With the Home Office’s Wastewater Analysis for Narcotics Detection (WAND) they found at £9.8 billion the Cocaine industry is 4 times what had previously been assumed. That's a lot of dirty money launder.
What the hell is a charity shop? Like a storefront for a non profit that you can donate money to or a shop with cheap subsidized groceries for poor people?
UK Charities collect unwanted used/unused products from people and sell to fund their operations. Product ranges from small toys, books, tableware, clothing, used electronics to furnitures. Sometimes you found good new stuff too.
Essentially just a thrift shop run by a charity, with proceeds going to their stated goal. In the UK it's generally Oxfam, Cancer Research UK or the BHF (British Heart Foundation)
Last month I visited the Scottish Borders and generally found this to be true, especially in Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso. I wasn't shocked however as I find the situation in Canada to be very similar (in the UK switch cannabis dispensaries for chippies). 25 years ago when a Wal-Mart came to the small town I grew up in, only took a couple of years to gut the high street, certainly Amazon only threw fuel on that fire.
The harsh reality is that more often than not the shops don't add much value over ordering online and having it delivered.
Progress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.
In the average European mediterranean city, shops provide safety, lights.
As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses. And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.
Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).
You cannot have real estate as an investment (sometimes the only one without capital gains tax), and simultaneously people living around and hanging out. Investment real estate pushes permanent inhabitants out.
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
Do you understand where that "built wealth" comes from? It doesn't appear from the ether - it's transferred from one person to another. In this case, it's transferred from a legitimate useful business to a rent-seeking investor who creates no value but holds value hostage. And if the amount of "built wealth" is too high, no business exists that can afford to pay it, and so it doesn't get "built".
That wealth comes from using the land, not owning it. The landlord has nothing to do with it - he only takes as much of the wealth someone else created as he can get away with.
Traditionaly as in since what post redlining ban downzoning in the 1960s? No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle where they’d replace the doorknobs with cheaper furnishings and 10x their investment and somehow their peasant kids working peasant jobs would afford that.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
> No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle
It is not:) There was a fortunate coincidence of factors like economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
This is mostly good things for people to think about, but... "immigrants doing god knows what" just looks like racism dropped into an otherwise reasonable ramble. Hopefully that's not how you meant it.
It's racism because how to even tell if people are immigrants? "Oh we're in Britain but they're not white. Must be immigrants.". People born and living all their lives in Britain who are not white or speaking to their friends in English can probably fill a whole city, but the implied thought of "not white, must be immigrants" is racism...
>In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
People respond to what's happening locally. There's no question UK towns have been getting more lawless and dangerous than they were, say, twenty years ago. It may not be very bad in absolute terms, but that's not the criteria people use for comparison.
Every time a big box store (Staples, Best Buy, Toys R Us that kinda thing) location in my area closes down, it's not replaced with another. Instead one of those liquidation "Amazon returns" type stores opens. It makes retail look very sick.
I am pretty sure there has been similar scenarios unfolding across the EU to various degrees, and I have heard more than one rumours of forcing those big supermarket chain to have local shops to help bolster the high streets footfall.
I always wondered about the nail / foot spa stores. What is it about these businesses that makes them such good defaults when nothing else seems to be able to survive?
Nail salons make a lot of money. manicures and pedicures cost a lot, depending on the class level they might be $50-$500. Supplies cost almost nothing. The workers are usually immigrants making very little living in communal housing.
They don't have inventory/consumables which makes money laundering easier. The low transaction cost makes paying cash normal. The primary cost is labor and they force the indentured employees to pay it back for 'living expenses'.
IIRC in the UK specifically it's the biggest export industry. It's why the City of London (not to be confused with the city that is called London) won't ever be broken up.
I always think that they're fronts for money laundering. They're easy to set up and don't require lots of expensive equipment and they're probably mainly cash based (never visited one, so guessing here).
One thing that isn't brought up is that businesses like these are a third space, especially for women. They go there to hang out, chat, destress. So there's always going to be demand.
Nail salons have been opening right next to each other in my area, so I've been pondering this for awhile. It may just be a question of starting capital. You don't need much to start a nail salon. They don't have special furniture (the foot places do, but I'm just talking about the manicure places). They stock only a tiny amount of supplies. They don't need a web presence, or a lot of marketing in general. They don't require special equipment or stock nontrivial amounts of dangerous chemicals.
The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.
I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.
Isn't it like that everywhere? And I suspect the recipe is pretty much the same:
Local business owners are taxed to death.
Meanwhile, multinationals with HQs in tax havens roll in and set up national branches. The local branches pay their HQs for imaginary "services" and "rights", allowing them to operate practically tax-free in the country.
Good luck staying open little guy. We're lucky we still have vape shops and nail parlours.
I don't think it's taxes so much as compliance cost of setting up and running a location. BigCo can hire specialists to figure out "ackshually no this is why my site plan is compliant than you very much" and hire them at cost whereas the local guy has to get kicked in this dick by some hired engineering firm's or law firm's profit margin for the same service aaaand gets a worse service on top because the local business who wants to keep doing business there can't fight for their client like some guy in an office at BigCo can.
Even if you control for the Amazon factor or the Walmart factor by looking at services, the bulk of these "successful" businesses are either chains or owned by a bigger corperate entity that can do kind of the same thing.
There's some truth to this. Compliance costs can be huge, particularly if you're dealing with anything that's toxic or dangerous. I worked at small electronics manufacturer in the 90s that spent an incredible amount of money making sure the area they washed the circuit boards with alcohol was up to code and all the paperwork was filled out properly. We didn't have anybody working there who even knew what the rules were.
I don't really think the issue is taxes. The fact the more and more, the default buying habit is to buy on the internet means there is less and less viable business with a brick and mortar shop where you have to pay rent. The U.K is not an exception. In France, Spain, Portugal, I have seen the same things : Either you are a business that sells services, fast food or anything else that is either hardly movable on the internet, or has a significant advantage being able to buy things right away (vape for example, like tobacco shop, you don't want to wait tomorrow to have your nicotine fix), or you die off.
It's also a vicious circle : Because there is less and less physical shop selling specific goods, you have to turn to the internet, which mean local businesses get less traffic and die off. If you have any slightly niche hobby and do not live in a major metropolis, you are SoL. As an example, I would have to go 200km away to buy raw leather and leatherwork tools despite living in one of the biggest city in my country.
Part of the problem is that there's not really a way to ensure brick-and-mortar captures its value-add. It costs a lot of money to rent and staff the space, and there are real benefits to being able to browse in a real space (depending on the store in question, they can offer curation, close examination of the product, the sales staff can sometimes offer valuable suggestions or opinions, you can try on clothes, you can check compatibility of some products directly in the store or get a sense of how they actually look), but nothing but friction or a vague sense of guilt prevents a customer from using the store to choose a product, for free, and then ordering it for cheaper online, which completely screws over the physical location.
