Urban NIMBYism and Climate Apartheid
Climate apartheid is a term due to Desmond Tutu, about how rich places that are vulnerable to climate change, like New York and London, can use their wealth to avoid the worst of its effects through retreat to higher grounds or even flood walls, while poor places cannot. Already 15 years ago, he argued that “Adaptation is becoming a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale” and “the only solution to climate change is urgent mitigation.”
And now people using the language of social justice and environmentalism push for such apartheid through attempts to make it harder for people to live in rich cities where people’s environmental footprints are much lower than in rich suburbs and rural areas. The exact grounds vary depending on the NIMBY. What I’ve seen most recently is a call for urban rewilding, leaving patches of city undeveloped on the theory that they could be used to reduce environmental footprint and increase biodiversity. Naturally, the exact opposite would follow, and the cities would become more exclusive, causing more people to instead live car-heavy, high-emission lifestyles while the denizens of city centers look down on them for living a longer distance to work than is comfortable to bike.
The impact of urban NIMBYism
NIMBYism in cities comprises advocacy, almost always at an intensely local level, to reduce the quantity of residential and commercial development. To that effect, NIMBYs employ a variety of strategies, some of which explicitly use environmental language and others of which do not:
- They argue that open space that is to be redeveloped is a valuable neighborhood park. In Berlin, this is the Tempelhofer Feld saga, where a treeless parade within the Ring, much of which is paved as former airport runways, is held as a park and even a wildlife habitat (there are actual wooded parks nearby). In Tel Aviv, Kikar HaMedina was built with redevelopment in mind, but this stalled until recently, as the people living nearby liked it as open space, much larger than a neighborhood of that size would normally have.
- They moralize about urban design. This is where NIMBYs in the Western world tell people that skyscrapers are inhuman and associate them with East Asia or Dubai, places that they have little trouble portraying as inferior, for racist reasons. Ironically, while the NIMBYs use Singapore and Hong Kong as bywords for the evils of tall buildings, Singapore gets high marks on international rankings for rewilding, on the strength of its preservation of a large tract of tropical rainforest while the rest of the city’s area is redeveloped at high intensity.
- They moralize about the people who would move into the city. This is most common among people who identify their NIMBYism as anti-gentrification: they complain that apartment dwellers (or, in places that already have apartments, dwellers of high-rises) have inferior values, do not socialize in the neighborhood enough to their (the NIMBYs’) taste, do not care about the things the NIMBYs care about the most (such as those treeless parades). In the United States this often includes the assertion that gentrifying cities are growing whiter, which they are not even there, let alone in Europe, where every new building that local NIMBYs accuse of bringing gentrifiers has a larger share of non-European names on the mailboxes than is average for Berlin.
- They call for less centralized cities, thus rejecting commercialization of city center and near-center neighborhoods. European city centers are remarkably low-rise for their size and wealth; American ones have single-family zoning within a short distance of city center. In either case, NIMBYs explicitly justify it by moralizing against office jobs and the concept of the commute.
Whatever the justification, the outcome is to reduce the quantity of housing built as well as the amount of commercial development in the center. The less housing is built, the higher the rents are. The marginal residents who are so affected are usually not the ones who socialize in-neighborhood, and so the ones who do go ahead and assume that just because nobody they know got a lower rent through new construction, nobody else did either.
But the issue of apartheid is not exactly about prices. It’s about city size and environmental footprint. At the end of the day, Berlin’s per capita CO2 emissions are, per a shoddy (and since retracted) report complaining that it should stop building subways, 5.38 t/year, where the German average is 9.15. A larger Berlin fulfills German climate goals, by putting more people on top of a large public transportation system none of whose components is anywhere near capacity (the S-Bahn trunks run 18 trains per hour and the U-Bahn ones run 12-15; capacity is 24-30 on an S-Bahn system and more than that on a separate subway). The same calculation works for New York, London, or Paris. Thus, even construction that uses traditional techniques with heavy concrete and its high emissions is still on net an emissions reduction if it’s in a city with high mass transit usage.
Rewilding as adaptation
I can’t find the original article I saw about rewilding that claimed it was necessary for climate adaptation in large cities (no word about mitigation). But I’ve found others, by larger organizations. For example, here is Citizen Zoo, which claims that its mission is for people to live near wildlife:
Rewilding people is just as important as rewilding places.
Across the world, we have lost our connection to nature. Humans are the primary drivers behind the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe we are seeing before our eyes. The only way to solve these issues is through a positive connection between people and nature. This can inform behavioural changes and a co-existence of humans and wildlife that benefit biodiversity.
The biggest drivers of climate change are people who live far from other people, who drive long distances, and whose detached houses have high winter heating needs. One of the justifications used by people who actively prefer such lifestyle, rather than merely not being able to afford a city like New York or London, is proximity to nature. The line about losing the connection to nature was historically used by British and American patricians to argue for dispersion of city residents in the late 19th century, creating modern suburbia as we know it. It was then used again by NIMBYs in the 1960s and 70s arguing that tall buildings were inhuman (apparently, the residents of Singapore, Taipei, and other cities where high-rises are normal don’t count).
And here again, environmental pastoralist organizations invoke the climate catastrophe as an argument to engage in policy that makes this catastrophe worse.
YIMBYism and biodiversity
Climate change is by far the biggest environmental problem in the world right now. But it’s not the only one; there are real issues of biodiversity that aren’t quite about climate but instead are about habitat loss. The radical environmentalist Chris Clarke (who I still owe a post to about YIMBYism and environmentalism) long fought against development of utility-scale solar power in the Mojave Desert in a sensitive area with endangered turtles; Chris would point out that global environmental activism about habitat loss centers forest biomes and tends to denigrate deserts as lifeless and thus does not pay attention to their own biodiversity hotspots.
The YIMBY take on this is that larger and denser cities come at the expense of suburban sprawl, which encroaches on ecologically sensitive areas. Not for nothing, developers who only build single-family housing like zoning rules that make it harder to redevelop in cities. In Oregon, many of them opposed the statewide YIMBY bill permitting more infill housing, on the accelerationist ground that infill housing would reduce rents and reduce the political pressure to expand the state’s urban growth boundaries and release new fringe land for new housing.
But this means throwing away all pretense of adaptation, or rewilding, or bringing people closer to what someone who thinks travel by bus or subway is less moral than travel by bike thinks nature is. I don’t know if tall buildings make rich cities more resilient to climate change or less (I suspect it’s neither), and frankly, I don’t care. India and Bangladesh should think about how to be more resilient; the US and Germany should think about how to reduce their emissions. What I do know is that tall buildings are a substitute for low-density suburbs where people drive everywhere, which, when built, are likely to be replacing either wildlands or farmland, depending on the region.
Pedestrian Observations 
I would appreciate more thoughtful posts that have well reasoned and creative things to say that addresses some more particular problem or aspect of this difficult situation we are in, and invites collaborative engagement.
(-rather than simplistic, prejudicial, and politically divisive lectures.)
whose detached houses have high winter heating needs.
Heat pumps don’t burn anything. They don’t care where the electricity comes from.
It depends on where you are. The weather is “Turkish Bath” south of the Mason Dixon line six months of the years. They use lots and lots of air conditioning.
The environment minister in Germany, Robert Habeck (Greens), is promoting heat pumps as an alternative to gas heating. The result: far right protests and even some mainline right ones feature the slogan “Hang the Greens,” egged on by a right-populist media that officially hates the far right and in practice says everything the far right wants.
I am really a bit confused as to why anyone thinks heat pumps are bad.
Better to use domestic energy and not foreign gas for national security if nothing else?
Probably because as of now, they’re still somewhat more expensive in terms of capital costs than conventional heating systems. While they’ll likely earn back that money in the long run via lower operating costs, how long that “long run” is can definitively vary from case to case and depending on circumstances (future energy prices, availability of subsidies/investment grants, etc. etc.) and if you dislike environmentalism, it’s easy to spin that into a narrative where people are being made to pay more without being able to expect any definite future benefits from that.
Heat pumps don’t have opinions, heat pumps are usually designed to use electricity. Since they don’t have opinions they will use electricity from any source. And since they don’t have opinions what knee jerk reactionaries have to say won’t change that they don’t burn anything.
The south uses less energy on A/C than the north uses on heating. The number on this aren’t obscure.
No they aren’t obscure. Overall they have about three quarters of degree days as the Midwest or Northeast. Half-ish of it is air conditioning.
New York city residents, with an average of 4,696 kilowatt-hours per household per year already consume less electricity than the residents of any other part of the country. The average Dallas household, by contrast, uses 16,116 kilowatt-hours, more than three times as much.
David Owen, Green Metropolis with references.
This is ultimately sourced to PlaNYC, so, about 15 years ago. There’s a reason I didn’t use those stats in my post.
Not quite sure what you mean. If anything I would think the differential would be higher today because the progressive states have had long campaigns to conserve power, better energy efficiency.
Here is data from Statista for 2017. No Texas city on the list, possibly because Texas is the only state that doesn’t have its grid connected to any other (they might guard their data?). But to be fair, while I’d be very sceptical that Texans’ energy consumption (and these data don’t include transport) has decreased, they have greened their electricity grid.
City ………. kWh per month
Miami ………1,125
Phoenix……….905
Atlanta ………..837
LA ………………735
NYC…………….304
SF………………..261
It makes sense that SF is the lowest because it probably has the mildest year-round climate in the US. The SF Bay Area wouldn’t be as good but still a lot better than Texas or the south.
Nah, the progressive states still have buildings with terrible heating and cooling efficiency, very little new construction, and difficult retrofits (in New York historic districts, windows must slide or look like they slide – tilt-and-turn windows are not traditional in the US and therefore illegal in such districts). For example, you may have seen that there’s a push among some American environmentalists to replace gas stoves with cleaner electric stoves; well, in nearly the entire US, the vast majority of stoves are electric, the exceptions being the Northeast and California.
And the part where the American grid is decarbonizing thanks to the death of coal is one reason I avoid using numbers from the 2000s. It’s the same thing in the UK and Germany (except in Germany the few nuclear plants have closed and this drives the Anglos even more insane than the fact that France hasn’t switched to English as its official language).
Those numbers on housing result mostly from the much greater new house builds in those parts. Retrofitting low-quality American housing–most new build–is a marginal proposition, unfortunately.
As to decarbonisation, sure, I said that Texas’ grid has decarbonised and it is partly due to wind and to gas displacing coal. But then the statistic we’re talking about here is not the source of electricity but the quantity being consumed. The south still has a huge way to go before it can counter the effect of their overconsumption of electricity (and as I said, transport is not even in this statistic).
Most houses aren’t in historic districts to be fair.
And as long as people are aware of the cost savings single family homes have presumably been improving their energy efficiency the whole time on cost grounds.
It’s probably worth getting to 1/2 of the 12000kWh we use for heating in the UK on cost/comfort grounds alone.
They make efficient double hung windows. That are acceptable in the tiny fraction of housing in historic districts. Where the historic district is concerned about it. Many aren’t, as long as it blends in. If you want to get crazy there is vacuum insulated glass.
If you are upgrading something in a non historic district, new windows is probably not the place to start. Insulation where it’s cheap to install, thermostat with a timer, sealing air leaks, insulation and insulation.
Any home with decent insulation and perhaps a verandah in hot areas with a heat pump/AC isn’t going to need masses of energy to heat or cool.
And certainly in Britain while London has the lowest emissions, the rich suburbs of the capital AKA South East England draws with the South West in joint second lowest. And the South West is significantly warmer in the winter due to the gulf stream – https://lginform.local.gov.uk/reports/lgastandard?mod-metric=53&mod-area=E12000008&mod-group=AllRegions_England&mod-type=namedComparisonGroup&mod-groupType=namedComparisonGroup
Presumably this is because as the South East is a rich area people are more likely to have done their loft insulation and cavity wall insulation – perhaps EPCs have been good for something.
Perhaps also the strongish rail network in the South East reduces people’s transport energy costs?
In the US, suburbs have much higher emissions than rural areas (cities are generally lowest of all)
“NIMBYs explicitly justify it by moralizing against …. concept of the commute”
Can you expand upon this?
Shouldn’t YIMBYs want shorter/less commute by building denser housing and more efficient transit?
It could shorten commutes, but building infill housing in high-demand neighborhoods of (say) New York is going to create more commuting to city center rather than less. This offends various NIMBYs, who wish development were more isotropic.
Ask people along the Flushing line or the Canarsie line how adding more housing is working out. Most NIMBYs are BANANAs who want everything to be the way they were when they figured out puberty. As long as they can get high speed internet, cell phone service, good Sichuan and off street parking.
Is the city adding new housing along these lines? LIC has a lot of housing growth but that’s not where the 7 is overcrowded; ridership growth on the L is less from new housing and more from gentrification along the L replacing residents who don’t work in Manhattan with residents who do.
There are videos from the real estate agents touting their new building here there and everywhere. Or the new gut rehab of a single family brownstone/brick into four one bedrooms with in-unit laundry and mini-split air conditioning. And granite countertops to open the take-out on.
This particular NIMBY vision is the “city of neighborhoods” one, where ideally, everyone would work, socialize and relax (~parks) within a short radius (both geographically and in travel time), thus basically all frequent (say, more than once per week) travel demand could be satisfied on foot or by bike (potentially including trams/buses/”jitneys”). Typical points of reference are the way cities were built before industrialization, “human scale”, and that this would be very comfortable and pleasant, with something something “communities”.
The YIMBY answer is that yes, for the most part it would indeed be very pleasant if it were feasible, but it would be completely unaffordable. The two primary drawbacks are that:
1) Unlike grocery stores, where people aren’t particularly attached to one and thus the overwhelming majority will shop at whichever one is closest (or on the way home, etc.), each person has some particular job in some particular geographic location, and jobs are not exchangeable. Trying to cut up a metropolis into de facto isolated towns, picking up the downtown office buildings (the same logic applies to many other forms of employment) and giving one office building to each town wouldn’t work — they would have to be company towns, so if one changed jobs, they would have to move to the town their new job was in, or take up jobs that were worse matches for their skills (from the other direction: companies would have to hire not the person who would be the best fit for the job, but whoever happened to live in town). Couples/families where the members worked in different towns would be ****ed. The envisioned arrangement would be unaffordable partly because people would be poorer because productivity would go down as companies had to become smaller and/or less specialized. (Actually, I submit that this kind of NIMBY usually doesn’t like big companies. They are not “human scale”.) Counterargument: home office.
