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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   25964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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People mock Slough for being a shithole, but a random residential panorama from there looks like this.

The least impoverished state in India is commie Kerala, and a random residential panorama from its capital... let me paste that... Thiruvananthapuram looks like this, which is not a shithole, but it's not the kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism that will sway American NIMBYs either.

If we go to India proper, aka BIMARU, then the situation looks even worse: a random panorama from Delhi looks like this and I've cheated because Delhi is not technically a BIMARU state. Here's one from a random town in UP.

You're not comparing like for like here. The Slough street is a top 10% (or even higher) nighbourhood. Your first photo of India is an average to below average neighbourhood and your second and third ones are commercial areas with some residences on top rather than pure residential areas which are on average somewhat nicer and look more like your first photo. But even then, it's nowhere near a top 10% neighbourhood and we know this immediately because the street is too narrow for one.

That isn't top 10%. A top 10% neighborhood in the Slough area would be called "Windsor" or "Maidenhead".

Sure, in Slough yes but it's definitely top 10% for England as a whole (even ignoring land value and just looking at house quality).

It’s a 90th percentile (almost exactly) house by price, but this a poor comparison because incomes are so much higher in the Southeast and especially for residents of the affluent green belt suburbs, in which as @MadMonzer suggests this is probably more like 75th percentile.

In the median part of the UK, probably somewhere in the north, £600k can buy you a much nicer place than this.

Top 10% neighborhoods in India are often still pretty dirty, though, the street outside an apartment building where the average apartment costs $2m will have a broken sidewalk, garbage, a random cow.

Do you have a link to a top 10% Indian neighborhood? I honestly clicked on random street view streets.

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

Top 1%-10% looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Qef6cvBq2HCzgZMc9

Another example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/8MYWxih9nbs7aP14A

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

I had to click along the road just once to find a pile of trash. The other two are nicer, probably because people living there actually use these streets. I would rate them Russia-tier, though it's more like the penultimate decile, not the ultimate one.

Huh? That Russian neighborhood looks pretty nice. Intact curbs, lots of landscaping, and no piles of trash. There's even an under-construction sign.

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

There's still garbage on the street, https://maps.app.goo.gl/kaDQdMq7PXkkycNP9.

Fair enough, it'll probably be picked up and removed within a few days, which is very likely a higher frequency of garbage collection than in Slough given the council funding crisis they have and all...

People mock Slough for being a shithole, but a random residential panorama from there looks like this.

This is a very nice middle class street in England, though. One of those 3-bedroom semi-detached houses costs $770,000. The people who are buying those homes today (not 20 years ago) are like young dual-income software engineer or lawyer or accountant couples (especially given the state of British salaries) .For the same price, ie. 65 million rupees or 6.5 crore rupees, you can buy something much nicer than that in Thiruvananthapuram, at least according to some property websites I just googled.

Obviously India's big problem is squalor, even in wealthy neighborhoods, but presumably this bothers Indian expats less. The interiors of the homes are usually spotless, in any case.

Some of our American friends here may not realize when looking on the street that each of those buildings is not one house, but two houses that share a wall in the middle. That half of a building is what's costing three quarters of a million dollars. It's twice as crowded a street as you might think it is if you're only considering one full building as a single house.

As an American I assumed those were all single family homes, God bless America.

Duplexes are a thing in America, although they do not generally cater to the crowd that buys three quarter million dollar houses.

This is location dependent.

There are new-build duplex 'condominium' in an HOA in our small NE town for $669k (2 bed 2.5 bath 2,165 sqft.)

Whenever I go on Google Street view in the UK, I'm shocked by how ugly the houses are. Why is everything so grey and depressing looking? I'm used to thinking of it as a rich country, but the quality of housing appears to be extremely low.

Whenever I go on Google Street view in the UK, I'm shocked by how ugly the houses are. Why is everything so grey and depressing looking?

That, along with queuing, is basically the UKs brand. There's a reason the original title for Orwell's work was 1948.

The UK has the worst housing quality in the developed world. My family's house back in our semi rural ancestral village that was build in the 1980s is better built and has more amenities today (AC for example) than those houses in the picture.

The quality of housing is poor in the UK by first world standards even compared to any other nation with similar income, so it’s not just that Europe is poorer than the US.

There are many reasons but most come back to the mid-1930s which, unlike in most of the world, was a period of great economic growth and development for the UK, which was less affected by the Great Depression than any comparable nation. (This also explains appeasement to some extent.)

