[tylerFowler]

It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic.

From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.

There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.

These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.

[wolverine876]

> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc.

That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:

Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services?

> every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments

Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).

[jvanderbot]

It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

[wolverine876]

> the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

Did it? Not in NYC. Crime is very low; it's arguably one of the safest places to be in the country.

[Supermancho]

> Not in NYC.

That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

[wolverine876]

> NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century.

Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.

> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

What makes you say that has changed from the past?

[mgce]

I think this discussion is about today. I don't follow your reference to old history or how that affects the general discussion?

[IG_Semmelweiss]

"Crime is very low"

Murder may be low.

Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

[wolverine876]

You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims?

> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

here you go. Unfortunately city agencies seems very good at not tracking and making this info very public. So you have to go find it from 3rd party nonprofits

The relevant bits:

>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)

>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]

In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://cbcny.org/research/straight-from-new-yorkers [2] See article, figure 2.

[monero-xmr]

The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it.

> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”

> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

[outop]

> What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street?

In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.

[rsynnott]

_Do_ people feel particularly unsafe in NYC, tho? Like people who live there, not tourists?

(Tourists' impressions of safety are a really terrible guide to anything, and can be dramatically incorrect in either direction.)

[watwut]

All those are low by historical standard.

[AndyNemmity]

Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.

[reducesuffering]

Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.

[elzbardico]

This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well. As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.

As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.

Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.

Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.

Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.

Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.

Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!

[AndyNemmity]

The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.

Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.

[eptcyka]

Instead of crime per capita, what’s the likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime in NYC?

[jahewson]

Sorry but moving the goalpost from “one of the safest places to be in the country” to “one of the safest big cities in the country” is not fair game. The US has over 19,000 cities and you discarded all but 91 of them.

[jvanderbot]

When you have so many people per square mile, it slightly skews the metrics. The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.

[bryanrasmussen]

I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy!

I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?

There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!

You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!

I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.

[wpm]

It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.

I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.

Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

[wolverine876]

> It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).

[csomar]

Most crime is marginal even inside cities "infested" with crime. If you are personally affected (statistically improbable), the city/place is already unlivable and it'll go down quickly like some places in South America.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.

> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

[bluGill]

The problem with numbers as they are only as good as the source numbers and questions you ask..

If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).

Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.

[pmyteh]

One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.

One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.

The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.

The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.

The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.

[jvanderbot]

> seemed to

In GP comment - sorry too late to edit.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-saf...

[whythre]

Accurate crime statistics are… let’s say, ‘discouraged,’ by the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office.

[warcher]

In the end the murder rate cannot be fudged, and it is quite favorable.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...

[raydev]

There's more to "violent crime" than just murder.

[ajross]

You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch?

In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.

[fosk]

In places like San Francisco it is an understood phenomenon that crime is underreported because nobody will investigate it anyways so why bother[1].

[1] https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-law...

[Fomite]

Accurate crime statistics are discouraged by every police department and Mayor's Office in this country.

[bryanrasmussen]

What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.

[zdragnar]

Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.

[wolverine876]

So how do you know the truth? Maybe crime is even lower.

I'm not sure how the no-snitch culture lowers the crime rate; it would seem to lower the conviction rate.

[wernercd]

The problem is the differences...

IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities.

I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments.

Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice".

The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.

[hughesjj]

Citation needed on all of that. It's not just retail closing up in NYC -- the rent is ludicrous, and no one wants to start renting at a lowe rate lest their appraisal goes down and their mortgage lender/city coffers start putting the pressure on the landlord

[sifttio]

Corporate real estate is a different beast. Residential real estate and corporate real estate do not mirror each other in the market. One can be in high demand while the other has excess supply.

Residential landlords are also much different than dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length of lease, laws and many other factors are completely different.

[bombcar]

Perhaps we need to encourage (via taxes?) convertible buildings that can either be corporate or residential with relative ease, similar to how in smaller towns you often have dentists and lawyers operating out of obviously converted houses.

