In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.
(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)
(Now, are American cities kind of dirty? Yeah. There's a ton of people who travel through every day. But Americans, as a rule, seem to not like paying that much for other folks. Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of urban cleaning that'd be necessary.)
That said, I'm not sure what to attribute that to. It could be the broad availability of drug rehab and housing services. It could be that the climate is inhospitable to living on the street for the majority of the year. For all I know, it could be an aftershock of the city's love affair with redlining, effectively putting me away from where I would see it.
Generally speaking, one is more likely to run into horse manure around Austin.
To clarify, I meant that quite literally. Horses are considered a legal vehicle. It is not uncommon to see people riding horses (small groups, solo, & APD mounted patrol) along the shoulder of a road or along the creek and river trails in central/south/southeast/east Austin, especially on the weekends. Probably other places too, but those are the areas I am familiar with.
It is certainly more common to see horse manure in the city than it is to see the human feces or needles that was alluded to in the comment I replied too. At least, in my personal experience spanning decades.
Also pure corruption. You'll notice there are a bunch of regions where the homeless roam, and bunch where they do not, and there are very good reasons as to why that is the case.
I doubt it. Housing is one of those problems that is quite easy to solve and the fact that poorer countries can do it while the US can't must be because of nefarious. The same shit is said about developing countries having a lower COVID death rate than the US, "they must be hiding a lot of bodies." In fact, it is quite hard to hide a lot of bodies.
The fact is the US does poorly on a lot of metrics and we have the capability not to.
https://pavementpieces.com/on-the-front-line-of-the-heroin-e...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/rockaway-beach-needles...
https://nypost.com/2021/09/25/nyc-drug-users-shoot-up-in-bro...
https://nypost.com/2021/08/07/new-records-reveal-rampant-dru...
http://bronxink.org/2019/09/19/28351-a-zone-of-neglect/
https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/these-are-nycs-poop...
I've lived in three neighborhoods for my entire life: Bloomingdale (now called "Manhattan Valley"), South Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The only one that I regularly saw needles in was South Harlem, and that was only by one apartment where we had a guy dealing on the corner. That was a pretty unpleasant situation. I only saw needles once or twice in Bloomingdale, and I've yet to see them anywhere in my current parts of Brooklyn.
As for the poop: NYC has a big dog poop problem, which is what that article is about. I don't think anybody has ever contested that.
Here’s an example of me not being oblique. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363040
I've said this in other threads: there is crime in NYC. It's a big city with a lot of people in it, and I am not pretending that it is a utopia. But it just isn't an overriding (or even pressing) feature of life here.
Then it’s an overriding and pressing feature of your life.
I've never seen drug addicts block a storefront here. The closest thing I've seen to that is someone (and I really do mean one individual) try to panhandle in a restaurant. They were kicked out.
Crime overall is up 11.2% in one year. That’s affecting a lot of people other than you. I find your dismissal of so many people’s misery to be callous at best.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1103/nypd-citywide-cri...
I have not been callous, in any ordinary sense of the word. When people are affected by crime (and indeed, they are in this city), I feel bad for them. What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.
(If you want real callousness, read about the people who died in last year's flooding[1]. NYC has a flood control system that should have lessened the damage, but it didn't function because the city hasn't done regular street cleanings for the past two years. Why haven't they done street cleanings? Because car owners complained about having to move their cars during the pandemic.)
[1]: https://abc7ny.com/nyc-flooding-deadly-13-killed-basement-ap...
I assume that is a general statement and not based on something I said, because of course I made no such accusations.
I am however glad that you give your own two eyes credibility for reporting. Each of the articles I posted was a product of someone else’s two eyes and included pictures of what would be considered an alarming situation if one lived in those neighborhoods. Many of them are from a borough called “The Bronx”, which is north of you. It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.
As far as the statistics I gave you, year over a year is obviously a much better sample then part of the year. It’s smooths out the curves. I could easily have chosen some statistics from the summer of 2020 that would make it look much worse. I did not.
Not sure why you threw in the drainage situation but I like that you did. Offhand the only city I know of that plans properly for this is Phoenix, Arizona. From what I can tell no other major city in the country comes even close to that kind of preparation.
