West Coast baby
Yeah it won’t really solve it in a single city though. NYC has tons and tons of dense urban housing but still insane housing prices.
Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?
The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.
The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.
Anybody claiming one general solution will fix every single grievance they have sounds a step away from buying essential oils.
Don’t get me wrong, it will help, but no every pet problem will not be magically solved by waving hands and going “just do better urban panning, duh”
Just don’t romanticize your proposed solution to a degree where you think you can slap it in and problems solve themselves.
I mean the overarching problem being talked about here is not having well planned cities (ie 15 min cities) that provide housing for everyone.
The solution mentioned would absolutely solve or go a long way to solve all the problems mentioned in the meme.
I don’t disagree that it would improve things. But don’t just expect something to fix all the problems magically, especially not when it’s basically waving your hands and going “just city plan better this time around.” It won’t be magical, 40 years down the line when this movement of new planning strategies is finally finished, it will already have been outdated for 35 years. These problems are hilariously complicated.
Outdated? The things that people are now advocating for are things that used to be commonplace:
- being close to shops, work, and third places
- large areas of inner cities left for public parks
- roads not yet dominated by cars
- majority of people relying on decent affordable/free public transport or walking
Sure. And now we clearly know that it would’ve been better to develop things that way in the first place; instead of rapid relatively unplanned sprawling residential. At the time these developments were being mostly planned, zoned, and legislated, that was seen as the right strategy.
That’s literally my point. We don’t know everything, don’t expect magic fixes. This will be better, it will need improvements.
I mean without researching I know that Tolkien was pro-car and then flipped to really anti car early on (I think either 10s or 20s). There was no doubt others that saw that car infrastructure was bad for society. I think you can probly blame a really strong car lobby for how bad we ended up.
Its’s also not that crazy to undo, look at the Netherlands. There is at least one example where they got rid of canals for motorways, realised it was terrible and put the canals back. Amsterdam also was a mess of roads and it only took 20 years to get to what it is today.
Hindsight is 20/20 yadda yadda. It’s very easy to look back and see what the correct solution might’ve been (well, until you dig into it, normally, then it becomes much harder). It’s so so so much harder to have a solution in front of you and be justifiably confident you were on the right side of every issue for the rest of time, especially when it comes to engineering.
We all wish we could wave a magic wand and fix every problem with all of our various solutions, but it’s simply unknowable and unfeasible.
That point about the car lobby is one I see a lot. It’s of course true… But probably not in a way that makes it a boogeyman in the same way we’re aware of lobbying now. Let me put it this way, did automakers lobby hard for car centric transportation, downplaying downsides? Almost definitely. Did people generally feel cars may lead to greater social and economic prosperity than the alternatives? Yeah, probably so. There was push back, for sure, but there was pushback on the existence of electricity too. And what’s more, did we even have the modeling and research to be able to definitely say cars wouldn’t be worth their cost then? No we didn’t. We don’t even now, but on balance we have enough that people are generally favoring different urban panning priorities in certain spheres. We don’t even know that the science and engineering that went into vehicles wasn’t worth it. It’s unknowable.
This is a long winded rant to say, we know better now, shame on us for not improving now, though we are. We will know even better in 20 years, 40 years, 100, shame on us then if we don’t improve then. But there are no magic bullets in life. We see one solution, but even what that solution looks like in the details can make or break it, and those details will need to be different for every community, both spatially and temporally. What we build now, even if it is a super perfect solution to everyone it effects, may not be right for people 50 years from now. Life is fundamentally chaotic and we can only ever hope to do the best we can with what we’ve got. And to that point, people are people, we will never be perfect, never be able to achieve even that temporarily perfect solution. There will be good and bad implementations, things won’t be implemented to anyone’s ideal, there will have to be compromises and time and knowledge constraints.
No magic solutions.
Hindsight is 20/20 does not make a good argument here. Cars are bad for people, we have the studies and the research.
- they kill a higher number of people than other modes of transport.
- on average car drivers are more unhealthy and die earlier than people who self propel/use public transport
- fumes and particles from cars lower the air quality in cities and are responsible for more deaths than just collisions
- even if you go full electric particles from the tyres released at speed are terrible for people
- car parking is a massive waste of land in city centres
- commerce benefits more from cycle infrastructure than car infrastructure because more people are likely to get off their bike to go in to a shop they didn’t intend to go to than car drivers who have to find a parking space
There are definitely more examples of why cars are bad in urban settings. Banning cars in city centres is the very easy solution that would make everyone’s lives in the cities better today. It’s also not a super crazy solution, cars didn’t always occupy space in cities.
Also car drivers are not the majority in cities or even some contries but somehow the whole population is beholden to them.
Yeah, this is not a “slap it in” solution. If indeed it does solve all of these problems. Traffic is gonna get worse before it gets better if you take away roads and lanes. Culture has to shift and people have to leave their cars at home, or really affordable housing and good transit? Thats just gonna supply the outsized demand to move to California’s densest areas. So you’ll have the same problem, but with lots of new people who don’t experience it. Planning has to find people who will change their lives to make all of society better, too.
Traffic was pretty damn good during covid when everyone was working from home. We could go back to that for starters.
Forming the international pajama workers union. 😋
You’re right this is probably the biggest wedge issue in transportation for regular joe.
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
The problem is corporations, and lack of regulation and social services.
- 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.
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.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it’s not required.
Based on what this meme is proposing, I can smell the urine in the elevators from 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The community would be those who you see at the same café or whatever. Ideally places would have some kind of board or system for people to organize activities. These could be political or just something fun, like a board game night or other things.
