There are almost 20,000 'ghost' homes sitting empty in London

argumate

uk.businessinsider.com

There are almost 20,000 'ghost' homes sitting empty in London

Research from Property Partner shows London is the vacant home capital of the country, with 19,845 homes sitting idle for over six months in 2016.

Oscar Williams-Grut, Business Insider UK

commissarchrisman

The hotspot for ‘ghost’ houses — those left empty to appreciate in value — is in the affluent borough of Kensington & Chelsea in London, where 1,399 houses sit empty. The number represents an 8.5% rise on 2015 and a 22.7% rise between 2006 and 2016.

Why on Earth are any people from Grenfell still sleeping in sports halls after the disaster? London and Kensington especially is chock full of empty luxury apartments being sat on by speculators. These must be opened up immediately.

the-darkest-of-souls

Unless they’re owned by the gov you can’t just take people’s bloody property even if it’s empty that’s why

ace-pervert

thats fucked up

notyourmoderate

The problem in essence is that property owners would rather leave their property empty than to accept less than market value for rent. The question is not “no rent”, it’s “less rent”. Virtually anyone you find sleeping rough on the streets is going to have *some* degree of walking-around money, hardly anyone has literally *no* money. But, the owners of housing don’t want that money, they want market value. They believe that a better offer will come along, and if they accept a low offer they will miss their opportunity for the high offer. It’s a failing of people’s payoff-to-probability calculation.

And also it’s a failing of core concepts of how contemporary capitalism is executed. Not to go too deep into it, the crux is this: If they accept a low offer, their property is worth less. If a fork is sold for five dollars, it is worth five dollars. If a fork is sold for five cents, it is worth five cents. So marking down the rent on a property depreciates the property, marking it up appreciates the property. Because value is determined by common belief rather than any concrete consistencies, sellers try to fix the value of property high and buyers try to negotiate value low. So if one party wants to raise their profit, and one party wants to not sleep on a bench, they have similar ability to set the price but wildly disproportionate levels of need. It’s a conundrum, and there’s virtually no way to feasibly and achievably solve that problem.

argumate

set a reasonable level of land tax, then holding on to an empty house in an expensive area costs you money, encouraging you to rent it out or sell it.

mitigatedchaos

Alternatively, allow them to actually build more housing units. Japan isn’t seeing similar massive price spikes in its cities that are undergoing population growth. Send a guy over there and copy whatever it is they’re doing.

Source: commissarchrisman urban planning the invisible fist

More you might like

squareallworthy

mitigatedchaos

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

squareallworthy

What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?

mitigatedchaos

I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.

The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar. In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.

“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.” And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.

Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.

squareallworthy

I have no expertise on urban planning, no. But it strikes me that starting from a blank slate is exactly the wrong approach, and likely to lead you to repeat the same mistakes that plague other planned communities. The world does not need another Brasilia or Salt Lake City.

mitigatedchaos

I think that depends in part on our goals, or we might say that there is a tradeoff. In the United States, we’ve got expensive suburban sprawl as what people do unplanned, and traffic-choked cities with freeways bumper-to-bumper with cars, elevated crime rates…

Once the buildings have been built, it’s an expensive fight to install transit infrastructure, because you have to knock down peoples’ homes and businesses. If a bunch of corridors were left as park land to be converted later, it would be a lot easier.

But we want people to live more densely, right? For environmental reasons and maybe social reasons. How can we get the suburbanites to come in from the suburbs?

It turns out that suburbs have all sorts of nice features that people like, which is why they move out to them when they can afford to. I think those features can be replicated at a higher density, making the suburbanites more comfortable with living in a denser area, saving on carbon, etc if there’s some planning.

Likewise, people fight against density. Why? A variety of reasons, including crime, noise, having to give up their home, etc. But with a different structuring of both land and incentives, that could be changed, preventing yet more resource-consuming suburban sprawl.

Source: mitigatedchaos one thousand villages urban planning

mitigatedchaos

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

mitigatedchaos

@anaisnein

I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!

Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!

That might be it. I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.

If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically. Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders. It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.

What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.

What is a suburb? It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night. You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house. On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells). Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party. Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision. Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.

People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.

How can I make the city safe like a suburb? How can I make it green like a suburb? How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city? So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.

Though, perhaps you can help me to understand. What does it mean for there to be a there?

one thousand villages urban planning suburbs

argumate

Now I’m wondering what if students could spend student loans on other things, like starting businesses.

voxette-vk

So you’ve come around to the radical libertarians calling for voluntary slavery?

argumate

Just highly suspicious of the American student loan system! Like most American institutions it seems to neatly combine the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Why not just have regular loans (allow bankruptcy etc.) or just socialise the system entirely like a sensible country??

mitigatedchaos

The money must be laundered through the private sector to prove that it isn’t Socialism™.

