We need ‘Goldilocks,’ not ‘voodoo,’ urbanism

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2019/01/16/we-need-%E2%80%98goldilocks%E2%80%99-not-%E2%80%98voodoo%E2%80%99-urbanism

by pseudolus • 8 years ago

47 13 8 years ago

closeparen2• 8 years ago

The Congress of the New Urbanism is famous for advocating that our current built environment is not Goldilocks, and that the scales are tipped heavily towards sprawl and away from good urbanism. So it’s weird to see it publish the viewpoint it essentially formed to oppose (urban agglomerations are social problems to be solved by decentralizing and spreading out). It has a slightly different view of the nature of that social problem, but is overall aligned with the original postwar purveyors of sprawl.

More to the point, it doesn’t make any argument that the current level of growth is the Goldilocks zone. A YIMBY may read all this and agree that there’s such a thing as too much, while still thinking of the optimum as much higher than the status quo.

temp-dude-87844• 8 years ago

This "just right" kind of balance is sensible on its face, but in the real world it manifests as mediocrity, when hundreds of other destinations exist for those most willing and able to relocate, inevitably leaving behind those who are equipped the least. Over time, everyone will self-select to the level their resources bear.

Competition between jurisdictions is real. Suburbs capitalized on the proximity to a city without having to bear the costs of legacy infrastructure and social services. Today, towns in mid-tier regions fight over the same trickle-down scraps, offering enormous incentives that aren't likely to be recouped, in a desperate act to attract an income stream. They do this because others do it too, and no one wants to lose out for not having been persistent. Meanwhile, budgets for infrastructure and social services are tight everywhere, unless the relevant jurisdiction has an enormous wealth fund, typically from resource extraction.

The functioning of cities are barely economically sustainable, in our economic system largely based around capital and competition. Is it any wonder why their leaders strive so hard to attract wealth and forces that further attract that wealth?

bilbo0s2• 8 years ago

Frankly I'm not certain how his proposed system is any better than the one where all the cool kids move to San Fran?

I mean, there are just some realities about people that, I think, are oftentimes overlooked. He calls them "social networks", but at their root, it's the manifestation of the tendency for humans to be tribal. You can try to move San Fran to Omaha Nebraska if you like, but it won't work. People are tribal. The cool kids will still want to hang with the cool kids. In fact, it's extremely probable that the cool kids would just not move.

I'll even go one step further and say that not only will the new proposal fail to elicit the desired behavior from the cool kids, but I'll go ahead and predict that this proposed change would also do nothing to better the lot of, say, impoverished minorities. It's just a fact of life that the human proclivity for tribalism will work against them. It worked against them in the post war "urban sprawl" model, it's working against them in the current "urban revival" model, and it will work against them in the "goldilocks" model. Why has it worked against them so consistently over time? Because we're not changing the people, we're just changing the model.

And so much of what is happening is due to people, and how people think and behave.

shoguning• 8 years ago

Frankly, I think the piece is poorly written, and thus hard to critique.

But I _think_ what the author is saying is that we need good urban design everywhere, not just in downtowns. That would benefit everyone. Ie, if you make necessities available in walking or transit distance, people can save money. It doesn't really matter where the cool kids choose to live, if everyone has the benefit of more people-oriented urban planning.

zwayhowder2• 8 years ago

Rather than look at moving San Fran to Omaha, think of it as making San Fran, San Jose, Sacramento & a number of the cities/towns in between "one place".

If I take Tokyo as an example there is no denying it is huge, probably too big at 10m in the urban area and a further 15m in the outer urban areas. But the important thing is that for a relatively low cost you can get from anywhere to anywhere else in 30-60 minutes. And even a short walk from the busiest train station in the world (Shinjuku, close to 4m people a day) you can own a semi-detached house of your own for less than $1m (roughly).

One of the big moves here in Australia is to make Sydney & Melbourne 30 minute cities. The idea being that people generally only travel 30 minutes each way to work every day. It's based on the idea of the city having multiple CBDs (Central Business Districts/Downtown areas) so someone who works in the Sydney based one can live within 30 minutes of it, while someone who works in the Parramatta based CBD can live further away from Sydney.

In principle it's a great idea, in practice I know a lot of people who commute for well over an hour each way to work in the Sydney CBD and my wife commutes the other way from our inner city residence to her job in the third (and furthest inland) CBD area and is considering quitting after just a few months.

