Harvey will leave a huge amount of wreckage behind, some of it invisible. In particular, we don’t yet know just how much poison has been released by flooding of chemical plants, waste dumps, and more. But it’s a good bet that more people will eventually die from the toxins Harvey leaves behind than were killed during the storm itself.
.. Many toxic waste sites are flooded, but the Environmental Protection Agency is conspicuously absent.
.. Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York, but it covers roughly the same area, and probably has a smaller percentage of land that hasn’t been paved or built on.
.. The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is more than $3,000, the highest in the nation and roughly triple the rent in Houston; the median price of a single-family home is more than $800,000.
.. America’s big metropolitan areas are pretty sharply divided between Sunbelt cities where anything goes, like Houston or Atlanta, and those on the East or West Coast where nothing goes, like San Francisco or, to a lesser extent, New York
.. Chicago is a huge city with dense development but relatively low housing prices; maybe it has some lessons to teach the rest of us?
.. this is one policy area where “both sides get it wrong” — a claim I usually despise
.. In particular, we should encourage construction that takes advantage of the most effective mass transit technology yet devised: the elevator.
Why Millennials Are (Partly) to Blame for the Housing Shortage
As young people and builders have shifted their focus toward trendier urban markets, overall housing construction has declined
For decades during the late-20th century, suburbs were the place to build, as urban cores suffered from high crime, poor schools and stagnant or shrinking populations.But preferences have changed among young people, many of whom want to live closer to transit, restaurants and their workplaces... As builders have shifted focus toward trendier urban markets and away from cheaper suburbs, they have produced less housing overall than they otherwise might have. While starter-home construction has bounced back in recent months, it remains far from reversing this long-term trend.
.. The takeaway, Mr. Romem says, is that pricey cities need to loosen land-use restrictions in core areas where there is more demand. Allowing for more high-rise condo buildings would make it economical to produce starter homes in these areas as well.
“Do you care about preserving things the way they are, so that only wealthy people can continue buying in, or do you want to [encourage more density], so that housing is more affordable for everyone?” he asked.
Thoughts on Will Wilkinson’s post on cities
it’s not really cities that are doing well, but certain kinds of cities, suburbs, and towns. It’s really the places with high levels of human capital. To understand the real pattern, read Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs. The engineer-heavy suburbs of Fremont or Milpitas are doing great, as are college towns like Ann Arbor and Gainesville. Meanwhile, big cities like Baltimore and St. Louis are still stagnating and crime-ridden, while others such as Detroit and Cleveland have only just now started climbing up out of their Rust Belt doldrums. It’s not city vs. country, it’s innovation hubs vs. old-economy legacy towns.
.. Many American cities remain extremely segregated, especially between black residents and others. Chicago is a thriving, diverse, fun, relatively safe metropolis – unless you go to the poor black areas, in which case you’re in “Chiraq“.
.. the most segregated cities in America include places like Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Those are precisely the places that are having the most difficulty adapting to the new, innovation-based economy. And those tend to be the places where crime rates have rebounded to their early 1990s highs, or never really fell in the first place.
.. Either America succeeds as a polyracial nation, or it doesn’t succeed at all.
Break Up the Liberal City
if they are innovation capitals it’s a form of innovation that generates fewer jobs than past technological advance. If they produce some intellectual ferment they have also cloistered our liberal intelligentsia and actually weakened liberalism politically by concentrating its votes.
.. Liberalism has become more smug and out-of-touch; conservatism more anti-intellectual and buffoonish. The hive-mind genius supposedly generated by concentrating all the best and the brightest has given us great apps and some fun TV shows to binge-watch, but the 2000s and 2010s haven’t exactly been the Florentine Renaissance.