I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.
I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.