[hughesjj]

I don't get how any of that is relevant when my claim is that the corporate rental rates is also too high and the financing for rentals shares the same concerns w.r.t rentable price regardless if it's residential or corporate landlords

[Supermancho]

Takes a few seconds. All major cities (even Fargo ND) have seen increased theft. This is unsurprising due to the economies in western countries (which is all i can speak to).

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre....

[entangledqubit]

I believe that some retailer special interest group put out some numbers that did not support any real increase in shoplifting/shrinkage. Initially they made a claim otherwise but they ended up backpedaling. Oddly, the numbers around shrinkage from self-checkout seems to be persistent though.

[causality0]

I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?

[talldatethrow]

I was at a hardware store when someone walked out with a compressor.

I said to the clerk "that's a 99-2003 GMC Sierra in case you want to tell them when you call it in"

And he replied "oh we don't even call the police.. they won't do anything"

I was so angry I called corporate on the way home. Corporate told me "oh yes that's right, that's our policy. We have insurance for that!"

I said "that's great you have insurance, but I'd like my police department and newspaper to know my town is going to hell..."

[pstrateman]

Yes because the police stop arresting people for it.

If you don't prosecute, it effectively stops being illegal.

[beepbooptheory]

If true, maybe. But this very point makes this whole line of argumentation unfalsifiable and in that a little limp...

[bombcar]

Most of the time. Certain crimes (eg public intoxication) often have an arrest followed by letting the person go when they’ve sobered up, so no official prosecution but not no arrest.

[wolverine876]

Do you have evidence of that?

[x0x0]

Lots of crime doesn't get reported.

The police where I live are transparently useless. Someone tried to steal my car at bart. Even my auto insurance didn't bother asking for a police report while paying out $3k for a repair to the door. Everyone involved understands it's an utter waste of time and not a thing will happen.

For at least n=1, no crime happened.

[nathan_douglas]

Twenty years ago, in a small college town, my car was broken into and the stereo stolen. I called the police out and the cop said, “okay, what do you want me to do about it?”

Well, I don’t know. What should be done about this? I guess I thought my report might be tabulated, that perhaps a pawn shop or two might be called. My wife and I were living financial-aid-reimbursement-check to MGIB check to work-study check at the time. We got the one of the cheapest car stereos we could find, but it still hurt. We had just gotten it installed literally that day, and the next morning it was gone.

I’m sorry to have wasted your time, officer. There’s probably a kid with a one-hitter that you could arrest on your way back to the station.

[causality0]

That's very interesting. It would explain why the "high level" takes such as papers and articles keep saying crime is plummeting but all the anecdotal accounts are "crime is getting worse and worse and nobody does anything about it".

[vundercind]

This is everywhere, and not a new thing.

[wolverine876]

Crime is historically low in many cities, including NYC. Visit and you'll see what I mean.

[curtisblaine]

Not so easy. A lot of crime in zones with high density of immigration goes unreported because immigrants are illegal. A lot of crime in shit neighborhoods goes unreported because of "code of silence" mentality.

[wernercd]

Crime is historically low... as crimes like theft are decriminalized.

It's easy to say there's less crime when you make stuff not a crime.

For reference: all the stores closing because of all of the theft not being prosecuted or that's no longer enforced.

IE: California where theft of under $1000 is no longer enforced.

[rovolo]

The CA $950 threshold is when the theft switches from a misdemeanor to a felony:

https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...

In comparison, Texas has a $2,500 threshold for upgrading from a misdemeanor to a felony:

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...

[wolverine876]

I'm talking about objective facts. You can make up reasons, but so can anyone about anything - they don't mean anything without a factual basis.

Where in NY are these stores closing?

[malfist]

Ah yes, New York, home of "stop and frisk" and it's other soft on crime policies.

[gottorf]

NYPD hasn't been stopping and frisking in a while.

[wernercd]

"stop and frisk" 1990 called and wants its talking point back.

