You will have to solve the epidemic of homelessness and crime in high-density areas of the United States before people will accept using mass transit. I fully support doing so - I would for example support a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it - but that's the barrier.
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.
The entire west coast is really bad about its strategy for tackling homelessness. The central issue there is the federal government needs to massively ramp up housing, it can’t be solved at a local level (there’s a role to play for cities but basically you need nationwide housing reform.)
Chicago and NYC have massively used transit systems despite their homeless populations. I lived in Chicago and I miss a real transit system here in TX badly.
That is to say, we don’t need to do A before B. We need to do A & B
Seattle is fine. I've lived here and commuted via bus almost exclusively for 10 years now. The bus stop I catch is right at 3rd and Pine, with is the "scary drug dealing" corner that tourists are warned to stay away from.[0] I've never had a problem with homeless people either on the bus, at the stop, or while commuting. Over literally thousands of trips, I can probably count on one hand the number of fistfights I've seen - I saw more fights outside a bar in Pittsburgh in 2 years.
Some people are just scared of homeless people, poor people, or non-white people (or a mixture of the three). For those people, the issue isn't the actual safety, but their own discomfort or anxiety.
I'd bet that the injury rates on commuting even the scary bus routes here are comparable to or below the injury rate from driving.
The NYC subway is "massively used" but it isn't universally used, and for good reason. It's a national embarassment, both objectively and using an informal international standard scale for equivalent cities. As a result, the NYC subway is somewhere between intolerable and unwokrable for another massive part of the population who can't abide its relative lack of reliability, the danger, the filth or a combination of these.
I don’t understand how more state control is preferable. I live in California and the state government is not very in tune to the needs of my locality and seems very corrupt.
Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because substantially all cities do not want housing growth. They're all operating under the same set of incentives.
In order to have a vote in local elections, you have to be a resident. In localities with predominantly owner-occupied properties, this implies that you're a property owner. So you vote for policies that increase local housing costs, because you've got yours and you want its price to go up rather than down.
Suppose there are people in San Francisco who would like to move to San Jose or Los Angeles or San Diego, and vice versa. Everyone in San Francisco wants their property in San Francisco to get more expensive and the properties they might buy anywhere else to get less expensive, and likewise for every other city. But since only the people already in San Francisco can vote in San Francisco, the interests of all the people who want to move there are not being represented, and likewise the interests of all the people in San Francisco who want to move to San Jose but don't get a vote in San Jose.
If you move this to the state level, all of the people in San Jose and Los Angeles and San Diego can vote to lower housing costs in San Francisco and vice versa, and since the people outside of a given city outnumber the people in it, the balance could shift in favor of housing affordability instead of the untenable status quo.
That's when they resort to the bribery which they call rent control. Instead of building more housing, they give existing tenants (who can vote in the jurisdiction) lower rents than prospective tenants (who can't). Which moves enough tenants to the other side of the ballot to keep the construction restrictions in place, and further reduces the incentive for new construction, raising long-term rents even more.
Prohibiting rent control at the state level would be a great move because economists broadly agree that it's a terrible idea and then you get all the previously paid off tenants whose rent would increase clamoring for other measures to get housing costs down and increase the incentive for new construction. (Many other states sensibly already prohibit it at the state level.)
In California rent control is established by a referendum so it requires either another referendum to repeal or a some large majority in the legislature (which is unlikely to pass since the legislators understand that it's likely to be their last legislation). You cannot take away free/cheap stuff from people in a democracy, nobody is going to vote for that.
Rent control is a huge pain the ass because it's simultaneously supported by fatcats who know exactly what it does (i.e. raise overall housing costs) and naive idealists who think they're sticking it to the fatcats.
We don't allow a Hokou style of internal migration controls in the US, and we shouldn't allow places to block population growth. Both of these systems lead to massive inequality, lack of opportunity, and bad outcomes.
If you want to wall off your city, it should come with consequences such that you are not allowed to pay for services at a wage less than that which would suppprt somebody living in your city. Typical homes values are at $2.5M? That requires income of $500K to purchase, so no more nurses or cashiers or anybody else's enabling your life that does not get paid at that level.
Your taking of property is a continuous denial of other people living in a place. You paid a fix price, sure, but when the value increases, you are now taking far more away from the rest of society.
Land is not made by human hands. You should have the right to the fruits of your labor, but land is our common birthright, and just by being born first your should not be absolved from paying for what you are taking from everyone else.
Cities councils not wanting housing is why we’re in a mess in the first place. Why would it make sense to do more of the same and expect a different outcome. That’s the definition of something.
Outcomes change as the needs of the municipality change. Members get voted in and out. Do you think there is a misalignment between the city council and the constituents? Or is this what the residents want?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because it’s being enforced on everyone not just those who like things the way they are. The bar is always higher when you want to force people to do something.
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because "Fuck you, I've got mine" is no way to organize society. Local control enabled a race to the bottom of trying to fob the poors off on someone else.
