This Experiment Undid Our Cities. How Do We Fix It?

[$tevie]

In the 1960s, the neighborhood we now live in (Fell's Point, Baltimore, MD) was a colorful mix of neighborhood bars, visiting sailors, whores, drunks, 18th century houses, wharves, industry, and warehouses. But the city planned to connect I-83 with I-95. The plan as laid out was going to cut a swathe through Baltimore's oldest neighborhoods, including Fell's Point. These neighborhoods were white but they were working class, and developers and city planners didn't really care about them much more than they cared about the people of color who lived in the city.

Then we had the Road Fight, led by future Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Fell's Point was saved. There were tons of empty houses that the city had forced people out of via eminent domain with chintzy pricing, and it was a great place to buy a house CHEAP. And lots of storefronts. People bought places, moved in, opened junk shops and antique stores and consignment shops and head shops and Mom and Pop stores. Edie the Egg Lady from the Johns Waters movies had a shop on Broadway. It was fun and funky and inexpensive.

Then, gentrification hit. People bought the old houses and renovated them and the prices began to go up until they boggled the mind. So of course, here come the developers. They bought warehouses and made them into office buildings. They bought empty land and began to develop it.

The next thing we knew, the newcomers in their renovated manses were rewriting zoning to eliminate as much commercial use as they possibly could, which meant months and months of meetings and battles and having things grandfathered in. God forbid you should own a storefront that wasn't being used as a storefront at that moment, goodbye commercial zoning. Because the newcomers wanted a Quaint Historical Maritime Village.

But the joke's on them, because developers moved in and began building big apartment complexes and getting height variances and parking variances and now they have to fight like hell to try to keep the place Quaint.

There aren't even as many bars, because the newcomers bought houses in the middle of over 100 bars and then freaked out because they were surrounded by over 100 bars. Gradually the little neighborhood bars are all dying out, and mostly only the larger bar/restaurants are still around. As the original owners retire, their businesses are bought and turned into chi chi places for upscale folks in their million dollar private homes.

And there it is. It's evolution, I grant you, but it was driven by money and not by people.

And maybe the old folks DID object to the big apartment buildings. Because they know the neighborhood is going to end up pricing them right out. And taking all the fun and local color away.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

It is a fairly straightforward search.
How Finland Conquered Homelessness
https: //www.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-paradigm-shift-in-social-policy-how-finland-conquered-homelessness-a-ba1a531e-8129-4c71-94fc-7268c5b109d9

anonymouse1 wrote:
Got a link to that Finland piece--sounds interesting!

[quote=Filliam H. Muffman]
This is one of several problems with cities in the US. Another big one is mega corps pushing up home prices by buying thousands of homes to keep average people from becoming home owners.

Finland fixed about 75% of their homeless problem. It looks like a bargain compared to how much our cities/states spend waste money on it.

GM ruining public transportation is another occasionally getting fixed in small steps.

I mentioned it before, office buildings being required to have apartments for employees, and retail shops, would cut way down on traffic.

[numbered]

They don't have adequate parking planned, access is a joke, which means we'll be choked out of getting to and from our house. And it will never result in affordable housing. Just more unaffordable housing and a ruined neighborhood. There are massive problems with affordable housing, but it all stems from people with loads more money than I have. I'm not giving up the small amount of comfort I have for them.

[btw, the argument that 'never result in affordable housing' is a violation of the law of supply and demand. But I digress.]

This is really the core of NIMBY. There is an idea that people like where they live and do not want it to change. But when other people want to live in that region--and there is no place or infrastructure for sprawl--there is no growth and prices skyrocket. Local decisions stop development. For a legit reason...as kj said above, "Why are we "bad guys" because we don't want that?"

This is what happened in Cali.

So now the public policy debate is between people who want things to stay the same, and people who want to live in areas with jobs. In Cali, the state government has started mandating cities provide places for development with specific numbers of units.

And people have gone crazy. There are several ballot proposals to take authority from the state.

Personally, I wrote a letter to my local weekly insisting that all the people who moved into town since 1990 should leave because I liked things better then. (My neighbor picked 1960.) But I do not see any action....


[Edit: if you really want to understand the feelings of many young people, this twitter user posts from government and NIMBY meetings and often mocks the speakers. This thread is from a recent meeting to approve a housing project that has been delayed 8 years because neighbors do not want it. You can 'feel' both sides in this thread.]

[sekker]

NIMBYism is absolutely real.

Saw it in my neighborhood in Minnesota.

The rest? Not informed enough to answer.

As for GM ruining cities - this did happen in Minnesota in the 1950s. They paid off the city regulators to remove all of the light rail in the Twin Cities. This is well documented.

[mrbigstuff]

If I live in medium-density, single-family row housing, and that's the setting I want to live in, replacing the adjoining row houses with high-density, 5-story apartment complexes on either side means, in fact, I no longer live where I want to

In essence, things should never change. what a person sees now, shall remain, ad infinitum?

I don't agree with everything in that simplistic take of the guy in the video, but at its core is the resistance to the natural cycle of growth. change. scary stuff. yes, it is very possible that there will be apartment buildings built on land that people were hoping would remain vacant and underutilized for eternity. how were the existing apartment buildings constructed?

and you know what else? the land that was a quaint village, with nice wood-frame and masonry Colonial and Federal style buildings from the 18th century. mostly gone. does anyone regret and pine for those days? no, of course not, because they were not alive during that period. it's all conditioning and it's not unnatural, but it is unrealistic. and before that quaint "settler" village, it was farmland. and before that, it probably belonged to some native peoples. how far back shall we go to. preserve the "character" of a community?