S&F has been "unconstitutional" for over a decade - and that's not counting Defund The Police shenannery, open border policies and stuff like "bail reform".

IE: Illegal immigrants attacking police and getting released without bail.

[tylerFowler]

True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

[masom]

"older" and "newer" is the construction type.

Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.

The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.

The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).

It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.

[bobthepanda]

i think the best way to describe it is to consider what an office in these types of buildings looks like.

consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.

now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?

[tylerFowler]

Well.. yeah when you put that way I see what you mean. No those types of buildings wouldn't be very amenable, I suppose I had assumed we would already exclude those from consideration.

Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.

[bobthepanda]

the problem now is that in 2024, these Office-Space style buildings are getting into their 40s and 50s, and with the glut of new class A office space being made available in more contemporary bright, airy open styles, that's the kind of building that is going to be a struggle to fill with new office tenants or convert to residential.

[wolverine876]

I don't mean this in the usual snarky way, but read the OP. It goes into detail with a developer about these issues.

[rvba]

> who wants to work somewhere with no services

Nobody wants to work there, yet lots of people work there since they need money. And it's the employer who chooses the location. Of course top talent does not need to work in a crappy company, but that's the theory. Also empty space = less trafic. And you can get food delivered. If you can afford it.

People are foreced to work in crappy open plan offices all the time.

[underlipton]

Not easier, maybe slightly more economical. One could easily turn the less-desirable inner spaces into common areas or something else economically-sustainable, like public storage, co-working spaces, etc.

[ido]

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...

[gizmo]

A city doesn't need to be big to have skyscrapers. It's just a policy choice, like how wide roads are or public transportation. Many Americans are surprised that small European towns are big enough to justify a train station.

[heroprotagonist]

Small American towns used to have train stations, even in the middle of nowhere. They enabled factories and other industrial work. Then the trains would go away, and the factories would die, or it would happen the other way around. Then teenagers would go out to abandoned tressels to have bonfires and drink near the scenic decay every weekend, until the cops showed up to scatter them running into the woods.

[gizmo]

True, but only in the east coast and Midwest. Even at the peak of US rail (1916) the west coast was only sparsely connected.

[waveBidder]

… it was also only sparsely populated

[gizmo]

Have you ever looked at a rail map?

California and Indiana both had a population of about 2.7 million in 1916. Indiana had a dense rail network and California didn't. Indiana is only ~5x smaller than California.

This is what the rail network looked like in 1916:

https://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/4400/4401/4401.htm

[ben_w]

Thinking of "too small for a station", whenever I passed through Dovey Junction I was only able to see one building, on the other side of a river, and it appears that there is literally no road or path to that building.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wx98GRYpPaRbrcRg6?g_st=ic

[andjd]

"junction" is pulling the heavy weight here. The station is right before the tracks branch, so the purpose of the station is probably to let riders transfer from service on the one branch to service on the other.

[arethuza]

Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?

[rsynnott]

A fairly common US city plan seems to be: small ultra-high-density core with a bunch of skyscrapers, fading almost immediately to rather low-density, and then shortly afterwards to virtually no-density. European cities tend to be generally higher-density (no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris), but with fewer skyscrapers.

[lolinder]

> no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris

This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.

So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.

It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris

[myrmidon]

> It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.

If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).

[demosthanos]

> I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC

Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris

[WJW]

Europe just seems to go for much more mid-rise high-density neighborhoods compared to the US with skyscrapers in the city center and then sprawling suburbs that are so low-density you can barely get out of them without a car.

[arethuza]

What I found most surprising about a lot of US city "downtowns" is how utterly dead they are in the evenings and at weekends.

[fosk]

They are also dangerous and that’s also a big reason why nobody hangs out there after a certain time. European downtowns are family friendly and actually nice and safe, unlike the US.

[brnt]

I think the comment about Kansas City shows that the big reason nobody hangs out there is that nobody actually lives there. And so since after 18:00 everybody these huge, built-up areas are suddenly available, you create excellent conditions for things that'll keep people from going there.

