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by vvern 532 days ago
This feels like a crazy take. The stronger labor laws part I hear, but the anti-urbanism part I don’t.

Do you have data or an ideology or something? Seems like you’ve been radicalized to a point of view, but by what?

2 comments

There were couple of videos on YouTube outlining how transport driven development makes poor people even more poor. Reasoning is that light rail transport makes housing along it more expensive. It's definitely feels like that in Montreal near REM, although I don't have 'proofs'. Gentrification on steroids kind of reasoning.
It's more about public transportation make the urban middle class richer, and have marginal to no effect on lower class people or rural middle class. As long as roads are not paid for by tolls and gas taxes but by general taxes (basically mine), public transportation should have no negative effect for poorer people. That's why i don't bitch about car being way, way more subsidized than train/buses in my city, and i find people crying about it out of touch and to be honest quite selfish.
> It's more about public transportation make the urban middle class richer, and have marginal to no effect on lower class people or rural middle class.

It means that if you want your life to become better, you have to move in closer to the large cities. In turn, this means that your living conditions will worsen.

> That's why i don't bitch about car being way, way more subsidized than train/buses in my city

My state is doing the inverse. We (heavily) subsidize transit, and our car infrastructure is paid for by user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). The results aren't so great.

That source makes claims that its data does not actually back up - that road infrastructure is actually paid for by user fees, while only actually providing data that highway infrastructure is paid for by user fees. Highways are clearly not most road infrastructure.
They use the Census data reported by the cities. It's called "highway and street", and it includes all the surface roads except for roads with limited access. Their table just somewhat misleadingly removed the "street" part of the series name.
Nope. I researched that in details, and I'm writing a book about it.

In short: no large city in Europe, US, or Japan managed to lower housing sale prices by increasing housing density and building transit. This is even tacitly acknowledged by urbanists. The best result that I found in literature, was a one-time 5-8% decrease in _rental_ costs immediately near the new construction.

But the negative effects are clear: people have to pay ever-rising costs for worse and worse housing. With the "upside" being "near to theaters and museums" (that people visit maybe once a year).

> Seems like you’ve been radicalized to a point of view, but by what?

By urbanist propaganda resulting in visible misery.

It has turned from a useful science of "how to make living in cities better" to "how to force more density onto people".

ive been flirting with the idea of leaving the city for years. what resources and/or communities do you recommend regarding this literal "movement"? please ignore me if this is like asking chomsky to check my grammar
The trick is, you don't really need anything. Just find a good place and settle there. The US has all the infrastructure needed for that.
> With the "upside" being "near to theaters and museums" (that people visit maybe once a year).

If this is the only upside you see in cities, then maybe you need to do more research.

so you want better outcomes (lower homelessness and lower housing sale prices) by restricting new builds in urban centers to motivate people to live further away (working remote)?

where has this actually been done?

I don't think this has ever been done on purpose with the explicit goal of anti-urbanism.

However, it's been done a bunch of times accidentally. One really great example: Copenhagen in Denmark. Its population actually decreased after the initial boom, it's only now back up to the levels of early 70-s: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...

As a result, the overall Danish well-being and economics improved compared to neighboring countries. I believe, that this is very much a part of the reason for the "Danish Bumblebee" economy (meaning that it shouldn't be able to fly, but does).

And Copenhagen is routinely scored as one of the best cities on the planet.

Copenhagen's suburbanization was not accidental. They specifically built infrastructure and public transit to support suburbs with a strong connection to the city center. Their success with homelessness probably has more to do with high taxes and a lot of welfare support systems than anything else.