Blame minimum parking requirements. An 800 ft² 2-bedroom apartment is really 1200 ft², when the zoning code requires one parking space per bedroom.

Is there a !debianinrandomplaces community yet?

This is Trump we’re talking about, not LBJ. He’d be physically incapable of that.

Not to be confused with LGBuntu, which is specifically for model railroading.

Man, I wish more folks (especially “moderate” Democrats) understood that.

How many “public funding for broadband rollout” rug pulls is that, now? Five? Six?

It’s not because Trump has giving up on persecuting immigrants; it’s because the Marines and the National Guard aren’t jackbooted or thuggish enough. They will all be replaced with vast swarms of new ICE recruits, who will have no qualms against gestapo behavior, soon enough.

Honestly, I think it’s because search results for web articles are so poisoned by SEO spam that people turn to YouTube for information even when they would otherwise prefer it to be textual rather than video.

The Supreme Court has a long history of shit takes like Dred Scott and Korematsu, too. Doesn’t make 'em right.

Well, I have no experience with Portugal, so I will concede that, regarding Portugal, you may very well be correct, and the speculative investment housing bubble has some underlying cause other than North American-style Euclidean low-density zoning.

I believe that my argument does apply in North America (as well as other English-speaking countries that have copied American city planning ideas, such as Australia, New Zealand, and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK), though.

Pretty much what the removed comment said (really just don’t build if its going to exacerbate problems). Do you love to talk past people that are agreeing with the premise and making the movement look bad or what are you on about?

Again, I am disputing that premise of “just don’t build if its going to exacerbate problems” and saying that everyone repeating it is wrong. The problems of car-dependency need to be exacerbated in order to force a break from the car-dependent status quo.

It’s not a great analogy, but creating good urbanism is kinda like exercise: similarly to how you have to work the muscle hard enough to break it down in order for it to build back stronger, you have to deliberately build things anticipating walkability etc., even knowing that it will make traffic worse, in order to get the infrastructure supporting other modes of transportation to actually happen. No pain, no gain.

Edit: it suddenly occurs to me that when I wrote “only one of those options is good,” you might have misread it as “only option #1 is good.” That is not what I meant; option #3 is the only good one.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

The notion that you have to have transit beforehand (or at least simultaneously) in order to justify density is that kind of answer. It’s intuitive, but it’s wrong. Short of master-planning an entire new community from the top-down, like they do in China maybe, density always — always — comes before transit. This is because if you don’t already have density-induced traffic problems demonstrating the need for transit, The Powers That Be use it as an excuse to never build it! That’s just how city planning and transit planning in America work, and it’s not going to change no matter how ass-backwards any of us might think it is.

In reality, there are three options when planning new development:

1. Refuse to build the new development because it’s too dense and would ruin the traffic.
2. Insist on including a fuckton of parking and maybe even turning the adjacent street into a stroad in the name of “capacity.”
3. Build the new development without the fuckton of parking, knowing full well that it’s going to make driving there suck, because you understand that the public will Deal With It and adjust by walking and biking more.

Only one of those three options (edit: option #3, if it isn’t blindingly obvious from context) is good urbanism; the other two perpetuate car-dependency (either because of sprawl or because you’ve created urban canyons of car sewers lined by parking decks, respectively).

“Option #4, build mass transit along with the development” is not and never will be on that list. Insisting on it is equivalent to picking option #1. Mass Transit only becomes a possibility after the area has a well-established pattern of picking #3, and even then it takes years or decades after that.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, having spent decades not just online but especially IRL in planning meetings, listening to people arguing for mythical option #4 even though you know (because they’ve also been at the meetings for years) they understand the above perfectly well and are absolutely NIMBY concern trolls whose actual preference is #1, you’d become more skeptical of the argument.

But even then, it wasn’t just that general misconception / ‘comment difficult to distinguish from trolling’ that caused me to remove the comment. It was the addition of the much more concrete, specific, and easily provable (if it had been true) claim that development without parking causes vacancy – not traffic/parking problems for the surrounding area, vacancy for the development itself, specifically – and then refusal to prove it after I gave him the opportunity, that pushed it over the edge.

Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily.

The problem is lack of housing specifically in the places where the high demand for it exists.

The notion of prices being high because everything is getting bought up by investors is an easy, comfortable scapegoat, but that’s all it is – a scapegoat. Fundamentally, landlords and flippers don’t make money unless they have an occupant to lease or sell the housing unit to. Sure, you could say that the speculative bubble holding vacant properties and waiting for them to appreciate is making the housing crisis worse, but that only comes into effect after prices start to spiral and thus cannot be the underlying cause that made housing an attractive investment for speculators in the first place.

The real underlying cause is simple: supply is not being allowed to meet demand because of zoning codes that restrict density.

Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public

You might be right in the way that you mean, but I want to talk about how you’re also right in a different way: people are too often wired to see rezoning for density as “interference” by the government because changing the law is a government action, but in reality it is undoing the previous interference the government did when they restricted the zoning to begin with.

Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.

The way I see it, the problem isn’t that people need to be rewired to be less individualist, the problem is that the government needs to stop indulging their desires by subsidizing them at public expense. I have no problem with somebody “wanting” to live in a single-family house instead of an apartment/condo, but I have a very big problem with the government subsidizing that want by forcing developers to build single-family houses when the market demands dense housing, displacing all the other people who could’ve lived there and causing the massive negative externalities of car-dependency in the process.

That sounds less like “the way public infrastructure expansion works isn’t a ponzi scheme,” and more “my city is the exception to the rule that does it right.”

Still doesn’t change my critic to your modding in that instance. Abusing public parking else where is a problem, and doesn’t spur calls for public transit. Not sure why we need a citation on an obvious conclusion.

“Not providing parking causes the housing development to remain vacant” is a lie, not an “obvious conclusion.” If you think I’m wrong, prove it by citing an example of a housing development that couldn’t find tenants or buyers because of lack of parking.

The part about causing parking problems elsewhere is not why the comment was removed.

Spreading misinformation is inherently uncvil – in fact, it is much more uncivil than using a harsh tone, in terms of its capacity to degrade the quality of discussion. This community is not a ‘safe space’ for sealions, concern trolls, or other bad-faith commenters, no matter how polite.

Speaking of moderation policies, rule 1 prohibits being insulting to other people in this community, not (for example) insulting big truck drivers in the abstract, which is why the four reports you just made will not be acted upon.

I really wish the anti car community was ready to address this problem.

What do you think pushing for separate infrastructure for cyclists is, if not that? Nobody wants to ride on a sidewalk trying to dodge pedestrians; it happens when cyclists are forced off the street by drivers and have nowhere else to go.

I work in municipal development, and here’s the cold facts

Spoken like a true city planner, LOL. I love how even when you folks are trying to give the “cold facts” you still end up being gentle and diplomatic about it. 🥰

Here’s my bottom-line conclusion to the above comment, from someone who doesn’t work in municipal development and thus hasn’t been required to develop that ‘public official’ speaking habit:

In order to get the government to pay to build transit, it has to be made painful to drive first. That means you have to build the density first even when you don’t have transit to support it yet.

I know a lot of you folks even in this community don’t want to hear it, but as an activist who’s been on the other side of conversations with municipal development people for decades, that really is how it works.

And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they’re cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they’re super expensive, but they usually aren’t built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.

I think it’s worth noting that, while infrastructure is often initially built by developers, subsequent maintenance usually falls back on the government. That means, from a municipal development perspective, that it’s super-important to go back and retrofit density to build up the tax base, before the extreme maintenance costs of building entire streets just to serve single-family houses on large lots bankrupts the city. For a long time, cities have been getting by funding maintenance of existing infrastructure using those developer impact fees in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but that quits working once the frontier of green-field development moves beyond the jurisdictional limits. After that, densifying becomes a financial imperative, whether the NIMBYs like it or not.