Nevermind that either doing it in a more capitalist, more socialist, or just straight-up better national centrist way would be more effective.

American dysfunction politics the invisible fist

One Thousand Villages@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.
@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of... — **One Thousand Villages**
@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.
@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of getting people to go for medium-density housing.
And I guess @bambamramfan I think I’ve mentioned a similar idea already. (Though it was a low-trust mechanism, I’m of the opinion that high trust is an equilibrium state which can be achieved through various mechanisms.)
There is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which is to borrow an idea from computer science for resolving the challenges of urban areas by recursively reducing the size of problems until they can be adequately resolved. Thus, the city is reduced to a bunch of villages/towns.
The above render is for a rough sketch design that spans one kilometer and houses a population of around 5,000 or more, assuming an apartment is about 100 sqm (based on the size of an average apartment in the US). After reviewing it, I can’t help but think it should perhaps be about ¼ the size, but ah well. Grey is civic buildings, light green is residential, light blue is commercial, and light brown is footpaths.
Mixed use development has a lot of advantages, including reductions in commuting, but for various reasons people don’t like it.
People seem to find themselves feeling less connected to, and less trusting of, others.
Crime continues to be a problem for many cities.
Childhood obesity is on the increase, and children most likely need to get outside more.
Police violence is a problem in many cities.
Greenery is important for human psychological health.
High levels of traffic congestion.
My proposal, then, is to create a smaller community within the city with several key elements:
Semi-permeable membrane - Outer wall reduces noise. Security and level of surveillance can be adjusted according to local crime levels. As crime rises, all visitors can be tracked, or access can even be limited.
Quick access to public transportation (orange areas) - the average human walks at 5kph, and is therefore never more than about 700m and ~10 minutes from a public transport stop.
Quick access to local shops - reduce unnecessary transport usage and make goods available easily to the locals, also it’s directly next to the transit stop.
Community Center - Common facilities for exercise, social clubs, social events, and so on are near the center. All residents own a share of the Community Development Board (or something) which hires personnel to clean up the neighborhood, maintain the facilities, and puts on community social events on the regular. This is very local, direct political involvement with a high share of control per person.
Community Support Officers (CSOs) - (I only recently discovered UK has something with the same name.) Trained not only in police work, but also emergency medical care, fire suppression, and social work. Part of the idea here is that CSOs will engage almost entirely in foot patrols when not doing other support work. They will know who is an actual threat, vs who is mentally ill, possibly be able to deflect bad paths before they become permanent, and pick up on crimes using high-context detective work. The people of the block will be real people to them and they will see their consequences as they happen.
Low-velocity roads - Borrowed from Barcelona, encourages and enhances walking, discourages car use, but still lets cargo move in and out. Safer for children.
Ample foot/bicycle paths, ample green space for exercise, sports, and letting children outside to play.
Probably this needs to be revised a lot more, starting with a reduction to 500m.
I think something like this might have the potential to lower crime and police violence, while reducing the opposition to medium-density living and increasing psychological and physical health.
But you know, I’m not an expert. There’s probably something terribly wrong with this.

urban planning politics art the mitigated exhibition flagpost one thousand villages

mailadreapta

tanadrin

Not a huge fan of the writing style, but this article makes a solid underlying point: whatever the other incentives for building high-rise residential buildings, they’re terrible if you care about the social health of your city. I’m sympathetic to motives like decreasing housing prices in general, but if the tradeoff is between inexpensive housing and annihilating the social fabric, I’m not sure you’ve actually made any improvements to the situation. We’ve known more-or-less how to build healthy cities for decades now, thanks to the work of people like Jane Jacobs; that that Le Corbusier shit still seems to exert a powerful influence over urban planning should be a civilizational embarrassment.

tanadrin

@jadagul replied to your post:

I suspect most of the action is less in building high-rises–though I like high-rises–and more in moving single-family deatched homes into three- and four-story residential complexes. Which are exactly the sort of thing that happened in the areas Jacobs celebrated. I’m not sure even high-rises are anti-Jacobsian if you still have plenty of ground-level retail etc.

Yeah, that last point is part of it; it’s not the density, it’s that isolating neighborhoods or regions of a city to be purely residential or purely commercial makes them either commuter neighborhoods where everyone spends their time bottled up in their personal living space bubble, or sterile wastelands where nobody can just wander down to a cafe for breakfast on a Sunday morning if they feel like it (or, for a less furiously bourgeoise example, you don’t have to spend an hour going to and from work every day).

