West Coast baby
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pfft and not fill our valuable real estate with lawns and parking lots?
Anytime you have people living in dense, highly populated areas it will make nearby land a premium. High demand for land (and the resulting high prices) will result in high rent and high cost of living.
I’m not really sure how to fix this. You could have some government managed system for what businesses get the high demand land, but that will result in less popular stores being in the best locations and greatly incentivize corruption as businesses want highly profitable locations that can only be granted by politicians.
To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.
Actually, at some point the graph flips around. If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium (rich people hate living near poor people).
But you can’t make Everywhere dense in the USA - have you looked at the size of the land? It’s huge and mostly uninhabited
Considering the price of home ownership near city centers, I’ll call bullshit on that one.
Japan has declining population, unlike basically every county in the world.
I have a lot of suggestions, but one that I think you’d find particularly interesting is land tax rates.
This video is 46 minutes, but it’s the mayor of Detroit explaining why low taxes on land incentivize blight and abandonment instead of productive use.
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.
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.
Exactly. My main reasons why I want a home instead of an apartment is the lack of space, the need to have some private space outside (i.e. a courtyard) and privacy. A lower density apartment building that has all these things could be built, but it would probably be a luxury apartment that would cost an obscene amount of money.
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 are still paying for laundry. As a homeowner the full cost of replacing and maintaining the machines is on you. You also have to pay for the electricty and the water usage.
So what? This is standard and it’s perfectly acceptable for the average homeowner. It sucks a million times worse to have to go to a laundromat, I’ve been there and done that.
Question from a European: Why does living in an apartment mean you have to go to a laundromat? Do apartments in the US not have washing machines?
Having to share on-site laundry facilities with other residents is bad enough (especially with the BRAND NEW machines breaking down all the time). If I had to go hang out at a laundromat every couple weeks for hours, I’d be even more depressed…
YEP. Same here. It’s a world of difference, having room to do whatever you want in peace and privacy.
When I lived in apartments back in the 2000s I couldn’t even leave anything of value on my porch or doorstep without fear of it being stolen. My girlfriend’s bike was stolen from the 2nd floor where it was parked right in front of our apartment door. At my apartment before that a drunk stole a wooden pallet that I had on the porch. They stole fucking wood!
But out here at my rural home, I have land and a garden and we can leave our cars unlocked and bikes or whatever outdoors and nobody messes with it.
So y’all can keep all that urban density and I will stay far away from it most of the time.
I think you’re making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can’t have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.
Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you’ve made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there’s less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don’t need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.
The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You’ve got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won’t put them a plane ride away from home. And you’ve got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.
Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I’m saying? You don’t have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.
