I don’t get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
There’s a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don’t even realize that they’re racing to the bottom. By today’s standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let’s build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let’s build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let’s ban airbnb, and let’s severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we’re gonna have to build some high rises, but let’s not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
I don’t get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
There’s a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don’t even realize that they’re racing to the bottom. By today’s standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let’s build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let’s build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let’s ban airbnb, and let’s severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we’re gonna have to build some high rises, but let’s not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.