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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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“ So many American voters want the NIMBYism”

  • this occurred post WW2 after a great migration and what was termed as “White Flight”. It’s basically impossible at this point to discern whether it occurred because of technology or crime. The urban schools became ghettoized which meant you have to pay private school tuition which meant making a lot of money. Cheap urban living became non-existent.

Is Charlotte a big city? I haven’t lived there in 20 years but I thought it was car-centric sprawl.

Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.

14th biggest city in the country.

That doesn’t mean anything in the US. Houston is the 4th largest city. Zero walkable neighborhoods. It’s one giant suburb.

I take it you've never set foot in Houston to injudiciously repeat that classic trope. All neighborhoods within the I-610 loop are walkable by any metric. Montrose is a genuinely pleasant neighborhood replete of ambient cafes. Museum District too. EaDo's nightlife experience is just as good as any other major city in the Western world. MetroRail is a system that is utilized by medical professionals commuting to work. Rice Village and the Medical Center add a density of educated professionals and vast amenities. Hermann Park is a serious urban park and I will say that the US does parks in particular better than most European countries. Beautiful biking trails along the Buffalo Bayou in the heart of the city. You only know Houston from trite, outdated tweets. I don't get the singling out of Houston when Dallas and Phoenix would strengthen that argument, though even those cities have developed substantial pockets of walkability that were nonexistent in the 1990s.

Worth a watch:https://youtube.com/watch?v=0fMTaNYYvwE?si=b5V8XKnuqY_P5T0C

I did live in Houston for a month during Covid. I’ll be honest I not consider most of that video as highly walkable. And most would seem like you need to drive into a strip of things to do and not walk from him.

I'm curious as to what your standard for walkable is. Mine is simply that commercial areas are accessible by foot with sidewalks and walkways. Sure, most of Houston is highly residential and not replete of neighborhood stores like a city with more urban bones such as NYC or Chicago, but during its population boom in the 1970s, downtown was a gargantuan parking lot, and it wasn't until the early 2000s that its utility was no longer confined to office workers. It is absolutely possible to walk to your local HEB within the I-610 loop. If you are looking for a place where you can find a cafe and a supermarket immediately at your doorstep, then as you leave major cities that simply is non-existent in most of America, and for that matter, northern Europe due to the regulatory constraints of the zoning law.

Maybe I am not using walkable in the vernacular in the US but basically do all functions of life within a 10 min walk. Gyms, bar, Church, grocery store, potentially work all without needing a car. Houston even if we just limit it to walkable neighborhoods I remember limited options.

Fair enough, most of this is anything but a given in Europe, too. Unless you're in Italy or eastern Europe.

Well yeah, people in Houston and Charlotte don't want much walkable neighborhoods. If they did, they wouldn't constantly vote against dense construction and bike lanes and the like.

My initial comment was that diversity and immigration are bad. Yes people in America vote against dense construction. People do NOT like living in diverse dense neighborhoods. They don’t like living next to black people.

Yet homogenous societies live in dense neighborhoods. Buenos Aires where they literally genocide blacks and Indians is dense and walkable. European cities are dense and walkable. Chinese cities are dense and walkable. Tokyo is dense and walkable.

So yes you prove my point. People do not like living in diverse societies. When people are in homogenous societies they suddenly choose to live close to each other.

Singapore is by no means homogeneous. There were race riots in the 1960s. Malays are economically less successful than the Chinese, and probably more prone to crime. Housing has racial quotas to ensure every building is in line with the national makeup. None of this stops them from living densely.

Don’t they have a semi-democracy and at times closer to dictatorship? They also execute people a lot?

So yes I think Americans would live in cities more if we executed every black person who stole or dealt drugs.

Why does it matter if they're Black? Yes, a large portion would be Black, but presumably you'd want to neutralize the criminals of other races, too.

I guess you can do all, I’ve only been a victim of black crime and personally seen black crime. There would be a disparate impact on the black community if we policed more and raised penalties to make cities livable.

Because they execute drug dealers, cane robbers, and even fine you for eating in public transport. I rarely hear these things proposed by YIMBY immigration enjoyers.