2) While there are lots of people whose interest in other people is as unselective as their choice of grocery store, thus who could create a comfortable social group out of whatever random selection of neighbors they ended up in their “community”, others have less indiscriminate tastes — and a larger connected population also has benefits for various forms of entertainment. They can scale “outward” (big sportsball arenas) or “inward” (3.5th ed. D&D enthusiast group, no, there is a separate 3rd ed. D&D enthusiast group elsewhere in the city).
Can’t you have a more fine-grained approach that espouses high-density development along transit corridors, and re-wilded parkland/forest in the areas that aren’t effectively served by transit? Wouldn’t this achieve both goals: high transit usage AND allowing urban dwellers proximity to the natural environment, and therefore be preferable to urban development that just sprawls in all directions whether there is adequate transit or not?
To take a concrete example: wouldn’t the best solution for Tempelhofer Feld be for high-density housing (at a minimum to normal inner Berlin Blockrandbebauung densities) within, say 750m of the U6 and the Ringbahn (with a couple of in-fill stations on the latter), and then for the areas away from transit to be turned into proper parkland a la Volkspark Friedrichshain, rather than the desolate, unshaded grass field there is now?
Covering the whole thing with housing would create a lot of areas that aren’t effectively served by transit which would inevitably be car-dependent. I can’t see any viable way to extend any existing lines to serve Tempelhofer Feld, and building a brand new line just to serve that location would be a fairly gargantuan project, when Berlin has other priorities for transit construction.
Yes, it’s absolutely possible. And this is something that NIMBYs don’t support. They don’t support high-rise office towers in Alexanderplatz or Warschauer Straße. They give me excuses why it’s not possible to upzone the single-family areas on top of S-Bahn stations like Bornholmer Straße; in London, one urbanist ‘splained the Green Belt to me when I asked why the land use next to Cockfosters was golf courses, and tried telling me that a Finger Plan-like system could not succeed. With Tempelhofer Feld, the plans are already to only develop the margins of the park, with Ringbahn infill, and the white Greens of Neukölln and Kreuzberg still say that their park is being despoiled by (other) gentrifiers.
Yeah, a Finger Plan-style concept was what I was thinking of. Densify around transit, and leave as much of the city that is out of the ped-shed of transit stations to parkland or other non-residential usage. So why not advocate that in your original post, rather than attacking all urban parkland as racist NIMBYism that will cause the climate apocalypse?
And if I’m looking for someone to blame about anti high-rise sentiment in Alexanderplatz, it would probably be the moronic company whose careless construction error has knocked out one of the city’s most important U-Bahn lines for a year. It’s hard to conceive of a more catastrophic bungle than that, which has probably cost Berlin billions of euros in lost productivity.
Wait, that is why U2 is running as a single-track shuttle between Klosterstraße and Senefelderplatz? How come the NIMBYs never mentioned that and instead talked about how they were downsizing the building from 150 to 125 m?
(But then, the Amazon tower has done no such thing and I was still seeing NIMBY posters all over Friedrichshain.)
I don’t really think that the opposition to the amazon tower is NIMBYism. At least in the political circles where I’m active in Berlin, most don’t have a problem with tall buildings, but with the corporatization of places like Warschauer Straße. Once the RAW-Gelände gets developed it’ll become even more boring for non-office workers.
Where do they think Amazon should build – in Brandenburg near the Tesla gigafactory surrounded by parking? City center is what’s most accessible; that’s why jobs go there.
The point is to at least acknowledge that these are not empty places that magically turn into office blocks. If redevelopment continues this way, all of the cultural venues at e.g. Warschauer Straße will close or relocate, losing their own good transit access.
It’s something else to densify around places that are already dead (e.g. Potsdamer Platz) or to densify in a social way that includes affordable and convenient culture/entertainment for a place that’s known for just that.
They didn’t evict cultural venues to build the tower. I haven’t seen work on the local effects of new offices on rents, but the local effects of new housing on rents are always that it reduces them, especially in close proximity. The cultural venues may have to compete with new cultural venues offering services to new workers and new residents, but that’s not at all the same as displacement through high rents.
I’m not against preserving culturally significant public spaces or the concept of Green Belt in general.
European office groundscrapers and residential mansion blocks deliver effective urban densities. I’m not opposed to towers but I wouldn’t insist on them either, and personally I wouldn’t lose sleep over 150m vs 125m. Nothing wrong with pockets of Hong Kong style densities but overall I don’t see the economic need for that sort of density to become the norm in Europe. As long as no new suburban housing or out-of-town retail or office parks are still being built I’m happy.
Green Belts are fine in most instances. A break in urbanity after 15-20km radius ensures everyone has relatively good access to the countryside. London has a well developed spatial framework called the London Plan with Opportunity Areas identified to deliver, in my view, pretty ambitious housing targets. The hierarchy for developments is largely as follows – former industrial/dock/warehousing sites (Stratford, Nine Elms) -> big box supermarkets and retail parks (Tottenham Hale) -> dated post-war shopping centres (Barking Vicarage Field) -> postwar council estates (Elephant & Castle, Woodberry Downs) -> smaller car parking sites (Stanmore tube station car park). There’s pretty much a mature formula for every type and everything that ought to be identified is identified. Yes there is always opposition to development but things almost always eventually get through. The pace of development across London is such that you can afford the baseline level of planning prevarications.
When the Green Belt was drawn initially it did include areas around some tube stations. Frankly they are atypical cases there’s no point losing sleep over them. I’m no fan of Golf Courses but the thing to do with golf courses is rewilding rather than building over them. The best asset around Cockfosters is Trent Park – nothing wrong with having a transit-accessible high quality park benefiting thousands of residents. As things stand Cockfosters and Oakwood car parks are earmarked high-density housing developments anyway. Yes there are the usual political shenanigans but they’ll eventually go through.
There are plenty of densification opportunities in places like Potters Bar, Hatfield and Welwyn, and these things are happening systematically across the Home Counties. Best examples are places like Slough, Maidenhead and Reading. No point in being overly fixated on Cockfosters.
This is something that Copenhagen did very well. It’s hard to retrofit into an existing city though.
The easiest way to retrofit improved landscaping within the city is to eliminate automobile parking and reduce motorist lanes on the streets, which not only provides more pedestrian friendly space, but space for surface tram, a policy Barcelona has embarked upon. NYC has plenty of fast taxi thruways that could be reduced to a miserable crawl, as tram blows by and pedestrians enjoy the arbor of shade trees.
Excellent article! First, there is crying need to look at the “Apartheid” issue from perspective of how new train lines are designed to favor rich institutions like universities at the expense of dedicated bus fare paying poor neighborhoods. In Boston, for example, I’m certain the standing room only commuter busses coming from immigrant worker rich Chelsea neighborhood subsidize the subway lines going toward university neighborhoods. Same sort of problem exists in St Louis, San Diego, and Los Angeles, where powerful institutions override the fare box and ridership commonsense because of a glamour around having fancy new rail transit system.
Regarding the western state city code department “housing infill” as way to solve housing crisis and increase urban density is really complex issue because adding more stick single house construction density, turning garages into bedrooms, within existing 1/4 acre parcel suburbs will increase car culture blight at the street level, where folks park cars on front lawns and in back yards, and is unlikely to help reach density level needed for rail transit options. It seems like hapless suburban death trap in west more likely requires redevelopment toward multi-story multi-use steel and concrete seismic resistant construction methods. Also, western USA property development in rural farm and forest habitat areas should place severe code limitations in new road construction and house development. Green belt restrictions CAN stop suburban sprawl into farm and wildlife habitat.
Last remark regarding mentioned Mojave NP restrictions on solar farms, should also view this as part of the complex statewide political water wars. This is actually a largely a clever political distraction caused by California governors and Diane Feinstein who promote saving desert habit while also destroying the more critical fisheries and waterfowl wetland habit of the San Francisco Bay Estuary. Folks from NYC and others East coast cities have to realize that every time they eat a garden salad, munch on almonds, fruits and other products imported from California and Florida, they are contributing to destruction of water resource habit where fish populations are collapsing. Urban imports of foodstuffs and other materials destroys habitat on global basis. So in this sense, urban tree planting to produce shade for pedestrians and restoration of New Jersey wetland habitat is not really bad idea if it does raise urban folk awareness of habitats farther away, causing them eat from potted plants on the balcony and more carefully recycle their wastes.
” I’m certain the standing room only commuter busses coming from immigrant worker rich Chelsea neighborhood subsidize the subway lines going toward university neighborhoods”
I’m not certain. Rail has lower operating costs per passenger than buses, because more passengers travel in a single vehicle. Rail is more expensive to build, but the Boston lines have been around for a century and don’t need to be built any more. Both rail and bus subsidize each other in the sense of making the network more useful and thus encouraging ridership on all lines in the network.
““housing infill” as way to solve housing crisis and increase urban density is really complex issue ”
No it’s not. It is easy to double a neighborhood’s density by putting in ADUs, row houses, etc without meaningfully affecting its height. Having a few more cars parked outside the front door is an insignificant issue.
I’m not arguing that existing Boston rail should be removed because I agree that rolling on rails is cheaper operationally than leaf spring suspension and pneumatic rubber tire. But, I’m quite certain these old standing room only busses that charge $2- for two mile trip to get over no pedestrians allowed Tobin Bridge turn a handsome profit that subsidizes the improvements of stations and rail improvements in wealthier neighborhoods in town. Many of these folks BTW provide cheap hotel housing keeping and Hay Market restaurant labor in city center.
Ah, but this is America. It’s never “a few more cars”; even people who don’t know the make and model of their car insist that they must have one to make any trip that could, by distance, be done by cycling/transit (regardless of whether or not cycling infra/transit exists to make that trip). Of course, this ignores the problem, diminishing though it is in some places, of parking mandates.
I’d like to point out, too, that for at least a lot of “left-NIMBYs” here in the Portland (OR) area, low housing density is categorically never the issue. Because, you see, de facto only rich people live in dense or tall housing, and rich people are de facto the problem every time, even when we very much to need to get our money back from them and circulate in the economy. I’m very far from defending the wealthy, but constructing your argument such that even insofar as wealth is representative of economic activity and urban vitality it’s unacceptable, is a great way to find yourself accidentally anti-urban.
And yet, there’s where a lot of the nominally leftist forces that should be pro-urban, pro-density, pro-transit, end up anti-urban and pro-car, and so any attempt to add to housing stock is just read as “pro-developer”, instead of pro-development. I’ve had that argument about the MAX made to me, explicitly: that it was “pro-developer”…never mind that if that’d been so, you’d have expected a lot more intensive development around the stations in the succeeding decades, instead of the small handful of TODs there are. Middling-to-poor quality of American rail transit projects notwithstanding, rail–in particular–has the “for rich people” sheen that seems to lead people to think that it’s an expensive mode made just for expensive people, instead of the resource-efficient catalyst for broader, more equitable economic development that it could be if so many of these “left NIMBYs” would let development happen organically via market pressures for REdevelopment.
I understand that affordability requirements are supposed to be the cludge that ensures displacement doesn’t happen, but the correct direction to let things move is housing abundance built around transit abundance. The alternative has been just a blip above nothing for decades.
I’m not sure I understand your point. My reference was less to Portland and more about California where suburban zoning restricts are being altered to “infill” within cities rather than expand new development into farmland and open space. In concept, infill is good idea to raise density, but like you point out the love affair with cars won’t end unless stick construction apartments and post WW2 Cracker Jack junky houses are removed and replaced with larger multi-use buildings designed to last longer than 99 years. Yes, best place is in city center and along new rail thruways ans around transit stations. My guess is battery powered transit vans running shuttle through neighborhoods to ferry passengers to station can become very cheap, and can be paid for by private motorist taxes. So, the stations can rent limited parking built below the tracks, and begin infill and increased ridership by parking restrictions in neighborhoods. Then, city condemns certain overly worn or bank foreclosed stick houses so that multi-use high rise (about 8 stories) buildings begin to raise density but also services within walking distance of remaining suburban properties. Much of this can be paid for by ICE motorist fuel taxes, parking permits, garage access fees, etc.
My point is that you lose these people here: “…houses are removed and replaced with larger multi-use buildings designed to last longer than 99 years”. Once built, nothing can be changed, even buildings that aren’t meant to last very long; certainly not residential buildings, at least. Talking with left-NIMBYs, you learn very quickly that they have no interest in the actual efficient utilization of resources in creating urban forms that the “left” might incline you to believe they would.
Essentially, you’re being too practical about the discussion; NIMBYs of all stripes are inherently ideological, and the ideology is fundamentally anti-urban, anti-development, and anti-change. The fact that what’s being preserved is–by design–intended to be disposable, and of low-enough density that it couldn’t be replicated for everyone without comprehensive environmental destruction even just the first time around is irrelevant. SOME people SOMEwhere will be hurt even a little bit, and if preventing that initial hurt causes even greater pain further down the line, so be it.
Those are the people you’re arguing with.
“Hey, I’m not ideological. I oppose (re)development because, well, four decades ago, when the new highways created a glut of land I bought some for cheap, and since the expansion stopped, this unintended speculative investment turned out to appreciate handsomely. But my land is even today kind of in the outer ring of suburbia. Demand for it is heavily bolstered by the illegality of building densely in the inner ring suburbia. Given that I intend to eventually sell my land for a good price, it is in my interest to keep up the artificial shortage of buildable land.”