The 'secret' of European downtowns is that they are not uninhabited.

[nervousvarun]

The answer is crime. It's always crime.

[User23]

This is why you hear about a housing affordability problem in Washington DC despite a quick search showing dozens of recent sales for 2-3 bedroom apartments for under $100,000.

There never was a housing shortage, there’s just a shortage of people willing to live in vibrant urban neighborhoods.

[baby]

With remote work they are dead all the time now

[jagger27]

The death of the third place is far more important than any impact remote work has had.

[bluGill]

East of the Mississippi river has similar population densities to Europe (still less, but not by much). However US population density is skewed downward by the large amount nearly uninhabited land in "the west" and Alaska.

[weberer]

A lot of it is about zoning laws. The downtown Helsinki area has 0 skyscrapers, and the closest ones are the Redi buildings about 5km away.

[loftyal]

Wait until you see China. There are multiple cities bigger than NYC or London that most people have never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

[cedilla]

Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km.

There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.

[Ographer]

It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone.

It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.

Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.

[keiferski]

Europe seems to do a better job at constructing buildings that can be used in various use cases, though. So when the office use case goes away, making the building into apartments is fairly simple.

This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.

[tylerFowler]

The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.

[tolien]

All things considered, I wouldn't be surprised if a non-zero number of people have only heard of Kansas City because of Taylor Swift.

[KptMarchewa]

Wouldn't be that Nashville? IDK that much about Taylor Swift, but that's the only city that comes in mind.

[ColonelBlimp]

Lucky you. Search for Travis Kelce unless you prefer to keep your exposure to useless information under control.

[dnissley]

Similarly it was strange to me when visiting Athens that there were essentially no skyscrapers!

[Yeul]

European cities didn't have skyscrapers until recently because of "muh monuments muh medieval skyline".

It's changing though I'm seeing 40 story (luxury) apartment complexes go up all over Dutch cities.

[JohnClark1337]

Yeah, the US is big. Movies and TV shows usually only show like 2 or 3 cities which makes everything seem like it's close together. For instance I live on the east coast, and I've never been to LA California, which might seem weird but it's over 2500 miles away. Different regions have basically different sub-cultures that emerge because we're so spread out.

[RankingMember]

I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I appreciate you highlighting some positive developments.

In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic.

[1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous...

[nox101]

I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me).

Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it.

Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes.

I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad.

I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.

[ensignavenger]

Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.

[coffeebeqn]

It coincided with opening the new light rail in the most popular nightlife areas. Hardly a laboratory setting

[friendzis]

Your point is nightlifers correlate with nuisance riders?

[rsynnott]

... I mean, yes, of course. Never been on a night bus after the bars close?

[cogman10]

Does Kansas City have a police presence on the tram? I'd expect that to be more effective than a fare.

[tylerFowler]

Ohhh yeah, they definitely do. Usually just on weekends or for events but you have fully uniformed & armed officers riding the loops.

[jandrese]

Adding fares just means the nuisance riders will jump the fares. It won't stop them from riding.

[ensignavenger]

If that were the case, the theory is that the issues would not have increased after they went fare free. The increase may have been due to something else, though. Experimentation is probably the only way we will truly find out.

[bluGill]

Nuisance riders often have nothing better to do with their time and little money. They will find someplace else to go.

[tylerFowler]

The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

[hibikir]

KC was smartin choosing lines that had actual demand, so the lines remained popular: Go to the other side of the state, and see what happened in the streetcar in St Louis. It's only running because running it seasonally at a loss is cheaper than paying back the federal government for their share of the project. No amount of pretty colors fix the fact that nobody needs to travel that route, and nowhere near enough people live near the stops

[toyg]

Effective commercialization of station space is indeed a positive development, but you don't really need to privatize railways to get that (even without going into the whole "privatizing in Japan is not the same as here", since large private companies and local authorities coordinate strongly in ways that we wouldn't consider acceptable in the West). Very dense European cities, like London and Paris, are getting more and more of that type of development too; and even in Tokyo, not all stations have a commercial development on top. It's mostly a function of density levels, which are sky-high in Japan.

