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by JeffSnazz 891 days ago
Well if you build them elsewhere you're not going to do much about the unhoused population downtown. That just leads to using police violence to forcibly segregate by class....

Anyway, housing is kind of fucked so long as americans consider it a private investment rather than a common good. How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?
2 comments
cyberax 891 days ago
> Well if you build them elsewhere you're not going to do much about the unhoused population downtown.

Newsflash: neither would tiny houses. On the West Coast, the downtown homeless population is almost 100% drug addicts these days. No amount of housing can fix that.

And for the sane population (i.e. not fentanyl addicts), being AWAY from downtowns is a blessing.

> Anyway, housing is kind of fucked so long as americans consider it a private investment rather than a common good. How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?

We stopped building highways, and switched from Moses' model of building enough roads to the "urbanist" model. Where we put in transit that makes it easy to go to the downtown ONLY.

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JeffSnazz 889 days ago
> We stopped building highways, and switched from Moses' model of building enough roads to the "urbanist" model. Where we put in transit that makes it easy to go to the downtown ONLY.

I don't think we've switched out of the Moses model yet, or we only did in the last twenty years or so—the urbanist model is still idealistic in most cities. And frankly the urbanist model probably still won't be sufficient without public housing—I'm guessing a popular push for that is still about 10-20 years out.

Obviously, prioritizing driving around a city isn't going to do jack-shit for anyone who isn't trying to prioritize driving around a city. Public transit works well enough for most folks!

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cyberax 889 days ago
> I don't think we've switched out of the Moses model yet, or we only did in the last twenty years or so

We did. Most large cities stopped building new roads, and are instead sabotaging existing ones ("road diets").

The inflection point was some time in 1990-s. October 1992 is the date of the completion of the last Interstate freeway.

> And frankly the urbanist model probably still won't be sufficient without public housing—I'm guessing a popular push for that is still about 10-20 years out.

The thing is, we don't have a housing crisis. We have around 20% more units per capita than in 1980-s, and way more square footage per capita. What we have is an over-centralization crisis.

No amount of band-aid fixes will make it better. By forcing (via economic forces) more people into misery centrals (now with housing projects to generate generational poverty!), you'll only make centralization even worse.

> Public transit works well enough for most folks!

It really doesn't. Transit is a result of city growth, you simply _have_ to build transit once the city becomes dense enough.

And I get it, in the 1970-s and 1980-s people were still worried about overpopulation. So, urbanism was born as a way to make it more bearable to live in dense cities. Now we have an opposite problem, the native US population is peaking right now and whatever growth we're going to have will be only from immigration. We don't _need_ dense cities.

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mulmen 891 days ago
> Anyway, housing is kind of fucked so long as americans consider it a private investment rather than a common good.

JeffSnazz for president 2024.

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