— A pragmatical NIMBY
It might be a surprise, but “buildings designed to last longer than 99 years” also loses me, a YIMBY. Buildings are just a piece of fixed capital equipment that produce the actual valuable thing, the controlled indoor environment. Surely, in the case of any manufactured good, it would be immediately obvious that technology, customer demands, competitor products, etc. change somewhat rapidly, thus it would be madness to (over)design a production line to be able to keep churning out the same product, unchanged, for a hundred years. It may not be immediately obvious, but the same is true of housing, or offices. A hundred years ago, apartment blocks with one bathroom per floor, shared between the multiple units on that floor were not uncommon (albeit no longer cutting edge). Today, at least in detached single-unit houses it is common to have multiple bathrooms in a single unit. A hundred years ago, close to city centers rooming houses were deliberately built. Later, they were outlawed, but nowadays the concept is becoming fashionable again under the name of microapartments, and might as a result become legal to build once again. Ventilation was designed for a high airflow (for health and comfort, given a lack of cooling, and the indoor emissions of various gas-powered equipment), then for low airflow (energy conservation), then possibly for high airflow again (after Covid). What sorts of appliances would go in a kitchen changed drastically, and with them, the popularity of small apartments having a kitchen of their own — as opposed to relying on nearby industrial kitchens (restaurant/cafeteria, takeout, nowadays delivery) — going back and forth. Cutting-edge offices used to have pneumatic letter-sending pipework.
Given the above, I would suggest that it is reasonable to expect that buildings should be expected to see various degrees of interior remodeling somewhat frequently. (Minor remodeling perhaps every 15-30 years, extensive remodeling touching the “services” (HVAC, plumbing, electricity, etc.) perhaps half as often?) At which point, designing to preserve the loadbearing structure… potentially ends up being a modest saving, potentially a constraint on flexibility or an additional expense. The choice here is not obvious to me, so if a designer chooses to design an “inflexible” building (with clear designations for its internal spaces, separated by loadbearing walls) for a, say, 60 year lifecycle, I have not a word of complaint. 30 years, I might raise an eyebrow, but I would expect them to have a convincing justification.
This principle particularly applies to a building that is explicitly designed to be multi-use. If you already know that retail, light industry, office, studio/microapartment, and units suitable for (larger) families have sufficiently different requirements that they should be tracked as separate land (floorspace?) uses, surely it is obvious that nobody will be able to correctly predict their relative proportions decades into the future. Perhaps there will be a net demand to subdivide larger units into studios, or the exact opposite.
As a further point, how can you possibly know that any particular number of stories will be appropriate more than half a century into the future? Even if everyone does their projections correctly, the area may either vastly exceed expectations (SFBA, London-Docklands), turn into the equivalent of a rustbelt town, or experience a transportation-induced land glut. In the former case, it is entirely justified to tear down 50-year buildings so that something significantly taller can be built in their place; in the latter cases, the building will stay there, but the marginal expense in making them as tall as they are will have been wasted for the duration they stay up.
Somehow the real estate developer ended as the most evil business person of them all in certain left learning circles in the United States. Not really sure how this happened. And yes, a lot of left leaning transit activists see transit as a social service rather than a method of getting people from place a to place b. They romanticize the bus.
Somehow developers are seen as bad guys?wow! Developers are able to manipulate system to dodge popular existing resident malcontent with project plans they push through government agencies for poorly conceived projects that shouldn’t be done. This isn’t a liberal vs conservative thing all all, but is NIMBYism by existing residents. But often residents are right because projects get pushed through without full public evaluation. While everybody is busy working during midday, unable to take off time without pay to attend and defend their own interests, developer paid consultants schedule meetings and pressure planning board members to expedite high profit margin low quality projects that will often burden additional tax increases for police and fire, impose some flood control risk, highway traffic nuisance, parking density problem, etc on existing residents. Then too after board extracts contractor concession for project that adds a greenway pedestrian path or bicycle lane, money runs out on this idea or later developer files civil litigation to undo the agreement.
Left-leaning activists in the US only romanticize the bus in opposition to rail in Los Angeles, and apparently it’s because the Bus Riders’ Union is ideologically Maoist and accelerationist; elsewhere, bus-good-train-bad is the domain of economists who hate public-sector services and road advocates who hate transportation that doesn’t use roads. There’s a separate center-left-ish trend of telling people to learn to love the bus, usually in connection with the idea that 15-minute frequencies with untimed transfers are good enough, but it’s not the same as what we’re talking about.
Alon–as native Californian I can assure you that regional folks related to Kevin McCarthy killed CA high speed rail program despite voters twice affirming desire to built it. Progressive leftists like me only see bus as inferior substitute for rail because busses get stuck in private motorist traffic and stop lights. There is a problem of higher cost for building long rail lines through low density stick construction suburbs. There is also problem high density urban areas like NYC that impose sight unseen, with very poor regulation oversight, on wildlife habitats and indigenous tribal regions globally as export agriculture is basically modern plantation economy on steroids. Wyoming still exports by rail open hopper car coal to burn in east coast power plants so electric rail transit can function, right? Exporting trash on barges to who-knows-where, and “recyclable” materials to Ohio by truck are also issues cities have to better regulate and ideally reckon with on local basis. Right wing prefer to just turn a blind eye to this stuff while California lefts try to figure a tech solution.
This is just another example of how “climate bros” sacrifice the well-being of Black and Brown communities for the sake of reducing carbon emissions. What you are calling for is paving over and redeveloping traditionally marginalized frontline communities to satisfies the white middle class and their guilt over how they have exploited the developing world. There is no question that marginalized Black bodies will bear the brunt of this massive urban real estate scheme. Instead, we need an approach that decenters emissions and places equity at the forefront.
No, what I’m calling for, with a specific example, is developing over a treeless parade in a majority-white area; Neukölln is about 50% people of color (and getting less white every year), and it’s notable how anti-gentrification advocacy there is entirely white and racially oblivious. The squats are likewise entirely white – I’ve never seen a person of color come into or out of Køpi and a friend who socializes there (or used to) complained to me about how white that space is.
In contrast, the best place in inner Berlin to look for a diverse building is those new market-rate buildings, ones that academic papers often berate as bringing suburban capitalistic values to the city and gentrifying its more moral inhabitants out. One such development, near Kollwitzplatz, was singled out in one such paper for marketing itself as offering quiet from city noise, and then when I visited a few months ago I looked at the names on the buildings and about 25% of them were non-European (and my building is 33%); Berlin writ large is around 20% POC.
I don’t know anything about Berlin, but I assure you that Black and Brown neighborhoods in the United States are at risk of displacement because yuppies want to colonize the city and live out their dreams there. Look at mass displacement in places like Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, West Philadelphia, Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, and Midtown Detroit. This displacement is inherently violent as the new arrivals call the police on longtime residents. Police are also known to target these communities to make them “safe” for gentrification. These communities should be allowed to decide their own destinies, not real estate developers or outsiders.
As for your example in Berlin, how many of the POC are Asians or white-adjacent Latinos?
There’s no Asian model minority myth here. The POC are mostly from MENA, and I’m not even counting Latin Americans as POC in Europe since nobody treats them as nonwhite.
If you want to stop gentrification, support building new housing in wealthy white neighborhoods. Yeesh.
It’s insane that you are creating an alliance with the very landlords who are driving up rent while being opposed to new housing themselves.
The normal “laws” of supply and demand don’t apply here because the wealthy can just keep buying housing units as investments. They’re just going to buy it all and keep buying units in the city. We need housing that the Black and Brown working class can actually afford — we need affordability requirements.
Investments most definitely follow supply and demand. The way you make money off an investment is by renting it out. It doesn’t matter if a housing unit is owner occupied or rented out – either way the same number of people are living in it. In fact rental units are more accessible to low-income people because there are no mortgage requirements, and because a person can live in them for a short period and then move elsewhere if their circumstances or needs change.
Again, this is not true. Investors are happy to hold on to empty units to drive up the price, or just to store value. Lots of empty luxury units in Manhattan and the centers of other US cities. Try walking around at night and see how many windows are dark.
In the ultra premium space, such as the Shard, this does appear to happen.
That said there’s little evidence of it further down the food chain.
So argue for housing in place, public housing, subsidized rents, etc. All you’re doing by relentless opposing new development is further enriching the very landlords making money off the backs of those same poor POCs by depriving them of alternative places to live, all while you drive up those landlords’ wealth by making their urban property proportionately more rare; never even mind the climate damage of inducing auto-dependent sprawl, the proportionately larger burden of transportation costs that car ownership places on poorer people, and since we’re talking about it, that the impacts of climate change will fall most heavily on poor POC in developing nations.
You are not helping who you think you are; you are making their situation worse; redevelopment for new housing is not the same as demolishing homes for highways; enhancing urban vitality by concentrating economic activity by higher density is what has always, for all of history, made cities work.It also helps the working class because they have access to more employers, who at a certain point realize they have to compete for workers, not the other way around, and so must offer better pay/working conditions.
Cities have always been the friend of working people and every oppressed group of every color. You only hurt those same people by making cities house fewer of us.
@Ernest Tufft, these are the people I was telling you about. No concept at all of how this all actually works out in practice, but plenty enough passion to get in the way. Every wealthy NIMBY’s best ally is a poor NIMBY who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
> I assure you that Black and Brown neighborhoods in the United States are at risk of displacement because yuppies want to colonize the city and live out their dreams there.
My family is from northern Texas and Oklahoma, places where there are no jobs, places which even now are passing laws designed to target people like me and jail us or worse, and whipping up the public in hysteria to attack us in the streets. Are you really claiming it is morally wrong for me to have left those places and come to a place where I’m less of a target of state and societal violence, and can live a modest life within a 45-minute commute from my job? (I assure you I’d be closer, except *I* can’t afford that, either.)
> Look at mass displacement in places like Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, West Philadelphia, Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, and Midtown Detroit.
Mass displacement which happens because we don’t build enough new places to live in Williamsburg, Old City, West Hollywood, and the Gold Coast. Those wealthy neighborhoods have not been doing their share of growing to accommodate increased population, and that’s a travesty, because it does put pressure on historically marginalized communities who live where the rents are cheaper. But that’s *exactly* what this post was about: the people in *those* communities, too, who refuse to accept that population growth has to be accommodated. That everywhere needs to grow, and grow more dense, or people are going to get displaced.
> These communities should be allowed to decide their own destinies, not real estate developers or outsiders.
How do you decide who’s an “outsider”? How long does someone have to live in a community before having a voice in that destiny? Are you planning to establish restrictive covenants on land transfers? Organize mass violence to harass, intimidate, attack the newcomers? That’s not a legacy that anyone can embrace with a clean conscience. But absent those things–or honestly, even in the presence of them–community turnover is inevitable. If the newcomers have money, someone will sell or rent to them, whether you build new places or no.
So long as job growth exceeds housing growth, outsiders–some of them even Black and Brown themselves–will come to the cities and take those jobs, and the demand for housing will increase. The newcomers will have to live somewhere. Communities that build new housing will be able to absorb some of the influx with less displacement. Communities that don’t will see even more displacement–force the newcomers to compete for the existing stock, and the rent squeeze will be even worse. The only winner there is the landlord.
people are going to get displaced.
Like what happened when their grandparents displaced the people who displaced the people who bought the house when it was new. Who displaced the farmers who had been there earlier who displaced the indigenous people living quite happily in a lightly managed environment. Neighborhoods change over time.
Bring all the buildings in a neighborhood into a single enormous housing cooperative, membership in which is gained by inheritance or by passing an exam of cultural identification with the neighborhood. Some units are set aside for the purpose of renting them to outsiders, but they cannot buy units or land.
We tried that in the past and made it illegal. You let Ethnicwick restrict who can live there, the suburban Village of Lilywhite can restrict it to white Protestants.
That’s what drives me nuts about this particular sect of NIMBYs: the total lack of self-awareness. Yes, you are oppressed; no, you’re not the only ones, and yes you are capable of being the oppressors, particularly if you identify with the interests (like keeping housing scarce) of those oppressing you. The only way to successfully decommodify housing is to make supply of it so abundant in places where there are good jobs and social services–not in abandoned sections of Detroit or empty parts of Nebraska. They’re just so out of touch with the bigger picture.
As adirondacker says, some people will be displaced by development; the point is to make that a non-issue by ensuring those people have somewhere else–in good quality housing, near where they currently are–to go. Opposing all development where you are is a fantastic way to keep poor POCs rent-burdened in crappy little units that would’ve been redeveloped decades ago in more functional housing markets. People have been opposing new development for decades already; why these “left-NIMBYs” think THEIR particular brand of NIMBYism is going to create different, better outcomes compared to our current situation is beyond me.
Yes. I wonder whether that would actually be a good idea. If the reason many people are NIMBYs is because they want to be sure that their neighbors are similar to them, be that in terms of culture (“no rednecks, thank you”) or race, then giving them a more direct means to achieve their desired end implies that they would be less NIMBY and the housing market would for the most part be less broken and unaffordable. Small, or studio, or microapartment densification/infill wouldn’t be threatening to the residents of Liliwhyte if they could know that they would be occupied by, dunno, millennials who share their particular favor of politics.
(In naively optimistic theory, something similar could be said about Ethnickwick. If they could keep out the gentrifiers without violence or just generally turning the place into such a dump that almost all gentrifiers avoid it, then supposedly they would do that instead of violence and general dumpiness. Of course, this explanation is extremely normative; I dislike dumpiness because I’m middle-class a.k.a. bourgeois, but going by what economists call “revealed preference”, in lumpenproletarian culture they like dumpiness, so it’s narrow-minded of me to project my preferences onto them.) If people will achieve their classist/racist/etc. goals by whatever means are available, then making less destructive means available to them is simply good overall.
Personally I consider the best counterargument to be “creating large, ideologically/socially motivated landowners that are intrinsically averse to transactions due to their internal structure (internal politics), would add a lot of friction to the land market under their ownership, potentially slowing down construction even more and thus making all the existing problems worse”.
Everybody can’t live on Central Park West. Make Detroit less yucky more people will settle for it instead of Central Park West.
@Basil Marte: “If people will achieve their classist/racist/etc. goals by whatever means are available, then making less destructive means available to them is simply good overall”
….I mean, in theory, sure, but generally speaking, the same ideologies that say “keep our community Ethnic/Class/Race” tend to be antifeminist, and so as women lose their reproductive rights, more children are born, more space is needed…so on so forth. I admit this generalization is hard to substantiate, but consider the counterfactual: that urban areas which tend to be the least Ethnic/Class/Race have lower birth rates. Once again, almost certain that there are other factors involved in this, but at least under the current socioeconomic system, it’s pretty consistent across the world; development is the antidote to overpopulation, and development and urbanization are so coincidental that they’re almost synonymous.
