🍿🍿🍿 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html
"Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out."
Yep, this article is right.
I think the main problem is traffic though. Everyone wants more houses but our roads are jammed and we literally cannot widen the roads anymore. Don’t even bring up public transit. Outside of SF a car is required. The amount of money and mindshare needed to retool suburbia to get people out of their cars and into busses will NEVER happen unless you vastly raise the gas tax or make renewing a car registration cost like $100-200k. In which case that will never happen.
Public transit will never ever work, folks! Never been done! Oh wait. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/
You have to admit that traffic would be much less shitty if public commuter works like Bart or Caltrain electrification weren't hobbled by frivolous lawsuits though. I'll give you three guess as to which group trends to file them 🤔
This is actually a simple problem with very old roots, roads and cars are to blame. Any city that was developed heavily before cars were invented (read Europe) is far more walkable by design, thus the wealthy choose to live downtown, thus downtown is nicer. The US tried to develop something different, using trains, street cars, and roads to commute into the city so the wealthy could live isolated in the suburbs. This turned out to not be a good idea, but you can't really reverse the decision because the cities are built for cars by design. Thus you get a sub par city experience in the US.
No city is walkable if poop and needles are everywhere on ground. I'd prefer driveable cities.
Public transportation stopped being an option when the public sector was permitted to unionize. Autonomous cars solve the congestion issue. The US also doesn’t have the density for public transpo to be very efficient.
How much denser than the Bay area do you need to be for public transit to work?
You actually need public transit for it to work. Instead of saying FU to CalTrain and expanding BART to encircle the Bay Area we got 20 billion thrown at a train to nowhere. Because tech workers really want to live in Bakersfield or something.
If you live in King county, just look at what’s getting voted on. The last ballot had a gun control measure in response to national news of shootings. 11 people died from rifles in King county in the entire year before this measure. Yet over 1000 people overdosed on opiates last year. Zero mention of drug control. In fact you can carry several grams of heroin on you in Seattle and the police won’t arrest you for it.
Paywall - I couldn’t read it. But in general, yes, economic liberalism is a total failure for the population.
Please enlighten us how social liberalism can fix this. Oh wait, it brings drug use and feces. Scratch that.
Drug use is pretty constant across all economic groups - it’s generally only the poor or isolated ones that end up on the street. So really inequality, not after the fact “liberal” policies is a main part of it. Social liberalism didn’t seek to fix this but if cities were run by social democratic policies, they might alleviate some of the rough edges. But ultimately socialist cities where residents democratically set priorities and development would fix the roots of many of these issues.
“When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by.” This is the classic case of the local wealthy not taking care of their own backyard. Why do you think they take up global causes rather than fix what they can actually fix?
Developers are making too much money for “good will” alone to change anything.
I know Ellis you hate when anyone makes money and is not distributing it to the poor. Not everyone in this city must act like Robin Hood. If these people on the Embarcadero worked hard and made money and bought a beautiful apartment.... I don’t blame them for not wanting to step over the people hanging out in tents outside. And the poop. And the needles. Because that’s what will be around this new navigation center they are building. And who says the wealthy HAVE to take care of their backyard? That’s up to the city. And they are doing a piss poor job.
"I watched Joe Biden’s campaign kick off the other day; the only house he mentioned was the White House." 😂😂