My personal feeling (and I should add that while I do haThe same as the Portland/Vancouver/The same as the Portland/Vancouver/ve extensive local government experience I am not a town/traffic/transit planner, engineer or anything similar) is that the largest problem is that currently virtually all major transport routes are predicated on getting to the original Sydney CBD. Want to get from Cronulla to Parramatta by train, well you get a train to the Sydney CBD and then get one out to Parramatta, a trip that takes almost 2 hours. There is no option by bus, so you drive and travel less than half the distance in 1/3 the time (except for traffic); now the roads from Cronulla to Parramatta are not large freeways designed to move thousands of cars per hour so it's stop start at traffic lights and a generally sub-par experience. So in reality you are most likely to decide to work in the Sydney CBD.

Tokyo & other mega-cities tend to have a lot of crisscrossing or overlapping mass transit systems and roads to make it easier to get from A to B, regardless of their orientation to the historic spot where the first GPO was built.

Personal Story Time, feel free to stop reading here:

Last night I attended the birthday drinks of an old friend. Our friendship is old enough to legally drink in any state of America now. It was the first time I'd seen him in years, despite the fact we live relatively close (as the crow flies) because of that CBD centric transit system, we go out and socialise in different areas. I caught up with a lot of friends last night including an ex girlfriend and another very very dear friend who again I don't see because for either of us to visit requires an hour or more on a train or in a car.

Surprisingly it is Uber that has actually improved my attendance at events like this. Now I can for a relatively low cost go home on the shorter third side of the triangle and not have to worry about changing trains/buses or staying sober to drive home (and hoping every other road user stays sober too).

bilbo0s2• 8 years ago

But none of that solves the fundamental problem. ie - the cool kids still want to hang out with the cool kids.

Where do those losing to income inequality come in? You haven't changed the nature of the jobs. They still require a level of education and training that the people you're not thinking about don't have.

Think of it this way, you had a nice party with all of your old friends. Awesome. But how does the lady living in the trailer park, or the guy living in the ghetto start making connections among your friend group? How do they start launching businesses with you guys in the hypothetical urban model that you've put forth? Those answers are not so easy, because they have a lot to do with people.

So if you like this model better, then by all means implement it, just don't expect it to help those at the bottom. A little honesty, and an acknowledgement that it's a model that's better only for some group of the people at the top, basically only for their convenience, would be appreciated. Society at large would still have the inequality problems it has now after the changes are made. In fact, the problems would be worse, because right now we're only pushing inner-city people out, under the proposed changes, people in suburban and rural areas would be pushed out too.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

heurist• 8 years ago

We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration of wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from. The wealth concentration only allows large capital investors to develop housing projects and they like feeling big so they build big things that the average (up to 90-99%) American has no chance of ever owning. When the middle class can't own or develop productive real estate they have to pay rent, move more frequently, and more easily lose touch with their community. When real estate is forced into the boom-bust cycle of the capital markets everything gets built in waves and then later falls apart all at the same time, straining local economies. Small, organic development spaced across decades is still the best option.

maxsilver2• 8 years ago

We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration of wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from.

Agree with 99% of your post, but these two ideas contradict each other.

Zoning/land use restrictions are things that lower the concentration of wealth (they literally cap the wealth of a parcel of land).

When you reduce/eliminate zoning controls, you will increase concentration of wealth, because the value of that land is now allowed to rise as high as private capital will allow it -- higher than it could have ever risen before. (This can be seen by the cities in the US currently reducing/eliminating their zoning).

ItsDeathball• 8 years ago

Part of the argument in the article, I think, is that cities are only relaxing zoning restrictions in a limited area, in their dense urban cores. If the entire city is under a high level of demand, but the ability to meet that demand is concentrated only on a small area where zoning has been liberalized, then that leads to a situation where reducing zoning (in a small area) leads to increased concentration of wealth.

If the entire urban area were allowed to incrementally and organically build to market demand, then land value would not be so concentrated in the core.

closeparen2• 8 years ago

I doubt there’s any more or less concentration of wealth either way. The question is whether it concentrates to preexisting homeowners or to the new productive industry and its imported workers.

ttonkytonk• 8 years ago

I think it's easy for people who have the benefit of being in the favored areas to poo-poo this article, but for those of us who are less fortunate, it's nice to see that someone "gets it".

Also it's interesting that a society that prides itself on strength finds itself all but helpless to address these issues.

We need ‘Goldilocks,’ not ‘voodoo,’ urbanism

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