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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Look. Clearly I need some education in this area. Why didn't the "projects" in the 80's and 90's effectively provide these benefits?
Because they were inadequately funded, regulated to low income areas with no jobs and shit schools. They we're just a glorified hole to stick brown ppl
Unlike this new "grassroots" push for dense, mixed use housing, which will end up as a glorified hole to stick poor people of all ethnicities.
Have you ever been to other major, population dense cities around the world? Like, Tokyo, Kolkata, Paris or, hell, even NYC? They all have dense housing areas and urban planning. It's very possible to create dense urban design without it becoming a shit hole.
Yeah I lived in NYC for years. It's a complete shithole urban nightmare with no space, no privacy, no quiet, and no way out. It's filthy, decaying, and it smells bad. Density is the problem, not the solution.
NYC has more resources to function than just about anywhere. High tax, both state and city, combined with a massive number of taxpayers. Extremely high road and bridge tolls. Best-case, near-universal ridership of the long-established public transit (and significant rider fees). Very small land area over which to spread its city income.
If they can't maintain a clean and tidy city with the resources they have, the taxation and manpower required is probably not achievable.
I think that unless you have a non-American (e.g. Japanese) community caretaking ethic that comes with other baggage (and can't easily be recreated in American culture), the residents will wear it down and trash it faster than it can be fixed. If you put 10m rats in a proportional land area, they'd kill each other - I don't know why we think it's healthy for human habitation to exist at that level
It's important to reconsider other aspects of urban design as well, though. "lol, just add more people" won't work any better than "lol, just add more cars" did if taken in isolation.
Walkability, public transit, green spaces, close-proximity shopping and services, and so on all need to be considered. Otherwise you end up with exactly what already doesn't work but now with more people.
That's implied when people are talking about proper urban design.
It's extremely dangerous to assume that.
Who would be doing the sticking, and why would they do it? There's plenty of demand for dense, mixed-use housing - I don't think anyone's going to be made to move in.
Have you ever seen a city outside the US? I live in São Paulo - you can literally walk for two minutes (no hyperbole) and go from a rich (as in LOADED) neighborhood to a lower-middle class one.
This is absolutely in the US too. I've lived in multiple different cities where gigantic mansions with in ground pools and tennis courts and two Maseratis in the garage are like 2 blocks from busted ass poor neighborhoods
I saw a video that they intentionally made the projects bad to try to "incentivize" people to get out of them. The whole stupid pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
It also centralizes the problem, which intensifies it. What you need is communities of mixed income, which has effects on schools, hospitals, stores nearby, etc.
This is less about the government building things and more about the government changing zoning so denser communities are built.
Can you be more specific?
I think others provided the type of context I was looking for but when I think dense living I think of the dense high rise projects that were built to provide low cost, section8 housing that theoretically were supposed to provide benefits to poor folks that I assume would also include the benefits discussed in your meme. However they were notoriously dangerous and had a myriad of problems that made them far worse and extremely dangerous for residents.
I'm a big fan of trying more than one thing at once, so even though I think it's possible to learn lessons from effective public housing projects in Europe, I also think that we can achieve a lot through the private market. In CA, there are a lot of zoning barriers to building this kind of stuff. Even without government assistance, we can get some of this just by removing prohibitions on building this in a lot of areas.