I don't care about nebulous concepts like "social fabric" and neither do a lot of other people.
This is likely true. And yet people bitch plenty about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment of the good life in the downtown areas of big cities.
In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric and have less feces, discarded needles and the like or you can not care and see people moving out of cities like San Francisco because they are going to hell as all the poor people ruin it for the upper classes who still don't care about those people but hate stepping over the mess.
How would having more people live in rural or small towns reduce homelessness, instead of just dispersing it?
To me social fabric in this context of decaying small towns has a negative connotation that in my mind it reads as a reversion to white, sis, straight, nuclear families as the idea of what America is. And it's used that way by political campaigns as well to play on fears, racism, and us/them to win votes.
Most people in the U.S. are one or more of "white, cis, straight". What often passes for 'diversity' in some places is very much the exception, not the rule.
Non-hispanic white is only 57% right now and declining. a ton of cities are white minority - kind of to the point about this picture of past american rural ideals are out of date.
Out LGTBQ is somewhere approaching 5% across all generations. Key word out.
Gen Z are ~15% out. I wouldn't be surprised if the true non-cis/non-straight % is closer to 20%.
So that probably puts cis white in the slight minority and shrinking.
And I'm not sure what 'passes' means I will try to use HN rule of benefit of the doubt
The 'nebulous' bit referenced in parent comment is your claim that hyperdensity is uniformly detrimental to the social fabric. Do you think there is less of a meaningful social fabric in the most dense neighborhoods of NYC or Tokyo, compared to the average American suburb? There will always be people who opt to live in smaller towns, but those simply cannot sustain the sheer level of density that big city cores can.
> about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment
> In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric
Actually there was the other solution. The other solution compared to yours of "make people live in the small towns.", is instead "Make lots of tall skyscapers, so that big cities are affordable".
If we lower the costs of big cities (By making lots and lots of supply, including tall skyscapers), then prices are lower for those who need them, and more people can live here, and take advantage of the big cities, and it can also benefit the poor by actually making it possible for them to live here, instead of on the streets.
We don't have to force out the poor from the big cities. Instead we can make the big cities affordable to live in, with lots and lots of tall skyscrapers.
> see people moving out of cities like San Francisco
Actually, you are the one who is trying to get people to move out of the big cities. I want there to be more supply for everyone, in these big cities, with more skyscapers.
Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build, so building more skyscrapers isn't likely to make urban cores affordable for the types of folks who wind up homeless.
I know a lot about homelessness. I spent nearly six years homeless and before that had a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy and I still run several blogs on the topic, though I update them less than I used to as my focus has shifted to trying to solve the housing shortage that is a root cause of homelessness in the US.
> so building more skyscrapers isn't likely to make urban cores affordable for the types of folks who wind up homeless.
Yes it will. Think of a skyscaper like a Yuppie containment center. For every high end apartment that exists, a Yuppie is no longer filling up an apartment in the mission, that very well could be afforable if they weren't currently full of yuppies.
There are lots of yuppies who would love to live in those skyscapers, and if we build more of them, then those people will no longer be taking away afforable housing from other people who need it.
Also, historically, this is how housing has worked. Previously high end apartments, become low end, over time, as the rich move out of those places, into other, newer apartments.
> Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build
Doesn't matter. Because the goal is to get wealthy individuals, out of the existing apartments. The poor aren't forced to live in those skyscapers, but if the skyscapers exist, then there is less competition for the lower end of the market.
Building more housing generally is good and does bring down rents.
It still will not make big cities and skyscrapers in specific affordable for the types of people who end up homeless.
Having been homeless and spoken to many homeless and so forth, I think we need some housing stock below $600/month in rent that will take households of up to three people. Skyscrapers are unlikely to be a means to provide housing at that price point, though they can be found sometimes in older low to mid-rise buildings.
More skyscrapers may make downtowns more affordable for more middle class types who are currently forced out to the suburbs. They are unlikely to serve the types of people at high risk of homelessness, either directly or indirectly.
There comes a point past which you simply can't lower the rent any further if your carrying costs are simply too high.
The point of skyscrapers isn't that they provide the affordable housing. It's that they provide a lot of medium price housing so there is lower demand for housing in smaller buildings.
The biggest problem with housing in big cities is that there isn't enough of it. When that is the case, the most important thing is putting more in. Even if the housing you put in is expensive, as long as it is dense, it will lower housing prices for other places because there is less competition.
At the risk of being accused of self promotion, a quote from one of my projects:
At least one study suggests that four-story buildings are the sweet spot for minimizing energy usage. Though some people speculate that additional research will find that optimal height for minimizing carbon footprint will prove to be in the 6- to 12-story range, there is general agreement that very tall buildings are an energy burden to be avoided if we want to get climate change under control.
One of the things that is part of my mental model is that poor people are frequently people with serious health problems and our built environment is part of what fosters that.
I'm dirt poor and not at my best tonight because of that. This late in the month I'm often broke as is the case currently. It's a very stressful way to live and it compounds problems.
I have lived without a car for more than a decade which is challenging in the US. Our built environment requires a lot of Americans to own a car so they can get to work and get groceries and what not. We make it very difficult to make your life work without a car.
We also have an obesity epidemic which means a lot of people suffering from preventable health problems. That epidemic is rooted in our built environment and the fact that it's so hard to walk anywhere.