Possible solutions to this include
1. More stores introduce a paid membership. This is not a bad idea, a store pays for the cost of the physical location with the membership fee and has similar prices to online stores, and they have an incentive to maintain product quality, Costco is very successful with this model, but I'd be worried that that the model is begging for enshitiffication, you could really cash out on the store's reputation by lowering the product quality and increasing the costs and relying on the friction of the existing membership to keep customers for a fair while.
2. Stores focus on being an enjoyable experience, and hope that if you're spending enough time there, you're going to want to buy something. This is what Barnes and Nobles is doing, and most surviving malls.
3. Some sort of policy fix. I'd be in favor of an online shopping "tariff" designed to bring online prices in line with what it costs to run physical locations, collected by the feds and redistributed to localities. Has the minor downside that everyone but me would hate it, and it would be so monstrously unpopular that it could never happen. If we could figure out a way around that, though, it could be quite good.
The memberships idea suffers from the same problem we have on the internet -- nobody wants to manage a dozen different memberships in order to go shopping. They'll just use Amazon instead.
It's both tbf. Shops generate less revenue than before but business rates are going up. The charity shops have low customer footfall but get a legitimate tax break (and let's just say the rumours that the vape and nail shops aren't the best at tax compliance probably aren't totally unfair...)
Charity shops actually get pretty decent footfall at least in my experience (but maybe that's just where I live). More than that they have a few structural advantages other than tax breaks which means they are able to compete where traditional retail can't - things like low staffing costs (if they use volunteers), no/very low inventory cost, and they are usually able/willing to sign up to lease terms which more commercial enterprises would either struggle to secure, or would be unable to live with (eg almost no security of tenure).
You expect retail outlets for that? 30 years ago when I was making my own shoes in London and wanted to buy hide I had to trail around grimy industrial areas to visit a wholesale warehouse and persuade them to do retail for a moment. (I bought my tools from other hobbyists.)
This. People forget how much more stuff was niche or industrial/b2b only before ecommerce came along.
Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.
Agreed. It's a whole lot easier to engage in esoteric hobbies these days, because there just has to be a single warehouse somewhere, maybe even in another country, willing to sell you what you need.
Periodically I watch YouTube videos made by a historian of clothing. She makes a lot of clothing for research and display, and she had an episode on where to purchase linen and what to look for to make sure you don't get a sub-par product. When I was growing up you just wouldn't have been able do something like that unless you were living somewhere like Paris or Milan.
I'm a Frenchman but I hold no particular dumb grudge against the English, I actually like them, their style, their music, what I perceived was their refinement as much as their capacity to be hilarious, quick with the banter, overall good lads
so a few years ago, I booked a trip to London, then a train to Northampton cause I wanted to see the city where all the good shoe manufacturers are based (I own a pair of Crockett and Jones and enjoy other brands like Cheaney, Trickers, etc).
what a BRUTAL wake up call, what was on paper a thriving manufacturing town with rich history turned out to be a completely derelict place, with boarded windows in the main streets, beggars, dollar shops, litter absolutely everywhere and the signs that the golden age of the town is LONG gone. I don't know what happened there, recession, Brexit, I really don't know but I ended up taking the train back to London earlier than anticipated, completely shocked by what I saw
Good manufacturing jobs were gutted and sent overseas with no thought or care what the impact on communities would be. In some places families are now on the third generation on benefits because there simply aren't any jobs and the ones that are available require skills that people don't have because they aren't taught them in school due to the obsession with the Victorian education model and the shortage of skilled teachers and training opportunities for young people.
At this point nothing except for a total economic rebuild will save the UK high street and there is zero political will to do that because the current broken system makes certain people money.
London has been basically subsisting off the remains of the empire while everything else just crumbles.
Also for Frenchman to say re les Anglais "what I perceived was their refinement"... there's a joke that the only people who think the English are refined are Americans (as we are a savage people).
London is beautiful, I really want to go back and spend more time there (I want to visit Kew ASAP for example), but I felt two things very strongly:
- it's extremely diverse, in a way that no other big metropolitan cities I've visited really are (and way more varied and diverse than Paris). You feel that variety crossing a street, where you go from "oh what a nice place with great heritage buildings and all" to "oh I should keep my eyes open, sketchiness has increased dramatically in the past second"
- London during the day and London at night are basically two different ecosystems, love it during the day, not for me at night (too rowdy / wild)
This’ll cheer you up: Northampton is used as a case study for a successful post-industrial town. Below average unemployment, above average services and citizen satisfaction.
And it’s true. Northampton is doing pretty great compared to a majority of the U.K.
>This’ll cheer you up: Northampton is used as a case study for a successful post-industrial town.
That same bent of evil people came to my town to peddle some "looks good from my ivory tower" type municipal trash policy that incentivize all the wrong things. They cited an adjacent town that adopted their stuff and is renown locally for its filth as a "success story". The public's reaction was literally "hahahaha, oh wait you're serious, hahahahahahahahahah". City councilor literally had to bang the gavel a bunch and tell the crowd to be serious. It was glorious. The city council is not likely to adopt it at this point.
The great thing about towns like this is the journey leaving them. This isn't an isolated example either. Most towns I've been to have a derelict High Street.
As a frenchman living in London for 10y+, I am always shocked when I go to medium sized cities in the UK. I love the country side though.
Joke is that UK is a third world country bolted onto London, obviously exaggerated but if you look at numbers and you go there yourselves there is some truth in it.
Perhaps it's improved in the last few years, but Brighton is the only place I've personally seen someone sitting on a street shooting heroin in the early afternoon.
High streets in the UK are pretty dreadful. One saving grace is the proliferation of excellent kebab shops. Affordable, delicious and fast (not that kind) food. I wish we had more options like that in the US.
As a Brit that’s moved to Australia let me say the kebab shops here are a revelation. The meat is nicely cooked, generally identifiable, and not swimming in grease. The bread is usually more like real Greek gyros bread, the salad fresh…
My memories of Kebabs in the UK is of very dubious slices of something coming off the elephant-leg at the back of the store, nothing you would ever consider when sober.
Kebab shops are the very bottom of the market for the most part.
If you want quality Turkish kebabs which are nicely cooked, generally identifiable and not swimming in grease you go to a Turkish grill restaurant.
I don't know how long you've been away but they're everywhere here now with not an elephant leg in sight. They'll even serve you a nice salad and Bulgar wheat.
It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK.
About five years, I don’t believe for a second the market has changed that much across the country in that time.
Yes, you can get good Turkish food in a lot of places, and good Turkish food is delicious.
But the post I was responding to called out kebab shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average high-street kebab place.
Don’t get me wrong, it hits the spot after a skinful… but high-quality it is not. See my sibling post about the various meat-scandals.
> It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.
> Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?
I think you did.
I think you've presented criminal behaviour as if it's not an aberration.
You've ignored that there are good kebab shops and bad. That good high street kebab shops are common and sell more than just low quality donnas, including shish with fresh salad.
I never want to eat a donna kebab, so I don't order it.
> But the post I was responding to called out kebab shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average high-street kebab place.
You can in fact get excellent food at high-street kebab shops. That's my point. When I go to the UK it's literally what I survive on because the alternative (gellied eels anyone?) is completely inedible. You can also get haloumi from most of the good ones, which you can't in most places in the US.
