Mastodawn

Mostly Cloudy Jun 18, 2023

@megmac cars are another of the many ways we are walled off from one another.

BlackPixelDust: Art

Jun 18, 2023

@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.

@jtphillipsmnr yep :( It's awful.

BlackCatRanch Jun 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.

Theriac Jun 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

Frank Bennett 🇯🇵Jun 18, 2023

@megmac Exactly.

It's very strange to be told by movers and shakers in the economic system that preferences MUST be forced into a particular mold because markets are incapable of adapting to changing conditions. I thought that was the whole problem with centrally planned economies and everything.

Wolleysegap Jun 18, 2023

@megmac and retail cannot survive? Quite the leap. More like my real estate investment portfolio is about to take a beating. It's just like Las Vegas folks. Don't bet more than you can afford to lose.

coupland Jun 18, 2023

@megmac I live in a country where most (all?) of our cities are safe and liveable. It blew my mind when I first visited an American city that empties into the suburbs at night. It felt post-apocalyptic to be surrounded on all sides with high rises yet I could have laid down in the middle of the main street because there were simply no humans to be found.

@coupland yeah. Even within North America there's quite a lot of variation and even the difference between a city with a tiny amount of residential in its core and a city with almost none is stark. If there's some, stuff is usually open to 8 and on weekends and holidays. If there's none though? Everything shuts at 6, nothing is open on Sundays, and on a holiday you could pretend you're living in The Omega Man.

Cities (mostly outside the Canada/US part of North America) with real urban residential populations are a whole other level though.

Noah Gibbs Jun 18, 2023

@coupland @megmac Oh hey, was it Pittsburgh?

They love shooting movies about New York City in Pittsburgh, because is has all the old-style East Coast mouldings on all the buildings, it's actually clean, and it's abandoned after 5pm.

Which is weirdly desolate, yeah. Like, why is all this city *here* if nobody's using it?

(And so a small part of the answer is "to film it.")

Bruce Elrick Jun 18, 2023

@megmac
And if the floorplates are too deep, make make wider apartments to a shallower depth and build innovative common areas around the building core.

Ben Pate 🤘🏻Jun 18, 2023

I’m trying to follow this logic, but it seems like “retail” would be just fine if values/rents crashed in downtown areas. Commercial landlords would be screwed, but that was going to happen sooner or later. And the companies who value their real estate more than their employees happiness will see their wishes fulfilled by the monkeys paw. I don’t see the problem. @megmac

Tim Jun 18, 2023

Trains, 'office' workers go by trains and buses. Cycles even in London, Paris and Berlin... insufficient parking provision. : )))

@megmac Just the idea that lowered land value would make it harder for "retail" is so weird. Restaurants, cafes, small stores, all benefits immensly by lowered rent.

All this seems to be yet another "please will someone think of the landlords" article.

@WhyNotZoidberg I mean, retail will struggle from hollowed out American-style downtowns, but not because of lowered land value. It'll struggle because it requires a customer base and no one wants to drive an hour to a restaurant or a theatre in a dead downtown, and big events every now and then can't sustain them either. In American cores, businesses survive on commuters.

@megmac True, American downtowns are a completely different animal that European downtowns.

@megmac Oh I forgot... on the other hand, why not convert those empty offices into apartments? They're structurally sound, they have water and heat... After all homelessness is a deliberately fabricated problem.

Of course that too would crash the land value because having poor people and homeless people moving into small affordable apartments in the middle of skyscraper city is something land owners DO NOT WANT.

AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸Jun 18, 2023

@WhyNotZoidberg @megmac They'd need significant refitting to meet residential plumbing requirements, and to meet residential fire codes. For some buildings it might make more sense to tear them down and start again, but for others it'd just take a massive investment program.

@AGTMADCAT @megmac

Well, that is the only option tho, isn't it? The alternative would be literal graveyards where the headstones also would be what had died: The Office Building.

Also buildings have been brought up to code before, it happens all the time. If you can bring a 16th century apartment building up to code (despite actually NOT having water or heat, at all, to begin with) I am sure you can bring a 6 story 5 gazillion square feet office building up to code. Or a skyscraper.

AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸Jun 18, 2023

@WhyNotZoidberg @megmac Sorry, I should have been more clear. I'm not saying that it can't be done, I'm saying that the economic bar to doing so is very high. It's a problem that money can be thrown at, it's just a lot of money to throw. Office parks are much easier than skyscrapers because of the fire requirements (It's easier to add an external fire escape onto a 3 story building than a 30 story one.

@AGTMADCAT @megmac

Codes are obviously different over here. I can count the number of apartment buildings with external fire escapes I have seen on one hand, and I'm 50 so I have seen a few.

AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸Jun 18, 2023

@WhyNotZoidberg @megmac Yeah in Europe the ladder truck is considered the secondary exit, so the focus is on keeping the fire delayed until the truck gets there. Here in the US there have to be two exits from everywhere, and the cheapest way to retrofit that when you're carving up a large plate office floor into apartments is with external stairs. Buildings designed to be apartments from the start have other solutions of course.

@AGTMADCAT Funny enough the code says commercial buildings (including offices) must have two exits here...

Mark Crocker Jun 18, 2023

@WhyNotZoidberg @megmac your claim of landlord aversion to housing poor people reminds me of the one of the underlying causes of the problems in @pluralistic 's novella "Unauthorized Bread” https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/ , where one of the nefarious strategies for maximizing profits from furnished subsidized housing was kickbacks from locked-down high end #IOT appliances that required users to buy overpriced supplies to use them.

Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters

Cory Doctorow's book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here's an excerpt.

