For sure, but the federal government had a lot to do with that. I think there were a lot of cases where federal loan guarantees and the GI Bill even helped destroy Black neighborhoods with high home ownership and move them into rentals. And right now it’s outsiders who are doing the gentrification that perhaps more local control could stop.
I’m not trying to say what I think is the best policy here, just that there are a lot of competing forces.
It wasn’t.
I don’t know what the real root of the problem is, but there’s an insatiable appetite among people who can afford a house (in CA anyway) to pay as much as they possibly can. Almost no one who can barely afford to buy a $600k house just says, “I’m just gonna spend $300k and that’s good enough for me.”
I’m not arguing absolute resident/owner rights in all cases. I’m asking in the most common real world scenarios where market rate (read: unaffordable) multi-family housing is proposed in an (unaffordable) single family neighborhood, and the net effect on urban density and housing availability will be negligible. If you’re going to deprive people of their right to democratically govern their own communities you should have very clear reasons that directly relate to what you’re telling them they can and can’t do.
You keep coming back to this idea that zoning is not the sole reason why neighborhoods are segregated (both by income and by race) - I don’t think anybody is saying that zoning is the only thing at play here. I’m not even arguing that removing zoning restrictions on MFDs will appreciably lower housing prices in the aggregate. It might, I don’t know.
It’s kind of weird how adamant communities are about their zoning laws if removing them wouldn’t affect the character of their neighborhoods though, right?
I think this is the disconnect. I look at this question and think “if you’re going to deprive people of their right to live in an apartment building in a certain community, you should have very clear reasons that amount to more than ‘the neighbors don’t want you here’”.
Wait, I started my post with “for sure”.
I think some people are confused by what are or aren’t absolutist statements.
Is this what they want to do or what they’re allowed to do? They’d probably like to build a $200M apartment building that would house hundreds of people, but it’s illegal.
Financial literacy is absolutely a big problem in the AA community. It’s a common topic in the group my wife is a member of (not sure what to call it… a black activism / empowerment group?)
I’d say his audience—for this skit and for his entire show—was black people.
I do wish he’d made his point without the gratuitous chicken and watermelon stereotypes, but again, I probably wasn’t his target audience.
They do have clear reasons. Knocking down a bunch of single family homes in an older neighborhood to make room for generic mid-rise apartments can be a pretty big deal. There is a lot of disastrous urban history of that happening, often to the most disadvantaged communities.
There are points in Atlanta where you can stand within a half-mile of 10,000 jobs, a transit station, a grocery store, two big public parks, and a big freeway and be on land that’s ~zoned~ for 5 houses per half-acre. My hot take is–that’s bad, and they should let more people live there.
That’s very hard to prove one way or another regarding very large apartment buildings. Small apartment buildings are disappearing though, and because single family houses are preferred by builders, not because of zoning. I did take a little look at my neighborhood vs Playa Vista, which has had a huge amount of building of higher density large apartment buildings and condos (it used to be wetland) and it’s close enough that it’s hard to say and difficult to figure in terms of what I think a developer gets in terms of sales price per land area and construction costs.
An open space where they could build the infrastructure for large projects probably made it a good choice for them in that space as opposed to large single family homes, but that’s not the same as taking an existing neighborhood and putting a $200M building in it.
Los Angeles has had a fair amount of dense housing built in some areas like around The Staples Center where there used to be mostly single family homes or small buildings. They didn’t just change zoning to make it happen though. It took hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives.
LA has also had a lot of redevelopment in the downtown area so that there are now a lot of expensive sorta-high density buildings not far from skid row. That didn’t increase density though. Luxury (ie large) apartments are displacing tiny apartments and hotels.
In what way?
Made it through Can’t Get You Out Of My Head now, it’s… pretty good. In a lot of ways, some of it’s very much trodden ground, Curtis-wise, though. I think he’s crossed an inflection point, some intersection between a limit to his capacity to find new angles on things and the rate of change in the world. I would hesitantly predict he won’t produce another major work.
The music is as on-point as ever. Something always jumps out on a re-watch, but the first-pass official Bop of the Series is this jaunty little number from a Godard flick:
By destroying a nice, historic residential neighborhood? If you can’t find value in the built environment beyond how many people can be packed into an acre then we are unlikely to ever find agreement on this topic.
A very important difference is that, for a variety of reasons, apartment buildings are prime targets for institutional capital, while single-family housing is extremely marginal for big investors. As a developer, there’s infinitely more other-people’s-money flying around on attractive terms if you want to build an apartment building. If you’re developing single-family, you’re backed either by your own money or a club of rich friends.
I find value in it. I like my old residential neighborhood. I can’t fathom thinking that my enjoyment of the neighborhood is grounds to stop someone from building an apartment building there.
Ever? Anywhere? No historic preservation? Cow sheds are equivalent to cathedrals?
I’m fine with keeping the cathedrals.
Haha I pay a lot more for a small 2 bedroom and it is considered very cheap.
And yes salaries are very high because of cost of living, especially in california. Less so in my area - much worse up north.