One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.

[nox101]

I agree with your general points and I don't know what worked in Japan would work in the USA. I'm pretty confident what works in Europe will probably not work in the USA either though :(

> That means facilities are spotless

I can assure you no stations are remotely spotless. In fact I'm surprised some of them aren't considered fire hazards. Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Akihabara, all have extremely messy areas. Newer stations appear clean but that's only because they're new AFAICT. Just commenting because I don't want people to ge the wrong impression. They might be cleaner than SF, NYC, Paris on average but they're not as clean as Stockholm or Singapore

[pezezin]

Of the stations that you mention, I find Akihabara to be actually quite nice and reasonably well organized (for Japanese standards).

But I agree with you that the others are a mess. Shibuya and Ueno look like half the stations are falling apart, and Shinjuku is some kind of non-euclidean labyrinth, every time I go there, I get lost. If there is even a fire there, the death toll is going to be immense.

[nox101]

Akihabara, there are new and old parts of the station. The new part (lower level) are relatively clean. The old parts (upper level, Sobu-sen) are less clean (unless they've been renewed - I haven't been up in a 2-3 years)

[bobthepanda]

I think that you and the OP have different notions of spotless.

In Japan, at major train stations I find the bathrooms reasonably clean and good to use. In New York, it smells of poop and pee because the odds are that someone probably publicly urinated, or some pipe somewhere in the subway tunnel is leaking sewage.

[nox101]

That's generally true of all bathrooms in the USA vs Japan. I think I've seen 1 disgusting bathroom in Japan a restaurant/mall/store in the more 15+ years I've spent there where as in the USA it's like 1 of 5 that's disgusting. In other words, it's not unique to train stations.

That said, the bathrooms between JR Shinjuku and Marunouchi-line used to smell pretty rancid. I haven't used them recently though.

[jen20]

My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.

[warcher]

Honestly the places that did it successfully didn’t try to make transit cheap, they didn’t subsidize cars. Requiring amenities like parking by law seems to be working at cross purposes to spending money on transit. For desirable real estate it seems the only way to make affordable housing it to take away expensive upgrades. I think we can agree that safety is not a luxury, but parking spots, private laundry, private kitchens, even private bathrooms, these are things that many people live without every day. I remember some of those times in my life fondly even. Making it illegal by force of law to live like that seems… counterproductive to me, if our stated goal is affordable housing.

[jimbob45]

Why not just ban the homeless then? They’re not hard to identify and remove.

[nomel]

> transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA

That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.

The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.

If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.

But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.

I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.

[matt-p]

I suspect charging a nominal but non zero fee e.g $2 on peak $1 off peak per trip probably ends up with the best of both worlds. Free ends up with some negative side effects

[bluGill]

A couple dollars pre day is nothing to most people but multiply by thousands of riders every day and it is a lot of money. There is no transit system in the world that couldn't be better with more funding so take that money.

You of course need a plan for the poor but that should be a minority.

[wiether]

I can't find the sources anymore but where I live, PT was never free, but there was no physical restriction to access it.

So by not paying your ticket/subscription, you only had to hope for not seeing controllers who could fine you.

A few years ago, they said that too many people were not actually paying for usage, so they decided to put physical restrictions (fare gates?).

Journalists decided to investigate and they did the math. Basically they came up with something like : once you take everything into account (building and maintaining physical machines for buying fares and controlling access, managing everything around billing, enforcing fares with human controllers...), on every euro spent by a user, more than 60% went to the costs related to the fare system itself. Less than 40% was actual money that the company could use to improve the UX.

And obviously, the overall UX decreased because they also raised the fares. So we're paying more, there's still lots of bad people in the stations/subway, but now we have to go through a metal gate to prove that we have paid the fare and do the same to exit PT. Which, obviously, creates virtual congestion at peak hours, because the human flow is slowed and the width to pass is much narrower than it used to be.

