of people that do live there work in a different city. Also, most people that work there come from other cities. Since the only "real" public transport is a nearly straight line of metro, traffic is an absolute mess most of the day. I strongly suspect that the original planning wasn't for such high density, especially when you account for the ridiculously low number of bus lines from there to anywhere and back, but I'd need to do proper research to assert for sure.
- cost of living - can be solved if its social housing provided by the government and/or assigned by need and/or there is a restriction that the properties can only be owned by individuals.
- traffic - if everything is a walkable or cycleable distance traffic should be alright even with poor public transport. Although if we are trying to right the wrongs of bad urban planning you'd like to think public transport, green spaces, utilities and amenities would be well planned out in this scenario.
- homelessness - homelessness is not directly related to cost of living, its more related to lack of a social safety net and social services. The cost of living rising just exacerbates the issue.
For the cost of living thing, ideally you just implement similar good urban planning across the country. The reason some places are so expensive is because they have relatively livable cities compared to most of the country, so people want to move their. If you just improve the cities in places people already want to be for some reason or another, then you'll just get more people across the country interested in being there unless they have similar options near them. Guess you could alternatively make enough housing for like 50 million people in that one city. Technically, there's always the excuse of "you just didn't build enough". Not sure how the cost per housing unit gets for super structures, particularly since the cost of them includes infrastructure costs we don't usually value into the cost of the home (pipes, roads, etc) and commercial spaces + residential which would make a small city with huge population possible.
The problem is corporations, and lack of regulation and social services.
Look. Clearly I need some education in this area. Why didn't the "projects" in the 80's and 90's effectively provide these benefits?
I saw a video that they intentionally made the projects bad to try to "incentivize" people to get out of them. The whole stupid pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
It also centralizes the problem, which intensifies it. What you need is communities of mixed income, which has effects on schools, hospitals, stores nearby, etc.
This is less about the government building things and more about the government changing zoning so denser communities are built.
Can you be more specific?
I think others provided the type of context I was looking for but when I think dense living I think of the dense high rise projects that were built to provide low cost, section8 housing that theoretically were supposed to provide benefits to poor folks that I assume would also include the benefits discussed in your meme. However they were notoriously dangerous and had a myriad of problems that made them far worse and extremely dangerous for residents.
Pfft and not fill our valuable real estate with lawns and parking lots?
I don't like the idea that the colonisers took the land at the barrel of a gun (inc in England with the Enclosure Acts) and we're demanding...a shell in return.
Well designed, small, community living based on the ideas of the Commons would be just as effective as all of the above without forcing us to live on top of each other having zero connection to the land effectively in dog kennels or shipping containers.
Connect to the local; don't create ant nests.
I don't think it's a choice between one and the other.
First, the goal isn't to make an endless sea of identical skyscrapers. It's to make a blend of large and medium ones with rowhouses and duplexes mixed in, and then use the space that creates to make big, expansive parks and natural spaces for everyone. And if you want to start a commune, now there is a lot more space for communal, rustic living much closer to major cultural and transit hubs.
So like London...where I'm from...where those two articles describing the urban hellscape are located...
All that happens is people get stuffed into smaller and smaller locations.
Well unless you're a First Nations or American Indian tribe member you don't have any more claim to the land than the Europeans who stole it from them.
You know people outside of the Americas use this site, right?
Hold up a sec: I think this sometimes gets overlooked, but a right to occupancy has to recognize being born somewhere or growing up there as an entitlement to continued residence.
None of us have control over how our parents brought us into a specific location, or what atrocities our forebears committed. And every child has a right not to be deported, full stop.
Anytime you have people living in dense, highly populated areas it will make nearby land a premium. High demand for land (and the resulting high prices) will result in high rent and high cost of living.
I'm not really sure how to fix this. You could have some government managed system for what businesses get the high demand land, but that will result in less popular stores being in the best locations and greatly incentivize corruption as businesses want highly profitable locations that can only be granted by politicians.
To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.
I have a lot of suggestions, but one that I think you'd find particularly interesting is land tax rates.
This video is 46 minutes, but it's the mayor of Detroit explaining why low taxes on land incentivize blight and abandonment instead of productive use.
