39 minutes ago, KJP said:

What we were is what we should be again. So much wonderful built environments were sacrificed at the altar of the almighty car. I doubt Europe was physically destroyed more by World War II than US cities were destroyed by the car. The GMs, Studebakers, Shell, Phillips, et al did exactly what they said in the 1930s they would do. This is Kansas City....

 

Wow. That is grim...

Seattle's urbanism got messed up because a lot of tech workers are couchlocked and have everything delivered to them like they're royalty or something. (assuming pre-COVID). When at work all their food comes from inside the building. They do not add value to the community like an insurance company does with their relaxed staff and family focus.

Edited May 26, 20214 yr by GCrites80s

1 hour ago, KJP said:

What we were is what we should be again. So much wonderful built environments were sacrificed at the altar of the almighty car. I doubt Europe was physically destroyed more by World War II than US cities were destroyed by the car. The GMs, Studebakers, Shell, Phillips, et al did exactly what they said in the 1930s they would do. This is Kansas City....

 

 

Europe's cities were destroyed and not only rebuilt, but actually RESTORED in many cases.  Buildings were saved as best they could, and where not similar replacements were constructed.  Sadly our cities have been lost to time now after 60 years of freeways.  

 

 

1 hour ago, LlamaLawyer said:

A friend of mine from Seattle has remarked that since Amazon became huge, a lot of his favorite things about Seattle are gone, and it doesn't have the charm it once had.

 That's like the local joke where I live about how many Virginians it takes to change a lightbulb.  Ans. Three. One to hold the ladder, one to change the bulb, and one highly refined older woman to remark how much lovelier the old bulb was.

1 hour ago, LlamaLawyer said:

I think one can be a little more sympathetic to NIMBYs in a city like Seattle with a sustained population explosion and Amazon essentially taking over the town. A friend of mine from Seattle has remarked that since Amazon became huge, a lot of his favorite things about Seattle are gone, and it doesn't have the charm it once had.

 

Those kinds of complaints make a lot less sense in a city where 2/3 of the population is gone and the population rebound has either just begun or not started yet.

 

Part of the reason stuff is disappearing is the lack of housing supply keeping up with demand. Of course an area is going to lose it's charm if the only people that can afford to live there are tech bros. It's pretty well studied that building new housing decreases displacement. There are valid NIMBY arguments like not wanting an asphalt plant in your back yard, but generally I find the opposition to new housing in residential areas pretty indefensible. 

 

https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/2020-pennington.pdf

36 minutes ago, Henryefry said:

 

Part of the reason stuff is disappearing is the lack of housing supply keeping up with demand. Of course an area is going to lose it's charm if the only people that can afford to live there are tech bros. It's pretty well studied that building new housing decreases displacement. There are valid NIMBY arguments like not wanting an asphalt plant in your back yard, but generally I find the opposition to new housing in residential areas pretty indefensible. 

 

https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/2020-pennington.pdf

This is fair enough, and I must concede that I couldn't read the pay-walled article to see the details of the project that was opposed or the opposition.

 

A lot of NIMBYism is self defeating. My point is that in a city that has explosive growth and a REAL gentrification problem, NIMBYism is understandable, even when the specific criticisms may miss the mark. It's very different from people who live in one of the cheaper cities in the country complaining about how a lot which used to have a building on it but has been a vacant lot or parking lot for the last forty years is now getting a building on it again. That's not gentrification, it's just rebuilding the city.

4 minutes ago, LlamaLawyer said:

This is fair enough, and I must concede that I couldn't read the pay-walled article to see the details of the project that was opposed or the opposition.

 

A lot of NIMBYism is self defeating. My point is that in a city that has explosive growth and a REAL gentrification problem, NIMBYism is understandable, even when the specific criticisms may miss the mark. It's very different from people who live in one of the cheaper cities in the country complaining about how a lot which used to have a building on it but has been a vacant lot or parking lot for the last forty years is now getting a building on it again. That's not gentrification, it's just rebuilding the city.

 

But the Seattle example isn't gentrification either. It's a bunch of new housing being built on a parking lot downtown. 

17 hours ago, LlamaLawyer said:

This is fair enough, and I must concede that I couldn't read the pay-walled article to see the details of the project that was opposed or the opposition.

