Cities: Skylines | Power, Politics, & Planning: Episode 1: Parking

Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting. Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods. That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant. There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three. I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): ▶ this video

"everything is just closer together over here." It's not "just" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years. Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike. Lots of free parking though. This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US ▶ this video