Most new single home construction in Germany is in the form of cubes with flat roofs, absolutely ugly and will look like crap in 30-50 years (for me it looks like crap now already), see e.g. [1]. Insanity but for the builder it makes sense as it’s the cheapest way to conform to the energy saving requirements and maximize living room per lot size which is restricted due to idiotic zoning laws. I don’t get how this can be considered sustainable… And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
I skimmed three articles of this publication: one saying the more permittent zoning policies on historic urban areas would allow more growth and more environmentally sustainable buildings; other saying Europe is falling behind its auto-manufacturing and does not have its own Tesla, because they cannot kick out workers fast enough; third that Australia stopped asylum seeker by simply preventing boats coming in (and breaking international law?) and eu should do the same. So basically all of them are just lib news media feel-good “progressive yay!” style used to sell conservative capitalist ideas. Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes, kick out the workers and smash the unions so we can pay ourselves bigger dividends and stop the asylum seekers escaping the horrid conditions of ex-colonial nations we created over centuries regardless of whether they deserve an asylum or not.
Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?
This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me.
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.
> Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.
Since they’re mostly talking about the US, the thesis here is wrong. Almost all NIMBYism of the era was borne of redlining and white flight in the post-war era, which drove whites out of the cities to the burbs because there were too many “coloreds.” So basically, Americans were - and still are - racist no matter what SCOTUS says.
The problem is that this equates two very different way of building houses, and lumps them together.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
When it comes to the UK, I think this diagnosis that people lost trust that new buildings would beautify rather than uglify their towns and cities, is definitely a strong part of the picture.
But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.
Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.
Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.
I also wanted to address this -
> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.
Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] thread1: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/169220882?referrer=H...
Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.
Since they’re mostly talking about the US, the thesis here is wrong. Almost all NIMBYism of the era was borne of redlining and white flight in the post-war era, which drove whites out of the cities to the burbs because there were too many “coloreds.” So basically, Americans were - and still are - racist no matter what SCOTUS says.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.
Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.
Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.
I also wanted to address this -
> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.
Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.
Opposition is not really related to aesthetics.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.