I also don't know why people are calling it an "elephant leg", that's crazy. It's shwarma and it's delicious. I think racism and general UK/AU diet has contorted the perception here. People with more varied diets probably appreciate it a lot more.
It’s not shwarma at most of them mate, it’s highly processed doner, and the reason most of us would only touch them after 15 pints is we know what’s in it, or rather we know that we don’t know what’s in it. They’re extremely high fat and high salt, and there’s a multi-decade history of the manufacturers being busted for shenanigans.
Jellied eels? I don’t think most British people have ever eaten those except maybe on a dare.
I’m going to be charitable and assume you’ve only ever been to a small part of the East End of London, where you can get jellied eels (not the case in much of the country) and where there is likely a diverse enough community that actual decent shwarma exists.
Because if you’re eating doner kebabs regularly, from whatever vendor you come across in most of the UK, all I can say is you might want to check your heart health.
I mean most foods in the UK are bad for your health. Ham egg and chips (which I actually like) is hardly salt free. There's literally chips on or in everything. I've been all over the UK but tend to stay in East London precisely because it has the food I like.
I lived in Britain for more than a decade and the thing I missed the most from the continent was good, German/Turkish style kebabs than the sorry excuse with a soggy pita they sell in UK.
Are they really excellent? Kebab shops elsewhere in Europe are often associated with shady dealings. For example, in Finland a family will run one for a while for immigration fraud, then hand it on to another immigrant family for rinse and repeat. Naturally, they serve the lowest-quality food they can get away with. In Poland many are run by a mafia using exploited Banglafeshi labor to run them with zero concern for food quality.
Modern döner-kebab meat is rarely the quality shaowarma of a century ago. It is highly processed and basically a big hot dog.
Kebab stores, local entrepreneurs unwilling to hire a local and pay EUR 1500, private universities, slumlords. That's how immigration and visa frauds operate in Poland, yes. Then immigration and visa fraud is only on the surface, behind there is likely some more serious organized crime.
Are you saying a hot dog flame kissed and scraped off with a knife and dumped into a pita with some yogurt/garlic/mayo/what have you sauce would not be delicious? Come on. People outside the US act all high and proud about the hot dog but literally every meat eating culture has some other scrap meat dish, sometimes its the whole anus rather than minced and put in a casing for you. Waste of the animal to throw out fine meat if prepared well.
Cultures may have traditional offal-based dishes, and indeed they can be delicious, but the meat is not highly processed, because that is something that came about only with modern industry.
I find nicotine vaping really pleasurable. It's all about finding the right device and flavor though. I'm rocking the XROS Pro 2 right now but I also have a box mod with a mesh coil that I sometimes use as well. I'm not against vape shops as long as they aren't selling disposables.
Hello! Progressive cosmopolitan type here to tell you that living in the city center and walking everywhere, whenever possible, is the best life I've ever had - well worth the premium I pay in order to enjoy it. You have no idea what you're missing.
hello! yes, that's exactly what I assume when I see walkable cities evangelism. I assume it's being evangelized by people who WFH or live near work, have a supermarket across the street, and get everything else delivered to their doorstep. I understand why cars may seem obsolete from their perspective, even a nuisance interfering with their 5-minute strolls to the coffee shop. but the overwhelming majority of us unfortunately lives in a vastly different reality.
Only because we have built our cities to prioritize car storage above all else. If we stopped building for cars and built for people instead things would change quicky.
And what does building for people look like, precisely? I live in a 1910s London housing estate with pretty ordinary single family sized homes with gardens and lots of green space. Cars were not really a big deal when they designed and built the place
Yet this is no utopia.
It takes 20 mins to get to the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 500-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end. Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries back home. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend that sort of time buying food for the next few days or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" of the different lines becomes considerable.
How did people shop for groceries when your neighborhood was originally built? Surely it was not designed to be so inconvenient: what has changed in the meantime?
One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My own neighborhood, about ten years older than yours, comes very close to the ideal: it has its share of apartment buildings, but none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
Groceries might have been delivered. Also there were small food shops (butcher, grocer, fishmonger, baker) in every neighborhood that don't exist any more.
"15 Minute City" ideas sound nice on paper, but I think that in reality the research shows they are net-negative in basically everything apart from encouraging active-transport.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi ... your typical HN reader perhaps). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, security guards, farmers, construction workers etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided. Oh and ding ding ding yes these types people who have mobility issues also tend to be the poorer and lower-income people in society too.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet?
Basically the "15 Minute City" utopia is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
In a sense it IS "working as intended", because if you look close enough, the cycle-talibans (those who unflexibly express their maoist intent of forcing unwilling people to not use their private cars) are antisocial (at best).
Cars are the most antisocial device. They truly destroy communities, they destroy connections, they are giant sinkholes of money and effort. They are dangerous prisons that trap us in a cycle of cost and physical danger.
I follow the argument but the conclusion feels off. If the reason white collars move in is that it's nicer and more desirable, is the solution not improving a place? Making it worse?
It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).
The point is that it makes some bits nicer for rich people, while the poorer people are forced out of these nicer areas.
You can't have the entire place be 15 minutes because some people have jobs etc that are just incompatible with that, and they tend to be lower income people.
It's essentially "economic cleansing" so only the nice charming rich people with interesting jobs doing something awfully smart in tech can live in the lovely areas with the nice cafes and that lovely little grocery store that does that tapenade to die for. Meanwhile the lower income folks have the run down high streets with the vape shops, the betting shops, the drug addicts living in derelict doorways etc.
Which gaps? Unless you're outside zone six, you can get pretty much anywhere in London by tube or train within 20 minutes walking and if 20 minutes walking is too much for you then sure use the car, but traffic is so heavy in London that plenty of people just train.
Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.
I don't know. I have been living in south of Spain for the last 7 years, buildings aren't high rises yet i the 2 neighborhood I have lived in I had most of the commodities available.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
That's close but not quite right. I understand exactly how necessary cars are for most people, having spent many years trapped in a car-dependent life myself, and I am so glad to have escaped from it that I want to do everything I can to liberate others. A walkable urban life should not be an expensive luxury - there is no fundamental economic reason for it. The scarcity is entirely a function of uptight, restrictive zoning codes, and we can fix that.
America managed to demolish and rebuild most of its cities less than a century ago to make cars mandatory. Amsterdam did the same in reverse only two decades ago - in this century! Except that involved more building and less demolition because it was the cars that forced the demolition.
Having done both, I can honestly say I prefer living in the countryside and driving to living in the city center and walking in every way except getting home after a night out. The city felt massively overwhelming in almost every way, I actually found it less convenient in a lot of ways, and I found it very hard to get away from noise and people without a car to get myself into the countryside. I'm not debating that it's the best life for you, but I think there's a good number of people who are like me as well.
In Dublin, we periodically pedestrianise a street or two. And there is much angst about “oh, but the businesses”. And inevitably a year or so on the businesses on the street are busier than they ever were.