As for the kid thing, in many cities the kids will commute to school or other places on their own. We’ve created a system where that’s unsafe in almost all locations in the US, but it isn’t required. We have a society of helicopter parents, partially out of necessity because kids can’t get anywhere on their own.
Pfft and not fill our valuable real estate with lawns and parking lots?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
If someone’s a jerk, don’t forget that there’s a “report” button for a reason.
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Shelter is critical to survival. The general rule of thumb places it as a higher priority than food or water. Arguing against people having access to reliable shelter, regardless the rational, is arguing for deliberately killing them.
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The “they’re defective and will destroy whatever they live. Don’t let them in!!!” is just calling them cockroaches in a different way. It’s fear mongering nonsense and there is no evidence to support that claim.
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You’re assuming correlation does not equal causation. It turns out being homeless, even for a relatively short period of time, is devastating to mental health and even if not the root cause (IE genetic predeposition, TBIs, etc.) it can strongly exasperate them and create some nasty co-morbidities.
Being repeatedly assulted and or raided by police, neighborhood vigilantes and other desperate people is an extremely quick path towards PTSD/other general anxiety disorders. The aggressive de-humunization that occurs can be a potent factor in antisocial disorders. Direct health impacts like physical battery, hypo/hyperthermia, illness, etc. can cause more detect brain damage such as TBIs, etc. Schizophrenia is usually fairly treatable, schizophrenia with PTSD amplified paranoia much less so.
This seems to be a general issue on Lemmy that people just love to put you into a group of people to start insulting them. You are so unhinged it’s unreal.
Well, this seems to be a very ironic comment
No it is not. Tell me please where I said I was against giving people homes or that I was calling them cockroaches or similar.
This is a typical issue on Lemmy that people are overly aggressive and want to hate and bully others for no reason whatsoever.
I don’t know what kind of crazy that is, but you find it here a lot. It’s so extreme I start to think many here aren’t actually people but some type of enrage bot.
I was thinking more about calling the other person unhinged, while saying that others are quick to insult.
The person alleged I said this:
The “they’re defective and will destroy whatever they live. Don’t let them in!!!” is just calling them cockroaches in a different way.
Not only did I not say this, I definitely am not calling homeless people cockroaches. The overall reaction to my post was hostile. What’s a better word to describe this behaviour on Lemmy in general? Because I see it happen quite regularly, not only to me, but others as well.
The hostility wasn’t directed at you personally, it was directed at the specific brainworm of:
If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment.
What evidence do you have for that claim?
I’d like to point out that the second item is pointless. You’re making an appeal to authority fallacy and referencing an article to support an opinion which doesn’t need the reference. The portion that needs a reference (if you’re gonna provide one) is the second part of the second point.
Here is a link to the CAUF society in reasons why homeless people may refuse to go to shelters.
I think that additional housing isn’t really a solution to homelessness unless you give them unmitigated access. Pretty much, “It’s free and you can do whatever you want.”
The issue with homelessness isn’t available space, we have tons of open office space where they could stay at night. The problem is that these places have rules and restrictions (no alcohol, no pets, curfew, etc).
For my own anecdote, there was a homeless guy who stayed by a gas station near my old apartment and I tried to check in on him from time to time and give him some money. He saved up his donations each day for a motel room and I asked him why he didn’t save his money and go to the shelter or share a room with someone else to save money? He stated that he didn’t like sharing a space with other people either in a shelter or as a roommate. The guy would rather sleep outside rather than share space.
The 2nd point is poorly worded, but the point wasn’t to appeal to any authority, but rather that I understand it can be a bit of jump to understand how the rhetoric being parroted by the parsnipwitch is harmful and was trying to provide further reading on that. You are correct in that was not well communicated… my bad…
I can not prove a lack of evidence (proof of negative) which the original commenter agrees is true: https://feddit.de/comment/3535479
I would argue that unmitigated access is the correct way to go and that all of the reasons people experiencing homelessness refuse shelter are perfectly valid, rational, and sane reasons. If you disagree I would encourage you to spend a couple nights in an overnight shelter and get your perspective after.
Also, thank you for helping out gas station guy. I understand that wasn’t the point of your anecdote and it might have felt pointless, but the ability to have a door that locks probably meant the world to him.
I certainly agree with the reasons why people don’t seek help, but it should be acknowledged that they are turning away assistance which makes it difficult to help them fix their problems. Some of these reasons to turn away help are also more addressable than others. If someone is just mentally impaired (mental illness or mentally handicapped) we can’t just force them to accept help.
The guy at the gas station was a part of my community and people knew him well. He wasn’t a typical beggar and he was super honest. He would flat out tell you, “Hey I need some money for smokes or food.” I’d rather give money to him than the 2 guys who stand at the intersection with signs everyday.
Unmitigated access probably would be the most successful solution, but if we follow the real world logical steps we also know that that wouldn’t work either. Whether in major high density apartments or in single family houses funding for these properties has to come from somewhere, likely the government. The government is never going to pass legislation which just gives out homes to the homeless, they probably wouldn’t even do it for low income workers who might be viewed as a better investment.
If we imagined that the government would do such a thing there are problems like maintenance costs, de facto ghettos, de facto red lining, and social discrimination. Sure, the government could address these things as well, but if we have to move to theory just to reach this point we know that’s not going to happen. At a certain point the argument just moves to, “Well ________ country does xyz,” without addressing the social and political differences from wherever that place is. To make these things possible in this way would require a completely different government and thus a completely different social disposition.
I’m all for social change and ending homelessness, but I think it’s a waste of time pretending that the unrealistic is a solution. Saying just build and give away homes to end homelessness without the social disposition for that to happen is as naive as the right saying to just build a wall to stop illegal immigration.
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