>There have always been very expensive parts of town.
Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.
I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.
> Honestly, having had lived in mixed-income neighborhoods, the wealthy are missing out.
I cannot understand why cities in the US are built the way they are.
I live in a relatively big city in Germany in a somewhat dense neighborhood (most buildings have 3-5 stories). I have two grocery stores within five minutes of walking, a great Italian restaurant around the corner. If I want to go to the city center it is a ten minute train ride, going to the lake is a 12 minute ride. I can quickly get around the city center by using the subway and all of this for a fraction of the cost of owning a car.
I grew up in a more rural area and personally, living in a denser cities feels more "luxurious" than living in a town where I can't get anywhere if I don't drive. The cities are still far from perfect, but this is mostly because they desperately try to accomodate the car obsessed public (but not as desperately as American cities)
> Otherwise you'll just have all the big cities turn into places for the elites of the societies while the rest needs to live on the outskirts.
Why is that a bad thing? Not everyone has to live in one place. A more distributed economy across a web of smaller cities seems more desirable. The high cost of living is exactly what is supposed to discourage people from moving to an expensive place. If people want to put up with a high cost and live in the outskirts with a longer commute, then that is their choice - they are explicitly signaling that they accept such a trade off, and I don’t think any special accommodation should be made for them given that voluntary choice.
One reason I don’t feel much sympathy for that outcome is that in the US, there are numerous locations across the country that are affordable and good places to live. The problem is that many feel entitled to live in the most desirable and trendy (in demand) places, and then bemoan the expense. But why wouldn’t it be expensive? No one is entitled to live where they want at whatever price point they want, just as I am not entitled to get a beachfront property in Hawaii just because I desire it.
> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?
How do you do that?
The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments.
- In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country).
- There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc.
- Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price.
- When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation.
If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.
> If people didn't want to live in cities then why does the housing there cost more?
Density seems to always make an area more expensive. What are the two densest cities in the US? Which are the two most expensive cities in the US?
Increasing density does not ever seem to make an area cheaper to live. Maybe that is ok, but it does contradict the idea of building more to make it cheaper.
> And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
Many of them are/were also simply anti-social, racist, or just moved where they could plausibly drive to a job, and then kept that job for eternity, depending on what generation and which geography they come from, and for some of those, that actually meant moving to the areas we want to live in too, but can't because they all own it and the local government.
Although some people aren't willing to sacrifice certain luxuries, I don't know that living approximately where you already live and work is one of those. This idea comes up all the time of "just move to some arbitrary cheaper place" but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of those places require cars, and are quite isolated. Much of the time the difference in cost is made up in property taxes anyway, because the place is so low-density it can distribute the cost of the town's maintenance in an effective way.
It turns out that places that people want to live, much of the time, are places where other people live, for all sorts of practical and spiritual reasons, rather than in the woods
> Any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die.
(I'm honestly not sure if this is a troll comment or not. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt though.)
Alternatively one could say any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to prosper and innovate.
Also, and more importantly, the majority of dense, walkable cities do not have high costs of living - e.g. Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, or even much of Chicago. Just because the most expensive major global cities are dense and walkable that does not mean that all dense and walkable cities are expensive.
If you look at the most expensive zip codes in the US [1] you'll see that eight out of ten are in low-density suburban or semi-rural areas. Does that mean that low-density suburban areas are all super expensive?
>In the last few years I have noticed changes around the city. Some big investments downtown, new developments for commercial and shopping space, etc.
I guess investors have the big cities' real estate markets locked down. Now they're trying the same gentrification game in small towns to get rents raised?
I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.
> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.
Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.
> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.
Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.
>So, if you make a lot of money, the city is great. If you don't make a lot of money, the city _would_ be great if you could actually afford to live there.
I do think that there is a chicken and egg problem here, and it's part of why we think it's so important to keep poor people in their houses as the place gentrifies; A poor person growing up in a rich city has massively more economic mobility than they'd have growing up in a small town.
Of course, you are right that it's hard to be poor in a big city; but if you can snag a rent controlled room, or your aunt's couch or whatever, it can be a good leg up.
>> Plenty of people live quite well in denser environments
> Very few do.
So the people living in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are not living well? That's news. Tell me how else I'm not living.
Outside of the very core of these cities, you can live, and live well while benefitting off of all the things large urban centers provide (culturally, financially, etc).
> FWIW I am lucky enough to live in a high density part of an old city, and it is wonderful.
I live in a low-density US suburb built in the late 90s. The prototypical place that according to the memes, I must drive 30 minutes to the nearest store.
> I can walk 8 minutes to a small street of shops with almost everything I need. I can cycle to other parts of the city to enjoy other amenities and meet friends.
Also, I can walk in ~10 minutes to stores and entertainment of nearly any type I could need.
It's not a binary choice of dense city center or can't walk to anything. Most suburbs can be very walkable.
>nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs.
Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.
> But there are plenty of examples of density leading to lower prices, in the suburbs.
Do you have specific examples? The only places I can think of are economically depressed (e.g. in the midwest, or in Florida swampland) and aren't particularly dense.
Maybe Houston? Houston is famous for having almost no zoning, but even Houston seems to be heating up these days.
> if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.
We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.
Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
> Only a very narrow segment of the population values [great restaurants, coffee shops, music venues, and street art] when looking for somewhere to live.
Are you kidding? Why have people been urbanizing for the last few decades? Why do people value walkability? Why are small towns and rural communities losing population, even when people are able to work remotely? Why is all the most expensive real estate close to these things?
If you look at literally any research on the topic, the exact opposite is true. Only a small segment of people don't care about those factors[1]. Do you have any data to back up your assertion, or is it just your enlightened perspective that you're basing this on?
> Expand your perspective.
Expand your ability to make an argument other than implying that someone else is ignorant. That's a childish way to avoid actually supporting your argument. You have no idea where I grew up, where I live now, or what my perspective is.
People aren't automatically ignorant because they disagree with what your gut says or your own personal preferences.
>>>I am incredibly puzzled by the need to live in the most expensive places on earth; how does that benefit your quality of life?
You have the causality in the wrong order. They are the most expensive places on earth because they improve your quality of life, not the other way around. The price is derived from demand which is derived from a desire to have access to many goods, services, and experiences not available in many other places.
I can speak personally to two other cities I've lived in where housing costs are quite high (though lower than SF and Manhattan): DC and Santa Monica / West LA.
My fiancée and I lived in DC for 5 years in a wonderful expat bubble. While I'm am American, the vast majority of our friends were from all around the world and worked at international development organizations. The extra money we paid for housing was worth all the interesting experiences.
Los Angeles is no different. It's easy to find interesting experiences and food through its diverse populations. There is a fundamental aspect to the nature of cities, viz. that there is a good to density itself. It enables humans to get value out of the shear existence of interacting with other humans in interesting ways. You need enough demand for an experience to support the existence of many experiences (e.g. You can't have a live punk music scene in a town of 100 people. Or even if somehow you do bc the entire town loves punk, it will be at the expense of those people being into other interests. Having enough people with enough wealth and distributed across enough interests/cultures/foods/music tastes, etc facilitates access to way more possible experiences. That, at least, I why I love large American cities.
> Cities are not where the hearts and minds of Americans are
People don't want dense, urban NYC, I get that, but that doesn't mean they want a lonely McMansion development either. Maybe they want a more urbanized suburban town, with just enough walkable amenities. I think people can have love for a town or a neighborhood. In general though, the best American towns are unaffordable as usual.
Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.
I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.
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