> We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base
Petition to have automod give this response to “just move lol”
TrixoftheTrade on
The gist of the article is basically that progressive groups have captured the sapphire-blue electorates of major urban cities, and basically drove to encase them in amber.
A significant portion of the right wing backlash against “the libs” (outside of any of the cultural wars nonsense), is that the cities don’t work. And the impression they don’t work travels even farther than the actuality.
Cherry-picked stories about a $1.5 million dollar shed in SF, the 20,000+ homeless in LA, a 3 year permitting process to open a ramen shop in Seattle, or shoplifters ransacking a 7/11 in Chicago do numbers on TikTok and whip people into a frenzy against the “libs”.
The right wing refrain of “Democrats have run these cities for decades – look at them now,” has no real counter. And honestly, the things that do work in cities almost seem to occur in spite of the city governments & interest groups, not because of them.
Okbuddyliberals on
And the democratic party is moving more and more in a progressive direction and turning against pro market politics. Even this very sub seems to be falling in that direction, with many folks seeming to think that returning to Bill Clinton style politics would be bad and that we should instead go with politicians like radical socialist AOC. So the American dream may freeze even more
737900ER on
> Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.
> Blame Jane Jacobs […] To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them.
> They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.
> Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950.
> If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.
> Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available.
> Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.
> Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.
Fleetfox17 on
Bad title, but great article. I’m a Bernie supporter since 2016 who is also educated in Urban Planning, so I really hate the association of progressive politics with single family zoning or the shit state of American car-dependency. I don’t think any progressives believe the current situation is okay, although I am aware that a lot people see progressive message on housing as just promoting price controls or something similar. I see progressive housing policy as increasing supply and letting people build whatever they want, and not just housing but transportation as well.
YaGetSkeeted0n on
Fantastic article. Death to the restrictive anti-growth regime.
Cyberhwk on
* Liberals: People can’t “just move!” This is where they have roots! Their community! This is where their lives and support systems are!
Somehow I knew that the reckoning with NIMBYism would lead to this point. Not entirely undeserved or out of nowhere, mind you.
For every highway project blocked (good; albeit too late to have stopped the worst harms to our cities) countless other projects, including housing, have been blocked in the name of the same message, and to protect far less vibrant and dynamic communities than the West Village of the 1960s.
And the article does point out that Jane herself said that…
>At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.
But as the article continues on…
>But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.
>To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.
And yeah, we are living in the “Post Historic Preservation Era” of American Communities, Cities and notably Suburbs too, and that’s had a lot of consequences. In order for things to get better, something’s gotta give.
8 Comments
> We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base
Petition to have automod give this response to “just move lol”
The gist of the article is basically that progressive groups have captured the sapphire-blue electorates of major urban cities, and basically drove to encase them in amber.
A significant portion of the right wing backlash against “the libs” (outside of any of the cultural wars nonsense), is that the cities don’t work. And the impression they don’t work travels even farther than the actuality.
Cherry-picked stories about a $1.5 million dollar shed in SF, the 20,000+ homeless in LA, a 3 year permitting process to open a ramen shop in Seattle, or shoplifters ransacking a 7/11 in Chicago do numbers on TikTok and whip people into a frenzy against the “libs”.
The right wing refrain of “Democrats have run these cities for decades – look at them now,” has no real counter. And honestly, the things that do work in cities almost seem to occur in spite of the city governments & interest groups, not because of them.
And the democratic party is moving more and more in a progressive direction and turning against pro market politics. Even this very sub seems to be falling in that direction, with many folks seeming to think that returning to Bill Clinton style politics would be bad and that we should instead go with politicians like radical socialist AOC. So the American dream may freeze even more
> Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.
> Blame Jane Jacobs […] To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them.
> They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.
> Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950.
> If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.
> Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available.
> Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.
> Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.
Bad title, but great article. I’m a Bernie supporter since 2016 who is also educated in Urban Planning, so I really hate the association of progressive politics with single family zoning or the shit state of American car-dependency. I don’t think any progressives believe the current situation is okay, although I am aware that a lot people see progressive message on housing as just promoting price controls or something similar. I see progressive housing policy as increasing supply and letting people build whatever they want, and not just housing but transportation as well.
Fantastic article. Death to the restrictive anti-growth regime.
* Liberals: People can’t “just move!” This is where they have roots! Their community! This is where their lives and support systems are!
* Conservatives: [LMAO, deuces. ✌✌✌ Fuck y’all. I’m out](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/MigrationHeatmap-1-1.jpg).
>II. Who Killed American Mobility?
>Blame Jane Jacobs.
Somehow I knew that the reckoning with NIMBYism would lead to this point. Not entirely undeserved or out of nowhere, mind you.
For every highway project blocked (good; albeit too late to have stopped the worst harms to our cities) countless other projects, including housing, have been blocked in the name of the same message, and to protect far less vibrant and dynamic communities than the West Village of the 1960s.
And the article does point out that Jane herself said that…
>At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.
But as the article continues on…
>But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.
>To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.
And yeah, we are living in the “Post Historic Preservation Era” of American Communities, Cities and notably Suburbs too, and that’s had a lot of consequences. In order for things to get better, something’s gotta give.