Meanwhile, in another city, they went the other way : free PT. I have yet to hear of some regular users seeing it as the decrease in UX.

[bluGill]

Best practice is have enough people checking riders thatyou don't get there. You want those fare checkers around anyway for security.

[underlipton]

You're describing issues that all have a core of, "Snooty (upper) middle-class temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who won't let themselves have nice things because The Poors." Here is a short and simple plan for fixing the issue: get over yourselves.

[seer]

I feel like this might be a double edged sword in the long run.

A lot of public transit where I live (Mumbai) is subsidized, which means its not profitable to run the way it is run.

That was a very popular decision at the time (help mobility of the poor), but it ends up with massive underdevelopment as the needs expand. There’s no money for private companies to invest in the infra and it waits on election cycles to push investment.

I feel that if it was actually profitable to build new trains / metros / etc it would have happened much quicker.

[tylerFowler]

Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem, although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so. So it just sorta.. moved.

I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.

[Zak]

Crime rates on that site appear to be from 2020.

[matt-p]

I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago.

I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.

[tylerFowler]

Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.

[matt-p]

Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest.

I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.

[weberer]

They've been doing it in the USA for quite a while as well. Most former factories are now "The Lofts at [name]"

[epolanski]

Also, you pay property taxes on the actual floor sizes.

So even if you turn into apartments the areas close to windows the rest of the space is still taxed even if empty.

Thus, in areas like Manhattan it's virtually impossible to convert those buildings or you need to literally cut off the center of these buildings.

[justanother]

To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place.

Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.

[tylerFowler]

The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.

[listenallyall]

Redevelopment of derelict downtowns has been outsourced to massive real estate corporations who have created a successful formula that they can pretty much copycat over and over.

Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others.

https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts

Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.

[Leherenn]

It feels hard to avoid. You need scale to make the project viable: a single small redevelopment in a run down area is unappealing, but if you do the whole block, that's a different story.

There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.

[tylerFowler]

In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time.

Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.

Tldr; idk, necessary evil?

[steveBK123]

It is a policy problem. There was an OddLots podcast on the topic of NYC CRE to Resi conversions a while ago.

One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.

[zikduruqe]

Can confirm, I worked in 909 Walnut, and witnessed downtown transform.

KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.

[b800h]

One problem with doing this - as seen in Manchester in the UK, is that the new residents will demand that their neighbouring bars and clubs be closed to cut down on noise and disturbance. It has the effect of gutting a city centre of it's culture and nightlife.

[surfingdino]

Same thing is happening in London's Soho. New 'luxury flats' blocks are being built and life gets sucked out of the place through gentrification, but I guess Soho Estates is happy. Another victim of this short-term developer greed is London's Denmark Street where Jimmy, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the rest of the world's rock and pop royalty used to hang out, record, and shop for gear. That area could have been turned into London's mini Nashville with recording studios and clubs, but instead we got the Outernet monstrosity. Most of the old shops are gone, the only ones surviving are maybe three guitar shops. There are a couple of new ones, Roland and Korg, but the staff are so incompetent that I don't see them lasting.

[asdfman123]

I'm hardly an expert on this, but it seems the exact same thing happened to all sorts of cities in the 2010s. Millennials wanted to live in cities.

It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.

[tylerFowler]

Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.

[Yeul]

There's a massive demographic increase in single person households. If you're single you have to meet people you can't just retreat into your suburbia castle with your family.

Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.

[pookha]

They also converted old factories into these wild thrift stores and concert spaces (West Bottoms).

[melenaboija]

I have seen something similar happen in Birmingham, AL while living there since 2015 to 2022.

[aquova]

I know people who live nearish the KC downtown area, and live in an old elementary school that was converted into an apartment complex. A bit weird architecturally, but they seem to like it.

[tetris11]

> 750sqft

70m2 for anyone wondering