Re:American society wasn't always so car-centric. Our future...
by AnthonyMouse on Monday January 22, 2024 @02:39PM
(#39094290)
> It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.