The long game should be to subvert by positive, undeniable example the idea that ethnic/class/race distinctions have any actual relevance to global human flourishing, and that the other qualities we should be judging each other on are best supported/brought out by having basic material needs–e.g., housing–met easily. Letting people stay in their Ethnic/Class/Race subdivisions, literal or figurative, has not made for a peaceful human history so far.
In basically every rich and middle-income country today, natalism is just a fantasy. There are some subcultures with high birthrates, but at macro scale the outcome of an anti-feminist society is that some women withdraw from childbirth and others from the workforce, so birthrates are low – look at Japan and South Korea, or for that matter India outside a few shrinking pockets of illiteracy like Bihar.
(The number of American Christian natalists I’ve seen, out of the many I encountered through being mutuals with Lyman Stone back when I used Twitter, who had anything to say about how Israel has stable and above-replacement birthrates, is zero. I suspect the issue is that American Christians are not educated in the history of the Jews, so they say stupid things about it that they’re then forced to apologize for in order to maintain good standing in the coalition; Lyman, who otherwise has a very good understanding of medieval history, somehow thought the Blood Libel was that Jews were engaging in abortion rather than that they were kidnapping Christian children.)
Liberation comes from decommodifying housing by taking it off the market. That means building tons of social housing units, establishing community land trusts, and updating rent regulations. I know economists hate rent control and rent stabilization, but it’s allowed one million low-income renters to stay in New York despite intense pressure from the market. Even the new “affordable” units aren’t actually affordable to Single moms, or those making $10,000 a year. Stable housing is a human right. People deserve to raise their families in a stable environment without constant cycles of displacement.
Economists, heh. Some paid for by those who benefit from free-for-all on rents and housing costs. Or enamoured by conventional thinking on housing policies that have been shown repeatedly to be deeply flawed, eg. leading directly to the GFC and likely the next one too.
As for “job” growth, why does New York need to import yuppies instead of properly the thousands of underemployed Black and Brown youth who were raised there?
Why does Engulf&Devour need to be in New York ( or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago or…. ) why can’t they be in Cincinnati?
But then, Japan and South Korea are both very urbanized countries, and their cultures are even more dominated by their largest cities, helping to create a more unified, urban national culture. Viz a vis birth rates, I’d point out that in both cases, what’s helping to hold back babies is a lack of economic reform, resulting in dramatic and chronic slowdowns in expected income growth. Additionally, race and ethnicity are barely a factor in these countries; class is the predominant social variable. That’s a built in bonus to development: you can generally assume that someone living in the same neighborhood/complex/building as you will have a comparable level of income, so given that race/ethnicity aren’t a variable in most of East Asia, you have no “those people” to worry about moving in next door; they don’t exist/can’t afford to.
Only rural pockets of the U.S. are quite as homogeneous. Cultures vary between our most remote-but-still-white rural areas and our most-mixed-but-still-predominantly-white areas. We don’t have the same binary for women of domestic servitude or a working life as the Tigers do; each is more likely in rural or urban areas, respectively (1), logically enough. Women, in particular, have always flocked to cities for work and independence. Even if there’s no increase in the number of additional children that are born in ethnic enclaves specifically due to being ethnic enclaves, their populations can continue to grow, in numbers of enclaves if not always in size, as people–men and women both–may move from those rural, homogeneous places–where a lot more women still have more children–to urban, heterogeneous places where they don’t, while still wanting not to see non-white people around. Allowing people to keep their lower-density Ethnicwicks is just a good way to create dysfunctional (in part because fundamentally non-urban people move to urban areas for work without losing their rural-sized personal space bubbles, in addition to their discomfort with diversity) urban areas that end up either dissolving or tearing themselves apart; see America of the past century.
(1) https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/a_glance_at_the_age.html
@Luke
“generally speaking, the same ideologies that say “keep our community Ethnic/Class/Race” tend to be antifeminist, and so as women lose their reproductive rights, more children are born […] there are other factors involved in this”
In a modern context (not Ceaucescu’s Romania), I think the “other factors” explain basically the entire effect. The men and women who end up with above-median-size families simply wanted to have more children; to the extent they succeed, they (particularly focusing on the women) don’t experience this as a loss of reproductive self-determination. And my impression is that the actual factors explaining changes in birth rates — primarily, ones reducing inconvenient logistical friction in raising children — operate fairly proportionately across ideologies and other categories. If raising children to the standard the potential parents’ peers consider adequate is less onerous and financially costly, somehow far fewer people reach the conclusion that they shouldn’t have children for the sake of combating climate change. Urbanization can have effects in both directions: as you note, historically it tended to reduce birth rates (Iran 1983 (6.5) -> 2000 (2.0)), but improving the situation in some currently deeply screwed up cities (bringing prices down so that the additional bedroom the prospective parents treat as a precondition isn’t ruinously expensive, taming traffic so that low-teens can move without their parents chaperoning (or in the suburbs, chauffeuring) them, etc.) could in those locations increase birth rates from their current lows.
Separately, there is the matter of right-populist governments deliberately playing the mustache-twirling cartoon villain tying transition/abortion/etc. legality to the train tracks. This does, unfortunately, have a small demographic effect, but that effect is not the point; they would do the same sort of thing if the culture war were about whether to be pro-/anti-vampire. (Some of them, like Fidesz, do actually want to increase birthrates. The means they intend for this purpose are a wide variety of surprisingly hefty monetary benefits. Unfortunately, most of them are not particularly well thought out.)
“The long game should be to subvert by positive, undeniable example the idea that ethnic/class/race distinctions have any actual relevance to global human flourishing, and that the other qualities we should be judging each other on are best supported/brought out by having basic material needs–e.g., housing–met easily. Letting people stay in their Ethnic/Class/Race subdivisions, literal or figurative, has not made for a peaceful human history so far.”
I support the abundance agenda for other reasons (increases flourishing in general), but I don’t think that it would lead to this particular outcome. Part of it is that many people want to identify with some sort of subculture or such group, and in fact complain loudly about the “empty” or “impersonal” or “soulless” society of today. (I think this is part of the motivation behind the “lots of disconnected neighborhoods” vision.) They create such divisions out of thin air fairly often, in addition to latching onto preexisting ones. An even worse part is that some features of the divisions actually matter for real-world purposes. To avoid controversial examples: to the extent some professions (say, medical doctors) develop a subculture around themselves, those tend to include not just random in-jokes but also bits pragmatically useful for doing the job well. While some of these are explicitly taught during formal training, others are not. However, children raised by a parent in the profession will usually absorb parts of the culture, thus in effect completing some of the goals of later on-the-job training/acclimatization ahead of schedule. The same might also give them a leg up during formal training; they already have some inkling of the big picture, thus they can connect new pieces more easily than an “outsider” student. This is part of the reason why a hilariously disproportionate number of medical doctors have at least one parent who is a medical doctor.
Yes, this is what’s happening in LA metro rail. Rental units have less political power than property ownership. The answer to some of this is mixed affluence multi-use buildings, instead of uniform affluent “projects” along the rail line and around stations. If wealthier folks live in the view apartments of these high rise buildings, and employment awaits in ground floor service and retail, the middle level “rent control” rental apartments ensure labor supply who can walk to work, and which get benefits of those tenants and owners above them who are determined to keep building clean and in good repair. Hopefully, this becomes happy multi-cultural neighborhood where folks learn to care for each other.
Los Angeles, specifically, is in a weird spot because of how bad its public transit is. The average incomes of people who ride the trains are pretty low, and the average incomes of people who ride the buses are extremely low, to the point that anything that reduces a place’s poverty and exclusion also reduces transit ridership – whether it uplifts the actual residents or displaces them (in New York and San Francisco, gentrification raises transit ridership because the gentrifiers work in city center and take the train; in Los Angeles it has the opposite effect because the job centralization effect is smaller than the income effect).
And the thing about American gentrification is that there really is no such thing as a happy multicultural neighborhood where people care for one another. In New York, if you see a mixed census tract, it’s because it straddles a hard color line (when I lived there, it was West 123rd Street; it’s moved north since). Schools remain sharply segregated, and parents petition for ways to keep them so – New York has examples of separate schools set up in the same school zone or even the same building.
Here there’s more spatial integration but not necessarily social integration. Neukölln has white spaces, e.g. every notable antifa community space (B-Lage, K-Fetisch, squatter spaces, etc.); Muslim spaces, e.g. shisha/hookah bars; and very few crosshatched ones, e.g. Azzam. Racially integrated spaces in Berlin are notable for how delocalized they are – as I said to Ramona, the gentrifiers here are more diverse than the people we’re replacing, and one hallmark of the gentrifier is identifying with the city more than the neighborhood. Schools don’t have the same push for racial segregation as in the US, but there’s class segregation and middle-class parents fight to keep it that way (CDU specifically ran on this in the 2021 Berlin election).
Car ownership in California transcends to lowest income levels because many homeless live in their cars, or park car next to tent. But, originally, yes, LA bus transit was created by automakers for those who couldn’t afford a car, or were disabled and unable to drive a car. In my humble observation though the working class commuters who ride bus are not same as those dysfunctional hobo homeless folks unable or unwilling to work, but tinker with fuel burning contraption. These are students and single women who figure out the transit system to commute routinely from lower price inland neighborhoods toward downtown or beach where labor jobs exist. While NYC and SF have larger proportion of higher wage workers on more rapid rail transit, these same type lower wage folks and students still make up significant portion if not majority of transit ridership. Making sure this larger ridership work force of cleaning ladies, hotel workers, low wage factory and warehouse workers, waiters, retail workers, students, get to where they work is probably more still important to aggregate macro economy efficiency on daily basis than the higher education worker.
Actually, reducing carbon emissions is very important for Black and Brown people. Numerous research studies by California Air Resources Board have shown the low income children and old folks living near freeways Ana along train tracks, airports, shipyards, smoke stack factories, petrochemical plants, etc suffer early death because of carbon emissions. They know exactly the sources of air pollution too because different fuel sources create different carbon molecules. So, air samples gathered by aircraft flying over neighborhoods can pin point who the polluters are. So, minorities get hit harder by climate change and benefit the most by carbon reduction.
This post is a reason why NIMBYism is really difficult to deal with politically. The NIMBY coalition is a near perfect Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. The activists who at least claim to be representing marginalized communities are the Baptists. The wealthy property owners that don’t want new development are the Bootleggers but, especially in areas like the Bay Area, have no issue using the Baptists as cover. There is no perfect solution to any issue. I’d also note that the Black-Brown coalition exists a lot more in the head space of activists than in related. Several months ago, high profile Latino politicians in Los Angeles were caught in a hot mic moment making fun of African-Americans, Jews, and Armenians while pondering how they can achieve more power for themselves.
No, the black-Hispanic coalition is way more of a thing; if anything, white Americans believe black-Hispanic relations are somewhat worse than black and Hispanic Americans do.
But again, I’m giving concrete examples of NIMBYism in a city where the NIMBYs are the sort of people who Don’t See Race and don’t mind how all of their spaces are 95-100% white in a city that’s 80% white. It’s not at all Baptists and Bootleggers; it’s people who feel mildly guilty about inherited housing wealth but who still view it as superior to working wealth – what do you mean, you work at an office job and don’t think going to boring meetings is the worst oppression ever?
Yes, NIMBYism exists on both the left and right. At the most basic level that NIMBYism is tribal – ‘I don’t want poor people moving in’ and ‘I don’t want rich people moving in’. You see that in England outside of London, where there is resistance to renewal of traditionally working class inner city areas – often low quality and low density post war council estates. Replacement housing has had a tendency to be suburban low-density because ‘housing should be for local people’ and ‘working class people aspire to having a house and a car’. There is suspicion and hostility towards young professionals living in city centre flats, but they were ‘tolerated’ as long as they didn’t spill over into ‘working class areas’.
Manchester’s housing market has recently started going through the roof, with ‘London types’ moving in. There is some consolation that the market is now so buoyant that economics are starting to trump politics. Things that are accepted wisdom in London are starting to be replicated in Manchester. Inner city retail parks are being turned into high density mixed use developments and old housing estate redevelopments are starting to take on London level densities. There are the usual opposition voices but common sense seems to eventually prevail. There were a couple of recent examples of Manchester City Council refusing developments at transport nodes (one of them replacing a supermarket car park) on grounds of lack of parking and ‘out of scale with the surrounding character’ only for the refusal to be overturned on appeal.
There is still some level of cultural aversion to agglomeration. A prominent northern MP – the Labour MP for Wigan, said she didn’t want Wigan to become a commuter town for people working in Manchester and she didn’t want Manchester to become a second London.
In any democracy there will be all sorts of voices. There’s no point trying to silence them – a robust and fair planning system that ensure NIMBYs don’t cause real damage but everything gets a hearing is probably as good a system as you can hope for, and I think you’ll have to accept that in a democracy certain things just won’t move at a pace they do in China but eventually things will get there. I think London is in that place, and mad as it sounds the rest of England is slowly getting there. How much is NIMBYism really a problem in places like Berlin, beyond the usual background level of noise? As a still typical continental European city it never really lost the pre-war density (English cities outside of London pursued much more aggressive deurbanisation and suburbanisation). Watching from afar, it seems that post-unification reconstruction has been going on at a fair pace and I don’t really see any examples of things can could be accused of being too low density.
Germany has the lowest housing growth rate in Northern Europe. (The UK is also very low.) The housing growth goes roughly where there is demand – while Germany overall builds around 3 housing units per 1,000 people per year, the main cities including Berlin build around 5 – but there just isn’t a lot of it; Stockholm County has averaged around 7 starting in 2014, and Ile-de-France has averaged about 7 as well (nearly all in the suburbs due to Hidalgo’s NIMBYism).
