Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can't really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I'm not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I understand what's trying to be said here but I'd pass on that.
I've lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can't hear what my neighbors are saying, don't need to pay for laundry, don't need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don't have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I'm not going back to an apartment.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it's not required.
Based on what this meme is proposing, I can smell the urine in the elevators from here.
I think the kids are deluded and have no idea what they're missing. Density is hell. Single family homes are expensive because the vast majority of people don't want to spend the rest of their lives living in apartments.
I can't hear my neighbors, don't need an elevator, and don't need a garage because I don't need a car. I don't have a back yard but I'm pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
Other than SF. Where do you live in CA that doesn't require you to need a car?
I know you can make due. I lived without one for a long time, but it was a the biggest pain the ass not having one. Unless I only wanted to stay in my little local bubble.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it's just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother's apartment I can hear his neighbor's coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit's got tissues for walls I swear.
You could meet all of your apartment complaints with some decently designed medium density projects. I agree though that not everyone needs to live in a towering skyscraper
Good for you since you can afford it. Most people cannot. Which means you would still have your house in the suburbs somewhere, but all of these problems would be solved.
Shut your trap and get back to your pod!🔫
Could easily fix "LISA" in the last panel to "USA", and remove California from the first panel, and boom, you got a meme for the whole country
Anybody claiming one general solution will fix every single grievance they have sounds a step away from buying essential oils.
Don't get me wrong, it will help, but no every pet problem will not be magically solved by waving hands and going "just do better urban panning, duh"
Just don't romanticize your proposed solution to a degree where you think you can slap it in and problems solve themselves.
I mean the overarching problem being talked about here is not having well planned cities (ie 15 min cities) that provide housing for everyone.
The solution mentioned would absolutely solve or go a long way to solve all the problems mentioned in the meme.
I'm not american and have never even been there but doesn't New York city have the same problems? And AFAIK NYC is very vertical.
NYC doesn't have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
But NYC is also an extremely expensive place to live, and built vertically due to a lack of space for outward expansion.
Might also be good to point out that NYC has a lot more commercial office and high-end condo development than high-density housing.
But that also has a lot to do with how expensive land is, which is mostly due to it being land-locked as mentioned.
This is anecdotal from browsing vagabond sources, but there's a lot of reasons NYC might have fewer homeless.
A) The pigs and rules on the east coast are a lot more brutal towards the homeless than the west coast. This both leads to migration away from the east coast and for the homeless that are there to be much more invisible.
B) The west coast has a history of being relatively welcoming to the houseless / a lot of lore built up around it, so people tend to gravitate towards it.
C) The west coast has a much more survivable climate than the east coast - this is the reason I hear the most.
As a local, I'll add what I think are more meaningful differences.
First, most homeless people in CA are locals who were forced out, not interstate homeless migrants looking for a good place to be homeless.
The main reason is that CA doesn't have nearly as many temporary shelters for people to go to. And as you noted, it's more survivable to live outdoors.
Overall, NYC still has a pretty big population of folks in shelters, but CA has way more folks living in cars, trailers, and tents.
NYC doesn't have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
Because you'll literally die the very first winter night you're homeless without shelter in NYC. They have a bunch of shelters, so the problem is less visible, and when they run out of space they bus them to L.A.. Those that remain are found frozen to death in the morning.
Not sure how you're defining "bad," but NYC has an estimated 100k homeless while LA has an estimated 46k.
In addition to the other replies, it can also matter where in NYC you're talking about
https://metropolismoving.com/blog/housing-costs-nyc/
Bronx has a median rent to income ratio of 45%, while Manhattan is 30%. This is primarily due to the fact that median income for Manhattan renters is double what it is in the Bronx, but rent doesn't scale up the same. Against my own expectation, this makes Manhattan a reasonable-ish place to live, at least if we're just talking about rent and income.
The only thing I don't see is how it would fix people being homeless. Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc. If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment. You can't solve their problems with just providing housing.
Shelter is critical to survival. The general rule of thumb places it as a higher priority than food or water. Arguing against people having access to reliable shelter, regardless the rational, is arguing for deliberately killing them.
The "they're defective and will destroy whatever they live. Don't let them in!!!" is just calling them cockroaches in a different way. It's fear mongering nonsense and there is no evidence to support that claim.
You're assuming correlation does not equal causation. It turns out being homeless, even for a relatively short period of time, is devastating to mental health and even if not the root cause (IE genetic predeposition, TBIs, etc.) it can strongly exasperate them and create some nasty co-morbidities.
Being repeatedly assulted and or raided by police, neighborhood vigilantes and other desperate people is an extremely quick path towards PTSD/other general anxiety disorders. The aggressive de-humunization that occurs can be a potent factor in antisocial disorders. Direct health impacts like physical battery, hypo/hyperthermia, illness, etc. can cause more detect brain damage such as TBIs, etc. Schizophrenia is usually fairly treatable, schizophrenia with PTSD amplified paranoia much less so.
I'd like to point out that the second item is pointless. You're making an appeal to authority fallacy and referencing an article to support an opinion which doesn't need the reference. The portion that needs a reference (if you're gonna provide one) is the second part of the second point.
Here is a link to the CAUF society in reasons why homeless people may refuse to go to shelters.
I think that additional housing isn't really a solution to homelessness unless you give them unmitigated access. Pretty much, "It's free and you can do whatever you want."
The issue with homelessness isn't available space, we have tons of open office space where they could stay at night. The problem is that these places have rules and restrictions (no alcohol, no pets, curfew, etc).
For my own anecdote, there was a homeless guy who stayed by a gas station near my old apartment and I tried to check in on him from time to time and give him some money. He saved up his donations each day for a motel room and I asked him why he didn't save his money and go to the shelter or share a room with someone else to save money? He stated that he didn't like sharing a space with other people either in a shelter or as a roommate. The guy would rather sleep outside rather than share space.
There's multiple groups of homeless people.
There's the long term homeless, who often suffer from issues like mental illness, and short term homeless, who usually don't.
High housing prices absolutely causes people to become homeless when they lose their job, become addicted to drugs, etc.
Being homeless is itself traumatic, and exacerbates most issues homeless people have. Affordable housing and giving homeless people an apartment aren't a panacea, but it does prevent a ton of issues for newly homeless people.
Are you familiar with the "Housing first" model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.
is that truly the case, or just a pervasive urban legend?
which studies support this theory?
This assumes you kick them out after putting them into it.
No, you need to provide additional help to keep homeless people off the street. I only have experience with homeless in Germany, though. The reasons for homelessness can be different depending on the country.
That could alleviate those problems, but I doubt it'd actually solve them. Not to mention, they could also get worse:
Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.
People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.
Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it's really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.
If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.
Pfft and not fill our valuable real estate with lawns and parking lots?
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.
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.
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.
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