I went to high school in the Bronx, and spent most of my adolescence walking around it (including the "scary" part, which is the South Bronx). It's not a hellhole either, "rich multicultural" dogwhistling aside.
Edit: This is going to be my last comment. I don't think you live here, which makes me think that the back-and-forth of "here's what it's like" versus "here's an eye-popping news story about a crime" isn't accomplishing much.
Where I live is a little hard to pin down because I own residences on multiple continents. I say Seattle because that’s where my farm is and I spend most of my time there.
New York City was the greatest city in the world until recently, but I’m equally interested in what’s going on in Shanghai, Beijing, and other places. But in my view it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about a place even if you haven’t lived there for a while. Or ever. I listen to lots of wonderful commentary about the USA from people in the United Kingdom, for example.
Both “stories”, as you put it, are true. In fact, I congratulated the person for building a sheltered world. I did the same for my wife and children. Nothing wrong with keeping your family out of the muck.
“Will” pay for itself? Spoken like someone who has never had to pay the bills to run a retail establishment.
We have crime here. But this isn't a superhero comic; it's just not an overriding feature of life. I'm sorry if that's difficult for you to believe.
When it rains, a significant amount of the Market Street area (and surrounding blocks) smells like pee for a day.
---
Part of the issue with the "perception vs reality" claim in big cities is that people who live near-ish to places with issues like this avoid those places, either consciously (x area is dangerous so don't park there) or subconsciously (none of your friends go there, so you don't know anything there, and have no reason to go randomly). Visitors and new arrivals are pretty often more likely to encounter it at a more accurate rate.
Urban blight is so real it's a tautology to use two words.
The lack of enforcement and the actual protests against enforcement of the most basic laws borders on satire.
Do you think cops should be responsible for finding homeless people homes? You can't just throw them all in jail. Being poor isn't illegal yet.
I lived in Studio City for a bit. We had a well-known vagrant who lived under a local bridge who regularly accosted women, including assault, groping, etc. The nice walking paths along the LA river, and the immediate neighborhood around them were completely unsafe even during daylight hours for my wife and daughters to walk along. What could be done?
I lived in mount washington for a bit. There, the citizens would quietly organize, bring lots of shovels, and go "clean up" even the smallest encampments. I suspect if that word got out, they'd meet protestors, or even police.
I'm all for helping those who need and want it.
The trouble is, there's a significant enough population that doesn't want help, and wants to camp and live among drug use wherever they choose. This is the only case where "Not in my backyard" makes absolute sense. Police can and should protect the safety of neighborhoods and parks which are funded and occupied by tax payers.
Go to venice. It looks like a third world country. Last time I went to the beach, none of the shops were open and obviously-mentally-ill people were sitting in their own filth on residential and commercial doorsteps. One obviously intoxicated person was holding a can of gasoline on the sidewalk, and swaying between cars he didn't own. What good can come of this? The rights of the people in that area need to be balanced against each other through the use of local laws and law enforcement. We've gone way too far past "balanced" towards an ideologically-forced tolerance of vagrancy.
It is not the job of the average citizen to come up with solutions, it is normal and fine for citizens to collectively demand change from their government and to weigh the outcomes during the next election cycle. My own lack of ingenious ideas for it does not mean I need to be silent and tolerate the solution.
We used to do just that, and it worked just fine.
It is also extraordinarily expensive to do that.
Usually I find defecation is easiest - not for me, but for the unfortunate souls without access to privacy - at the far end of a subway platform, away from the glare of publicity.
>>The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
The presence of this comment purposely invites controversy.
If these people are supposed to behave differently (from a cultural standpoint), there are issues that need to be resolved first. These “two different topics” are heavily intertwined.
The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.
To those unsympathetic to addiction being a medical condition, these facilities are just seen as legalization which goes against everything they've been fed. This isn't even a NIMBY thing as they don't just not want it in their area, they don't want them to exist at all.
Showing how they have worked in Europe, then they will just write it off as socialist policies run amok.
Portugal: https://deserthopetreatment.com/addiction-guide/drug-industr...
Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted
This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.
Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.
> fights and the filth, got too many concussions
Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.
