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Notes -
Slight tangent:
Aah Seattle.... my favorite city to complain about.
Seattle is one of those places, where the more you look, the weirder it gets. Nothing about the city makes sense, and it seems to find the least intuitive solution to every core problem facing it.
I'm leaving Seattle for NYC in 2 weeks, and could not be happier about it.
The 3 words that come to mind when you think of the Seattle landscape are :
Rainy
Hilly
Dark
So, you'd think that the infrastructure would be built to work around these 3 traits. NOPE. If anything, the city tries to pretend as if none of those exist and gaslights you for complaining about it.
It's the rainy, so you'd want covered indoor spaces for people to socialize in for the 9 months of the year. There are none. Maybe covered outdoor spaces ? None.
It's dark, so you'd there to be well lit central walkable streets so people feel safe when it is dark at 3pm outside. There are none. But, dark places means amazing nightlife right ? Nope. Everything closes at 9.30.
It is hilly, so you'd want a street-cars/funiculars for the worst hills right ? Nope. The 2 paltry streetcars follow some of the flattest terrain in town.
Now here is the hilarious thing, this wouldn't be that big an issue. Afterall, all of America is abysmally planned and it manages to get by just fine. Thing is, all of Seattle's problems become 10x worse once you add the right variable into the mix. Yes ofc, Homelessness. (plus the dilapidation, drugs and crime resulting from it)
Why can't we have warm-ish covered public spaces --> because homeless people.
Why does no one want to walk in dark, badly lit, cold, rainy downtown neighborhoods unlike Northern Europe with similar weather --> because meth crazed homeless people
Why does no one use public transit --> because drooling drugged out homeless people
But why does driving into downtown also suck --> because property crime : homeless people
Should we do anything to solve it. Maybe start with politely asking homeless people to move or telling Mr. Felony that 22 strikes are 22 too many ? (/s)
No, we show compassion. Because there is nothing as egalitarian as allowing thousands of people to steal, stalk, harass & assault people while they waste their life away on increasingly accessible drugs.
I refuse to buy this uniquely American association of "suburbia = soft discrimination through differential access = class war = signaling". In every well-connected European & Asian city, the rich & high-status live in the middle of the city. It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.
You are correct in that discrimination is central to signaling class. But, using the world's most inefficient urban planning to facilitate this is a uniquely American (and associated fake countries that pretend they aren't vassal states).
It is that way in those cities because the authorities make it that way. We used to have dense urban cores that were safe, prosperous, and full of healthy communities. The authorities (loosely defined) destroyed them, often on purpose, and have made lasting commitments to prevent their regeneration. The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference. We destroyed our communities, and committed ourselves to ruinous policies that preclude anything like them from arising again. Suburbia is not anyone's first plan, it's merely the workable option somewhat out of reach of the authorities' malign influence.
Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.
Everyone is discussing race related issues- but car culture led to freeways, which the federal government built through the centers of beautiful dense cities knocking down beautiful stone buildings etc. Here is a video covering this transformation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa&index=8
It is from a great series on the wild economic incinerator of suburbia, how poor downtowns produce more economically (well, income for cities) than upperclass areas or newer malls etc.: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa It also explains a lot of American cost disease re infrastructure.
If you look at pictures from 1930s downtown anywhere in the US, it looks very similar to a European equivalent. Massive beautiful stone structures erected in the late 19th century etc. 9:16 on the first video has some good pictures.
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Darryl Cooper did a good 5-part series on this recently: Part one; part two; part three; part three point five; part four; part five.
Wow! This truly is a great series.
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As mentioned, it's a long story, but I can try to get you started. Some elements:
Desegregation/Blockbusting/"White Flight", and the mechanics thereof. @The_Nybbler links one history, I offer excerpts from another here. The short version is that desegregation failed on its own terms, injecting massive amounts of interracial violence into previously peaceful and prosperous communities, which the authorities completely failed to anticipate or respond to.
The housing projects. See the discussion of Pruitt-Igoe here. These occurred more or less contemporaneously to desegregation, and were likewise driven by Progressive social-engineering theories with the aim of creating peaceful, prosperous communities for the underclass. The result were, in the words of Spike Lee, "self-cleaning ovens."
Deinstitutionalization resulted in insane people living on the street, rather than in controlled environments.
De-criminalization and toleration of vagrancy allowed the homeless to become a long-term problem within communities.
These specific policies did fatal damage to the communities of most major American cities. With the communities destroyed, the social basis for reform and regeneration no longer existed, and so the problems became self-perpetuating, and have continued since. Attempted solutions to the problems created by the last attempted solutions have created significant problems of their own.
The damage of these policies was aggravated by a number of other social trends and interventions, which amplified the damage they did. In most cases, the harms disproportionately fell on minority and especially black communities.
No-fault divorce, which delivered few of the benefits its advocates claimed, and all the harms its opponents warned of.
The Sexual Revolution generally, which likewise failed to secure the benefits its advocates claimed, caused a whole host of problems in its own right, and is effectively irreversable.
Lax drug policies and the cultivation of a ineradicable drug culture. The war On Drugs is one of the go-to examples of systemic racism, ignoring the historical fact that harsher punishments for the drugs ravaging black communities was a policy explicitly demanded by those communities, in an attempt to control the damage flowing outward from the above policies.
Educational "reforms" that have generally degraded the educational system's effectiveness, failed at all stated goals, massively increased costs, and occasionally observably made kids more violent.
...And the list goes on and on, but these would be a start. I suppose the short summary would be that, in the 1960s, Progressivism gained a critical mass of support sufficient to implement its policies, and that we live now in the ruins that they made of what once was a remarkably prosperous and orderly society.
How do you square this theory with the fact that many European countries have gone further with their progressive reforms along all of these dimensions (at least, that is my general impression - I'm not willing to claim expertise in every single EU member state's social policies and what it's like to live there, but I am willing to claim that most Americans perceive that European countries are both more progressive and less disordered than the US).
So, do European countries not have no-fault divorce? Do they not have lax drug policies or housing projects? Are the cops in London going around cracking rough sleepers over the head with their billy clubs and shipping them off to institutions? (I mention London specifically because the UK is the only European (kind of?) country I have any experience traveling in, and it's generally amazing to me how few "street people" you see in the cities. Most people I've talked to about this cite the stronger social safety net as being the reason.
As much as I instinctively would like more aggressive policing of vagrancy, vandalism, and property crime in American cities, I'm not sure it will solve the fundamental problem of too many people without jobs or other economic support. Given what it costs to actually arrest, jail, bring to trial, convict, and imprison somebody, it's simply not worth prosecuting most low-level property crime, even if it makes living in cities hell. Low-crime times and places seem more correlated with "enough jobs and housing to go around" than with "enough cops, courts and jails".
European countries are more or less racially homogeneous in comparison. That's how, I'd say.
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Here's one version: http://www.phillywarzone.com/
There used to be longer excerpts of the book online but they seem to be gone or at least hard to find. The short version is the "white flight" you've heard about, where white people would run to sell their house at the slightest hint of black people moving in.... well, it turns out often the black people weren't just moving in. They were violently driving the white people out, with the assistance of the local authorities. The book is about Philadelphia, but I heard similar stories about Baltimore a long time ago.
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There’s about 10 different versions of it, including that is was part of a Jewish plot to weaken Christianity, but I suspect he’s referring to poor implementation of desegregation policies.
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