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...no, you literally just have to remove the zoning restrictions on building housing and the market will trip over itself to build more housing until the price of rent collapses. Then you simply remove prohibitions on racial discrimination so that people don't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass.
This whole mess is caused by the government refusing to let markets solve the problem.
There aren't significant problems with race in Australia such that urban centres are very unsafe. But property here is even more expensive than in much of America, compared to income.
Productivity in the construction industry has been falling in Australia. It's been falling in America too. Regulations are partly to blame but the whole thing needs a reboot. There's an entire genre on tiktok showcasing the poor quality of new-build American houses, all this wonky or leaky, shoddy construction work. There are problems with price, quality and quantity.
Housing is the sort of industry where it makes sense for big companies to do it, not tiny little shrimps. Learning-by-doing is clearly needed and not happening. There has to be close coordination with government anyway to build out the infrastructure needed, dams, water, power... It should be managed by the state but in a capable, effective fashion. I realise that last sentence sounds retardedly naive but it is possible in principle.
When in doubt, copy Singapore. It's run with heavy state involvement there, 80% of the housing stock is public housing, they have construction productivity that actually goes up and housing is actually affordable. Per Claude:
Singapore also has ethnic quotas in their public housing. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/buying-a-flat/buying-procedure-for-resale-flats/plan-source-and-contract/planning-considerations/eip-spr-quota
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They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.
69% of Americans choose to live in suburbs. Ultra-urban state planning (even if competent!) won't work on us. It isn't relevant to our wants and inclinations.
This is like people who say America should be more like Japan because of their great health outcomes. On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we just aren't Japanese and a bunch of fat white people severely underperform them on health outcomes. There's no path from us to them.
If Western, white countries are unable to replicate the successes of Asian countries then we may as well give up on politics and civilization generally.
The Chinese didn't go 'oh well they're white and we're yellow, we'd better just accept inferiority, mediocrity and humiliation - we'll just be coolies working for pennies'. They copied what they liked about our civilization and discarded what they didn't want. Lee Quan Yew did exactly that, he went to London and America and brought back good ideas to try.
Low-crime isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Clean public transport isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Crime used to be low. Public transport used to be clean. It still is in many places. If the demographics are bad, adjust tactics to keep them in line or change the demographics. Send criminals to prison or blow their heads off - capital punishment has a long history in the West. You can just do things.
Americans should definitely stop eating chemical slop and eat more Japanese food - rice and fish. It tastes good and is good. Or they could eat excellent European cuisine. Nothing about being white condemns a country to substandard outcomes.
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Europeans (the supermajority population in most American suburbs) have lived in dense urban towns and cities for thousands of years too.
The American preference for suburbs also is less organic than many conservatives online suggest. Zoning laws effectively prevent mid-density inner suburbs of the European or even traditional American kind.
Not dense like modern Asian cities, or even modern European ones. I'm right now in a "city" in Europe that's less dense than the suburb (of NYC) I live in at home. For being a city it's surprisingly civilized; just not having so many damned people is a major advantage.
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Yes, pre-car America had dense walkable 'streetcar suburbs'. Not a modern lower density SFH car-based suburb, but a proper extension of the city. Some small houses mixed in with big apartment buildings. Just hop on the trolley to go to work.
Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools. Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.
Google tells me Europe was 5-10% urban circa 1700. And that's really straining the definition of 'urban' to include towns of a few thousand people. I don't think that special Chinese-only DNA makes Singapore function. But they have a certain set of social norms and types of people we don't much have in the US. Their ways aren't and won't be ours. Given the wildly different situations (ethnically Chinese ruled modern city-state vs much more pluralistic continent-spanning world power), I'd even say shouldn't.
Not exactly voluntarily; there was some ethnic cleansing.
Exactly. The inner-ring suburbs of western European cities that were affluent c.1900 (mostly western ones - Holland Park, St John's Wood, Neuilly-sur-Seine etc.) never stopped being. My impression is that the same is true of most ex-NYC commuter towns.
This pattern implies that the problem is the broader problem that makes US cities other than NYC unable to police themselves, and Americans resort to ways of living that don't need policing.
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That didn’t happen because of the invention of the suburbs. Dense inner suburbs in New York City like Brooklyn Heights have some of America’s most desirable and expensive real estate even though their residents could easily afford huge McMansions further out into the (20th century) suburbs. In Paris and London they likewise remain extremely expensive and desirable real estate even though - again - their residents could easily move out to the modern suburbs and live in much larger houses with big gardens etc.
The factors that turned the inner suburbs of Baltimore and Philadelphia into shitholes have nothing to do with some inherent issues with that urban housing layout. There were indeed intractable problems with dense urban and particularly tenement housing until the mid-19th century but modern sewage, plumbing, hygiene and other innovations mean they were no longer relevant a century ago, let alone today.
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