Here I am. I believe modern American suburban living is terrible for the health of both people and the planet, but I understand that it's largely a reaction to unbearable crime rates and disorder in densely-populated areas, and that addressing them is the only way to get American families with children (as opposed to young adults who can put up with more) back in cities.

(Note: I'm not American.)

It's not just crime and disorder, it's mismanagement in general. Many large cities have very high taxes and struggle to deliver basic civic services beyond safety, like transit, parks, civic maintenance, or public improvements. Every year, things get shittier and worse. Tore out the flowers. Closed up the toilets. Potholes unpatched. Children can't read. Removed the benches. Tore down the statues. Closed the library branch. Closed the public pool. Stopped maintaining the beach. Stopped mowing the grass. No more leaf collection. Let brush overgrow everything. Cut the municipal office hours. Added more sales tax. Added more property tax. Added more income tax. Increased salary and benefits. It's maddening, it never ends.

ETA: Oh yeah! And no more fireworks on the 4th of July!

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Buenos Aires where they literally genocide blacks and Indians is dense and walkable. European cities are dense and walkable. Chinese cities are dense and walkable. Tokyo is dense and walkable.

A lot of these are either from historic choices, lack of land, and/or poverty. Europe is consumed with NIMBYism too, they're worse than the US now in many parts! Hong Kong has long been a NIMBY hub.

But it would be a mistake to infer that the territory’s housing shortages are because there is no more space in between the mountains. Like in nearly every country, Hong Kong’s problems ultimately derive from uncertain property rights regimes that do not let those who would benefit from development trade with those who have the power for it to be blocked.

Am I supposed to believe this is from racial tensions?.

Hong Kong has like 100 km^2 of land according to your own article that isn’t turned into condo towers. Yes cities still like to have some parks. Plus the article explains there are property right issues.

“Europe now has NIMBY”

  • Europe just let in a lot of third world brown people.

I will agree urbanism has multi-factor analysis. People don’t want to live in Coruscant style cities. But diversity seems to be a very good predictor of a countries urbanism.

Plus the article explains there are property right issues.

Yes, that is literally the exact mechanism in which NIMBYism functions in basically every country.

“Europe now has NIMBY”

Europe just let in a lot of third world brown people.

NIMBYist personality isn't new in Europe, great piece out recently on how that got overcame for a while and they were actually able to do stuff. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revolution/

The YIMBY vs NIMBY fight has been an ancient battle.

Pre-diversity or in the US The Great Migration when was urbanism an issue? The Southside of Chicago was thriving before blacks moved in. And now it’s a ghetto.

You can literally buy a 4k sq ft mansion there a few blocks from University of Chicago but it’s dirt cheap because blacks live there.

Yeah, I had the impression that Charlotte, like almost all Southern cities, had exactly one walkable White neighborhood which you won't be living in unless you can afford million-dollar houses or $3000 rents. (Edit: and like all such neighborhoods nowadays, if your politics are anything other than "left-liberal shading towards DSA", you won't feel welcome there and you won't be making any friends. Expect pride flags and "In This House We Believe..." signs everywhere.) And, like most Southern cities, the public transportation in the postwar neighborhoods consisted of maybe one bus per hour, and there are no "third places" there unless you count Wal-Mart and McDonalds.

What? Densely populated urban areas will skew left just about anywhere in America (bar some pockets of Miami, thanks to Cubans, and Las Vegas, due to Mormons), but Southern cities are the ones that are more likely to have a substantial Republican minority, with neighborhoods that see 30-40% of their residents voting for Trump. Off the top of my head, you have Fort Worth, Jacksonville, and Virginia Beach (I don't consider Virginia to be a Southern state, but it's no less Southern than NC) which are some of the largest cities in the nation to have elected Trump. There are plenty of affordable, decently conservative neighborhoods around the SMU campus in Dallas and Houston's Energy Corridor/Memorial area (unsure if you mean walkable in a more purist sense, but you absolutely can walk to the supermarket and other retail spaces). Oklahoma City and Tulsa have plenty of solid downtown neighborhoods that are only 50-60% Democratic. In New Orleans, you have the tranquil Lakeview neighborhood entirely removed from the unsavory elements further east in the city, as safe as any suburb. Nashville, Memphis, and Birmingham's majority-white neighborhoods are not DSA strongholds, you have some rebellious partisan Democrat college kids but also many Republicans born and raised in the city. If you can handle a neighborhood that is only plurality-white, you'll have plenty more options made available.