 

A lot of NIMBYism is self defeating. My point is that in a city that has explosive growth and a REAL gentrification problem, NIMBYism is understandable, even when the specific criticisms may miss the mark. It's very different from people who live in one of the cheaper cities in the country complaining about how a lot which used to have a building on it but has been a vacant lot or parking lot for the last forty years is now getting a building on it again. That's not gentrification, it's just rebuilding the city.

Here's the conclusion

 

Conclusion

 

This paper explores the spillover effects of new housing construction in San Francisco from 2003-2017. Like many gentrifying cities across the United States, San Francisco is locked in a policy debate over how to achieve housing affordability. New market rate construction has become politically divisive as advocates debate whether its aggregate supply effects outweigh its potential local demand effects. This paper provides evidence that there is no tradeoff between aggregate and local effects: the supply effect is larger than the demand effect at every distance from the new construction. However, a hyperlocal demand effect exists within a narrow radius of 100m, i.e., within eyeshot of the new construction. Within this narrow band, building renovations and business turnover increase. The upgrade in neighborhood quality(25) attracts higher-income newcomers, so that when incumbents move out, they are more likely to be replaced by wealthier newcomers. In San Francisco, new market rate housing increases gentrification and reduces displacement. These findings highlight that market rate and affordable housing construction are complementary. Building more market rate housing benefits all San Francisco renters through spillover effects on rents. However, these spillover effects do not reduce gentrification and they may not continue to reduce displacement in the long term. If the city continues to gentrify over time, these reduced rents will become less effective at retaining lower-income people because there will be fewer low-income people to retain. Affordable housing can effectively reduce both displacement and gentrification by targeting people at higher risk of displacement and preserving housing for low-income people. In conclusion, policymakers who want to slow displacement and gentrification should accelerate both market rate and affordable housing construction. The high rent elasticity of displacement also suggests that policies like rental assistance and a universal basic income (UBI) could be efficient, cost-effective ways to meaningfully reduce displacement and preserve income diversit

 

(25)Neighborhood quality here could mean either the upgrade of physical housing stock, or the arrival of higher-income residents to the new building. Guerrieri et al. (2013) find that universal preferences for wealthy neighbors can drive gentrification.

 

Jeez that had to be an expensive one to demo. For its size at least.

On 5/26/2021 at 1:06 PM, GCrites80s said:

Seattle's urbanism got messed up because a lot of tech workers are couchlocked and have everything delivered to them like they're royalty or something. (assuming pre-COVID). When at work all their food comes from inside the building. They do not add value to the community like an insurance company does with their relaxed staff and family focus.

 

I've said elsewhere that if Progressive had built downtown, they would have been similar.  That's their corporate culture.

3 hours ago, KJP said:

 

 

Camden was scary, at least back in the 80's. I remember police telling you not to stop at a red light...if nobody's around at it's night time, just go! 

On 5/28/2021 at 3:00 PM, surfohio said:

 

Camden was scary, at least back in the 80's. I remember police telling you not to stop at a red light...if nobody's around at it's night time, just go! 

 

I used to ride my bike in Camden on a regular basis. It's still super duper poor and there are definitely areas to avoid, but it's not scary anymore. I met a lot of really nice folks on the streets of Camden.

I remember when living in cities was considered unhealthy (pollution, crime, etc) and living in rural areas was considered healthy.....

 

 

I would also add that there will likely be a bit of a kill off of white rural males over next couple years.  Rural hospitals have closed especially in states that have not passed the ACA aka Obamacare.  

 

The same rural whites especially in the south are really not getting vaccinated. I would expect a bad fall/winter for them when new variants come to Florida and spread from there via their hootenannies and shindigs. Baptist churches will no doubt spread covid far and wide.  New variants might likely target a new age group as the over 75 groups will likely be at herd immunity. The virus can then become more aggressive. 

  

Interesting if Sturgis Harley festival becomes the start of the annual covid kill off. 

I imagine that life today in most rural areas isn't that much different from life for the urban poor - no jobs, no healthy food, no hospitals or services. Only Walmart to shop at. And rural areas have the added disadvantage of needing a car to get everywhere, which cuts down on opportunities for spontaneous exercise. 

42 minutes ago, audidave said:

 

  

Interesting if Sturgis Harley festival becomes the start of the annual covid kill off. 

