solarpunk memes

My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can't really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I'm not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.

Yeah, right synae, A single, relevant meme.

All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it's not required.

I can't hear my neighbors, don't need an elevator, and don't need a garage because I don't need a car. I don't have a back yard but I'm pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.

Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.

You (or whoever) can opt to live in a cute neighborhood, I would. But you cannot opt to live in a cute neighborhood in the middle of a massive city. I think that's the key piece here.

There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it's just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.

Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.

And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother's apartment I can hear his neighbor's coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit's got tissues for walls I swear.

You could meet all of your apartment complaints with some decently designed medium density projects. I agree though that not everyone needs to live in a towering skyscraper

Good for you since you can afford it. Most people cannot. Which means you would still have your house in the suburbs somewhere, but all of these problems would be solved.

...and insane traffic.

...and homelessness.

NYC doesn't have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.

But NYC is also an extremely expensive place to live, and built vertically due to a lack of space for outward expansion.

In addition to the other replies, it can also matter where in NYC you're talking about

https://metropolismoving.com/blog/housing-costs-nyc/

Bronx has a median rent to income ratio of 45%, while Manhattan is 30%. This is primarily due to the fact that median income for Manhattan renters is double what it is in the Bronx, but rent doesn't scale up the same. Against my own expectation, this makes Manhattan a reasonable-ish place to live, at least if we're just talking about rent and income.

1. Shelter is critical to survival. The general rule of thumb places it as a higher priority than food or water. Arguing against people having access to reliable shelter, regardless the rational, is arguing for deliberately killing them.

2. The "they're defective and will destroy whatever they live. Don't let them in!!!" is just calling them cockroaches in a different way. It's fear mongering nonsense and there is no evidence to support that claim.

3. You're assuming correlation does not equal causation. It turns out being homeless, even for a relatively short period of time, is devastating to mental health and even if not the root cause (IE genetic predeposition, TBIs, etc.) it can strongly exasperate them and create some nasty co-morbidities.

Being repeatedly assulted and or raided by police, neighborhood vigilantes and other desperate people is an extremely quick path towards PTSD/other general anxiety disorders. The aggressive de-humunization that occurs can be a potent factor in antisocial disorders. Direct health impacts like physical battery, hypo/hyperthermia, illness, etc. can cause more detect brain damage such as TBIs, etc. Schizophrenia is usually fairly treatable, schizophrenia with PTSD amplified paranoia much less so.

There's multiple groups of homeless people.

There's the long term homeless, who often suffer from issues like mental illness, and short term homeless, who usually don't.

High housing prices absolutely causes people to become homeless when they lose their job, become addicted to drugs, etc.

Being homeless is itself traumatic, and exacerbates most issues homeless people have. Affordable housing and giving homeless people an apartment aren't a panacea, but it does prevent a ton of issues for newly homeless people.

Are you familiar with the "Housing first" model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.

With density and admitily mixed development, it is pretty simple to live within walking distance of everything around you. A car just needs much more space then a pedestrian and you do not park your body at the site of the street. Other then that the key to good public transport is high frequency. So for a transit connection the more people want to travel the route, the more high frequency makes sense.

The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it....

You can't have efficient public transport with low density housing. Also high density housing makes it easier to have things like supermarkets within walking distance of everyone.

It doesn't solve it, but I can see how it would help to solve it. If everyone lives in super low density suburban neighborhoods, public transportation doesn't make any sense. You can't build a train station that would realistically serve a dozen people tops.

Higher density makes public transportation a viable option, which in turn reduces traffic and pollution.

Also high density mixed used means you don't need the car every time you need to go grocery shopping, or to a bar or even to a park. You can go by foot

High density basically makes the case for transit itself.

If you can walk/bike to your job without the threat of being run over, you are one less car on the road.

Thihk of it in levels:

1. People will skip work-commuting by car (including students) when there are other viable options that are not made life-threatening by other people in cars. Fewer trips= less traffic

2. People will avoid driving for errands when there is decent local public transit that lets them shop where they want. Even fewer trips = even less traffic

3. People will stop owning cars when there is decent local public transit and decent regional networks. Fewer cars = less traffic

Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.

People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.

However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.

Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it's really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.

If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.

As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.

Because they were inadequately funded, regulated to low income areas with no jobs and shit schools. They we're just a glorified hole to stick brown ppl

I saw a video that they intentionally made the projects bad to try to "incentivize" people to get out of them. The whole stupid pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

It also centralizes the problem, which intensifies it. What you need is communities of mixed income, which has effects on schools, hospitals, stores nearby, etc.

This is less about the government building things and more about the government changing zoning so denser communities are built.