!dev

People that bitch over city growth and development are fucking retarded.

Could you elaborate?

BuT oMg ThE gEnTrIfIcAtIoN1!1!

@iiii Nah I said everything I had to say about it.

@Root Oh nooo how dare they appeal to the majority of Americans!!!! 🙄🙄

Well. In the case of my city it's expanding onto some of the best soil in the whole country. Farmers aren't too happy about it.

@ScriptCoded that's one thing. But I'm talking about empty land in the middle of a city that is having housing complexes and shopping built on it. Or taking areas that are already developed to some degree, but are usually older buildings and replacing them.

@Stuxnet empty land could be transformed into a park

@iiii considering there's like 4, and a beach with parks close by, we don't need another fucking park. They're not even used that frequently in normal years.

I could understand that, but the people moaning about city expansion are usually the same ones moaning about building better infrastructure & transport links.

I mean - I think it's ok to have an opinion that a city has reached a size where it should stop growing, but then you need to invest in a decent method to move people between said city and wherever they need to get to.

@Root
Unfortunately, the city I live in is absolutely sold on the idea that the "tech Bros" are driving property values. Doesn't matter that almost no tech workers actually live in the city itself, opting for cheaper rent elsewhere. It couldn't possibly be banks speculating, or foreign capital expatriation.

House next door to me is obviously being used for money laundering, but can we track the source of funds for property purchases? Nope, that could lead to discriminatory housing practices, so instead let's just leave ourselves totally blind from a data perspective.

Maybe their property is losing its value

@electrineer no.

This city is just full of bitter old cunts that were happy with the size of the city 20 years ago. They can fuck off as far as I'm concerned. If you don't like it, there's a smaller city like 10-15 mins out that is a lot more accepting of these bitter old cunts, since that's what lives there already.

@AlmondSauce that's the problem around me: lots of new housing but no road expansion. Congestion is already terrible (though actually pretty nice lately with so many WFH).

One issue with gentrification is (mass) evictions for luxury renovations, pushing relatively poor people out of their city and forcing (sub)cultural venues to become more commercial (i.e. profit-driven) if they want to survive. It is however only logical in a capitalist world where the basic need of housing is more and more used for investment/speculation.

For a strategy to mitigate this, look up Vienna's policies on real estate.

@saucyatom While I have never seen this actually happen, I can definitely see it being an issue. I would think that it would happen more gradually, though, and allow people to earn more so they wouldn’t be displaced. But I don’t know.

However, I have almost never heard of complaints of the opposite happening: nice areas turning into ghettos. That’s more prevalent and a larger problem. I’d rather things got better, not worse.

That is happening to the area we live in in Las Vegas. It used to be a nice area; now there are shootings every month or two, police helicopters every couple of weeks, assaults and burglaries, etc. Some looney was even holding his family hostage at gunpoint. I could hear it over the police megaphones, and my bedroom walls were a free light show from the plethora of cop cars outside.

I'll add my 2c to this.

Very often new human hives (houses) are being built before infrastructure and that is the root of evil. Infrastructure in cities is often overloaded and not prepared to new suddenly appeared thousands of humans at some specific location.

@root @saucyatom
That's the hot topic of the moment here in Seattle. Prices have gotten out of hand, and places like the central district are experiencing mass displacement to build more expensive property. In a few years Blackstone will own all of south king county and that will become a renter state revenue stream. This is driven by what I wrote in a comment yesterday.

Capital hill just lost its LGBT community center to construction efforts.

We have a local politician with a socialist bent and a PhD in economics driving our own inability to address the issue. The problem with economists is they tend to look macro. That's fine for some cases, but our problems are more localised. She's so invested in her communist love story she will ignore numbers inconvenient to her theory.

Few inches closer to full time blackhat every day.

@Root I'm pretty sure there's a large difference between Germany and the US particularly on this topic.

In Germany it's definitely more that cities get more and more expensive, turning normal (or formerly poor) areas into luxury apartments. Also then some middle aged people move there and complain that the venues (bars, clubs, etc) in the area and their visitors are too loud, as if they didn't know what they get when moving to a "scene area". Those venues eventually close (or get forced out to make rooms for something more profitable). It is a gradual process, but salaries are not nearly increasing as fast as rents, especially on the lower end.

However I also have to say that even the worst areas in Germany are still quite safe and we don't have many of the issues poor areas in the US would have.

@saucyatom
We use the term NIMBYs for that kind of person ☺️

Stands for "not in my backyard."