Many of the folks who complain about parking removals 'hurting business' are the business owners who are annoyed that they can't park right in front of their operation. It slightly inconveniences them as a person so they assume it 'hurts' their business overall.
The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.
The sell is downtown brooklyn and its a good sell and would be nice. Convenience, density, transit access, some of the best in the world.
The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.
We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.
Oxford city center is extremely pedestrian friendly and yet it's also experienced this trend in the last 10 years. I don't think your comment is actually engaging seriously with what's been happening.
I've only briefly been to Oxford, but it felt like all of the nice places were locked inside the Westgate?
In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.
The end of the article raises a point that makes me wonder: that perhaps cities have put the cart before the horse and that people didn't go to the city center but, rather, that the city center was the place where people hung out. And with third-places in life support people have no reason to go to the city center anymore.
Remove cars, let people have a pint in the sun. The vast majority of the failure of the city is that we’ve moved so far away from what a city is, instinctually, that we don’t notice that they are entirely unpleasant places to be.
Loads of European cities and towns have developed extensive pedestrian-only zones. It doesn't necessarily bring life back after the Covid years. Many people today are going out less regardless of what nice amenities urban planners provide, and having food delivered appeals more to many young people than actually visiting an eatery.
My observation in europe is that pedestrian only areas in city center tend to be the most commercially successful areas in large cities.
In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.
The confounding variable is the correlation with these pedestrianized areas with guarenteed foot traffic and hungry belly tourist traffic especially from more deeply pocketed people capable of international travel than locals.
These areas aren't only used by tourists. People genuinely like them. Tourists actually often make them less attractive and affordable because price go up and quality of services tend to go down.
Well no, but its a huge leg of the chair, those tourists with their disposable income fit for European vacation from half the world over, who are guaranteed to show up in this particular neighborhood for probably forever, vs the tesco on the outer ring road.
Funny hearing this about the UK where a major A road looks like some dusty forgotten american rural county route. You can complain about building for the car after you’ve ripped apart the middle of london for a 12 lane viaduct freeway with four level interchanges.
My partner works in planning and economic growth for a council and the level of local opposition to this especially from local businesses is enormous. But every time I go to a high street I look around and think "this would be nicer if it wasn't for this bloody road".
I have a running game with my husband wherever we visit somewhere new - what are there more of, barbers or nail salons? It's usually a close competition but there's always quite a few of each
There have been a number of suggestions in various threads that some high street shops are money laundering; for what it's worth, London Centric investigated and found that the likely crime was tax evasion, not money laundering: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shop....
Yeah they’re crazy. Big space very nice. Two staff. Heated space (with open door).
…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day
Its the parking. It's always been about the parking.
If I go to my local high streets I either cannot park at all (all residents only permits or disabled or taxis only or bus stops etc) or I have to pay eye watering fees - e.g. £1 or 2 per 15 minutes. Council parking wardens will be out prowling looking for infractions and giving you a £80 fine without any grace period.
...Or I just go to a shopping center like Brent Cross and park for free with zero hassle.
Yes I can walk or take the bus to the high street, but that will turn a quick 20 minute errands I to a 100-120 minute roundtrip, with the discomfort of doing it with shopping bags on the return journey (and the buss will cost you more than parking and fuel, while being slower, less convenient, and less pleasant)
For what it is worth, I don't feel like crime or drugs are a concern, at least not in my part of London.
How will the bus cost more than £1-2 per 15 minutes, are buses very expensive in the UK, or are you just not spending very much time at these stores?
I will say, that sounds expensive for parking, but completely not out of line with what I would expect to pay for premium (location) parking, though I'm used to VHCOL parking rates and maybe you don't live in that big of a city.
This is in London, not in the main center but about halfway out. Many of the original towns and villages still kinda-exist to a certain extent (but obviously the gaps have been filled with urban sprawl) so there are lots of smaller "high streets" dotted throughout, typically near tube stations etc.
£1.85 each ride. So £3.70 round-trip.
Or just drive directly and quickly for pennies of electricity and free parking in a shopping center.
Yes I think that was parking cost not bus cost they were talking about (buses can be expensive for short journeys but the cost usually doesn't rise that much for longer ones in my recent experience - I paid £3 for a 40 min journey last week. But bus fares were capped at £2 for ages so I don't have a good feel now for what they cost).
Parking in premium areas can certainly be £5 an hour - but that really will be for premium areas with few spots and high demand, although that's a common situation in historic town centres. I wouldn't be mad enough to try and park in London but I'd expect parking there to be through the roof. The places I usually park for shopping etc (outside London but still SE) are more like £1 an hour in town centres, or free when the car park belongs to a shop or is in a less on-demand area.
In cities with good public transport few people take the car to the city center, yet the shops are dead. There also hasn’t been a major reduction in parking over the last couple of decades that would explain the phenomenon.
What do you mean no major reduction? You used to be able to park for free to pop into a shop to quickly grab something, now you have to pay high rates via an app and you are fined automatically via CCTV if you run out of time. That did not happen a few decades ago.
Or just go to a supermarket or shopping center where parking is free and easy
That's the crux of it. Most places outside of London don't have good public transport.
I can catch a bus but I have to walk to it, it comes at most twice an hour (usually hourly) and it a very circuitous route so it take ages.
Or I can drive 15 minutes from my door but it's expensive to park. So I generally head in the other direction to an out of soulless town shopping centre.
It would be luxury to have something like the Tube arriving every 2 minutes. I love it when I'm in London.
In the US, city and town centers were first hit hard mid-20th century by the Interstate Highway System which enabled suburban sprawl and big-box retailers. Later came e-commerce. When something does take the place of a local shop or restaurant, it often ends up being a chain of some kind. Add the post-pandemic shift to hybrid work and you also see a huge increase of office space vacancies.
There's also the fact that property developers, commercial landlords, and institutional lenders frequently favor corporate tenants over independent operators. Rising property values and high commercial rents also price out local, independent owners.
However, there have been some exceptions under the New Urbanism banner where you see localized revivals. Some cities (like Jersey City) cap chain occupancy of retail space to 30%. Portland and Austin use zoning rules to make commercial real estate unattractive to chains. Commercial community land trusts can also be used to freeze rent and make space more affordable for local businesses. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all approach.
My favorite Bankster(retired), has single handedly turned the main st in a small town here in Nova Scotia around, there were others holding on, and some trying, but her very accute targeting of interests and providing those services as loss leaders has drawn people back, and all the store fronts are occupied, and the vape shop is at the end of the strip.
The activity is high enough that some of the older established business interests were forced to leave there just out of town tax havens and grab a spot down town,while the grabbing was good.
I spoke to her an hour ago about a project she is pushing for cast bronze grates to go around municipal trees that I am working to get someone local(out of worksoftware dev) to do CAD drawings and then we need a huge flatbed 3D printer for patterns that I would take to a local foundry for casting, where I have partisipated in other projects.
But the main character of this is your average overachiving person with vast personal experience in multiple personal business, government, and finance positions, who stated, and I quote directly 'I am going to turn this town around', and has.