For someone who likes to imagine they base their conclusions on evidence, you sure come across as an econocratic old dog unable to learn new-urbanist new tricks. To me it seems a bit weird that you so hate Hidalgo and ignore all the socialist policies she (and predecessor Bertrand Delanöe) has introduced. Not just building new housing including lots of social housing (further below) but compulsory purchase of existing housing which is then rented out as permanently-affordable housing (not to mention the greening of Paris, bike lanes, removal of traffic etc). As Yonah Freemark has noted:
Hidalgo has recently increased the goal to 25% which is pretty remarkable for a prime city commonly perceived as over-gentrified. Here is Fergus O’Sullivan (in a now inaccessible piece in CityLab):
Hidalgo’s bona fides as a socialist seem beyond reproach. So it must be Levy who is out of step here, and he is. Levy is actually a Stalinist urban planner and won’t be happy until there are hi-rise monsters everywhere that housing demand exceeds supply! Never mind the destruction of Paris as everyone knows it, this would create a Stalinist paradise of affordable housing! This is a reversion to some of the policies from the 50s and, especially if it were to be truly affordable to the lowest incomes, would inevitably result in those hi-rise towers of dubious quality that infest the periphery of most big cities, eg. Nanterre Pablo Picasso where the latest riots started.
Not in central Paris of course because the NIMBYs successfully blocked them. Note however that Hidalgo would probably build such things if she could; however note too that the handful of hi-rise she can squeeze past the Parisian NIMBYs in the space between the Peripherique and the Paris border (Bercy-Charenton in the 12th and Duo Towers in the 13th; Project Triangle in 15th) won’t be providing much if any social or affordable housing. This latter turns out to be a universal law of hi-rise in places with high land values, ie. they are always at the premium end of the market and these economic forces are immutable. For an extreme demonstration look at London where all those shiny new glass hi-rise apartments never have any social housing and scant “affordable” housing (where affordable is defined as 80% of market rent, so you know, unaffordable in practice).
There’s also the Martin-Luther-King redevelopment of the old rail marshalling yards in Batignolles (behind Gare St Lazare in the 17th) which is not quite hi-rise, probably best called “mid-rise”, but whose almost-towers-in-park starchitect apartments are decidedly upmarket (price-wise at least, aesthetics is another thing); at least so far, because the original plan called for 3,500 new housing there. There are similar plans for the shabby La Chapelle area between the tracks leading to Gare du Nord/Gare de L’est.
If there was a Mayor Stalin-Levy, he could possibly forcibly build some hi-rise intended for social housing but almost certainly by destroying the very thing that most people, including low-income people, value in the first place. Low-income people may value these places mostly, perhaps some solely, for the jobs but you don’t get those jobs without a mixed social milieu: neither too wealthy (and non-dom) like London’s new hi-rise zones that are turning into soulless deserts at ground level, or the old social-sink hi-rise ghettos like Nanterre etc in the “banlieus”. The same effect can be seen in Manhattan.
Here is my summary of Freemark’s latest study (Table 2) of brownfield re-devo:
https://projections.pubpub.org/pub/3kq6u3x4/release/1
Metropolis on the water: Varieties of development logics along the Seine
by Yonah Freemark, Dec 20, 2019
Development………Year………..Area……..…Type ….Housing …..%Social
Front-de-Seine………..1970………….24Ha………hi-rise ….3,179 ………21%
Bercy-Rapée……………1978………….16Ha…………………….none ………NA
Citroén-Cevennes…1982-99……….42Ha…….Hauss…….2,500………54%
Bercy-Corb.Lach……..’88-97………..51Ha…….Hauss…….2,200………50%
Paris-Rive-Gauche….’95-present…130Ha…..Hauss*….7,5000…….50%
*“Haussmannian” is a somewhat simplistic shorthand for low-rise perimeter-block housing, which in pre-70s Paris produces up to 7 floors, or with modern low-ceilings, 7-10 floors.
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His points, summarized in the abstract below, are that the percentage of housing in these developments of prime and super-prime riverside developments comprising social/affordable housing has been increasing to about 50%. (Compared to approximately zero% in London’s equivalent developments).
*ie. Socialists beginning with Delanöe’s two terms followed by Hidalgo’s two terms.
My conclusion:
NIMBY, YIMBY …. I say Schmimby. I’m creating a new one:
HIMBY, Haussmannian In My Backyard.
The points are that this is proven to (1) produce some of the best urbanism in the world and (2) highest residential density in the world (only central Hong Kong and Manhattan equal or exceed it) and (3) without sacrificing a balanced social mix.
Most urbanists, including Freemark and O’Sullivan (and me) but not comrade Levy, would say that new HIMBY has been extraordinarily successful in Paris. It has provided a very significant fraction of social and truly affordable housing in one of the most prime living environments in the world. Whenever it is deviated from, like in London or in Batignolles or the towers in the 13th, either urbanism or density suffers, and often both, plus housing costs rise, often catastrophically. Another very significant flow-on from this recent urbanist history of Paris is that it has spread to the suburbs where the post-war horrorshow of hi-rise HLMs are being demolished and replaced with low-rise “Haussmannian” housing (that actually provides more housing that what was demolished while improving urbanism, and building TOD). The equivalent in London, namely about 90 social-housing estates, are also being demolished but so far–in Elephant & Castle’s Heygate Estate and Aylesbury Estate–no meaningful social or affordable housing is replacing the thousands being removed. Heygate’s 2,500 apartments are being ‘replaced’ with 75 apartments at “affordable” rents. That’s YIMBY in action.
Now, I don’t think there is any single hero in this. Afterall some of its origins lie in the Mayor Chirac era. A lot of it lies with Parisians themselves who overwhelmingly rejected the modern hi-rise experiments of the 60s-70s promoted by Pompidou. Neither the Front-de-Seine nor 13th hi-rises have been repeated. But I’m happy to consider Delanöe and Hidalgo as modern urbanist heroes (and Rive-Gauche has more social housing than all those earlier developments together). It is remarkable that Paris has been able to retain its essence while modernising and increasing its social/affordable housing, itself no minor factor in retaining its good urbanism. It’s too late for London or NYC to learn the lessons but not too late for Berlin or other cities facing development and housing pressures. In fact California’s SB827 is essentially this! The solution is HIMBY, not NIMBY or anything-goes-YIMBY.
Again with the he pronouns? This isn’t actually the Telegraph comment page (or way too many people at the Grauniad, but that’s a different story).
100,000 units in 18 years is about 5,000 a year, or 2/1,000. But these are not mostly recent construction in the city – housing growth in the last eight or so years has been more like 2,000 a year in Paris. The share of them that are said to be affordable is neither here nor there; the actual city of Paris, as opposed to the 15-minute fantasy of consumer theorists, is one in which the working class keeps leaving due to high rents. The immigrants who replace it are a mix of middle-class and working-class, and the latter are so reviled in France that Macron has just proposed to block social media as an anti-riot response, which he never did when the Le Pen voters were rioting against fuel taxes or vaccination or when all of white France rioted against the horrors of retirement at 64.
Hidalgo can call herself whatever she likes; the French socialists as a faction have a 40-year history of achieving nothing. Neither Mitterand’s program (like retirement at 60) nor its rollback in the last 15 years is visible in inequality statistics. France has the largest welfare state in the world, and the OECD’s highest government spending as a share of GDP, even higher than the Nordic countries; that it only has the same disposable income Gini as Germany, 0.3, while Scandinavia is at 0.26, tells me most of what I need to know about how seriously to take PS. Meanwhile, center-left parties in Northern Europe, where they have a track record of achieving things, are getting more and more YIMBY, as their way of showing why people under 40 should vote for them and not for the Greens. Germany is a laggard on this but SPD here is trying to be YIMBY, and Scholz even pledged to boost German housing production to 5/1,000, which boost has happened at approximately the same rate as his aid to Ukraine.
Fergus O’Sullivan’s takes on European urbanism are pretty bizarre at times. The issue is that English-language media in and about Europe is written by and for a specific group of people, in the same way that hipsters enjoy accusing other hipsters of being hipsters. One of the hallmarks of this group of people who read CityLab in Europe is that they try never to think about racism (because they themselves are a bit racist but don’t want to identify with the extreme right). Thus, sentiments that actual Germans express as “be careful of Turkish crime” or “you are the problem” or “actually 70% of Neukölln are German citizens so you’re the real racist for saying that I’m uncomfortable there because of the Middle Easterners” or “U8 has a lot of social problems” (all told to me in queer, soi-disant anti-fascist spaces) get airbrushed to some vague concern over gentrification. Again, it’s less CityLab and more a problem of the entirety of English-language media here – The Local is going to have the same problems and so does Politico; for better coverage, look for actually local media, in English translation if available like DW (or native French media – I think you’re still fluent?).
Pronouns, really?
Oh well, at least you didn’t just scream insults at me, so small mercies.
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I think you must realise your responses don’t really add up to much. Given the maturity of Paris it is fairly remarkable there has been any addition of new housing. (I know you know, but imagine imposing the Paris plan on inner London (≈5km radius circle) and think about how much social or affordable housing has been built in that circle in the last few decades. Even all that Nine Elms bling only just scrapes in, and it has zip affordable housing.) The 22% speaks for itself; and it is more credible than the London data on “affordable”.
I am more than aware of the Anglosphere press weirdness on France. It is true for the Guardian and three of their main writers are French! Agnès Poirier is the best of them but doesn’t write that often. (a new boy is that young American punk, Oliver Haynes?, who I also see on either France2 or France24? terrible) All commentators (on the rare cases they have comments turned on for such articles) who have lived there or have enough experience, make that point emphatically. Either it has been employment selection bias or those journos are tailoring their writing, or both. But on technical things like eco, science and urbanism I don’t think it is nearly so bad, but of course on that I am biased (though I claim it is evidence-based). I reckon Fergus O’S tends to get it about right, likewise Oliver Wainwright and maybe Owen Hatherley. And Yonah Freemark (is he French or have French family?). There are Brit writers who overcome this Anglo bias but can’t think of any Americans. OTOH I’m not so sure about the French MSM on the same things; and back-atcha, they tend to be very conservative and Hidalgo-haters.
In today’s GA (Guardian Australia). Note, they aren’t really promoting YIMBY but in fact HIMBY!
The problem is that they aren’t actually proposing HIMBY either, because 3-floor or even 4-floor buildings are not ‘Parisian’. I can even understand the YIMBYism, because those 3-floor apartments tend to be classic ‘six-packs’ which are pretty horrible. There has been a slight resistance to hi-rise due to the number of defects revealed in the past few years; structural issues have resulted in some scares, eg. evacuation of the 36-floor Opal Tower in Sydney. So we’re stuck in this awkward middle zone.
It is easy to see why these Australian NIMBYs are talking about 3-4 floor buildings. It is that they can better integrate into the existing low SFH suburban profile. The problem is that it produces a rather mixed bag which can be seen throughout the Australian (and American) suburban dreariness. It really doesn’t produce high enough density to achieve good urbanism or to create a genuine TOD (as a local centre with services and employment etc). Plus those six-packs tend to have lower-SES residents, often because they are not owner-occupied. To build proper HIMBY would require entire zones (of 1-2km radius) around transport nodes to be rezoned, then any (re)building to be mandated, ie. an actual Haussmannian strategy and it is extremely difficult to implement in the Anglosphere. Where greenfield/brownfield TODs are being created, like Green Square just north of the airport in Sydney, they are old industrial zones and are being done to the usual developer’s desires of mixed hi-rise. It will be a decade or more before we can judge them but I’d say it is extremely unlikely these will be anything like the hi-density, much desired inner-city zones like Potts Point (aka Kings Cross) in Sydney. The same is true for the UK, where a huge opportunity in Stratford, East London (2012 Olympic site) is being squandered; apparently Boris as mayor directly intervened to destroy the then plan for 8-10 floor Euro-blocks to the usual shit, expensive hi-rise or modern terraces with zero affordable housing.
It’s gotta be HIMBY.
If anyone knows about quality of life vs high rise/pedestrian open space density, I’d like to know the sources. It seems like 3-4 floor height with retail commercial at ground floor and 2-3 floors of residential just isn’t sustainable for the ground floor retail. On the other hand, 30-50 story buildings with bottom two floors retail results in too much pedestrian congestion on street level, even if pedestrian only space is provided. Of course the density of the high rise is also a factor, where building might be surrounded by lower altitude structures so as to average out street level density. Some green space for fresh air to brain of idiot urban dweller unaware of real planet habitat, but density enough to sustain underground rail seems like the goal adequate enough to eliminate destructive suburban sprawl. But, my own view, a suburban Californian who now loves living in Girona, Spain, is that NYC Manhattan pedestrian and density at street level is too great, it’s very difficult to feed and supply the city, and that the solution to improve human habitat is expansion of pedestrian space into car lanes of the streets and boulevards, so that only one or two lanes remain for box truck delivery, bus, and taxi.
On the one hand, Euroblock (mid-rise block-perimeter, which is known by many names — in Paris, Hausmannian, in Berlin, Blockrandbebauung) construction is indeed often in many ways a better solution for the particular problem than the alternatives on offer. (Good density, decently low construction cost, unlikely for the costs to blow out, unlikely for architects/etc. to badly mess up functional livability.) Building these as suburban TOD for newly improved/constructed transit is as reliable a tool as it gets.
On the other hand, for overall affordability, quantity is of central importance. If you have, dunno, red cubes and blue balls that you want to match 1:1, but you have many more red cubes than blue balls, then rearranging the order of the red cubes does nothing about the situation that you have fewer blue balls than red cubes. If people are queueing in front of shops because there is rationing for a good, then bringing up some people from the rear of the queue, so that they don’t have to wait for as long and so that they get in before the shop runs out of stock, increases the waiting time of everyone in the “jumped over” part of the queue (with no difference in the sum total time that everyone as a whole waited for) and makes someone who would have received the last item instead leave empty-handed.
Given the above, it should be clear why “compulsory purchase of existing housing which is then rented out as permanently-affordable housing” is of sharply limited benefit. Let’s ignore the PR of writing “permanent” in place of “for as long as the municipality wishes it to be that way” (maybe next election, Paris will elect Zombie Margaret Thatcher as mayor; not so permanently affordable social housing, is it). Even taking everything at face value, this only helps some people jump the queue, without addressing at all the reasons why there is a queue in the first place.
Sorry, I glazed over with the red and green balls explanation. Essentially, if you’re saying if you want mass housing one has to go hi-rise then I fundamentally disagree. It hasn’t produced anything close to the density of Paris so it is a very inefficient use of land –and only a few places in Asia exceed that density, and those are not acceptable models for outside Asia. Second, as you pointed out Haussmannian construction is a lot quicker, which helps it being cheaper per m2 (partly due to shorter finance periods). Third, it can be built by small constructors instead of big players. Fourth, greener construction (the biggest energy use is not the concrete & steel but in the cranes used to haul it all up). Fifth, urbanism.