I think most municipalities see growth as a general good. The issue starts when the cost of growth starts to outweigh the benefits. Roads/water/utilities/waste management are all municipal services that need to be able to handle the growth.
You're right of course, but our capitalist societies are organized around making profit, and pulling the ladder from under them is profitable for those who managed to climb the ladder first.
This won't change until properties stop being good investment vehicles, and that won't change since land is finite and demand for housing in desirable areas is always growing, therefore increasing the opportunity for profit and wealth accumulation.
If your city is also not getting state roads, state universities, state law enforcement, and state fire protection then great. Any city that refuses to get on board with state housing policy should be cutoff from all of the above.
Aren't those things all already handled by the city in most cities? (Except state universities, which aren't in many cities anyway.) That's why fire and police departments are named after the city they operate in, and mayors talk about fixing potholes.
The hostility of not wanting new people around you or any population growth seems to warrant the much more minor reciprocal hostility of forcing that population to island themselves.
I don't think people who insist their city should not grow are hostile. I think they are just ignorant and deluded. They are either not aware of, or choosing to ignore, the fact that their cities are economically dependent on neighboring cities to house their workforces, and to absorb their own natural increases.
That's what's happening in California. Newsom[1] and the legislature are on a war path against nimby's, muni and county planning departments.
City of Berkeley used 'noise' as a reason to block a UC Berkeley student housing project on environmental grounds. State just passed a law to make that illegal.
Judge just told Beverly Hills they can't issue any permits until they comply with state law.
[1] Newsom wants to be president and he knows he isn't going to get there on diversity and pronouns. He has to focus on jobs, housing, and crime.
> a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it
Out of curiosity, have you looked into this?
This was basically the NYCHA approach in the '30s-'50s. Then we got the '70s-80s, and for sure some good came from these developments -- rap music! -- but by all accounts they were not wonderful places to live. Not only because they often segregated poverty, but also because they were poorly maintained, like so many other state-owned housing schemes.
Housing is expensive, yes, and we need more of it, yes. But low-cost housing without other support is not a solution to the "epidemic of homelessness and crime" in cities. We need better plans to help people get out of poverty, treatment for addiction and other mental health problems, integration into society, meaningful work, etc. etc.
I'm not picking on you in particular (you do say "for example", so perhaps you already know the above!) but other should know that the mere availability of cheap or even free housing is not a panacea for social ills.
People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore. Elected leaders along with legislators and property investors do, and their interest is to make a lot of money for themselves while offering you the bare minimum, not provide other less fortunate humans with nice walkable cities.
> People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore.
I think you're confused about the meaning. It's not about brand new cities, it's about allowing construction of certain builds in areas to increase the density of cities, which by extension would lead to amenities in walking distance.
Zoning reforms work, they've been employed in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Minneapolis & St Paul have a light rail that was pretty decent pre covid, now it is a homeless shelter on rails. Practically no policing so there is open drug trade & usage.
We didn't really try it, we tried to kill it. It was segregated, not funded enough to maintain the housing, and policy was designed in a way to make it fail.
All other advanced nations besides the US do (or did) public housing quite effectively. Even very conservative places like Singapore have amazing public housing.
Many many people want to live in a concrete jungle, which is why NYC is so popular.
Public housing in the US did not fail because it was in large concrete towers. It failed because it was isolated from the economic community, it was not maintained, and it was sabotaged on the funding side.
Mass produced cement blocks are a fantastic way to live, and much of the rest of the world uses to great effect, some for public housing, but also for middle class and upper class housing.
It's so weird that so many in the US have this odd fixation that because they personally don't want that concert box, that so many others would kit absolutely looooove to live there. Check out Asia some time, or basically anywhere else in the world.
The small mindedness of "I don't like it therefore nobody ever could and you should never be allowed to live differently than the way I like" is a very destructive force in the US. We have apparently lost the ability to "let live" in "live and let live. "
You're right, we need truly integrated housing. It does work. My ~$2.5M home is an 1/8 mile from subsidized housing. Outside of boomers on nextdoor who think every package delivery person is casing their home, it works completely fine.
The "silo" isn't the problem, it's the lack of opportunities for employment, lack of access to basic amenities, etc.
People in wealthy silos, in downtowns, do fantastically. The problem was the systemic racism in the US, that enabled such a state of disinvestment and segregation, not the particular form of architecture.
That is an incredibly offensive and racist thing to even concieve, much less try to put into somebody else's mouth.
The problem of public housing's inaccessibility, being cut off from jobs and basic necessities, is well documented. Segregation has been a huge problem in the US because it has been used to deny basic opportunity to Black people, not because a lot of Black people are living together.
FWIW, the communist regimes did that in Eastern Europe, and for all the nasty shit they did, that was one of the few things that did more good than harm. It's how apartments in Bucharest are still relatively affordable despite the massive migration and gentrification.
Unless of course, the way the US tried it was the "malicious compliance way" which was designed to fail from the start, then I'm not surprised it didn't go well.
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.