 

The studies that claim Sturgis spread COVID are controversial, to say the least.   Lots of "could haves" in the ostensible conclusions.

36 minutes ago, BigDipper 80 said:

I imagine that life today in most rural areas isn't that much different from life for the urban poor - no jobs, no healthy food, no hospitals or services. Only Walmart to shop at. And rural areas have the added disadvantage of needing a car to get everywhere, which cuts down on opportunities for spontaneous exercise. 

 

"Opportunities for spontaneous exercise"?    Huh?   That makes no sense.  

It may cut down on necessary exercise to perform basic tasks.   But most rural people have big yards, and some even have farms.   

^Well we’ll find out for sure this year won’t we.  If there is another wild spike throughout the upper plain and mountain states 2 weeks after the rally this year I’d say its no longer “could haves”.   They are likely not people that care to get vaccines at least the majority. 

26 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

 

"Opportunities for spontaneous exercise"?    Huh?   That makes no sense.  

It may cut down on necessary exercise to perform basic tasks.   But most rural people have big yards, and some even have farms.   

 

Having lived on an actual farm, I can tell you that there is very little opportunity for exercise. Sure, if you're working the farm you're getting exercise. But most people who live on farms aren't doing the actual work. And modern machinery takes a lot of the physical activity out of farming anyway. If you're working the farm, that can mean sitting on your butt in a tractor cab all day. And then you're basically stuck in your house unless you drive somewhere.

 

When we go visit my farm-town living family I dread how inactive we will be. I go out of my way to find spots to hike because otherwise there will be very little physical activity. And this isn't just my opinion, study after study show that rural folks are a lot less active because the rural lifestyle in 21st Century America is not conducive to physical activity.

24 minutes ago, DEPACincy said:

 

Having lived on an actual farm, I can tell you that there is very little opportunity for exercise. Sure, if you're working the farm you're getting exercise. But most people who live on farms aren't doing the actual work. And modern machinery takes a lot of the physical activity out of farming anyway. If you're working the farm, that can mean sitting on your butt in a tractor cab all day. And then you're basically stuck in your house unless you drive somewhere.

 

When we go visit my farm-town living family I dread how inactive we will be. I go out of my way to find spots to hike because otherwise there will be very little physical activity. And this isn't just my opinion, study after study show that rural folks are a lot less active because the rural lifestyle in 21st Century America is not conducive to physical activity.

 

Isn't there the equivalent of a big yard?   There's certainly opportunity, whether people take advantage or not is up to them.

37 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

 

Isn't there the equivalent of a big yard?   There's certainly opportunity, whether people take advantage or not is up to them.

 

Sometimes. Sometimes not so much. We had a big yard, but some of our nearest neighbors had corn and soybeans right up to their doorstep basically. 

 

But more importantly, there's only so much you can do in that yard. If you're a kid you could play tag or wiffle ball, but there are no other kids within a mile to play with. So you end up hitting a wiffle ball around the yard by yourself until you get bored, then you go in and play video games. If you're an adult, there's not much you can do in that yard. You could jog or walk laps I guess, but that gets old real fast. If you're wealthy you could install a basketball court or pool, but most people don't have that kind of money. Poor people are basically out of luck. An urban neighborhood is much more conducive to a physical lifestyle. 

At our farm, trails and such get overgrown so quickly that if you're not actively maintaining them they can become useless in less than a month (depending on the time of year... this time of year is especially bad). No one is taking care of them for you like at a Metro Park or offroad trail system.

Cities offer healthy food in restaurants and takeout as well. Out in the sticks if you want something healthy you have to make it yourself. Every time. And that's even if you can get the ingredients. The selection is worse. I suppose you can grow it yourself too but then you're really all in.

"Spontaneous exercise" is just being active unintentionally. In an urban area, you're more likely to naturally get your 10,000 daily steps just doing your daily routine than you would out in nowheresville. Sure you might have a lot of open space, but you're not walking anywhere and actually have to plan exercise into your daily routine as opposed to it just happening on its own. 

22 hours ago, BigDipper 80 said:

I imagine that life today in most rural areas isn't that much different from life for the urban poor - no jobs, no healthy food, no hospitals or services. Only Walmart to shop at. And rural areas have the added disadvantage of needing a car to get everywhere, which cuts down on opportunities for spontaneous exercise. 

