As long as you are going to read things that aren't remotely present in my posts, why not accuse me of sex with goats?
People who care not for the environment care not for historical buildings? What else would you be insinuating?
I always thought that was a particularly amusing type of bestiality. If you are going to make a baseless ad hominem, please use that one.
And hey, isn't it really revealing that my mind immediately went to sex with goats and how funny it is?
Whatever floats your goat
So what? That doesn't change the fact that a taller city is a richer city with a smaller environmental impact and less motivation to bulldoze it's history.
Because London was a living refutation of that "fact"
You said things that were factually untrue
Where?
and then when I provided, y'know, links to people who actually know the subject you are trying to talk.
Then you must not have read the links you gave me, for when I said there was no absolute truth to how to plan and build a world class city I was using your link and when I came to the conclusion that the world's cities and indeed America's cities would have to have different solutions for they were not in the same boats, I was using your link to Strong Towns:
"There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach."
" Transfer payments between governments: where the federal or state government makes a direct investment in growth at the local level, such as funding a water or sewer system expansion.
Transportation spending: where transportation infrastructure is used to improve access to a site that can then be developed.
Public and private-sector debt: where cities, developers, companies, and individuals take on debt as part of the development process, whether during construction or through the assumption of a mortgage.
In each of these mechanisms, the local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange — a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation — is one element of a Ponzi scheme.
The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes."
Now this kind of thing can be found everywhere to one degree or another. Planners, obsessed with density, join with developers and politicians to skip over multiple generations of maturing in a single project. Even here in my small town in Central Minnesota, we have four story apartment buildings in neighborhoods surrounded by small single-family homes."So what’s the problem with this? Isn’t density good? How can there be a problem with letting developers meet the market demand? If the land costs so much, doesn’t this force developers to build at scale? This is how things are done, Chuck. It’s the market.
"Third, as the automobile become more ubiquitous, we completely transformed the way land was valued. Instead of a slow, incremental building of wealth from the center out, land become a somewhat random, hit-and-miss kind of prospect. Some sell for $2.5 million. Others wait and get nothing. A lot would depend on where the latest highway project was, what city would give the subsidy and where and – of course – who you knew and what you could get passed. The savvy developer today is less of a visionary designer or builder and more someone good at navigating bureaucracy.
This is why I’ve advocated for throwing out most of our zoning codes, but there is one simple provision I would keep: a height limitation. I would allow the next increment of development, but nothing more. Years ago I experimented writing a vertical building envelope based on the heights of adjacent buildings, but it doesn’t even need to be that complex. Something simple: The maximum building height shall be two stories or 1.5 times the average height of the directly adjacent buildings, whichever is greater. That would do the trick.
Of course, everyone who thinks their vacant lot is worth $2.5 million is going to be really angry when they discover that they can only get $75,000 for it. The fact that the higher value was a random lottery, not a real value, likely won’t be realized. Still, if we are going to turn our cities into Strong Towns, we need to get the incremental growth process back. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, a building height restriction is one simple, elegant way to help bring that about.
I like their 5-6 story hybrid approach very much
communist architecture
One of the ironies is that the style was created in capitalist countries for reasons of cost and efficiency directly post-WWII and through the height of the Cold War, and only spread to communist countries around the late 1960s - 1980s. "Not wasting taxpayers money" isn't just a communist value, after all, and the "giant concrete box with windows" wasn't really new: it was a growth out of Western modernist architecture of the 1930s.
You should see our cheap houses that were rapidly constructed post-war in the direst of economy (POST WWII); they are long rows of semi-detached three story houses all manufactured in the same manner. They look quite nice nowadays, though I would not weep if they were demolished and replaced (quite bland really), but they were functional, could house up to two families, were cheap and did not create blindspots that were to become gang centres. Sweden and the Anglo world's academics nurtured their own very unique flavour of Marxism, so ironically the post-communist world sheltered behind its iron curtain is today less Marxist than ours.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1570042 times)