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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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It’s clear that Americans do want this kind of housing. The handful of ex-NYC neighborhoods that offer even the vaguest semblance of this kind of lifestyle are often extremely expensive. See Venice and Santa Monica in LA, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Back Bay in Boston and so on.

There are millions of dirt-cheap middle-density units in America that cost nearly nothing.

Half of Philadelphia is mid-rise. The majority of Cleveland proper is. Huge swathes of St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are. In many of these places, you can buy a house for the price of a loaded pickup truck.

I love my suburban townhouse, but it's selling at a slight discount to similarly-sized houses with yards in the same development I live in. I'd rather walk two blocks along a walking trail to the nearest park than deal with maintaining a yard, but it seem the market has spoken and people want to live in Irvine.

People don't make their decisions based on the built environment though, they act based on their social environment. I'm moving from my nearly-perfect townhouse to a sprawling, Euclidean-zoned 80s suburb with a huge yard in a place with worse weather, and I'm happy about it. My in-laws live there, and kids should be near family.

I think that's why people complain about suburbs. Their family lives there, and they're trying to distance themselves from them.

Half of Philadelphia is mid-rise. The majority of Cleveland proper is. Huge swathes of St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are. In many of these places, you can buy a house for the price of a loaded pickup truck.

Yeah, and the places where a house costs the same as a pickup truck are not, generally, the places where it’s safe to actually enjoy the amenities of living in a dense neighborhood, like being able to walk to and from dinner, to let the kids play outside and walk to their friends’ houses, to not worry about extreme risk of property theft. Kensington in Philly wouldn’t be undesirable if the police did what was necessary to make it safe, clean and amenable to middle class people. But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities. You just have to get serious about it.

But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities.

The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.

Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites

But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities.

The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.

Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites

Reminds me of the hard times meme.

Also, use two spaces for line breaks, two returns to turn each line into a paragraph, or turn your comment into an unnumbered list.

This isn't true either. I look at an inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh like Dormont. It's about as walkable as one can reasonably expect. It has 2 nice main drags with lots of amenities, and it's affordable; less than a decade ago you could get a 3 bedroom house for under 100k. There was a time when people called it "Dirtmont" because it was kind of dumpy and working-class, but it was never dangerous, and no one would ever look down on anyone who lived there the way they'd even look down on someone living in a similarly white working-class area like Carrick. But now, people seem to like it. But not enough that people are banging down the doors to get in. There are a ton of areas like that around Pittsburgh, a lot of them in the city proper, but only trendy areas like Lawrenceville seem to be getting unaffordable (at least by Pittsburgh standards). I can't speak to other cities, but I doubt this is a unique situation.

the same as a pickup truck are not, generally, the places where it’s safe to actually enjoy the amenities of living in a dense neighborhood

This does not stop people from living in non-walkable housing in similarly terrible neighborhoods.

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