 

Having lived in both rural and urban areas, I think the plights of the rural poor and the urban poor have a number of marked dissimilarities.

 

The urban poor typically have to contend with an unreasonably high cost of living for their means, particularly as food deserts get filled by opportunists who tend to overcharge.

 

The rural poor typically have a very low cost of living. There are places in Ohio where you can rent a two bed apartment for less than $500 a month. They're in rural areas, not in inner city areas. Rural grocery stores are almost universally cheaper than their urban counterparts.

 

The urban poor have more "opportunities" but are kept down by a combination of a skills gap or racism. There are usually high paying jobs that exist within a radius of several miles from the urban poor, but racism and a skill gap work together to lock out the urban poor from such jobs. Transportation may also be a problem, but it's secondary to the skills gap, since if the urban poor could get hired into an upper middle class job, transportation would become feasible.

 

The rural poor are usually white, so they don't have to contend with anti-black racism, but they still have a skills gap and the "opportunities" simply don't exist at all. It's not just that the rural poor are unqualified for better jobs, there is no better job. And to create a better job typically requires education, which literally requires leaving the small town. I'm confident there are many small Ohio towns where literally no one has a household income over $200,000 a year. There are probably even more small towns where there may be one doctor or dentist or chiropractor with that kind of income, but no one else.

 

So there's also a difference in what happens to the rural poor vs. urban poor if they can get out of poverty. I know a number of people who grew up dirt poor in Cleveland and are now upper middle class or very successful, still in Cleveland. I struggle to think of an example of someone I know who grew up dirt poor in a small town, but is now successful in that same small town. There are lots of rural poor who escape poverty; but then they leave.

 

The urban poor have worse acute challenges, but the rural poor have a worse chronic problem, because the urban poor live in an ecosystem with a bright future and the rural poor live in an ecosystem with no future.

 

Work-from-home may change this some, but these are my broad observations.

This one seemed interesting and might spark some thoughtful debate....

 

Technology and changing social values will give Americans more control than ever over how and where they live in the future.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-05/future-of-housing-and-transportation-in-u-s-cities

 

Dear Coasties, You've got 10 years to make your move to Ohio. And if you don't like Ohio government (as we urbanistas tend not to), by the very nature of you moving here will cause to change it. If Oklahomans' mass exodus to California in the 1930s Dustbowl years helped trigger its California's boom times, so might a mass exodus to the Great Lakes region by Coasties trigger a new boom time here. We're one of the few places to see harsh, negative consequences from climate change, briefly prefaced by this lunar wobble. So there were Okies, and now there may be Lunars or Loonies!

 

 

 

On 7/14/2021 at 10:40 PM, KJP said:

Dear Coasties, You've got 10 years to make your move to Ohio. And if you don't like Ohio government (as we urbanistas tend not to), by the very nature of you moving here will cause to change it. If Oklahomans' mass exodus to California in the 1930s Dustbowl years helped trigger its California's boom times, so might a mass exodus to the Great Lakes region by Coasties trigger a new boom time here. We're one of the few places to see harsh, negative consequences from climate change, briefly prefaced by this lunar wobble. So there were Okies, and now there may be Lunars or Loonies!

 

 

Anyone owning property along the coast, prone to hurricanes, rising sea levels, earthquakes, etc. should have to carry insurance that pays for their damage and temporary displacement of owner or tenants. The cities, counties, maybe even state, should have to carry insurance as well, to cover costs of infrastructure damage. The federal government shouldn't have to spend billions of dollars of tax payer money EVERY year to fix bad decisions of a small percentage of the country who had to live in "paradise" and disasters that could have been avoided. Tired of hearing year after year, criticism of the president's response, FEMA's response, etc. Take some personal damn responsibility and live in-land or carry insurance.

I was always amazed, going to Florida, the number of sh!thole, raggedy beach towns. Daytona Beach, Panama City Beach and surrounding areas... I wouldn't care if those towns were entirely wiped off of North America (assuming everyone living there ran away and was safe.)

Edited July 16, 20213 yr by David

Pet peeve of mine: a lot of news stories, lists, or analyses about “greenest cities” or avoiding the effects of climate change seem to have unproductive and nonsensical methodologies. Here’s a new one I found, ClimateCheck.

