i'm not saying people shouldn't live like...

Anonymous asked:

i'm not saying people shouldn't live like suburbanites if they're paying for it, just that it doesn't work at high population densities, and it's been tried before, and jacobs objections aren't that it doesn't fit with her aesthetics and preferences, it's that it doesn't work and leads to crime and other social problems. my question really was "have you read jane jacobs lately" to see if you had responses about the pragmatics of past failures, when what you propose doesn't seem that different

I may have to, although I suspect “it’s been tried before” includes “…and they botched it”.

(I did read about the Hulme Crescents, although that may not be close to what you have in mind.)

But as for right now, I’m focusing on my (largely unrelated to urban planning) fiction writing, and for reading, I have that book by LKY arriving soon. (I don’t actually read that much. I’m not really a good person, you see.)

concrete and steel anons asks

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Anonymous asked:

you're not the first person to try and duplicate suburbs and small towns at urban densities. people trying that is like at least a third of what jane jacobs was objecting to.

Maybe not every community has to be the same.

Not everyone actually likes cities for what they are. Suburbs aren’t evil in themselves, they just have too much infrastructure per taxpayer… and particularly if we remove the need for large numbers of automobiles, the math on them changes.

concrete and steel anons asks one thousand villages

Anonymous asked:

The Israelis have damn good desalination tech, IIRC. Per wiki, they get 50% of their water from artificial means and have capacity to spare. Energy concerns still stand, of course, but that's a general problem, so assuming civilisation survives fresh water is a problem that we can solve (ignoring Vegas-style "why did you build a city in the middle of a damn desert" problems of course).

I am so glad I don’t own any property in Las Vegas.

politics concrete and steel anons asks

Anonymous asked:

they most certainly did botch it, but i think it'd be worth looking at how exactly. i think you're working towards something worthwhile but there's got to be compromise regarding adaptations to high population densities and how tight-knit you can have your social groups. if you want, i'll see if i can find some passages that are particularly relevant, so you can get the gist without reading the whole thing?

But how would you send it on Anon? …I guess I better make some room in my askbox.

anons asks concrete and steel

Anonymous asked:

But Miti, how are your anons supposed to optimize our asks for creepiness and/or offensiveness if we don't know your race and gender? Won't you think of the anons?

Ugggh. Who do you think you are, Google?

Come back when you’re a multinational corporation physically embodying the threat of a societal panopticon in order to more efficiently sell Authentic™ skinny mom jeans to hipsters, loser.

anons asks shtpost this is a joke

[soon your askbox would be full of shitpost asks like Argumate’s and] you’d be tempted to make an ms paint collage for every single one.

This ~~television show~~ blog doesn’t have that kind of ~~animation~~ drawing budget.

But don’t worry. Most anons on this blog do not get a Full Custom™ MS Paint.JPG for their asks. It’s just the rate of images per ask that would reduce.

anons asks shtpost

Anonymous asked:

Do you truly think anyone is going to buy your nationalist hogwash? You blithering buffon, the dual monachy will never succumb to such seditious sentiment! AEIOU!

~~A monarch is nothing more than the crown jewel worn by the State.~~

Dual Monachy? I’ve got anons inventing entirely new forms of government right here in my askbox.

anons asks shtpost

But yeah, I probably missed an ask some time in the last 9 hours, so if you sent one, you can send it again.

Also if you didn’t send one you can send one anyway. I tend to leave my askbox out in the open where just anyone could stuff asks in it.

anons asks

ranma-official

literalnobody

“money can’t buy happiness” is such a baby boomer concept like…. I don’t want excessive wealth to buy a golf plated toilet seat Karen, I just wish I wasn’t crying because I can’t afford both spaghetti and rent after working 40 hours a week

mitigatedchaos

Now see, I reaaaally want to use this post to bitch about not building enough housing units keeping the rents high where the jobs are in the first place.

Source: literalnobody politics concrete and steel

flakmaniak

Anonymous asked:

No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.

argumate answered:

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.

In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.

mitigatedchaos

It isn’t a 100% positional good.

You can actually build more housing units, if you’re allowed to.

Not uncoincidentally, this would also lower housing costs and the risk of gentrification in the first place, or at least lower damage associated with it.

Or we could just continue not building new housing units and simultaneously say white people leaving an area bad and also that white people moving into an area is bad. Surely this will help the poor, somehow.

flakmaniak

I get really annoyed when I hear that “housing is a positional good” stuff. No, it isn’t. First off, obviously not having a house sucks. (Ok yes presumably no one is saying that “housing at all” is positional.)

But second off, no, even “nice housing” isn’t a positional good. I currently live in a nice house in a nice suburb. This would be no less of a boon to my quality of life if more people got to do so. (I can hear you guys revving up the “well it’s impractical to structure society so that everyone can live in a suburb” arguments, but that’s not my understanding of what a positional good actually is.)

Anyway, I have an actual, real, non-social-status interest in having things like “a bunch of rooms as opposed to two” and “a decent-sized kitchen” and “a nice backyard” and “a placid neighborhood that is quiet and that you can walk around at 3AM without running into anybody”. (Well ok it’s sometimes not quiet but that’s neighbors’ lawns being mowed/leafblown/whatever by presumably-poorly-paid immigrants.)

Anyway the point is, “having trees around” (I live on a hill with plenty of trees) is actually Just Nice, regardless of whether I have more trees nearby than other people.

Again, you can scream “status!” all you want when looking at pictures of my neighborhood, but that doesn’t do anything to diminish the aesthetic and practical value of living here. (And yes, I’m in walking distance of a grocery store and the town center, about a mile each, so the “can’t do anything” argument falls apart too.)

(I guess this has bled over into being annoyed at the suburb-hate; not sure if the suburb-haters just have totally alien preferences or if they’re thinking of different styles of suburb. But I can attest that the one I live in is quite nice, and the “suburbs are hell” objection always rang false to me for that reason. Maybe most of them are hell, and I lucked into one of the nice ones.)

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

mitigatedchaos

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

Well, logically, if one demands unlimited right of reproduction, then that could be the conclusion one comes to.

But I think it’s being driven more by other concerns. These anons going in to Argumate’s blog seem to be totally unaware of the idea that one can build taller (which is also a way to get more square footage).

Land is a lot more limited, but it’s possible to build buildings with dozens of floors.

There’s this idea that “there’s only so many housing units to go around” and “the rich are hoarding them all” or something along those lines. That isn’t really true, and the rich aren’t necessarily as rich (or perhaps, there aren’t as many of them) as people think there are. There is no adequate stock of rich people houses that we can just seize and be done with it.

And quite frankly, it ignores a really, brutally obvious policy that could be applied if rich people keep building “too many” big rich people houses while poor people don’t have enough housing units - pass a luxury tax for large or expensive housing units and award that money as tax credits to developers building more affordable housing.

I’m not saying that’s an optimal policy, either. It’s just way less dumb than not building new housing because rich people might do it.

People might object, too, that the taller buildings won’t have enough transport/etc infrastructure - so make them take out an infrastructure deposit into the municipal fund instead, again, this is a problem that can be solved.

Now, it’s true that there will still be some fighting over hot spots. But that hurts way, way less if the rest of the housing is outrageously priced.

Source: argumate concrete and steel

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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