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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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None of this really deals with what generates such a need for suburbia: being physically separated from the criminal element and the dirty elements that have been allowed to dominate cities.

Sure it does.

This is fundamentally a problem of supply. Clean and bring order to the cities, and they’ll still be more expensive per square foot than the suburbs, because building out is still cheaper than building up, and building up will always imply multi-family units. Anyone who wants their white picket fence has no choice but to move out.

How is it a supply problem? There are, in most cities, particularly places like Chicago and Detroit, places that were once dense(ish) full of single, or multifamily (but not skyscrapers) housing that was cheap and close(ish) to the urban core and could easily get their via public transit. These places now look like warzones. The supply is still there (kinda, you'd probably want to demolish and rebuild basically the same thing). Just the people aren't they were replaced by bad people who did bad things, and then even most of the bad people left so there are just a handful of bad and sad people.

I’m not clear on how the timeline looks for those. I was thinking the urban cores didn’t really get hollowed out until the 60s, long after suburbia became popular. Then again this article suggests the decline started in the ‘20s. I don’t even know what to think for my own city.

Some of urban hollowing out earlier on was because the urban core was so shitty. There was pollution, literal shit, poorly constructed dense (and tall) housing structures, etc. That is fixed in most cities nowadays. The true urban commercial hub areas like Manhattan, The Loop, etc are dense, almost fully utilized, and extremely expensive.

"Streetcar suburbs" were the early original suburbs, and as the name suggests date back to when streetcars existed but automobiles didn't. The city core was dirty, smelly, loud, polluted and generally a miserable place to live, so people started living outside them as soon as reliable, affordable transportation existed. The history of city vs. suburb growth is also greatly confounded by the fact that many large cities annexed their inner-ring suburbs during the 20th century, "growing" in population but reducing in density.

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