And the thing is, on some level, developers must know this is a terrible way to design cities: think of how many shopping malls in America are designed to imitate the mixed character of a major thoroughfare of a small town or a cozy European neighborhood: it’s like they see the benches and the wrought-iron lamposts and think they can, in cargo-cult fashion, summon the necessary spirit to make this a desirable place to pass the time, but they’re not actually investigating what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. The clearest memory I have of this is a street in I think Sydney, which tried to do inviting shopfronts and cafes with outdoor seating and all that, but was otherwise surrounded by blank flat walls, and was devoid of any other visible human life besides me and the person walking next to me.

I think I am far from alone in thinking that a neighborhood where I can walk downstairs to the shop, buy some stamps, then post a letter, all over such a short distance I question whether it’s really worth it to even put on shoes, is far more pleasant a place to exist than one where I trade that for a half-acre of lawn and slightly less traffic noise. You could build a futuristic arcology-style high rise like that, that packed together a lot of different types of residential and commercial spaces, but it seems like zoning laws and practical considerations mostly prevent that in reality.

I am almost as anti single-family homes as I am high rises; urban sprawl is as ruinous to a healthy, livable city as artificially separating residential and commercial areas, and insisting every house be an island surrounded by its sea of grass sort of necessitates that kind of segregation anyway. The really crazy thing is that it feels like the U.S. has only been living this way from, like, the end of World War 2 or so, so it’s not like we’ve irreversibly committed our civilization to this path. At the very least, not actively punishing that kind of mixed development would be a start.

jadagul

Huh, so I associate “no high-rises” with “no mixed-use”. As you point out they’re obviously separable. But the sort of zoning regulations that bar the one often also bar the other.

Whether or not most people would, in practice, enjoy mixed-use development, a lot of people are very vociferously opposed to it. Which is part of why it’s illegal in most places.

mailadreapta

Who are these mixed-used haters, seriously? This is an honest question; the advantages of medium-density mixed-used development are praised in literally every media source I see and by 100% of my peer group, so I have a very hazy notion of who opposes it and what their real or supposed motivations are.

jadagul

People who want to make sure no one is on the streets outside their house ever.

Like, the reason a lot of people dislike mixed use housing is pretty much exactly the same Jacobsian reason it’s a good idea. There’s always people on the street and things happening. People who want not-that find it unpleasant.

mailadreapta

Okay, this gives me at least a vague idea of the reference group: people who are aesthetically pleased by the suburban notion of vast regions of Just Houses.

People are allowed to have that preference; but why are they allowed to oppose the existence of mixed-use even if they don’t have to live there?

mitigatedchaos

And could they be bought off by an alternate strategy?

Source: tanadrin urban planning policy

I mean, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous to suggest that the proper answer to “too many Chinese buyers are holding empty apartments in our country as a store of value” is “remove the state’s monopoly on the enforcement of property laws” instead of the far less difficult and less likely to break every thing “change the laws so that so many housing units can be built that holding these empty apartment buildings is no longer economically sensible.”

The number of empty housing units acting as a real asset store of value for Chinese money fleeing capital restrictions is also probably quite small relative to the market size, much like those expensive apartments in London that people were complaining should be socialized, even though in practice it wouldn’t make much difference in the price.

politics the invisible fist

brazenautomaton

Anonymous asked:

Sometimes, 14-15 year olds have to take on adult responsibilities for their families. A hardship license would allow them to drive and take on a job.

thesymbolofpeace answered:

They shouldn’t have to work how is that not against child labor laws that’s a kid

guidancerune

problem: families dealing with poverty when their parents cant sustain the family on their own

stupid idiot solution: aid programs, base income, fair housing

smart brain genius solution: Child Labour 2: Electric Boogaloo

brazenautomaton

galaxy buddha brain solution: “they shouldn’t have to do this thing in order to solve their problem, so I will wisely prevent them from solving their problem at all, because the moment the problem leaves my vision cone I will forget about it entirely except for the vague sense I am a Good Person who does Good Things”

this is how you get california housing laws

mitigatedchaos

This is the real risk of the opposite approach. The family ends up at the whims of the state bureaucracy, which may be dysfunctional or even deliberately rendered dysfunctional by politicals.

So unless your ideology specifically includes, in its doctrines, that you must be constantly checking on the effectiveness of the state bureaucracy, not to cut it, but to make sure what you’re doing actually works and isn’t just something you thought might work, you have to be careful.

Source: thesymbolofpeace the invisible fist the iron hand

> 2058
> arguing with Commies on minicom
> point out that the GDP per capita of the DSAZ is 8x that of Seattle
> point out no lines for antirejection drugs in DSAZ
> mfw “the Free Peoples’ Republic of Seattle isn’t real Socialism”
> mfw “Detroit Special Autonomous Zone is Fascist Dictatorship”
> mfw receiving these messages at coffee shop w/in DSAZ