Those hi-rise social housing projects are subject to deterioration faster and the lack of social accountability can spiral. There’s really no contest, yet in most of the west hi-rise wins. It’s largely about developers and big construction companies. Plus the incomprehension that hi-rise≠hi-density; indeed half or more of PObservers still don’t accept it.
What do you mean, not acceptable outside Asia? The Middle East is full of high-rise living and it’s fine, Rio and São Paulo are full of high-rise living and it’s fine, New York’s high-rise neighborhoods (=Upper East and West Sides) are pretty desirable and have the same density as the 11th with maybe twice the per capita floor space…
We continue to have this discordance on “hi-rise”. Much of the UWS is not what I call hi-rise; yes it is a bit higher than Paris-Haussmannian but mostly low-mid-rise, and that is why it is one of the best areas, and its density is no more than Paris. UES is hi-rise and not very good IMO. Though some of the best and most valuable is the likes of Murdoch’s old Rockefeller apartment right on the park which I remember as 12 floors (the apartment is the top three floors so the lower floor is Haussmannian! Rupert could gaze down, or across to the park, and still feel an attachment to the earth! stay human; maybe not!). The Dakota Building is 7 + mansard. Oh, and Matt Damon’s penthouse in the Standish in Brooklyn Hts is 12 floors. If the PO comments were searchable I’d find my spiel on Michael Sorkin and his rants about how developers are ruining Manhattan; he lived in a 5th floor walk-up near GV. He was the (American) anti-Ed Glaeser and Matthew Yglesias. That reminds me, NYC-UWS is a bit like Washington DC in being of that particular mid/low rise; DC is 12 floors. No accident it was designed by a Frenchman. Yglesias would replace it with hi-rise and ruin it.
I’m unconvinced about your approval of the Middle East nor of São Paulo or Rio (as I’ve commented here, the beach district is ok but a bit too high with everything in semi-permanent shadow and a bit oppressive). I think it was 1998 last I visited Vancouver so it was just getting started; but would you really want to live in those hi-rise or the old low-rise at English Bay (unless it has gone the same way)? The Asian stuff is the kind where you can reach out and touch your neighbouring hi-rise. Western building regs stop a lot of Asian-style hi-rise. I’ve read recently how Seoul and its forests of hi-rise is accruing various behavioural problems amongst the inhabitants. I understand their particularly issues but can’t recommend any of it as a model for either housing in general or density. Funny enough Singapore is probably the best–and contrary to common perceptions–a lot of its housing is not strictly hi-rise, more med-rise, and when combined with Asian habits (food markets and stalls on ground floor etc) can produce good urbanism.
Anyway, Alon Levy are you doing as you preach? No. To my knowledge you chose Haussmannian in both Paris and Berlin. Ditto Stockholm. Maybe even grew up in a SFH in Singapore? Probably UWS mid-rise in NYC?
Get thee to a hi-rise, and maybe I’ll listen; not really but you’d be on stronger (and higher) ground.
Quite a few of them think the Upper East Side is lacking in transit oriented development. I’m not quite sure what they want. The problem may be that most of them have never seen a New Law tenement. In 2023 it’s going need parking and you’ll get a Texas doughnut.
Alon, Middle East is not outside Asia. Middle East is Asia.
To be honest though, I agree that those Asian density models won’t be acceptable to Europeans. But pushing this further, why should we think that the Paris model will be acceptable to other Europeans?
Paris can be dense because Paris is Paris, with its high income and cultural prestige. New York can be dense also because of its high income and cultural prestige. Meanwhile, will an average Lyonnais accept the density of Paris’s 11th arr.? Hardly.
Perhaps because most of 19th and early-20th century Euro cities were based on it. Look at Barcelona’s Eixample. Note too that it was a model for NYC in the same period.
And perhaps because about 35 million visit it each year.
The 11th is exceptional even within Paris, and is acceptable because it is surrounded by the rest of Paris. It has v. high density because it is almost all residential with no large hospitals or other institutions or monuments etc. No parks to speak of. I agree that a whole city like it would not be good, but it could not happen because of the need for those institutions etc. So, it is just a bit of a freak island of only 3.7km2.
No one is pushing the 11th as a model for a whole city or any new development; not that it is awful, many love it, just as I wrote above, it is not a ‘complete’ urban environment.
The old arrondissements of Lyon will have similar density to Paris.
It’s a useful addition to the city’s affordable housing stock. No one ever claimed it was a solution by itself. But it does have the benefit of mixing it up in the existing fabric and all over the city. I’d be interested in seeing an economic analysis; on its face it may seem expensive but with cheap govt money and with rents still repaying it (if slowly) it may be quite viable compared to greenfield construction?
And that is the lesson from what Hidalgo has done. Many different policies and means to improve the city for people, all people not just the rich or bourgeois. People like me, a mere scientist on Ile-St-Louis who could only have lived in NYC if provided subsidised housing (as my Columbia professor friend has lived in for 30 years). Or like Alon who lived in the 12th even without any visible means of support (joke, I don’t know). London, forget it.
Your example reveals your Anglosphere thinking/politics.
Luckily–or not*–that kind of thing doesn’t happen in France, though some would have put Delanöe/Hidalgo in that category of “absolutely unacceptable”. It has only faded because two decades of those policies have proven themselves. No, in France when policies have been bedded down and shown to work they are rarely subject to ideology-based reversal; arguably this inertia may have disadvantages but it has worked well for Paris. Even Haussmannisation was really just a robust application of plans and concepts that were longstanding for the city but which no one was in a position to do. I suppose Mitterrand’s Grand Projets were another eruption but it too worked fine, or better than fine (despite some lingering nay-sayers). Chirac when mayor had a crazy plan to build giant road tunnels with associated parking under Paris, but it went nowhere and was probably the last gasp of that kind of thinking.
……….
*It’s not luck but something intrinsic to Frenchness. I’m about to start reading:
Paris, The shaping of the French capital. A political perspective.
Paul N. Balchin, 2021.
London Zone 1 to Zone 2 is only half as dense as Paris proper. The only way for London to get closer to Paris’s level of density is by building tall on the few plots available. We are not talking about 60s towers plonked in parks – we are talking about modern high-rise developments where horizontal density is also maxed out. If 6-10 storey mansion blocks were the staple of London’s zone 2 then there might be a case of not building too tall. In reality London is full of 2-3 storey terraces that are shared or sub-divided to death. The need for as many new units as possible is immense.
“I’ve read recently how Seoul and its forests of hi-rise is accruing various behavioural problems amongst the inhabitants.”
I’m sure that has nothing to do with their still ~2,000-hour work years, absolutely one-sided labor market, lack of social welfare support, hypercompetitive socioeconomy destroying any communal feeling and enhancing social isolation from even a very young age paired with intense pressure to conform (this is literally a meme to anyone paying attention to South Korea; domestically, they call it “Hell Joseon”)….Yes, it must be the apartment towers.
I’m not saying they’re perfect–one of the leading construction firms (GS) is having to reconstruct an entire just-finished ~1,700 unit development because some support piers were built without rebar; quality issues are extremely common–but to lay the entire country’s list of sociopathies at the foot of the apartments is a little silly, to say the least.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/does-living-in-crowded-places-drive-people-crazy/
It was in 19th century when urban parks were born. I think that landscaping urban streets and reducing the number of parked cars and other junk to open up space can actually make high rise apartment living more enjoyable. In addition to nuisance curbside parking, which tends to infringe on space for plant landscaping, big problem most urban areas have is presence of underground and above ground parking garages that perpetuate high volume street traffic. Since humans are programmed toward selfishness about need for cars and motorcycles, it’s very difficult politically to eliminate city center garages even within a predominately pedestrian only zone.
@Luke
Of course, like everyone else I know about all that. This was about how the housing situation was yet another factor and which was getting worse. Both the physical and the huge personal debt Koreans hold (>200% income, amongst highest in the world) which of course is related to housing.
No one is laying “the entire country’s list of sociopathies at the foot of the apartments.”
@michaelj It’s only related to housing indirectly. The personal debt issue is because the Korean gov’t refuses to allow any significant inflation to happen, out of fear of another ’97 style capital flight crisis; ergo, wages can’t rise enough to inflate away old debts. This also obviously dovetails with the lack of economic reform to address income inequality, financial market underdevelopment (domestic capital tends to flow into housing instead of other assets), and the fact that most of the country outside of Seoul is relatively undesirable enough that the pressure for development in Seoul–especially now that SK’s a high income country, and people expect more personal space; multigenerational households, or even households of more than one person, are increasingly rare–is intense.
I can’t imagine how much worse the housing crisis in Korea would be if they DIDN’T build at the scale they do.
@Luke
Same old misperception.
hi-rise≠hi density
Seoul is lower density than Paris. About 60%.
OK, most is about double the density of the Petite Couronne which is almost the same size as Seoul’s Special City, and it’s 4x Paris population (but only about 25% more than Petite Couronne).
But the important point remains: there is no compelling reason to build hi-rise. It isn’t denser. It isn’t cheaper (unless really horrible, even then …). It isn’t faster to build. It has no advantage re TOD. It isn’t greener (eco) either to build or to function. It doesn’t provide more ‘green’ or usable/amenable space at ground. Importantly, more often than not it produces anti-urbanism, the kind that produces Ballardian nightmares.
There may be cases that justify building hi-rise (eg. perhaps HK) but I doubt Seoul is it.
@Ernest Tufft
I suspect the reason people still own cars in big cities such as London is because in the UK for example there are parkway stations to allow people who live in the countryside to leave their cars and get the train into London.
However there aren’t parkway stations where people who live in London can get a train to and rent a car from to go to areas that you can’t easily get to by train. Some very wealthy people apparently own a car and leave it at Exeter – so they get the train from London to Exeter and then drive from there – but you have to be very rich to do that.
@michaelj
….So you start by conceding that Seoul proper is 2x as dense as Paris, and then neglect to mention that much, much more of the metro area is mountains, far too steep to build on? Hm.
I’m not trying to argue for Kowloon Walled City, but it also seems pretty unintuitive to insist that hi-rise isn’t hi-density. You could argue that the issue is that people still need the same number of services to avoid having to maintain levels of consumption, but I don’t know how putting more units on top of others, ceteris paribus, could not result in higher density. There are very definitely cities in Korea outside of Seoul (and Busan) that are building high-rises that don’t need to, and that’s a symptom of Sudogwon’s dominance of construction demand preferencing construction companies that do high-rises, but Seoul’s definitely among the most geographically-constrained large cities in the world, certainly more than Paris.
@Luke
Where did I say that? Paris is a lot denser than Seoul. But Petite Couronne, which is similar in size and population to Seoul Special City is about half as dense as Seoul SC.
It’s not that hi-rise zones cannot be denser than Haussmannian zones, but the reality is that they rarely are. And that includes Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and all Chinese cities that I have seen.
@michaelj
I’m sure you’re as tired of this discussion as I am, but you’re still ignoring the effect of topography. Seoul and Hong Kong–like NYC and Singapore (though it’s much less populous), but unlike Paris, Tokyo, any comparably-sized city in China besides Chongqing–has major geographic constraints on sprawl. There is no “List of mountains in Paris” article on wikipedia. There’s also the fact that the Hangang is no narrower than 500m wide, and mostly over 1km wide along its entire length.
Sometimes you can’t take the numbers at face value. Seoul may be lower density than Paris on average, but there are substantial areas of the city where population density is functionally zero.
I’m going to stick to the European context as that’s the one most familiar and relevant to me. American political dividing lines are too alien to me so I’ll defer to those more qualified to comment.
To put it bluntly, if you don’t build the right housing of enough quantity for the gentrifiers then you’ll find yourself being gentrified out. People are staying single and childless for longer so they need more units of smaller housing. Jobs are becoming ever more specialised and knowledge based, and that agglomeration force is driving up demand for inner city housing. It’s economically right and morally right to just cater to those social trends. Students and young professionals are determined if not initially entirely resourceful. Don’t build enough student accommodation or modern flats and they’ll live in house shares in traditional housing. Working class areas with good housing ARE attractive to them, and even suburbs get turned into Homes of Multiple Occupancy much to the disgust of former well heeled home owners. Fight that and you will lose – at the end of the day there is no practical way of stemming the flow of gentrifiers, who by and large are ordinary professionals who are a steadily growing mainstream demographic that the extremes of the political spectrum love to demonise.
By all means regulate developer and landlord profits, protect tenant rights, have an active state housing sector that operates at cost, have restrictions on non-resident purchases and have tax incentives against leaving housing empty. At the end of the day if you perpetuate a situation where 120 households are chasing 100 dwellings you are making the least well off vulnerable. Rent controls don’t solve that – I have read somewhere that Berlin’s rent control policy is now roundly considered a failure. Only when you provide 120 units for 120 households will you ensure nobody feels involuntarily displaced.
Incidentally I’ve never been that convinced that properties being left empty as investments is that big a problem. Lights are a terrible indicator of occupancy. Young professionals either work into the night or socialise into the night, and then they go home and crash. You’ll have the bedroom light on for 30 minutes a night if you are lucky. Transit statistics and the health of the high street should give you a much better indication of housing occupancy.
Berlin has the same rent control as the rest of Germany: it doesn’t affect new buildings, and rent may be hiked between tenants. A common experience here is someone who’s lived in the same apartment for 10-15 years, pays 400€ a month, wants to move for any reason (for example, the building may be undermaintained to the point of leaking), and finds that the rent is 1,000€ a month.
The thing that breaks people’s brains re gentrification is that neighborhoods are visibly getting better as they get more diverse. Kreuzberg is a lot safer than it was 25 years ago; it’s also a lot less white. (I think it’s also true of Tower Hamlets but am less sure.) Germans associate immigration purely with social problems – it has the same we’re-shouldering-a-terrible-burden-by-taking-these-immigrants-for-the-sake-of-human-rights mentality as Sweden – so they have to tell themselves that the neighborhood is going to hell. This includes the self-identified anti-racists, who almost never have any nonwhite peers and feel uncomfortable in diverse areas, so they find something else to blame. In a Neukölln that loses 1% of its German-without-migration-background population every year and is mostly gaining Muslims instead, of course a bar is going to have trouble paying the rent if it derives its income from alcohol sales, but B-Lage prefers to blame gentrification and not its total inability to diversify its clientele.