I think the only reason she deals with me at all is that I keep surprising her by failing forward and upward.
Thinking a bit more, I would (and will suggest) that she tackled the whole town as a reno project, which she also does with homes('I just write the cheques') as it had good bones, and she is very good at getting other people to also write cheques.
The key is likely that she does not ask for permission or help, (' I put my own money into this') got started with her own project, got elected to council, and has pushed and cajoled, and cut deals, while bieng gracious, cheerfull , etc, but never loosing site of the bottom line ('it's making money now')
To be clear, I see other towns with more people and money and development, floundering when it comes to having a social and cultural center. Absentee landloards, land banking, roving developers, capital flight along with purchased citizenships and
no planning whatsoever, the last is where my bankster friend has just stepped in. Art, music, activities,books,education, theater,food,bars,services, shopping, banks, government, etc, all in a 4 block core, most of it was vacant 5 years ago.
Thank you for the writeup. As someone from a small town struggling with the sorts of things most small towns struggle with, it's interesting to hear turnaround stories like this.
I wish cities would treat high streets as public commons, rather than particularly valuable private real estate. Landlords are just looking to make the most rent possible and don't particularly care whether their tenants have positive utility for the community or not. Similarly, landlords have no problem keeping store fronts empty because they are holding out for a high paying tenant and have certain tax advantages.
I live in a little community outside Boulder, and we have a nice little main street area, only a few blocks, which is a good size for our community. There's a few restaurants, a cafe, a community space, some boutiques, all of which encourage foot traffic and liveliness. But recently, a little book shop devoted to kids books was forced out due to increased rent demands, and an architecture firm moved in. What was previously drawing maybe 100+ people a day to the main street now attracts 5 employees who work in a closed office. Not the end of the world for the main street, but if a few more shops make a similar decision it will be completely dead.
It comes down to money and the cost of living. Landlords are extracting rent, no room for entrepreneurship.
A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.
As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.
Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)
They sell fairly space-efficient, expensive products or services. Generally speaking, the higher you push rent per square foot, the fewer types of businesses you can operate, because people and products take up space and have throughput limits. Nail and beauty services can get spendy fast.
The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.
To be fair, that specifically is not a US phenomena. Flagship stores that operate as a loss purely for the prestige of a location have existed basically since the dawn of modern retail. Operating in Manhattan or on the Champs Elysees is a sign you are a serious grownup store.
The flagship stores yes, but that was the special case (which is universal) of the more US-specific case of e.g. "why the fuck are there Chipotles everywhere"
Oh i see. Yeah, the corporate structure of “landowners with a business attached” is somewhat uniquely dominant in America. Though not totally unheard of, Japanese rail companies are property developers for example with attached department store chains, etc. so that trains and property drive foot traffic to each other.
Outgoings are different - cheap/dodgy imports, and modern slavery (nail salons are infamous for this) mean that their outgoings can be much lower than other shops. There’s also the tax avoidance many of these businesses partake in, both in the traditional cash-in-hand-business fashion, and the more modern(?) “American Candy store” way (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445)
In fact that's exactly what large enforcement operations against these do, the problem is that they just close down, the person who they were registered to disappears(if they ever existed at all) and another shop opens in the same place registered to someone else. It's a game of whack a mole.
It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.
Pubs are regulated by a limited amount of alcohol licenses, which goes back centuries. Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
> Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.
I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.
I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.
Vape shops sell addictive products and they have minimal overhead. I think the markup on a lot of what they sell, especially the more grey market stuff like nitrous oxide "whip cream chargers" and poppers, is quite high.
A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.
I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.
Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.
They sell something that doesn't work so well online or at a supermarket. Ditto barbers, phone repair, or whatever racially-coded tabloid bugbear de jour.
You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside (and like) cigs. Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.
They can’t. They tend to turn over like the rest. But as others noted, their low upstart costs makes them the more likely tenant out of other busines models on the sidelines seeking rent.
We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.
San Francisco forbids formula stores in many places. Okay, so we don't have a Chipotle and a Nordstrom Rack on Valencia St, but then a burrito on it costs $24.
> councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
You're advocating central planning.
The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.
Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.
If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.
Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"
It's not out of the realm of possibility for a real estate development company to partner with someone who runs daycares, surely? I'm sure the company that builds the homes already partner with a lot of different companies for specialized tasks?
Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.
They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.
Land and real estate is not unlimited especially in urban areas. Building companies optimize for profit so they don't have a good incentive to build out public necessities. It will be always a bit of squaring a circle if you want half sensible area development.
Building companies optimize for profit which is why they have a good incentive to build things that are in short supply. They build whatever the customer buys.
On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.
> On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.
If maximising profit were actually allowed we’d have far more homes. The current rules make sure builders are -not- allowed to build as many homes as needed.
> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default
I feel like the absurdity is the other way.
Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.
With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.
It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.
There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.
Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.
> It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.
I get that if building homes somehow created more people. What we have now is people living in cars, people and their kids living in 1 room apartments, etc. and we're telling them "it is better for you to live in horrible conditions than it is for us to build new homes because we won't have all the amenities (half the time this is just code for 'parking') built by the developer"
So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?
Huh? I don't get what this has to do with what I wrote. That sounds like it is about residential zoning requirements. You can build flats here, and especially you can section your old buildings into umpteen tiny apartments. You can't tear down the architecture that makes this town a tourist destination, but that's about it.
(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)
Because without planning there would be only houses and no daycare. Apartment complexes are the most profitable type of building (everybody needs an apartment to live), at least in my country, and daycares and schools are other infrastructure are not profitable and not worth investing if investor had a choice. They are a burden. So they make investor have no choice and carry a burden.
It's possible those kids don't yet exist. Among others, because would-be parents can't afford to work part-time or give up one job to care for the kid.
Is it real estate developer's problem? He builds the building, sells out the apartments and leaves. Where the buyer will put their kids is the buyer's problem.
I agree, I just think there’s some idea that people and cars are magically conjured into existence when homes are built, as though they are currently using no facilities.
In SF, which has alot of old buildings (relative to US suburbs), most daycares run out of the first floor of a house. Same for many of the local, walkable neighborhood retail corridors, it's just not as obvious because the first floors were converted to retail and restaurants 80-100+ years ago and it looks like they were always there. Sometimes an extra floor of residential was added to make way for the ground-level commercial; cheap at the time as you only needed to meet basic safety codes.
Then zoning happened and the process stopped, particularly for retail and dining. Zoning means it's expensive to convert residential spaces to commercial, and vice-versa, if you're allowed at all. So to make it work you gotta build new and bigger. But that's expensive, and the way commercial financial works means new commercial construction only pencils out for chains. The numbers work even if the space would stay empty, because even a bunch of small shops couldn't afford the rent that needs to be advertised for the space to make the financing pencil out.
Basically, zoning causes problems that are then addressed with more regulations, which causes more problems.