It's a numbers and climate problem. If you're homeless in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, or New York in the winter, you die. If you come to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, you survive
Eastern European cities are safer then they used to be in the nineties, sure. They are safe enough to have kids walk around. They are not safer then wester cities which are even more safer in general.
Police was watching the dude run away. I wont say his ethnicity.
Small Eastern cities do have criminality too, for that matter. Both organized and low level one. As I said, it is all improving in general, but claim that they are oh so safer is not true.
No, they don't. Prague is the capitol of Czech republic, there is a lot of business there, and tourists are just nuisance. Same for big Polish cities like Warsaw or Cracow. Crimes against foreigners are not treated any different than crimes against locals, there's simply not much crime to begin with.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Pol...
The 'Paris experience' famously does not scale to the rest of Western Europe. Getting mugged/fleeced by someone on day 1 in Paris is a ubiquitous experience that I have never heard be replicated anywhere else.
Marseille is the only city in Europe where I was waken up at night by gunshots.
Why not say nothing at all about it?
Coward.
At age 9 and 10, I was travelling every day alone in a city bus to school through a city in Poland in early nineties. Nothing ever happened to me. I don't think there was particularly that much violent crime even then. Car thefts, OTOH, were pretty common until the mid 2000s when the police and state got the hang of it.
That being said we picked a suburb that is actually quite walkable for our daily needs due a good public trail system and being adjacent to a large community college campus.
Detached homes, especially the lovely ones with mature trees and gardens, require a lot of work. Things like snow removal, leaf pickup, scrubbing mildew off the siding, tree trimming, concrete repair, roofs, hvac maintenance, cleaning and servicing multiple vehicles, and the list goes on. And of course older homes are booby trapped wrecks of lead, asbestos, cloth-insulated wiring, corroded pipe, and shoddy insulation. Naturally, in many desirable locations old is the only affordable type, too.
strongtowns.org has ongoing research that shows most suburban communities are not self-sustaining as a tax base and rely on nearby cities and outside investment to support their infrastructure.
I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).
Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.
Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?
Not necessarily - the rabbit population might be large and sustaining enough to support a fairly large coyote population.
It's not the case that the existence of prey means that there are no predators around - usually it is the opposite. Predators go where the prey is.
Good luck with the visa and cultural barrier if you like families.
I remember cruising through the streets of Tokyo in the middle of the night, still worried that I might get jumped by a meth hear even though it was extremely unlikely. It's a pre-conception that is hard to let go of.
The language barrier is the biggest issue. Assuming you live in a large city (and really, you should), the town halls have translators. You may need to wait for them to be available, and the translations may not be amazing, but they'll help you solve any tasks you need to do.
The next biggest issues are getting a phone number (you need a residence card first), getting a bank account (you need a residence card and a phone number), and getting a credit card (you need a residence card, a phone number, and will need to deal with them sending your card with your katakana name on the envelope). If you have a job, they'll help you do all of these things.
Getting housing isn't really a problem. At this point there's lots of gaikokujin housing (short-term rentals, month-to-month leases, sharedhouses, etc). It's possible to find it online with no Japanese language skills. Again, if you have a job, they'll help you find housing.
If you're coming in as a student, your school will also help you with all of these things.
Pewdiepie makes money off of making content. Saying "hey, this isn't very hard" isn't entertaining. Don't use him as a real-life example.
I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.
This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.
We have large windows too so it's fun seeing it all.
While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?
The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).
Three people jumped out of a car, beat me up and left. It was a gang initiation thing - beat up a random civilian and get to the first rank, or something. After that concussion I was a lot more susceptible to other concussions.
Can't make an NYC analogue - do people feel safe there walking at all hours of the night by themselves, even in dark areas? If so great, maybe that's a place I'd live too, like Tokyo or Taipei.
His answer might well be yes.
Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.
I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.
It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.
+ good public schools
* Bring back honors classes for those districts that removed them
* Stop no child left behind
* Teach more hardcore math at a younger age. Calculus should be introduced in 6-8 grades.
* Require more writing and reading in general.
In general bring the lower performing students up to par with the high performers, not the other way around.