Ars Technica

Nimbus Jun 18, 2023

I've been wanting a space that is a professional office downstairs and a personal residence upstairs. I'm having a hard time finding listings like this.

rus Jun 18, 2023

@nimbus5000 @megmac I love those style of building. My city did a little experiment with some, so there are about half a dozen in one area, and a mall where the first two floors are commercial and 3-6 are (very expensive) apartments.

The first one was the experiment, and is exactly what I'd like to see more of, the second seems to be a big commercial getting the zoning it wants just because they have mega-money.

America as a whole has terrible zoning groups.

Stan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Jun 18, 2023

@megmac @BruceMirken San Francisco (where I lived for 21 years) is going to be going through a lot of painful adjustments to the new reality of work life. I don’t think that the City’s leadership has *any* vision for how to deal with this other than begging employers to make their employees return to the office — and it’s not gonna happen. The Financial District is never going to be as it was before.

Bruce Mirken Jun 18, 2023

@StanWonn @megmac No doubt. It needs a new vision, not "Let's go back to 2019."

Stan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Jun 18, 2023

@BruceMirken @megmac Yeah, Breed’s pleading for mass-scale RTO is kind of like how West Virginia still seems to be hoping for a return to the “glory days” of coal mining.

@BruceMirken @StanWonn The difference between SF and a lot of other north american cities might be that, due to NIMBYs there's still a *lot* of residential in central SF, afaik, so even with bad city management there's room for things to shift on the ground.

In a lot of other cities grassroots civic organizing is basically completely dead, and downtowns are already hollowed out of anything but temporary workers.

@BruceMirken @StanWonn (note: I have never fully lived in SF but I have spent a lot of time there, including essentially part-time living there sporadically for work for a while. I really love the city and it makes me sad the state that it seems to be in now. But I recognize that that gives me a pretty limited perspective on the *real* state of things on the ground there now, so I'm happy to be corrected)

Bruce Mirken Jun 18, 2023

@megmac @StanWonn SFs Financial District is pretty much all offices. I lived in SF for 28 years.

@BruceMirken @StanWonn sure, I know. But the financial district never seemed, to me at least, to be the center of vibrancy in the city to begin with.

In so many other cities once you leave the downtown area it's a stark difference in density, vibrancy, and very few have any real secondary "mainstreets."

Stan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Jun 18, 2023

@megmac @BruceMirken I worked in the Financial District for about 11 years overall. It was a Monday-Friday area for sure, and for the most part a ghost town on weekends and holidays. To Bruce’s point, it would have been much better for there to have been more residential development in the area but that is not what we ended up with. That will have to change.

steve cooley Jun 18, 2023

@megmac wtf do we do

Pauline von Hellermann Jun 18, 2023

@megmac i love the concrete suggestion of converting empty office blocks into apartment blocks - yes!! First step to #SolarPunk cities

#WikiParty Jun 18, 2023

@megmac Of all #SouthAfrica's cities, only Cape Town has tried this but alas, only with "high-end" residential development. Particularly egregious is its toleration of vacant buildings where insufficient capital has been forthcoming for such. Also its acceptance of many levels of parking.

Boswell Jun 18, 2023

Not a fan of the 'get back to the office' line either.

Ask employees whether they would like an office or a significant payrise. Both of these things are connected.

Also, working in an office, you have a lower hourly rate and less wellbeing. Because the 'collaboration' and commute simply removes 2+ hours from your day.

I love office working, but with >10% inflation and >30% monthly mortgage repayments, you can't expect to go from WFH back to office w/o serious financial incentives

Noah Gibbs Jun 18, 2023

> Those officials that passed such laws would be literally run out of town.

Whereas *this* is the part that gets me.

No. No they wouldn't. Mostly they'd get to keep doing exactly what they're doing except at the occasional town hall event.

@codefolio oh yeah for sure. Even if they will the structure of civic politics is often so broken that even if they do get run out, the civil servants who are really running the show and accountable to approximately no one will just keep doing what they're doing.

That's what happened in my city.

bob Jun 18, 2023

@megmac when they say saving cities they really mean saving banks

Lukas 🥔Jun 18, 2023

@megmac office buildings becoming worth a fraction of their cost sounds desirable 😄

Shephallmassive Jun 18, 2023

@megmac yes its interesting that so much of the previous century was about moving the worker away from the competing interest of a family life. That somehow living and working in the same community risked workers who could be distracted by the inconvenient pull of domestic and family need. The accepted removal of parents for most of the day from home continues & grandparents cant help as retirement age gets higher, this meant even having a pet is impossible let a lone a child.

Kent Pitman Jun 18, 2023

Except given storms and sea level, and that so many cities are coastal, I'm not sure many cities are where I'd put my investment. A losing battle at this point.

Structurally, I think you're right about city use but we should be getting people away from the ocean, maybe even anticipating the toxic waste problem that comes of drowning cities.

But all of that would require the same acknowledgment of problem and willingness to change that phasing out fossil fuels would. And we're apparently not up for that :(

Given we'll ignore the coastal issue, I feel like the easiest thing we could do to help cities would be to require they be all-electric. It's arguably still hard for e-cars to have good range and access to support between cities but city density means you could do it there quickly, reducing fossil fuel vehicle use to inter-city and creating tractable pressure to rethink public transit within cities. We could do that on a pretty short timeline if we cared. But I don't think we're up to that either...

t o d d w a r n e r Jun 18, 2023

@megmac Mankind hasn't prominently lived in cities but for a very tiny fraction of our existence. And the concept of the suburbian commute is even more recent. And now we have a new highway system for a big chunk of the population: the Internet. How we live and work will restructure once again. It's wasteful, especially if we end up tearing down skyscrapers and continue to have far too many babies, but how we live is going to evolve.