If your idea of Southern is limited to Atlanta and Charlotte, then you may very well be right.

Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.

This is just completely untrue and historically illiterate. I was born and raised in Evanston, and am now living there again, and there was plenty of violence, murder, and gang shootings in Rogers Park and the Howard street corridor when I was a kid there in the 90s. Chicago, like most American cities, saw a spike in crime and violence that peaked there in 1974 at 970 homicides, still the record. It hit a slightly lower headcount but higher per capita rate in 1992 (948 homicides, but a higher rate due to a smaller population). Neither has been matched since. Not in 2016 (which saw around 762), and not during the peak of the COVID-era surge (which topped out around 800). It's been a continuous decline since then, and we had 416 last year, a 60-year low.

For reference: Rogers Park is the northernmost neighborhood in the city, and Howard Street is the literal Chicago/Evanston line. You will notice this is not 'contained' to the South or West sides of Chicago, it's the doorstep of the North Shore, some of the wealthiest lakefront real estate in the Midwest.

The southwest "bungalow belt" was safe - but it fell, starting around 1980. Its last hurrah was "Epton: Before It's Too Late" in the 1983 mayoral campaign which Harold Washington won.

The Loop and River North were safe from like 2006-2016. I don’t know when that area got safe but it very march declined after 2016. Having gun violence at my RN condo and a scary stolen car incident in River North told me to peace the fuck out. Rogers Park I agree has issues. Had stay there for a month with a friend a few years ago.

Hey man, I get it. My family actually moved us out of Evanston while I was in elementary school for the same reason. Within the same month, I think my brother both got mugged on the way back from school, and our apartment on Dobson, just a block or two off of Howard, got broken into. We ended up moving to Aurora, and it's only in the last couple of years that I've come back to Evanston.

Funnily enough, Howard Street's problems trace back to a weird jurisdictional accident: it became the Chicago/Evanston line, got physically cut off from Evanston services by a cemetery and the L tracks, and by the 80s was so full of cheap vacant buildings that a documented heroin market moved into right around the Clark/Howard stop. North Rogers Park basically just started subdividing their homes and larger apartments into smaller and cheaper units immediately after WW2 and never really stopped or replaced their aging buildings, and lo and behold you've got a slum and all the complementary problems high-density, low-income housing with poor services brings.

River North is a bit of a different story. It's a nightlife strip packed with 5am bars, and the local alderman actually tried to kill those licenses because drunk crowds plus guns kept ending in shootings. When the 2020 riots hit, River North and the Mag Mile got specifically targeted, not randomly, because that's where the concentrated high-end retail was, by organized crews with U-Hauls. Then COVID brought a citywide carjacking wave that hit the North Side especially hard just because it's dense with cars and pedestrians, and downtown emptied out during the day as offices went remote, so you lost the foot traffic that used to keep the nightlife crowds in check.

Juneway Terrace, the northernmost street in Rogers Park was (is??) known as Juneway Jungle.

Rodgers Park actually does have some really nice old apartments basically on the water. The demographics completely change as you get like 3 min away from the lake. Just old historical buildings that could be a great neighborhood.

River North wasn’t violence for a long time. I knew everyone in the club scene. There was a place called Cuvee that was high end. Then I guess it declined and I showed up one time and I still knew the doormen, but now they were bullet proof vest. There was a time when River North was just upper class kids from the North Shore.

Chicago had other issues leading to decline, but the violence making it into the wealthier neighborhoods and business drove a lot of people away. Chicago was two cities for a few decades. Post 2016 was a second White-Flight. I left the same reason Citadel left.

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