 

https://climatecheck.com

 

The concept is to have a rating for cities, zip codes, addresses etc based on climate change risk. The methodology equally weights five risk categories based on the projected change in each. The result is some obviously nonsensical scores like Burlington, VT having a worse score than Sacramento, CA or Indianapolis, IN having the same score as Houston, TX. Interested to hear what others think.

I'm fine enough with the 5 factors. What I'm not fine with is equally weighting future risk with current risk. They're trying to show who will have the most dramatic change in their risk score, not the actual risk.

 

The end result is that areas that are currently very risky (coastal, fire, and tornado prone areas) get scores that are low since the change in how risky they are isn't very large.

 

You can't really use the scores to compare different areas against each other, but I'm sure people will use it like that.

Cross-posted in the global warming thread 

 

 

I like the phrase, "suburban environmentalist is an oxymoron."

 

Dystopia Americana...

 

 

11 hours ago, KJP said:

Dystopia Americana...

 

 

 

My New Jersey in-laws tell me that Atlantic City was ALWAYS a bleak, fringy sort of town. Their version of always probably dates from 1946.

12 minutes ago, Dougal said:

 

My New Jersey in-laws tell me that Atlantic City was ALWAYS a bleak, fringy sort of town. Their version of always probably dates from 1946.

Atlantic City was supposed to be completely revitalized when gambling was legalized outside of Nevada.  Even at the peak after gambling was legalized and Atlantic City had little competition, it didn't happen.  Once outside of the Boardwalk and the string of new casinos with their garages, nothing had changed.  Now with over half of the casinos out of business in Atlantic City and gambling is everywhere, it will never happen.  

 

Gambling was never going to be the saving grace, not in Atlantic City or anywhere else.

Edited October 1, 20213 yr by LifeLongClevelander

 

Interesting thread...

 

Re: USA vs USSR,  I remember reading a book about the early years of the Soviet union and being stunned by how much was actually accomplished during that time period. Setting aside the authoritarianism, Russia went from a largely agrarian society, almost feudal, to highly industrialized and urbanized in a span of 30 to 40 years.  Until Stalin gave into his darker angels, the lives of ordinary Russians actually improved. Healthcare and literacy rates skyrocketed. The closest thing you could probably compare it to is the difference between China in the 1970s to China today.

27 minutes ago, OH_Really said:

Re: USA vs USSR,  I remember reading a book about the early years of the Soviet union and being stunned by how much was actually accomplished during that time period. Setting aside the authoritarianism, Russia went from a largely agrarian society, almost feudal, to highly industrialized and urbanized in a span of 30 to 40 years.  Until Stalin gave into his darker angels, the lives of ordinary Russians actually improved. Healthcare and literacy rates skyrocketed. The closest thing you could probably compare it to is the difference between China in the 1970s to China today.

 

The phrase that comes to mind here is "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?".

A lot of surface recovery happened in the early years of Nazi Germany, if one wants to discount the obvious.

Japan 1900-1940 was a pretty remarkable change. 

I often think it's ignored how the Soviets pioneered the 15 minute city that is so hot in US planning right now. Cities were planned around mikro-raions (micro-neighborhoods) where basic services (schools, shops, parks, clinics, etc) were built to be an easy walk away from your home, with less frequently needed services (large hospitals, movie theaters, etc) built in maybe every third or fourth neighborhood, and heavy industry separate. Connecting them all together was frequent, reliable, free public transportation.

 

Can't think of a better place to put this breakdown of WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO BE A NIMBY (OR NOT):

 

 

 

41 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

Yeech... Sheez Louise!

I think this ought to be posted here to get more attention. If the science on this is good, we have more than just a climate clock ticking down. We have a wealth clock ticking too, and we need that wealth to afford converting from our oil-soaked lifestyles and technologies. A lot of that depends on redesigning cities to require fewer vehicle-miles traveled, more efficient buildings and enhanced electrical grids.

 

3 hours ago, Foraker said:

This is why we need a lot more investment in alternative energy and our energy infrastructure, and why obstructing the funding for it in the US Senate is a big economic rather than a political problem -- we've passed peak oil, we need to transition to alternatives quickly or face frequent energy supply disruption.  Republicans are cheering on Senator Manchin for "owning the libs" as the country races toward chaos.  Buy your backup batteries now.

 

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/20/oil-system-collapsing-so-fast-it-may-derail-renewables-warn-french-government-scientists/