And also, people need to adjust their expectations. Small commercial and services spaces will rarely be able to bring in enough revenue to pay rent in a brand new multistory steel building, no matter the floor area. These businesses can only thrive in old buildings, at least in advanced, high-labor cost economies. But you can't build new old buildings. All you can do is make it cheap and easy for the market to repurpose existing spaces to meet demand. But zoning and approval processes create an economic environment antithetical to this.
If you want to keep your zoning and planning but are frustrated the free market doesn't do what you demand it to do, the state needs to build the darn spaces themselves and rent them out. But they don't like to do that because, shocker, it's really expensive to do things the way they demand. When the state (and community via taxes) has to internalize the costs of these demands directly rather than point fingers, it turns out they have trouble justifying the expense.
But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.
That happens because development is so absurdly regulated that the only way to get it done is to amortize your fixed costs over the whole "village" and then once that's done there's no subsequent infill development because those little things can't absorb the fixed costs.
No, it's not regulated at all. That's the problem.
Any developer can buy up a patch of land, throw up some houses in a month so close together that if you run out of toilet paper you can just reach out your window and use some of your neighbours, and with a design life just the same as the mortgage.
Oh the access road totally buggers up traffic along the existing road? Oh well too bad, full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
This leads to the situation that's arisen in a housing development (described as a village, where it's really about 300 houses crammed into a small field), where the houses have in fact not made it to their design life of 25 years and have had to be demolished at about 15 years old.
So, you've got people paying a £400,000 mortgage on a patch of rubble and mud, who are currently taking up space in council housing with the taxpayer footing the bill. But hey! At least it provided a lot of shareholder value! Full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
The developer needs planning, what do you mean not regulated?
This needs to be weighed against the externalities of homelessness. And if traffic is a problem, remove the cars and add bike infra (bloom Merwede is an example of this, albeit in a very expensive city).
Where are houses from 2011 being torn down? Short of mica that seems ridiculous.
Yeah, but getting planning is no obstacle, they'll just get that handed to them.
Bike infrastructure works great in urban parts of Holland. It doesn't work well in rural Scotland. I'll tell you what - I'll scrap my 30-year-old Range Rover agricultural machinery if you can demonstrate how a bakfiets can replace it.
These particular houses are in the outer part of Greater Glasgow. They're about 15 years old, the framing is absolutely rotten, and the crappy brickwork is literally falling apart. There's no saving them. They were build quickly and cheaply and sold at a premium price, like everything else.
Do they throw in a lot of sweeteners to make the planners happy? Nevermind things like green belt rules, etc. Though I am not familiar with the particulars of Scottish law (right to build is England-only I think?)
Worth noting that cycling works great in rural Netherlands too...
For what it's worth, I made a video about cycling infrastructure and urbanism in rural Ireland (where I used to live). Not the same as Scotland but maybe there are parallels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew . In some ways rural areas are better suited to bike infra than suburban because you have more space and there's generally less traffic. And many rural areas are still a reasonable distance from a town - in fact, I found that when I was driving, I'd just go to Tullamore, but on my bike, I'd ride to Clara, a much closer and smaller town. If more people did this it might help revitalize smaller towns.
It’s decided main by a rules based system. Companies are better at navigating that system, locals who invariably object (a tiny minority) just whine about things that aren’t relevant. These rules are created by local councils and driven from things like local plans which are approved by local residents in local referendums. I’ve seen residents approving the local plan saying “houses should be built in this area” and then 6 months later start protesting about a development in that very area.
If they want to change planning they can elect a government to change the rules to a “don’t build anything” system. Fortunatly the population as a whole doesn’t do that.
Zoning in the American sense doesn't exist in the UK, outside of Local Development Orders and (maybe, if you squint a bit) the system of Brownfield Land Registers.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.
Central planning is making the rent too high. The UK isn’t rich enough for stuff to be expensive because of extremely high demand. Its expensive because it’s too hard to build stuff.
Have you tried being more racist? I understand that's the solution.
Rather than taking an introverted look at political power, money and devolving English power from Westminster, in a similar manner as the NI, Scott and Welsh nations to fund investments outside of London.
Perhaps looking at national infrastructure, and agreeing what we want to see in towns and cities then using tax incentives to encourage desired behaviour.
Or we could just blame Europeans for British political decisions. That's been working well.
Maybe some amount of central planning wouldn't be bad? Maybe when it's broad strokes designations of public space usage and not how many toilet paper rolls one gets it can be a net benefit?
For what it’s worth I had the same thought as the ancestor post. Town squares are as privatization friendly as water, electricity, and oxygen. We just took it for granted that they were self sustaining as a public amenity and are now suffering because rich people bought up everything and are renting it back to us at half the quality and twice the price.
There is already central planning, it's just done between the state and corporations, which also includes landlords. They're advocating for a result that would be accomplished by corporations playing less of a role and local residents and workers playing a greater role in the planning.
See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.
What is your definition of "central planning" that you think it is good ??
Do some bunch of government clerks decide EVERY single _factory_ input and output in whole country is nothing wrong ? Starting with impossibility to do it right - is doing it by necessity wrong is not wrong ?
Do "central" setting prices for whole country, let say for next quarter - no matter reality - is possible ? I lived it and tell you: it's always wrong because it's impossible to do.
How you plan problems in production ? How you out-plan so someone stepped on something fragile ?
How you out-plan someone steal something ? Because "central planning" is sign that it's not good in your country so there is stealing and corruption on every step starting from "planners" to plans distributor to workers to packers to sellers.
How you like that reality now ?
Communism fall for a reason: stupidity of the imagined aka planned system. Because in all despotic systems on top of all of what needs to be done to live and work planned good life you have grafted parasitic structure of peoples which single occupation is just to spy on and terrorize their own peoples - and that costs a lot both in money and society quality.
You are attacking a straw man here. No-one here is advocating the total central planning of everything, that's been tried in Soviet-style communism and shown to be disastrous. I also agree with you on the basic principle that society should have as few centrally imposed rules as possible.
But some degree of central planning for at least some of society's operations has always been essential to make a civilized society work. Laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies, and natural monopolies such as armed forces, police forces, fire services and wide area road networks, are all centrally planned in modern societies.
Just as communist-style total regulation of everything has always failed, total deregulation has also been shown to fail everywhere it has been tried, as someone will always step into the resulting power vacuum and take control. If you disagree with me on this, please give me an example of a stable anarchist society that does not ride of top of someone else's regulated society.
The only question is where you put the boundaries.
For example: we prevent companies from producing bread with arsenic in it, even if producing it would be more economically efficient for that company. Is this something you would advocate?
Excuse me but did you read to what I was answering ?
Dude straight said, citing from memory: So ? Nothing wrong with it.
And I asked about his definition of central planing.
And I then described central planing from East block - Soviet and rest of occupied countries.
So if someone not see badness in what is most known failure of central planing then this is quite wtf.
And what is your definition of central planning because looks like you do not see difference between "law and regulations" and central planning that already happened on Earth.
But if someone makes boundaries foggy or meaningless then there is lack of sense in discussion.
But actually you must be trolling - how on the Earth universal restrictions in poisoning land in discussion about central planned economy ??
