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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.
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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!
I would say most of that falls under "disorder". Flowers may be removed due to vandalism, toilets may be closed and benches removed due to the homeless/drug addicts, etc. Most of this would be solved if you just locked 'em up: criminals in prison (harsher sentences), crazies in mental hospitals, drug addicts in rehab (and prison for repeat offenders). The rest is just a lack of funding, which is generally attributed to wealthier people moving to the suburbs and decreasing the city's revenue.
Regarding public transport specifically, most suburbs have terrible or nonexistent public transport, so that's certainly not a reason people move there. Denser cities generally have some kind of public transport, even if it's filled with people smoking every substance imaginable.
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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.
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”
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.
Yes, that is literally the exact mechanism in which NIMBYism functions in basically every country.
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.
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