It's also hard to walk anywhere because of pollution and extremes of weather rooted in climate change. In my mind, all these things are very clearly tied together.
But it's always challenging to express that effectively, more so when I am in poor health and dirt poor and can't seem to solve that.
The poorest people in the US are people like me. And I have gotten off a bunch of prescription drugs in part by living without a car for a lot of years. But I get openly attacked and dismissed anytime I try to talk about that. I get told I'm making that up and a liar and yadda.
I am not for building more skyscrapers, certainly not for what the article in question advocates of making them even taller.
The myriad problems the US has are rooted in our not human scaled, not human friendly built environment. This includes issues like poor air quality, lack of opportunity to get exercise as a consequence of running errands on foot and many other issues.
I think it's probably time for me to step away from this discussion. I don't know how to keep having it and comply with unstated expectations that my welfare is not important, my experiences are not real and cannot be expressed etc. That's not something I can politely deal with at the moment.
You are not listening to what anyone else is saying.
If there are more skyscrapers, then the yuppies will not live in those 600$ a month housing, and that housing will be available for the people who need it.
Thats the point.
All those low income housing that you want, will no longer be filled with yuppies who would otherwise gentrify an area.
If you read this post, people specifically quote or address the idea, of yuppies no longer living in those cheaping housing, because they are no in the skyscapers, and therefore the lower priced housing is available to others.
Because you have ignored or dodged this idea, like 3 times now.
I'm with you. I think there's enough evidence that skyscrapers aren't a good energy/density optimum; skyscrapers are relatively rare outside of North America. Very high, sustainable densities can be achieved with 4--6 stories buildings. I lived in Madrid in what was considered a poor neighborhood. It's density was three times that of what I have now in Seattle. There were more amenities within reach than I've ever had in my life. I was able to get fresh food on the daily. Not a single skyscraper in sight.
> Having been homeless and spoken to many homeless and so forth, I think we need some housing stock below $600/month in rent that will take households of up to three people. Skyscrapers are unlikely to be a means to provide housing at that price point, though they can be found sometimes in older low to mid-rise buildings.
Not they allow it in the west due to health/fire concerns, but the sub basements of apartment blocks in China have been converted into very cheap rooms for rent. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_tribe
One reason that you don’t have so many homeless in China is that the bottom on housing standards is a lot lower. Again, something that we can’t really replicate in the west.
> It still will not make big cities and skyscrapers in specific affordable for the types of people who end up homeless.
It will make the former places, that those yuppies were gentrifying, more affordable. Because for every skyscraper apartment, that is filled with a yuppy, that is one less house in the mission, being gentrified by a yuppie, which is now available for someone else to live there.
> for more middle class types
Then those middle income types will no longer be living in some other place, that is now available for someone of lower income.
It frees up their former place that they were living before, for a lower income resident.
I think you're missing a golden opportunity here. You can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities, with ultra high-speed rail, blazing-fast internet, free housing, the works. Then we can tear down the cities, towns, and suburbs they moved out of, establish a bunch of small towns with lots of forest and prairie, and produce goods for them to consume, on the condition that they stay in their megacities.
It would be like a Morlock/Eloi situation, except that we'll all be Morlocks. They'll do the missile defense systems and the smartphone OS's, and I'll grow the corn and mine the rare earth minerals. We can all even adopt a bicameral government, one that governs areas of population density above a certain value and one that governs areas below a certain value.
> you can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities
So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us.
Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else.
Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.
Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs.
If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there.
People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.
>Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places
That's the other weird assumption. My tiny-ass hometown has rents on par with San Francisco right now, because there are apparently enough high-earners who can now work remotely and want to live in a little mountain town.
The vast majority of the world has cheaper rents than SF. Its simply a numbers game.
Yes, I am sure you can find a couple people, who would move from a more expensive location, but that is a silly thing to bring up, as some counter example, when there are a lot more places that are cheaper, which people could move from.
So yes, it is a very reasonable assumption, to say that if someone moves to SF, that most of those people, are moving out of cheaper cost of living areas, because that is how stats work.
And anyway, maybe those mountain towns would be cheaper, if those yuppies were living in SF instead. So both points support me, even in the case of a yuppie coming from an expensive mountain town, moving to SF.
I'm not saying that people are moving from more expensive mountain town to the city, I'm saying that having wealth does not automatically make you want to move to an urban environment.
Especially since the sort of jobs that are starting to move to be location-independent pay better than the sort of low level in-person work that keeps a town or city running.
Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas, but it's not a yuppie vs low class thing. There will always be rich people who want country living, and a working class who enjoy (and are necessary to support) city life.
> Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas
Great. So you agree completely with my main point here, and your only disagreements seems to be semantic or irrelevant to that main point.
As long as you agree with the statement you that just made, then I can confidently say you have zero, or at least very little disagreement with what I was intending on communicating.
Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple."
I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.
Perhaps my sentence structure wasn't clear enough; I mean "we'll all be Morlocks", in that the cities shall serve the non-cities, and vice versa. You can't have a functioning nation of all urban or all small-town.
This is likely true. And yet people bitch plenty about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment of the good life in the downtown areas of big cities.
In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric and have less feces, discarded needles and the like or you can not care and see people moving out of cities like San Francisco because they are going to hell as all the poor people ruin it for the upper classes who still don't care about those people but hate stepping over the mess.