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While that is more or less what suburban NIMBYs imply when they protest against new transit developments, I think the truth is more that our inability to police low-level crimes or keep homeless people off the street inhibits growth that would occur naturally around transit stations after they are built i.e. some new Metro stop on the Silver Line in the DC area is currently surrounded by a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city, and is pretty clean and well-maintained, but for it to not be a permanent money pit denser housing and businesses would have to be built in the area and that would attract unsavory characters and run the risk of it becoming like a BART station (shudders) and spoiling the entire vicinity, so why build it in the first place?
It seems to me that there are some pieces missing from this argument.
Why should a small station be a money out?
If there were apartments built by it, they would probably be "luxury apartments" with fairly high rents (as is typical for new construction). Why should that attract unsavory characters?
There are plenty of unsavory BART stations in SF/Oakland, but there are also perfectly fine stations with no homeless around such as Warm Springs (which is surrounded on one side by million dollar newly built condos) (pay no attention to the industrial zone on some of the most expensive real estate in the country). That suggests that it's in large part due to local policies about what to allow, and if the local constituents are suburban nimbys they are probably going to demand some actual policing.
Because its public works in America, in this case in a blue area. All public works of that sort are money pits.
Because high concentrations of people with money creates opportunities for peddlers and beggars. Peddlers and beggars will travel to such real estate so long as their drug supply is close enough. The closer to the city center the more will come. Then once enough peddlers and beggars locate there a few dealers will be attracted to that supply of customers and located there.
Indeed, but the argument is you have to get out of SF/Oakland because the residents of those places are huge libs and softies and will never let you do your own thing, and you only can do your own thing by evading the libs and also being far enough away for them to ignore you.
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I don't expect every station to be a moneymaker, but I would rather population growth and infill occur naturally around existing stations, which at some point become profitable and can help support the next extension, as opposed to the sort of stasis that suburban voters and zoning regulations implicitly promote. The high levels of dysfunction we see around urban transit centers probably require population densities that wouldn't be reached for a long time, if ever, around new suburban stations, but the correlation between density and homelessness/crime is observed by all and hardens the resistance to any movement in that direction. I will admit that it's hard to tell how much of this is a result of national factors and how much is a result of voters with different policy preferences on policing self-segregating into different communities, and we will never know for sure without some kind of impossible social experiment involving large-scale population transfers.
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Luxury apartments with high rents tend to be more profitable to rob.
This proves too much. The existing homeowners are wealthy and therefore are already profitable to rob.
Yes, which means that the station will also be a problem if there are existing homeowners who are left there withouyt building new apartments.
But RR's scenario is that the luxury apartments are built instead of "a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city," In that case, luxury apartments would be more attractive to thieves than the alternative.
The station isn't built in the middle of nowhere, so yes, there are existing homeowners already. Navigating past a parking lot is not a problem, this is America and everyone has a car.
Apartment buildings are probably less vulnerable to burglary than your average SFH, if only because you need a key to get into the lobby and smashing the lobby windows would attract too much attention. With a SFH it's easy to just go around the back, probably nobody will even notice in less dense neighborhoods.
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