MegJun 17, 2023

God it's depressing that people believe this is the true nature of downtowns:

"Without commuting office workers, the office buildings go empty, they become worth a fraction of their cost, and retail cannot survive."

From https://innovationnation.blog/p/its-companies-fault-we-dont-want

Cities predate commutes. The hollowed out core that triples in population, swelled to bursting with bored and unhappy suburbanites during work hours, is a modern abomination made possible by cars and structural racism.

What's killing downtowns is that we spent so long on this awful vision of work and spent half a century strangling inner city infrastructure to subsidize incredibly expensive suburban lifestyles.

Want to make downtowns viable again? Convert dead office space to apartments and schools and colleges and other spaces people can work *and* live in.

Good luck with your rezoning applications though.

It's Companies' Fault we don't want to Return to the Office

It wasn't appealing to begin with

Innovation Nation
Show threadBlackPixelDust: Art 

@megmac
I was thinking about documentaries, memoirs and snippets of history.
People used to be able to WALK to work? Bike? Take the bus? And it only took a few minutes? And it was a job that paid the bills? None of the sources I've read have explicitly said this.

Black and Brown folk went to the city to find jobs in the 1800s and 1900s.
Suburbs were created after WW2 so middle class white americans could escape the 'turmoil' of the city. They don't be teaching this history. 😑
So yep.

Jun 18, 2023 at 2:32amWeb
Show threadMegJun 18, 2023
@jtphillipsmnr yep :( It's awful.
Show threadBlackCatRanchJun 18, 2023
@jtphillipsmnr @megmac maybe it just depends on the classes you’re taking because I certainly spent quite a lot of time in undergrad sociology classes covering the collapse of cities and flight of white professionals to suburbs. 1990ish - U of Toledo, right next to Detroit & Cleveland — both have been recovering some viability / vibrancy by creating smaller neighborhoods kind of like Portland.
Show threadTheriacJun 18, 2023
@jtphillipsmnr @megmac
A personal bug bear of mine is the way a few car manufacturers, worried that the then mixed traffic throughfares, would result in legal claims made by pedestrians getting hit by thier products and them being held liable. So they banded together and started essentially the first example of astroturfing (if you ignore Henry Ford and the teetotallers). The end result was some US states created the anti-jaywalking laws, but city planners pretty much enmasse took "modern" civic design to mean seperation of mixed traffic. While jaywalking is still purely a US thing, the model of making motorised traffic the focus of traffic models , while pedestrians were religated to the margins, both physically and metaphorically spread world wide.

All for the benefit of a few roaring 20s Elon Musks.

more detail piece on jaywaalking
The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”

Vox