Solarpunk Urbanism

1838 readers

1 users here now

A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.

Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.

Checkout these related communities:

[email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Does Density Solve Affordability? Explaining New York and San Francisco (youtu.be)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A well-researched video that explains why some dense urban areas are quite expensive.

TL;DW: Despite a substantial historic housing stock, our most expensive cities have built very little housing in recent years, leading to very low vacancy rates and high prices. Ramping up housing construction will be a necessary part of solving the affordability crisis.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It’s obvious that prices are controlled by a multiplicity of factors, not all of which can be covered in a short video. However, I found the complete lack of high-COL, high-construction cities to be quite convincing. This suggests that housing supply is so important that it’s very rare for prices to rise so high when supply is high, even despite these other factors. It’s not necessary to discuss every factor to demonstrate that one factor is a very important one. Why do you think this analysis is uncritical?

As far as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia I don’t think there is any real mystery—they simply aren’t considered as desirable as New York, SF, or LA by most people. They’re not quite Detroit but you don’t have thousands of people moving across the country to these cities—or wishing they could afford to.

Honestly, we know from every other category of good that scarcity causes prices to rise. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that, despite some additional complexities, the housing market works the same way.