Huge numbers of new suburbs were built. The default middle class British suburban house is probably still a 1930s ‘semi’[-detached] property that looks like this.

At the same time, local governments (later guaranteed by the national government) implemented policies that severely restricted suburban construction around all major British cities - seriously, look at the map in that link, especially around London. In addition, many of the wealthy long-standing commuters towns began exercising greater planning control over new developments; British local governments have very little power except over planning, and NIMBYism started early here.

For a long time, this didn’t affect much; the Blitz and postwar reconstruction destroyed a huge amount of housing stock, much of which was hastily and cheaply rebuilt in that era of austerity and rationing. Then, as London’s population declined by millions of people after WW2, there were plenty of beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian stucco townhouses and apartment buildings where homes could be had for cheap. Much of the population moved out into suburban towns build on brownfield sites or which had earlier been earmarked for development, to places like Slough.

After Margaret Thatcher restarted the British economy, millions of people began to return to London in large numbers, and the price of property began to shoot up. In the suburbs and city alike, local councils began to exercise their immense power over applications to prevent most new construction, to avoid loud works or annoyed neighbors or more strain on local schools or hospitals. In the city, much of the surviving pre-1945 stock of housing was ‘listed’ as architecturally important, which in combination with strict height limits meant London has a much lower density than comparable major cities and much less new construction.

That, coupled with the green belt itself, which all levels of government and almost all existing homeowners (who vote) guard zealously, means that British housing stock is largely both poor and expensive, especially in the southeast where most economic activity takes place. When housebuilders do get approval to build on even brownfield land, they cram as many ugly, cheap and small-windowed homes onto it as they can, because approvals can take decades of legal wrangling to achieve, thus the “Barratt box” (named after the largest UK housebuilder) negative descriptor of Deano meme fame.

If you have money and/or live somewhere with no jobs you can avoid all this and live in some of the most beautiful and well-preserved pre-1920s housing in the world. But most people can’t.

I thought those were all post-bombing 1950/60s stock? Those big windows don’t look prewar to me. We let the socialists get control during the crucial rebuilding period.

Yes, the housing stock in this picture is clearly postwar. Either the street was bombed, since Slough was apparently hit quite heavily, or it was new construction. But the reason why we can’t just demolish these houses and replace them with better ones, as happened elsewhere, is due to decisions made earlier and later than that.

There's also government regulations that require houses to look ugly so that people don't fall out the window.

https://x.com/SCP_Hughes/status/1674006804076920834

I thought they literally don't allow windows to open more than an inch now for the same reason.
There were a lot of window opening loicense jokes on Twitter last summer because of that.

Edit: it's 100mm or ~4"

Haven't heard that. Pretty sure fire regulations require that people can egress out of windows (at least in bedrooms), so maybe it applies only to some windows.

Yes, that is another BS regulation we have to deal with.

Regulations were recently introduced requiring a minimum window sill or guard height of 1.1 metres (43.3 inches).

For comparison, the US's de facto standard prescribes for window-sill heights a minimum of 18 inches (0.46 meter) and a maximum of 44 inches (1.12 meters).

It's even less restrictive than that; you can have floor to ceiling glazing (not uncommon in fixed windows and sliding doors) provided the glass meets the hazardous location standards. That standard isn't about people falling out of open windows, it's about breaking through closed ones.

There's another rule about that, R321.2.1. The minimum is 24 inches (0.61 meter), from the floor to the opening, unless a guard is provided. Obvious thing to do if you want a window lower than that is to make the top panel the operating one, and I think I've seen that. As long as it's above 18 inches you can use regular glass.

Kerala isn't better than any BIMARU states besides Bihar. The best infrastructure would be Chandigarh which looks like impoverished chiang mai from 20 years ago in the good parts. Although North East of India, the population with east Asian admixture has better infrastructure.

Bihar is the worst, the ironic thing being some of the smartest people come from these parts. South Asia has something cursed to it that it's somehow worse than other comparable nations at the similar gdp.

The only thing I know about Chandigarh is that it was designed as another one of the modernist monstrosities like Brasilia or EUR in Rome. Are the residential parts any better?

Brutalism, yes, it's way better than any Indian city by miles as they simply lack any planning or direction at all.

There's a reason why people are willing to freeze to death to leave, India isn't for beginners. There are some elite enclaves sprinkled here and there that you can only buy after doing shady shit with the government given the absurd prices.

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