I rent a workspace outside of my home, I'm paying less than 150 quid for a room in a light industrial zone. Gives me space for my fun stuff as well as work. I love having my own space, and it's very affordable.
I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.
I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.
Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.
That is a very valid point. However, I suspect that some of the businesses that managed to survive transitioned into operations that function solely as fulfillment centers for dispatching packages.
The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.
There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down.
Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.
This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.
Don't forget the brutal taxes in the UK in relation to the current economic circumstances.
The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.
It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.
Mentions the druggies in passing twice (once in a quote) and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??) but zero mention of either at the end of the article in terms of fixing the issue.
Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).
> and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??)
Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting or possession (or drinking in alcohol control areas) and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.
When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.
Worth remembering also if you are an American that in the UK we have not decriminalised marijuana, so there are drug possession and small-scale dealing crimes in there too.
I would kindly disagree. In my rather "posh" and "good neighborhood " little village I've had 3 house robberies (well, one robbery and 2 attempts) in the span of 14 months, and I have myself witnessed two shop robberies as I was in Sainsburys for milk and eggs.
The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).
Posh might be part of the issue. In my area seems like most home robberies are in wealthy neighborhoods, where no ones home and there might be nice jewelry to steal instead of my sad ancient tv.
It’s not, particularly, without unjust laws like three strikes.
For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to support the black market.
The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.
Three strikes, in particular, is inherently unjust. There's no serious argument that it is not.
Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.
Free parking, turn the centre into a relaxing space/park, with kids' playground.
Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
This is it, and I have heard politicians talk about these same ideas for years in my area. Alas, it looks like it's easier said and done, because the downward spiral is still ongoing.
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
> Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
Largely because no-one wants to go shopping then carry potentially heavy items on a bus or bike.
I grew up near Bluewater shopping center in England, which had plentiful free parking, lots of good shops that were open late and a security team which moved people doing undesirable things along.
Compare this to the nearest towns (Chatham, Gillingham, Strood, Rochester), where the (often Conservative!) council members seemed perplexed that people didn't want to pay £6/hour to park in a decrepit garage that constantly smelled of piss and walk past myriad instances of low-level quality of life crime to get to shops that closed before most office workers could reasonably leave work.
I haven't been back in ~10 years but I imagine the situation now is even worse and all of those towns are in the same category of vape shops, charity shops and empty shops.
I'd replace the free parking with great public transport and cycling infrastructure. The parking spaces can be in the surrounding area, with frequent public transport between them and the centre.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.
It’s not uncommon to see the car debate come up in threads like these. As someone who lived in central London for over a decade without a car and recently moved out where not having a car is incredibly inconvenient, I’ve experienced both realities.
Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.
The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.
I wouldn't say driving in the rain is fun, it's just slightly less bad than cycling maybe. I look around and don't see many people having fun in cars, it's mostly just anger, frustration and an inability to break the cycle. The only ones having fun are the fictional characters in the adverts. I think the sooner we stop pretending it's still fun and start treating it like the chore it is the better.
That's a thing I noticed in these discussions but also in real life developments: one party/group has strong opinions on what would work for them, probably even based on valid data, so they get elected/nominated and start implementing them - in complete ignorance of the valid data and opinions of the _other_ groups/parties. So they might reach (some of) their own goals while trampling the others' goals, so there's unhappiness and they get replaced with a new party/group which proceeds with the same losing approach just in another direction. Heck, nobody seems to be able _in_practice_ to join and overlap the expectations of the entire community and try (at least) to build a neighborhood for all its members. And it's frustrating.
With some exception e.g. London as you mentioned, councils have gone out of their way to make taking cars into town inconvenient, but put zero effort into making it easy to get there any other way. Result is that people prefer either out of town shopping centres with free parking or shopping online.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadProgress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.
In the average European mediterranean city, shops provide safety, lights.
As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses. And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.
Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
It is not:) There was a fortunate coincidence of factors like economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
Are there parts of society where this is different? This whole going concern is vibe-based.
Italian cities are depopulating because of economic decline, not because people feel increasingly unsafe after 5.
The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.
I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
Local business owners are taxed to death.
Meanwhile, multinationals with HQs in tax havens roll in and set up national branches. The local branches pay their HQs for imaginary "services" and "rights", allowing them to operate practically tax-free in the country.
Good luck staying open little guy. We're lucky we still have vape shops and nail parlours.
And the ones left aren’t paying taxes, or wages.
Even if you control for the Amazon factor or the Walmart factor by looking at services, the bulk of these "successful" businesses are either chains or owned by a bigger corperate entity that can do kind of the same thing.
It's also a vicious circle : Because there is less and less physical shop selling specific goods, you have to turn to the internet, which mean local businesses get less traffic and die off. If you have any slightly niche hobby and do not live in a major metropolis, you are SoL. As an example, I would have to go 200km away to buy raw leather and leatherwork tools despite living in one of the biggest city in my country.
Possible solutions to this include 1. More stores introduce a paid membership. This is not a bad idea, a store pays for the cost of the physical location with the membership fee and has similar prices to online stores, and they have an incentive to maintain product quality, Costco is very successful with this model, but I'd be worried that that the model is begging for enshitiffication, you could really cash out on the store's reputation by lowering the product quality and increasing the costs and relying on the friction of the existing membership to keep customers for a fair while. 2. Stores focus on being an enjoyable experience, and hope that if you're spending enough time there, you're going to want to buy something. This is what Barnes and Nobles is doing, and most surviving malls. 3. Some sort of policy fix. I'd be in favor of an online shopping "tariff" designed to bring online prices in line with what it costs to run physical locations, collected by the feds and redistributed to localities. Has the minor downside that everyone but me would hate it, and it would be so monstrously unpopular that it could never happen. If we could figure out a way around that, though, it could be quite good.
There are still goods that are primarily bought in person, hazardous and large where shipping is prohibitive.
You expect retail outlets for that? 30 years ago when I was making my own shoes in London and wanted to buy hide I had to trail around grimy industrial areas to visit a wholesale warehouse and persuade them to do retail for a moment. (I bought my tools from other hobbyists.)
Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.
Periodically I watch YouTube videos made by a historian of clothing. She makes a lot of clothing for research and display, and she had an episode on where to purchase linen and what to look for to make sure you don't get a sub-par product. When I was growing up you just wouldn't have been able do something like that unless you were living somewhere like Paris or Milan.
I'm a Frenchman but I hold no particular dumb grudge against the English, I actually like them, their style, their music, what I perceived was their refinement as much as their capacity to be hilarious, quick with the banter, overall good lads
so a few years ago, I booked a trip to London, then a train to Northampton cause I wanted to see the city where all the good shoe manufacturers are based (I own a pair of Crockett and Jones and enjoy other brands like Cheaney, Trickers, etc).
what a BRUTAL wake up call, what was on paper a thriving manufacturing town with rich history turned out to be a completely derelict place, with boarded windows in the main streets, beggars, dollar shops, litter absolutely everywhere and the signs that the golden age of the town is LONG gone. I don't know what happened there, recession, Brexit, I really don't know but I ended up taking the train back to London earlier than anticipated, completely shocked by what I saw
The manufacturing employees, such as there are, drive everywhere, often live far from town, shop onlin or at out-of-town megastores.