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Black wrote:
[quote=Filliam H. Muffman]
GM ruining public transportation is another occasionally getting fixed in small steps.

Got any evidence of that? Seems to have been systematically erased from the web.
Some writers have given GM a little bit of a pass because cars clogging roads threw trolley system schedules behind. This is a little more aggressive:
Paving the Way for Buses – The Great GM Streetcar Conspiracy, (Con’t)
https: //www.baycrossings.com/paving-the-way-for-buses-the-great-gm-streetcar-conspiracy-cont/

Small steps is things like LA Metro expansion (long way to go), and Seattle Sound Transit Light Rail.

[kj]

Acer wrote:
[quote=kj]
Screw NIMBY. Ok, well it's kind of a thing, but in this case it's not good guys against bad guys. We live in a neighborhood we like, and have rich developers who want to build basically Walmart style housing in the middle of it. Why are we "bad guys" because we don't want that? They don't have adequate parking planned, access is a joke, which means we'll be choked out of getting to and from our house. And it will never result in affordable housing. Just more unaffordable housing and a ruined neighborhood. There are massive problems with affordable housing, but it all stems from people with loads more money than I have. I'm not giving up the small amount of comfort I have for them. Btw, the most vocal supporters of this re-zoning are liberal people in the liberal "north end" where they will not let anyone build anything. They use historical building protections etc. to block anything. That's NIMBY.
People of modest means have built nice communities. Rich people want to take advantage of those communities, which eventually drives everyone who built those communities out. Don't naively buy into exploitation. This is not the way.

Giant developments are not the solution suggested in the OP.
That's what developers want though. We can already do ADUs. The developers are pushing this to make money, and that's all. Either one has to think they care about poor people, or that what they do will have the unintended effect of lowering rents and housing prices, and I don't think either. They truly want to build "willy-nilly", and I don't want that. Not in my backyard, or your back yard.
I know these people, and they just find all us regular people a nuisance.

[kj]

$tevie wrote:
In the 1960s, the neighborhood we now live in (Fell's Point, Baltimore, MD) was a colorful mix of neighborhood bars, visiting sailors, whores, drunks, 18th century houses, wharves, industry, and warehouses. But the city planned to connect I-83 with I-95. The plan as laid out was going to cut a swathe through Baltimore's oldest neighborhoods, including Fell's Point. These neighborhoods were white but they were working class, and developers and city planners didn't really care about them much more than they cared about the people of color who lived in the city.

Then we had the Road Fight, led by future Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Fell's Point was saved. There were tons of empty houses that the city had forced people out of via eminent domain with chintzy pricing, and it was a great place to buy a house CHEAP. And lots of storefronts. People bought places, moved in, opened junk shops and antique stores and consignment shops and head shops and Mom and Pop stores. Edie the Egg Lady from the Johns Waters movies had a shop on Broadway. It was fun and funky and inexpensive.

Then, gentrification hit. People bought the old houses and renovated them and the prices began to go up until they boggled the mind. So of course, here come the developers. They bought warehouses and made them into office buildings. They bought empty land and began to develop it.

The next thing we knew, the newcomers in their renovated manses were rewriting zoning to eliminate as much commercial use as they possibly could, which meant months and months of meetings and battles and having things grandfathered in. God forbid you should own a storefront that wasn't being used as a storefront at that moment, goodbye commercial zoning. Because the newcomers wanted a Quaint Historical Maritime Village.

But the joke's on them, because developers moved in and began building big apartment complexes and getting height variances and parking variances and now they have to fight like hell to try to keep the place Quaint.

There aren't even as many bars, because the newcomers bought houses in the middle of over 100 bars and then freaked out because they were surrounded by over 100 bars. Gradually the little neighborhood bars are all dying out, and mostly only the larger bar/restaurants are still around. As the original owners retire, their businesses are bought and turned into chi chi places for upscale folks in their million dollar private homes.

And there it is. It's evolution, I grant you, but it was driven by money and not by people.

And maybe the old folks DID object to the big apartment buildings. Because they know the neighborhood is going to end up pricing them right out. And taking all the fun and local color away.

Exactly. I think this used to happen more or less by accident, or just naturally, but developers have caught on and they catalyze the process and capitalize. The most extreme example I've seen is Austin, Tx. Where's the party block this week? ;-)

I don't know how to fix the problem, but this is not the solution. We're hanging on, but they want people like us out, and I'm certainly not going to help them along.

[kj]

[btw, the argument that 'never result in affordable housing' is a violation of the law of supply and demand. But I digress.]

In a free market. This market is manipulated up the ying yang. Plus, there is very limited supply. You can't fit all the people who want to live in San Diego in San Diego.

If you're from California, I'm surprised you haven't seen all this happen. The most powerful people don't want affordable housing, and there certainly isn't any in Cali. Everyone here is from Cali, they've seen it happen and they came to escape it. Unfortunately...it seems to have followed them up here.

[mrbigstuff]

Sorry, but a lot of the above arguments invoke the evil "them." Where have i heard that dire tone of voice before? There's no cabal that gathers annually in the Swiss Alps to set housing agenda. There's much that needs upending in our capitalist system, and housing is the biggest impediment to working and moderate middle classes, no argument from me there. But until we start a program of public housing once again, it will only be the private market that builds housing.