You keep saying this, but what is your plan? Letting people build denser housing is obviously a good idea.
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He is in the local high school hall of fame here. I’d like to corner him and bend his ear if he ever came back for an event.
I think his plan is to recognize that it’s complicated, the solutions are different in different markets, and one size fit all market worshipping ACism is not universally going to benefit people who don’t have money.
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Which ofc isn’t advocated for whatsoever in that article whatsoever
Little googling: Houston has no zoning.
Of course higher density is a good idea in many areas. My suggestion would be to do the things that the activists who really want to change zoning densities are already doing – which is getting involved with the local political processes that set land use regulations. They barriers to entry are much lower than you might expect, especially in smaller cities, and the people who have put in the time have been achieving quite a bit of success over the past decades. Things like mixed use zoning, transit-oriented development, walkability initiatives, complete streets, etc. have had a huge impact on improving the built environment and making cities better places for people to live. What is considered proper and desirable today is massively better than what the status quo was 30 years ago.
What I strongly do not suggest would be a wholesale elimination of widely practiced land use regulations simply because at the present time, in some areas, they are still lagging on a few issues.
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And what an urban paradise it is!
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And Houston seems to rank well in average home affordability, but very poorly in “affordable housing” as in what is available to low income people.
And yeah, I don’t know Houston, but know it’s reputation and the affordability of housing on average may well come from how shitty it’s laid out.
The main point, as I see it, of the build more densely crowd, is that if those turds in San Francisco with their $1100/sf housing allowed the density of Manhattan (10 times the density and $1400/sf) they’d have the cost of Bakersfield or something instead of the cost of…Manhattan.
From what I understand, a key feature of how Houston is laid out is a level of urban sprawl that makes the city look like and have the population density of a collection of suburbs.
Houston sounds like a great place to build a new McMansion.
Really just wanted to share a relatively non-terrible David Brooks article rather than get into it again over zoning and affordability. But yeah, there’s no reason to expect that’s how it would actually work out. High housing costs correlate directly with location desirability, and not at all (or perhaps even negatively) with density. Kind of like how the proposed solution to more traffic is more roads, but that just generates even more traffic.
Basically, private business is never going to provide affordable housing without being forced to by government. Ideally we’d just have a lot more and much better public housing, but that’s never going to happen in the Unlivable States of America and it’s effectively not a solvable issue in this country. You can have affordable housing or you can live somewhere nice. Choose.
I support higher densities for environmental reasons. I don’t expect more affordability from it.
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Houston confirmed urban sprawl. It’s LA of the south. I used to live there.
But it has remade itself from a bust oil town to a thriving incredibly diverse city of immigrant communities running a vibrant mixed economy. At least according to Tony Bourdain.
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Agree. But don’t want to throw those who live outside the city and manage without a 3000sf house and a 2 hour commute under the bus.
Thought everyone might enjoy this email I received.
Other possible reasons for Fred’s failure to get attention: spelling, inability to attach pictures to email.
lol he tried to attach his head shot to his email
I could feel his desperation through my screen. You know that guy has been trying to get his big break in movies since he was 18 and never made it.
I’m not exactly clear on what he is complaining about. If a bakery doesn’t have to make a cake for the gay couple, then why does anyone need to be hiring him. This is really the kind of thing he should wholeheartedly support.
This article seems to place a lot of hate on the players who won the game set before them, but almost none on those who established it in the first place. I mean, if one sets up a system where test scores in high school are the gatekeepers to prestigious universities, which in turn are gatekeepers to well-paying jobs, it should hardly be any wonder that the people placed into that game will play, and play to win. The victors and the spoils are exactly as proscribed: tech-savvy, well-paid, metropolitan youth with broad cultural tastes.
It fails spectacularly to discuss any alternatives or to make a case when our society was organized in a superior fashion to the current state of things. Should we, as a society, have eschewed the electronics, software, and biotech industries precisely because they would require and enrich college-educated labor? Are art galleries and areas with good restaurants and gayborhoods actually bad? Are we surprised that the people who won the game set before them are also trying to help their kids win the same game?
And its biggest failure is how it hides the impact of race and racial resentment politics in all of this. The so-called tolerant areas from the study he cited are almost all lily white. The wished-for alliance between working-class and intellectual middle class was back when there were most definitely more than the three classes that Brooks asserts: there was also the Black class, below all three and subject to a tacit agreement between the three white classes that they’d stay that way. It handwaves away white racial resentment as the unifying force for the lower rungs on the red ladder and how the upper rungs have weaponized it to secure their own power in favor of the unsupported assertion that the hatred of the bobos is even greater. He could have even given some derision towards the bobos about how their welcoming of Black people into higher status in society is only threatening towards people on the bottom rungs, at least for now, because of how much wealth it takes to make it into the bobo class and how this has then played a role in the shakeup.
He seems to almost get it when he starts contrasting the politics of tech CEOs with that of a typical tech worker, but he still kinda hamfistedly classes them both as bobos despite having considerably different levels of complicity in the state of America’s polarized politics.
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I never really wrapped this up into a coherent point, as I got called by my girls to go play a short game with them that helps them learn their letter sounds, a.k.a. contributing to the downfall of American society.
I don’t think it needs a conclusion. The article certainly has flaws worth pointing out. But grading on a ‘David Brooks wrote this’ curve, it gets a lot right.