Right, but isn’t there still quite strict limits on increases? I thought it was a certain percentage above an official average for the neighbourhood. Also, in Germany is there no limit in terms of fraction of a renter’s income, like in France?
Germany has only relative rent control (i.e. allowable increases every year, in line with inflation); this is the same as in the Netherlands and Sweden and in the few parts of the US and Canada that have rent control. France’s absolute rent control is pretty weird, and also not even that common in France (the courts famously struck down Anne Hidalgo’s attempt). Berlin tried to pass an absolute rent control and the courts spanked the city hard over it.
You need to learn about London. All the new shiny glass towers have low occupancy. Lights are a fair proxy for occupation. In some cases reporters have also confirmed it by determining the number of apartments without a resident on the electoral rolls (ie. non-dom foreigner). Oh, and in some there are a lot of unsold apartments which is why the developers don’t release sales data. The effect at ground level is devastating, and actually it may not matter if those apartments are mostly empty or filled with those non-dom owners, because they are not the sort who shop locally or fill cafes or support markets or walk their dogs, etc. It’s killing London as has been described in countless articles over the past decade:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/24/revealed-foreign-buyers-own-two-thirds-of-tower-st-george-wharf-london”
The Tower apartment building at St Georges Wharf:
Of the 214 units, 184 [86%] have no registered voters (and the rest are unoccupied).
Of the 210 with accessible deeds, 131 [62%] were foreign-owned.
London: the city that ate itself
Shard apartments still empty
and nicely summarised in this book:
wikipedia doesn’t cite how many housing units there are in London. Or average household size. Not in the the article titled “Demography of London”. A few hundred units out of millions isn’t big enough a rounding error.
“All the new shiny glass towers have low occupancy.”
If that’s actually true, then great! The owners pay a lot of real estate taxes while using no services. They cause no impact to anyone except a bit of shadow. The empty apartments in the sky didn’t displace anyone, because nobody was living in the sky previously. More likely they prevented displacement, as the rich people would otherwise have parked their wealth in real estate elsewhere that people do live in.
That’s an easy error to make. From Atkinson p219:
Eric2:
You have forgotten the 2,500 public apartments of Heygate Estate that were sold off to private developers, supposedly with provision to provide an equal number of social or “affordable” house in the new development but which ended up being SFA. Many of these sites were publicly owned, like the Battersea Powerstation that end up being luxury apartments, often empty most of the year or never sold. Ditto the old Chelsea barracks.
One of the worst things about this sell-off is how it was forced on local councils by Maggie Thatcher but the councils don’t keep the money (which could have been recycled into new council housing but wasn’t). Oh, and the selling price was often outrageously below market rates.
Then perhaps the biggest effect is the supercharging of the whole London property market which has driven it out of reach to all but the very wealthy.
1. I have no idea why London charges such low tax rates on luxury properties. As you can see, Ken Griffin’s NYC apartment is very profitable for NYC even if he leaves it empty. That London charges essentially no taxes for a similar apartment is a mistake in tax law, not building patterns.
2. You give one example of a redevelopment plan that went badly (Heygate Estate) and your description of that plan is misleading and to some extent outright false. Heygate Estate only had 1212 homes, and only 1020 of those were publicly owned and just 595 of those were occupied. Of those 595 households, 99% of them were rehoused within Southwark. The site is currently being redeveloped to include 3000 apartments, which means that approximately 2000 new families will be able to afford living there (or else park their wealth without displacing people from real estate elsewhere). On a randomly chosen night maybe 30 to 50% of the apartments have a light on in at least one window and of course many other apartments are occupied but with the lights off at that moment, so it appears that most apartments are indeed occupied. Yes it was bad if the city sold the land to a developer for a below market price, but like in #1, that’s a mistake in money transfers not in building patterns.
3. London builds less housing per capita than its peer cities, which is exactly why it’s more expensive than them. Contrary to new housing “supercharging” the housing marker (a classic example of cargo cult/magical thinking), whatever housing is being built is increasing supply and decreasing average prices, but not as much in other cities that build more.
#1: ok, you acknowledge your error. The reason for it probably has no relationship to the fact that a hedge-fund manager and developers and other billionaires funded Boris Johnson’s run for mayor (when most of this craziness began). Feel free to continue to believe it has no effect down the chain on Londoner’s housing and why they have a housing affordability crisis.
2. First I gave two examples, because they are the first two of a projected 90 to 100 council estates to be given this same treatment. (Others are given by Oliver Wainwright in the reference, below.) For the numbers I was working from memory and I mixed the number of apartments newly constructed (2500-3,000) with the original apartments in the complex. And Aylesbury which has 2,700 homes; seriously it hardly impacts the argument and you are nitpicking on trivia. There were 3,000 residents in the original Heygate Estate, 7,500 in Aylesbury. The original number is huge and the number of social & “affordable” housing in those developments is risible by comparison. Do you really believe you have changed that reality?
Your stuff about the number of socially housed residents is fluff from the council after years of emptying the complex prior to sale. Those who owned their apartments were given compensation at less than 40 percent of the market value so how is that different? (Do you think they would have enough to buy elsewhere/anywhere in London?)
Your source is the very local council responsible for this debacle, Southwark! There were members of that council who should have ended up in jail, it was so blatant and corrupt, or unbelievably incompetent. Otherwise how could a 9 hectare estate in prime London be sold to Lend Lease Group for just £50m, having spent £44m emptying the site and £21.5m on planning its redevelopment?
This debacle has been analysed in detail by a bunch of journalists and housing specialists. Here are a few:
and
and
Eric2
Not only does London build a lot less housing for actual working Londoners, and it has been doing it forever (since Thatcher) but it destroys thousands of social housing. (attention Adirondacker:) There are about 3.3 million residential units in London, and one quarter are social housing, a majority of it in those 90-100 council estates, all of which are lined up for privatisation as per Heygate/Aylesbury. While replacing zero social housing and maybe 5-7% pseudo-affordable housing. Does anyone seriously believe this will not make the housing crisis even worse.
You can choose to believe that most of the new-built housing in London for UHNW individuals or non-dom foreigners at very high prices, has no impact down the value chain. I can’t cure that problem. Maybe Atkinson can (ie. try reading his Alpha City; his cv: He directed the Housing and Community Research Unit at the University of Tasmania from 2005 to 2008.[1] In 2009, he became a Reader in Urban Studies and Criminology at the University of York.[2] He has been working as a Research Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield since 2014.[3] I suppose that doesn’t preclude him being a cargo-cultist but after reading the book I don’t think so.). Also try reading the Yonah Freemark articles on housing in Paris where the contrast with London is total (building 50% social/affordable housing in prime riverside developments) and Ile de France (simply a lot more social housing).
But demolishing about 3,500 council houses and replacing them exclusively with very, very expensive homes mostly marketed to rich foreigners, can’t have any impact on the cost of any other affordable housing … Or doesn’t take away developers, builders and their workers away from the more affordable end of the market … According to your theory, if only they build enough of this unaffordable housing it will ease the demand for all of London …
I mean, I am a bit gobsmacked that you don’t believe any of this. Do I recall correctly that you are, or have been, a property developer (and I don’t mean Eric Trump …)?
Some truths, but also a lot of Guardianista exaggerations and prejudices.
It’s entirely conceivable modern developments will be bought by foreign nationals with no right to vote, so they wouldn’t appear on the electoral register. Walk around Nine Elms and Battersea now and you’ll find plenty of well patronised shops and restaurants. There are three Chinese supermarkets around the Vauxhall / Nine Elms area for a start. There are plenty of people living there, just the sort of people you don’t consider real, ‘cos forrin innit’.
Can more be done to tackle global dodgy money? Absolutely, but make no mistake, there will always be some level of grey money sloshing around a global alpha city – it comes with the territory. If that offends you greatly you should move to Great Yarmouth.
The manner in which some of the estates were redeveloped was regrettable, but that doesn’t detract from the need to replace low-quality housing and increase housing density. Should Heygate Estate have been demolished? Absolutely. Is there replacement housing fostering a vibrant community? Resoundingly so.
London has always had a transient population whose movements have both responded to and shaped market forces. Nobody has an inherent right to stay within the same post code their whole life. London is the kind of place where you have to peddle hard just to stay still.
Yeah, and in Vancouver, the empty condos myth is not airbrushed with left-wing explanations that it’s just about global capital. No: people there are explicitly racist, mostly against Chinese people (which you may have seen – not sure how connected you are to Canada; I don’t want to ‘splain).
I completely forgot about this article from Rowan Moore (Guardian’s archi critic) just a few weeks ago:
You and others may sneer at this kind of Guardianista take. I think some people are desperate to defend the indefensible.
Rowland Atkinson in Alpha City:
Of the 25,000 units in this riverside district “only 600 were designated as affordable (itself a laughable token when pegged at 80 per cent of market rates), a number described as ‘loads’ by the former mayor Boris Johnson.”
He has a nice term for this: Necrotecture: the dead space generated by the market’s invisible hand.
Here’s another Guardianista on this same stretch of river:
A view from downunder:
FFS, I though you liked the French way of doing things. The French don’t waste time with “affordable housing” (n/b the number of Oxford classmates of mine who get “affordable housing” is telling). If you are going to shat on the UK’s urban inequalities do it properly.
Talk about how the Inner London labour party is committed to protecting billionaires 2 story houses in Hampstead while denying council house tenants governance rights because they might do a deal with developers to get nicer apartments or fix the pipes more cheaply.
France is one of the better countries in the world when it comes to housing because it has much of the best of both worlds. It has a proper rules based land planning law that allows private interests to develop housing extensively and intensively with clear fiscal rules that mean localities usually benefit from being YIMBY. The housing employment tax and higher-than-British social housing rents plus the electoral system mean social housing gets built as is relatively well maintained*. Instead reproducing the bleetings of the guilty parties in the British context (Socialists are the ones who built the British land system and the Tories simply kept it) you would do better to explain why France is superior. Spoilers its because France has a more market oriented system.
France is not perfect. Historical preservation especially in central Paris imposes massive costs on people especially the poorest with admitting what they’ve done. And as in so many of the “successful” social housing countries (Sweden, Austria etc), the system survives as a means of social exclusion.
Its an order of magnitude better than the UK, but the 1947 system was designed to be a tool of exploitation and social control, because people with your prejudices designed it to be so. Like them, you see urban England as threat to your worldview and sense of place in the world. If London had 20 Vauxhalls it would be a superior city to Paris.
n/b the number of Oxford classmates of mine who get “affordable housing” is telling
The rent isn’t too high, the pay is too low. Rent subsidies are subsides to employers.
@adirondacker:
I can’t tell what Borners is trying to say. Is that comment a dig at my Oxford experience …? (A lot of it seems Freudian and so I am not going to comment on its specifics.)
At any rate I really don’t think they can see the wood for the trees. The biggest problem and cause of the problem is that housing is being treated as an investment vehicle and financial asset (and money printing device for governments) rather than an essential requirement for a civilised life. This has infected the whole world (look at China!) but especially in the Anglosphere where it originated (though many blame Basel I thru III). It is this which has made the rent too high, with the market left to its own devices is building only the upper segment, even if so many of those units end up being left empty (as bank accounts). Yet another fucked-up market.
I’ll tell you that ten years before I was at Oxford, ie. while doing my PhD at Brighton, you could get a home loan for 120%, sometimes with ‘cash-back’! The crash in 1987 was hardly a surprise. When in Paris, I had to have 20-30% deposit (so only 70-80% loan) and I, like most in France, had to save for years in special accounts for that purpose (the reward was fixed interest at reasonable levels, and a market that someone like me could afford even if the ‘worst’ part of inner-Paris). In addition to other macroprudential safeguards, Capital Gains Tax was on all property, including primary residence and reduced each year of ownership until reaching zero at 15y IIRC. This is one reason why footloose international capital doesn’t particularly like France except for those looking for a trophy property and probably more likely to live in. And no one can play the flipping game to make a quick buck (or launder dubious money).
The other essential thing is for the state to take care of the very bottom of the ‘market’, ie. social housing. As I’ve said over and over on this blog, the withdrawal of the state from this responsibility has exacerbated the problem to unbearable levels. This was especially the case in the Anglosphere and places influenced by their colonial heritage (Hong Kong stopped in 1997 at the handover) with the worst of the worst being Thatcher’s UK by forced sale of social (council) housing yet no reinvestment of the proceeds into new social housing–this was blatant vicious neo-feudalism. The free market has absolutely no interest in building bottom-of-the-market housing. The US equivalent was leaving this end of the ‘market’ solely to the market via lo-doc loans and we know where that ended up. Even in the richest countries like Australia, this foolishness (plus middle-class welfare tax breaks for multiple-property owners, FFS) eventually caught up with them. Even the Nordics: Sweden stopped building social housing and Norway, Netherlands, Sweden & Denmark have some of the highest personal debt in the world (all >200% income).
In the UK it is the worst because of the added inequality/class system that spreads the pain to all but the wealthy. Singapore has expensive housing but hasn’t suffered as much because it never stopped building social housing.
Another element is some form of rent control, which again is aimed at helping the lower end (people with jobs, ie. distinct to social housing); contrary to deaf, dumb and blind econocrats there is a clear role for this.
………….
The UK has the highest spend on rent subsidies in the world. Tellingly that is the only benefit where the UK outspends say France because its pocketed by landowners as the Great British system intended.
Affordable housing is different its an in-kind development tax that is allocated on a lottery basis, which over time greater and greater priority to those “climbing the housing ladder”. That’s right they gentrified a “welfare program”. The new Labour administration in Westminister borough has been bragging about extracting affordable housing units….that are 700,000 pounds a pop. Its “affordable” because that’s less than 1/3 the market rate. Real socialism there guys.
Oh and the rent is too damn high. Incomes are low in the UK because we’ve had 75 years of top-down deindustrialisation policy, based on choking the land-supply in the more productive regions, pushing us to focus on skilled-labour intensive service industries.