Living in a big house is waaaaaay better than a living in an apartment inside a building. No contest here.
(I have a modest house on the commuter rail network. I probably will, too.)
At least out here, things are so screwy that minor details like cost of materials are rounding error.
Will happily pay for atmospheric carbon recapture, which covers the biggest externality.
Also, like most other commenters from the west coast, I'd live in one of the cities if they weren't littered with human waste, and if they had reasonable public schools.
No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.
What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.
Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
But single family homes set in the suburbs, amongst endless other single family homes? It's nowhere near as good. You have to drive everywhere and there's not enough density to support local shops.
I think it's a mistake to assume that because almost everyone would, with enough money, want their own home and land, that they'd also want it in the suburbs. You just need to look at property values to see that isn't the case - houses and apartments in the city are worth more.
I could trade my terraced house in the city for a much larger one in the distant suburbs. But that would mean driving everywhere, living by busy fast roads, not having a huge range of shops nearby, having to commute further into work, not being able to cycle - all things that make it not worth it. Clearly a lot of my neighbours feel the same way.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that outside the cities it’s all highways and endless suburbs.
The houses with no stores around, with no busses around where you and your kids needs driving everywhere are comparatively cheap. Even people living in houses with yards seem to prefer them if they are either walking distance from forest, walking distance from stores/community centers and ideally both.
The houses in the suburbs of Bay Area peninsula are more expensive than the houses inside SF city limits. Of course there many factors like schools that influence that, but I wouldn't argue your observation is always correct.
And price is due to supply/demand. If the supply of single family homes in the middle of cities was high enough to keep costs down, sure, plenty of families would choose those. But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.
Yes, but I dont see majority of people doing that worldwide. And where they do that, they prefer houses in near villages where there are stores and community centers nearby. And those houses have small businesses in them.
The local stores or walkable infrastructure are not exclusive feature of cities. That is something that does not exists only where it is illegal to open local store near the houses.
With the exception of wealthy countries, I'd argue most people don't have the choice of living in an apartment in the city or a big house in the country.
In wealthy countries, people live in remote houses like that because it is cheaper. Houses in walkable places are way more expensive. You have to be at the level of "shopping and everything is done by somebody else and kids are driven by nanny" rich to get to demographic where it is opposite.
Asia has rich people btw.
I never said people prefer that.
I said people prefer a single family home, a yard and a car. That's not actually achievable in most city centers (unless wealthy) so many people give up location in exchange for a single family home, a yard and car.
Thus, suburbs aren't forced on anyone. Many people chose a single family home, in the suburbs, over an apartment in the city. The cost of that is not being able to walk everywhere, and people are willing to pay that price.
You specifically said "I don't buy it" to the above comment that was about car oriented suburbs specifically.
Nowhere you specified you are changing topic from the above (suburbs) to "house anywhere".
I mean, people leave SF to move to the suburbs south of the city. They need a car, but they can also walk to their Main Street.
Based on the fact the price of that housing is more, I’d argue people want to live in the burbs over an apartment in a city.
> Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
Nope, dream ofmost of the people would be to "buy a single family home, with it's own land within the city without doing taxi driver for your kids".
But since this is completely scifi since houses in city are the most expensive people have to settle either for city apartments or house outside city and becoming taxi driver.
Put another way: consumers are choosing the best option for them, because they don't have to pay the true cost of their living environment. If the economic envelope matched the underlying reality, suburban development would be mostly an economic dead end.
Have you been to Japan? High density is not the problem.
Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.
Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.
Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.
What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.
But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.
Where did the meme that this would work originate?
Work backwards from cities that are actually clean & safe. Is Singapore this way because of their "extremely socialist policies"?
The Singapore way is easier, no doubt. But I don't think it's that ludicrous to believe we could have a free AND a socialist society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31362410
Actually never had a traffic accident on my bicycle.
Granted, my only personal comparison would be to Buffalo, Albany, Poughkeepsie and San Diego, all which have much less congested city centers.
The only east coast city that matched the "needles and feces" attitudes I have seen was Philadelphia. As soon as you start driving into the city it is impossible to notice how much trash and car debris is in the road. The moment I parked, we saw needles on the ground and as a result I was more likely to notice I imagine. But, it was truly a filthy city.
Buffalo city centers do have a high rate of panhandling and street scams, you just learn coping skills.
Once people who could not afford living in the suburbs can, they often also escape filthy cities.
In addition, you have unsafe cities like Sao Paulo and you have safe cities like Santiago or Buenos Aires. You have unsafe cities like Davao (although Duterte cleaned up some crime) and you have safe cities like Seoul or Tokyo. It's not due to color. Some cities are safe, others aren't and people who have the means to do so escape them.
LA has many hispanics who have migrated out to the suburbs... are they bad for doing so?
Lots of LatAm cities also have big suburbs and gated communities... are they "bad" for wanting to escape crime?
Was this directed at me? The two comments above me both referenced race. I didn’t inject it into the conversation, I was reacting to it being injected.
I don't see where they say this.
> "there are too many poor brown folks in the city"
This comes off as projection.
> What specifically do you think needs to change for that to be true?
They listed several things.
I literally quoted them saying this. Here it is again "just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there".
>This comes off as projection.
I don't understand what you think I am projecting. I'm afraid of poor brown people? I don't want white people in the city? For the record, I am a white person who has lived in the middle of various major American cities most of my life. I'm not going to argue with you if you cite housing costs, having a yard, privacy, calmness, or any of the numerous other advantages suburban life has over city living. But when I see someone complain that cities aren't "safe, clean, [or] friendly" for middle class white folks, I will call out what I see as a recycled dog whistle from the 1950s and 1960s.
>They listed several things.
I questioned those listed things because the implication behind them is not true. White people aren't waiting for cities to become safe because the cities have already gotten safe.
The fact is, this person was clearly also the victim of violence and chose to move out because they, specifically, were not safe. There's nothing dog-whistle about it.
The nearest metro to me just had a city council meeting to discuss snow plow drivers complaining about being shot at while on the job, and their struggles in hiring other city workers who are being harassed. Their response was to recommend trauma counselling to those who were shot at.
Many people who are comfortable not living in a city (even if they would prefer it) move out when they realize they have to raise their kids there. If inner cities were as safe, clean and friendly as my rural community, I too might never have moved out. Instead, I realized that only one of my neighbors ever showed the slightest interest in talking to me, were frequently rude, and few people walked anywhere alone. In the years I've left, carjackings, theft and vandalism have gotten so much worse- to the point that in some formerly "safe" neighborhoods, you couldn't lock your car door when parking on the street because if thieves couldn't open the handle, they'd just smash a window to get in.
Life isn't perfect out in the country, but there is literally nothing about living in a big city that is attractive enough to make me want to go back to that.
Cry "dogwhistle" all you want, but skin color has nothing to do with this story.
Then don’t mention the skin color in the first place. I wouldn’t have replied if the two comments above me didn’t paint this as a racial issue by specifically mentioning this was an issue for middle class white people and not just middle class people.
That commenter was actually quoting part of the comment above him…
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white
However, yeah, the neighborhoods in US downtowns where I've lived do not feel safe, despite staying in fairly high end accommodations. Crazy people walking around screaming, fighting, harassing people, banging on cars, using drugs laying in the middle of the sidewalk. I would never recommend that a woman, for instance, live in those locations. It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.
The number of people responding like this is really telling. The first comment in this chain mentioned this was a problem for white people. The person that responded repeated the comment about white people. Then I respond and say brown people only for multiple to accuse me of unnecessarily injecting race. It just shows the number of people who view white as the default. It is only "a racial issue" once brown people are mentioned.
I stand by what I said.
The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.
For serious though you hit the nail square. Pearl-clutching suburban types are actually moving back into the city where I'm at (to my neighborhood, among others), and it sucks in every way except my house's value is shooting up.
I'm being genuinely serious here. I used to love the concept of relatively high density living. For years I walked or rode my bicycle everywhere in cities. But I got sick of the fights and the filth, got too many concussions, and now I'm out here in the country side where I "see the world as a foreign and scary place".
Make it nicer and we'll come back. If that doesn't happen, don't complain when we make rational decisions for ourselves and our families.