If you don’t believe me, go look at Cockfosters or Barkingside Tube stations which have farms within sight of the station because Socialist snobs allied with Tory snobs decided TOD was a bad thing in 1947. Or look at how many two story houses are within sight of the Euston-St Pancras-King’s Cross station complex. Don’t worry Camden council is fighting the good fight with….a walled off community garden which nobody seems use…next to St Pancras. And Camden was Labour before my long deceased grandfather was born, so it must be the Tories fault somehow.
But remember Britain is a neo-liberal hellhole that has sold its soul to the market or something. Even though all of these problems already existed in 1970….
A lot of this is probably because the wealthy are over-represented as councillors and as MPs.
The fundamental reality is that when you speak to the wealthy as a group they are much better informed politically than most other people you speak to – that alone gives them a huge advantage.
Plus if you’re picking a councillor, picking a 55 year old retiree who worked for EY is always going to be a safe choice. They will be much more likely to be able to keep doing it for 30 years and they are less likely to have other life commitments getting in the way – fundamentally money solves a lot of problems.
And yeah that probably means that it has taken them a lot longer to realise that housing is expensive than if you’d have a more diverse group of councillors/MPs – but there’s no evidence that really any of the political parties have taken that seriously. It looks like Labour for their next set of selections after the current set might do a better job – but unfortunately that probably means the selections in 15-20 years time will be better.
@michaelj
I was waiting for you to wheel out Simon Jenkins. Thankfully such Guardianista shrills do not reflect mainstream view. With all that rambling they don’t even know what they are railing against. Of course the anti-Asian prejudice is barely concealed. Those apartments are not lifeless – they just house the kind of lives the guardianistas disapprove of.
@Weifeng Jiang, has Simon Jenkins ever been right about anything?
No one here has even bothered addressing any points made by Simon Jenkins. Just attacking the man.
And yes. He argued for Remain.
London has always had a significant international and transient population, and its architectural vernacular has never stayed still. Simon Jenkins wants London’s demography and architecture to be fixed to a single era that he views with rose tinted glasses. That’s conservatism just without an outward ‘Tory label’, but no less worse a form of conservatism. His claims of empty towers and destreeting are simply incorrect. As for the singling out of ‘Malaysia Square’ or ‘Hong Kong style’ – let’s call it out for what it is – racism.
As for supporting Remain, well thank goodness, a broken clock is still right twice a day.
I don’t think the composition of Parliament and Councils is a top 10 factor in why its so bad, the electoral system, the composition of the electorate, the nature of the two main parties, the decrepit nature of English local government and yes my hobby-horse England is a semi-colony within the United Kingdom whose misgovernence is a core part of the Union deal since the 1940’s.
Jenkins is a lightweight contrarian hack, a moderate conservative and a giant Nimby at the same time. But I’ve encountered people nimbier than Jenkins who are ostensibly Anarchist or Radical Marxists.
And yeah the xenophobia/racism is real. The UK tellingly lacking in a good historiography of the immigrant/racial angle to its NIMBYism because all the relevant people are cultural-social historians who find land economics boring and have a deep commitment to the sacred legacy of the Attlee government. Nothing like the impressive historiography on urban issues in the States. Or the local black YIMBY growth coalitions in Newark or Buffalo which I found myself having to describe to some black English planners at a Fabian society group. I was baffled how they knew nothing about it.
In terms of land planning, England could learn more from East Asia than France or Austria, because we are an island nation with a very high population density.
Also its not like East Asia is a monolith. Most Japanese families live in single family houses albeit close packed ones even in the Tokyo urban area.
Why not build more affordable and high quality housing for the residents who are already there? Instead, the only time the government invests in fixing up neighborhoods or building new housing, is when it intends to displace longtime Black and Brown residents. We need housing that’s for us.
The solution in Barcelona since 2018 was requiring a 30% of social housing for new buildings or renovations:
https://www.housing.eolasmagazine.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Javier_Buron_2023_small_3.pdf (page 12)
There were also plans to put in place a percentage cap on rent increases.
We had a mayor change last month, we got a new less radically social one (though not the most lobby-friendly), so we’ll see if it sticks.
Right-wing media or media whose business depends on the property market cry that this has stopped the housing market, but I’d take their noise with a pinch of salt.
https://www.spanishpropertyinsight.com/2021/08/21/barcelona-developers-confirm-collapse-in-new-home-building-in-the-catalan-capital/
There may be a bit less income for the constructor of a building with this rule, but most of the expense is actually the cost of land, not the cost of construction. They may have been delaying projects, in expectation of getting their most lobby-friendly candidate into the city hall, which they almost did:
https://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/socialist-jaume-collboni-appointed-barcelona-mayor-after-last-minute-plot-twist
If “affordable housing” worked, the inventors of the tool in Montgomery county Maryland and Massachusetts would be housing utopias where poor people moved to get better housing.
Oh wait, they don’t, they move to Florida and Texas. Because its such crap policy. Nobody has ever used it successfully. Nobody. 50 years of failure should mean something.
If these people really wanted to leverage value uplift to help the poor, they’d ditch the requirements and just levy a tax hypothecated to their own social housing building projects or a more extensive transit network. Barcelona isn’t anywhere near the technological limits of urban technology. If there’s an affordability Barca/Catalonia should actually come clean with how its their own damned fault. Because I can’t explain this disgusting piece of land use through developer greed.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cam%C3%AD+de+Cal+Pinques/@41.3419801,2.0638066,2175m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x12a49fbf183a5e41:0xc1ee3aae44e32ea!8m2!3d41.3412947!4d2.0672955!16s%2Fg%2F11thld15vv?entry=ttu
I’m not familiar with Montgomery, Massachusetts and Maryland, where may I read about what they did and why it failed?
About the particular piece of land that you point, I think it’s flooding buffer used for agriculture (notice the Llobregat river that created that whole delta? All that was sea until little before the Romans).
What is your broader point about it?
There is no empirically rigorous study of inclusionary zoning/affordable housing’s impact on housing outcomes (nor is there on social housing either). Planning academia is a trashcan fire of terrible because it refuses to rigorously ask what statistics tell you which housing systems are good. Its genuinely hard to find good statistics because systems differ in structures so much*. Land use planning at least in English still has yet to move from its bleed-the-patient phase to its microbiology phase, as an intellectual discipline.
The best summary I found was this;
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/inclusionary-housing-in-international-perspective
But its not very good. You can tell because it thinks England is best practice when its worst practice (best practice is their view is clearly putting “affordable” stickers on housing). I found the Spanish section bad too.
This is also useful, although the authors brains are so up their own arses they don’t know what to make of their empirical data which is telling them the least segregated cities in their data set are Japanese and Taiwanese, which have no social or “affordable” housing at all*.
https://www.routledge.com/Residential-Segregation-in-Comparative-Perspective-Making-Sense-of-Contextual/Fujita-Maloutas/p/book/9781138271197#:~:text=The%20aim%20of%20this%20book,this%20wide%20range%20of%20experiences.
Also useful is understanding a bit about how Soviet housing worked since that’s the least market oriented housing system in modern times with housing allocation and it was so good that in the late Soviet union 2/5’s of Muscovites had self-built 2nd homes with vegetable patches.
My broader point is that those who attempt to solve housing shortages with in kind contributions from developers are snake oil merchants. Which is unsurprising given how many of them own significant property portfolios that would depreciate in value if they actually solved the problem. Its like asking grain farmers to pay a tax in goats while using the law to force them to use “organic” methods only, then complaining why grain prices are high because the farmers are greedy.
*To give you an example OECD estimates that the average share of income devoted to housing is 20-21% among its member states. But Korea is 14%…because the most expensive part of renting in Korea isn’t the rent but the massive deposit.
So that means even if politically aware people are numerate – and there are very few – then they wouldn’t be able to promote anything sensible because the research is poor.
Not quite. Since house prices and rents are clearly not in a good place in say the UK. Housing has moved up the agenda during my lifetime and proposed solutions have slowly radicalised, especially in terms of voter interest. Now we have Labour party leaders talking about the greenbelt. Lived experience is real. And lots countries have managed to respond. And the fiscal circumstances are such that going back to the 1950’s social housing boom isn’t really option.
I’d love the OECD or UN create some more uniform statistical standards on how to compute housing quality, beyond the usual stuff of tenure and running water. Area per capita, average age of buildings, material standards etc etc. There is so much to account for.
That housing adjacent academic fields haven’t dealt seriously with this is such a tell.
Soviet union 2/5’s of Muscovites had self-built 2nd homes with vegetable patches.
Your idea of a second house and a Soviet era Muscovite’s idea of a second house aren’t the same. They spent the weekend growing vegetables because they were hard to get.
That’s exactly the point I was making. I didn’t say these were Martha’s Vineyard or the Cotswalds. The Soviet Union ran on unequal access to black and grey markets, which is what you get when pretend you can abolish evil by abolishing prices rather than engaging with material and political constraints. The Soviet Union used housing scarcity to extract resources and maintain social control on its population especially during the Stalin years.
Which is what the UK has done since 1947 to, presenting the native poor* with a catch 22 of having to choose between access to cheap housing and access employment/amenities. This dynamic can also be seen with marginalised communities in the other major social housing economies; NDL, Denmark, France, Sweden, Austria. Though the basic quality of housing, welfare payments and transport is significantly better than the UK.
*If you are an immigrant then go labour in London and pay for the lifestyle of true Britons with your taxes and rents.
The only thing you can do is build. You can only semi control who you are building for – social housing has a tendency of eventually becoming general housing anyway. Newcomers are either more resourceful or more determined – they are simply more competitive. New York is built on transient populations – it’s built on attracting the world’s best talents. Are you advocating restrictions on inter-state movements and making US immigration policy significantly stricter? If not then you have no means of stemming the flow of ‘yuppies’ coming in. The question then is why are a section of existing New Yorkers less competitive than newcomers? That’s what needs tackling. Oh and there are plenty of black and brown people among the ‘gentrifiers’ too.
POC neighbors should get a vote and a democratic voice on people who move into historically marginalized neighborhoods.
They do… in San Francisco, they voted London Breed by a large margin – she won the black and Asian votes and lost the white and Hispanic votes. In both New York and California, the main source of mass opposition to YIMBY bills lately has been from racist white suburbs (e.g. Long Islanders opposing Hochul’s bill). In European cities, as in American cities 40-50 years ago, the main source of opposition to urban redevelopment is from first-wave white gentrifiers who are certain the neighborhood is going to hell because a bar that only has white clientele in a diversifying area is having trouble paying rent.
That’s hardly a real solution, especially for the majority of places on planet earth. It is just a variation on terrorising by one group over another, and will lead to what was mentioned in an earlier post: wild see-sawing policy as different groups have their moment in power. Indeed, it would probably entrench such polarisation with the political cycle. It is simple majoritarianism which most of the time in most places will favour NIMBYs.
Plus, there is no evidence that I can see that POC-dominant cities have better urban or housing policy (I’m open to that discussion, eg. Singapore? Hmm, no, because it is ‘benign’ dictatorship by a single family of single ethnicity.).
Plus what adirondacker said.
I think Ramona has something like a Neighborhood Preservation Committee approving your lease. The problem with that is the Homeowner’s Association of Gated Village can do the same thing, exclude people not their-kind.
Lawn Guyland ain’t what it used to be. Nassau County is 70.8 percent “white alone” according to the 2022 estimates. 13.4 percent black and 12.9 percent Asian. Suffolk is 82.8 percent white alone. And there are erubs all over the place.
It’s just basic physics. A/Cs(and heat pumps) are more then 100 percent efficient because you are moving heat not creating or “destroying” it. Now you have to look at the whole system cost not just the end use. Does it make sense to use gas to make electricity rather than burn that gas to heat air or water directly? For the electrify
or synthetic methane so it works both ways. Shoot one thing yall don’t consider is that we have crummy 240v or some places even less fortunate 120v instead of that nice 400v three phase they got in Europe so are appliances will always be crummier unless they change electrical codes to allow European 240 volts to earth.(not holding my breath but it would be nice).
It would be very very difficult to find a residence with 120 volt only service. The 240 volt loads don’t care if the neutral is center tapped or not.
480 volt three phase service is quite common in commercial, in the U.S. Means you can put the lighting on 277 volt single phase. Older commercial and multifamily residential can be 208/120. Canadians lean toward 600/347. And the heat pump, especially the new fangled inverter driven ones, don’t care what the supply is.
The 120V potential maximum feels more of an issue for EV charging without a dedicated charger. That’s because assuming you can only draw 10A you double the charging time.
1500 watts if it’s an ancient garage wired with a 15 amp circuit. Most garages have 20 amp. 20 amp gets derated to 2,000 watts if the load is going to be connected for more than an hour. 10 hour charge for 20 kilowatts is a longish commute. New code is that every parking space in a garage needs a dedicated 20 amp circuit. Upgrading that to 30 amp/240 volt isn’t very expensive. If the electric dryer is in the garage there are multiple solutions for using that outlet. That’s 6 kilowatts an hour for 60 in a ten hour charge. It’s not a problem, for most people. For most people the service entrance and the main panel is in the garage and running a new 30 amp/240 volt circuit isn’t very expensive either…. It’s not a problem.
“Not for nothing, developers who only build single-family housing like zoning rules that make it harder to redevelop in cities.”
Would I be right in thinking that the vast majority of the money that funds climate change denial propaganda comes not from fossil fuel companies but from single-family housing developers?
Most single family developers are too small to have propaganda money. Unlike oil there isn’t anything that gets advantages from being large (You could refine crude oil in your kitchen – but large refineries are much more efficient and safer)
In the US, no – the denialist money is mostly from Koch-affiliated funds. Developers don’t really engage in this kind of ideological politics.
OK, I stand corrected, but Koch Industries itself seems like a diverse conglomerate, not an archetypal “fossil fuel company” like Shell, BP or ExxonMobil.
Does Koch Industries itself benefit substantially from climate change denial, or is its owner financing climate change denial for his own personal ideological reasons? I’m aware that a lot of conservative political foundations are spending down the estates of tycoons who died long ago, and have little other connection with the businesses those tycoons established.