Good manufacturing jobs were gutted and sent overseas with no thought or care what the impact on communities would be. In some places families are now on the third generation on benefits because there simply aren't any jobs and the ones that are available require skills that people don't have because they aren't taught them in school due to the obsession with the Victorian education model and the shortage of skilled teachers and training opportunities for young people.
At this point nothing except for a total economic rebuild will save the UK high street and there is zero political will to do that because the current broken system makes certain people money.
Also for Frenchman to say re les Anglais "what I perceived was their refinement"... there's a joke that the only people who think the English are refined are Americans (as we are a savage people).
- it's extremely diverse, in a way that no other big metropolitan cities I've visited really are (and way more varied and diverse than Paris). You feel that variety crossing a street, where you go from "oh what a nice place with great heritage buildings and all" to "oh I should keep my eyes open, sketchiness has increased dramatically in the past second"
- London during the day and London at night are basically two different ecosystems, love it during the day, not for me at night (too rowdy / wild)
And it’s true. Northampton is doing pretty great compared to a majority of the U.K.
That same bent of evil people came to my town to peddle some "looks good from my ivory tower" type municipal trash policy that incentivize all the wrong things. They cited an adjacent town that adopted their stuff and is renown locally for its filth as a "success story". The public's reaction was literally "hahahaha, oh wait you're serious, hahahahahahahahahah". City councilor literally had to bang the gavel a bunch and tell the crowd to be serious. It was glorious. The city council is not likely to adopt it at this point.
there's a chance that London money flows down there though, like Nice and the Riviera for France, I don't know
Expensive != posh -- the proximity and relatively easy trains to London probably help make it expensive.
Unfortunately the British elites know how to colonise and extract, they’re just terrible at administering and building anything sustainable
As a Brit that’s moved to Australia let me say the kebab shops here are a revelation. The meat is nicely cooked, generally identifiable, and not swimming in grease. The bread is usually more like real Greek gyros bread, the salad fresh…
My memories of Kebabs in the UK is of very dubious slices of something coming off the elephant-leg at the back of the store, nothing you would ever consider when sober.
If you want quality Turkish kebabs which are nicely cooked, generally identifiable and not swimming in grease you go to a Turkish grill restaurant.
I don't know how long you've been away but they're everywhere here now with not an elephant leg in sight. They'll even serve you a nice salad and Bulgar wheat.
It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK.
Yes, you can get good Turkish food in a lot of places, and good Turkish food is delicious.
But the post I was responding to called out kebab shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average high-street kebab place.
Don’t get me wrong, it hits the spot after a skinful… but high-quality it is not. See my sibling post about the various meat-scandals.
> It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.
Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?
I think you did.
I think you've presented criminal behaviour as if it's not an aberration.
You've ignored that there are good kebab shops and bad. That good high street kebab shops are common and sell more than just low quality donnas, including shish with fresh salad.
I never want to eat a donna kebab, so I don't order it.
Cool.
I'll be waiting here for you to quote and link exactly where I did this -
"It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for"
And until then ignoring anything else you have to say, because I think what’s actually disingenuous is to make things up and accuse people of them.
You can in fact get excellent food at high-street kebab shops. That's my point. When I go to the UK it's literally what I survive on because the alternative (gellied eels anyone?) is completely inedible. You can also get haloumi from most of the good ones, which you can't in most places in the US.
I also don't know why people are calling it an "elephant leg", that's crazy. It's shwarma and it's delicious. I think racism and general UK/AU diet has contorted the perception here. People with more varied diets probably appreciate it a lot more.
Jellied eels? I don’t think most British people have ever eaten those except maybe on a dare.
I’m going to be charitable and assume you’ve only ever been to a small part of the East End of London, where you can get jellied eels (not the case in much of the country) and where there is likely a diverse enough community that actual decent shwarma exists.
Because if you’re eating doner kebabs regularly, from whatever vendor you come across in most of the UK, all I can say is you might want to check your heart health.
Modern döner-kebab meat is rarely the quality shaowarma of a century ago. It is highly processed and basically a big hot dog.
it never cease to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.
Yet this is no utopia.
It takes 20 mins to get to the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 500-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end. Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries back home. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend that sort of time buying food for the next few days or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" of the different lines becomes considerable.
One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My own neighborhood, about ten years older than yours, comes very close to the ideal: it has its share of apartment buildings, but none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi ... your typical HN reader perhaps). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, security guards, farmers, construction workers etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided. Oh and ding ding ding yes these types people who have mobility issues also tend to be the poorer and lower-income people in society too.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet?
Basically the "15 Minute City" utopia is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).
You can't have the entire place be 15 minutes because some people have jobs etc that are just incompatible with that, and they tend to be lower income people.
It's essentially "economic cleansing" so only the nice charming rich people with interesting jobs doing something awfully smart in tech can live in the lovely areas with the nice cafes and that lovely little grocery store that does that tapenade to die for. Meanwhile the lower income folks have the run down high streets with the vape shops, the betting shops, the drug addicts living in derelict doorways etc.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
It doesn't seem that hard to replicate.
The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.
The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.
We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.
In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.
In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.
If you can’t put a picnic table on it, it’s a place where movement must be prioritized over recreation.
But we did remove traffic from half of Oxford Street last week.
…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day
If I go to my local high streets I either cannot park at all (all residents only permits or disabled or taxis only or bus stops etc) or I have to pay eye watering fees - e.g. £1 or 2 per 15 minutes. Council parking wardens will be out prowling looking for infractions and giving you a £80 fine without any grace period.
...Or I just go to a shopping center like Brent Cross and park for free with zero hassle.
Yes I can walk or take the bus to the high street, but that will turn a quick 20 minute errands I to a 100-120 minute roundtrip, with the discomfort of doing it with shopping bags on the return journey (and the buss will cost you more than parking and fuel, while being slower, less convenient, and less pleasant)
For what it is worth, I don't feel like crime or drugs are a concern, at least not in my part of London.
I will say, that sounds expensive for parking, but completely not out of line with what I would expect to pay for premium (location) parking, though I'm used to VHCOL parking rates and maybe you don't live in that big of a city.
£1.85 each ride. So £3.70 round-trip.
Or just drive directly and quickly for pennies of electricity and free parking in a shopping center.
Parking in premium areas can certainly be £5 an hour - but that really will be for premium areas with few spots and high demand, although that's a common situation in historic town centres. I wouldn't be mad enough to try and park in London but I'd expect parking there to be through the roof. The places I usually park for shopping etc (outside London but still SE) are more like £1 an hour in town centres, or free when the car park belongs to a shop or is in a less on-demand area.
Or just go to a supermarket or shopping center where parking is free and easy
I can catch a bus but I have to walk to it, it comes at most twice an hour (usually hourly) and it a very circuitous route so it take ages.
Or I can drive 15 minutes from my door but it's expensive to park. So I generally head in the other direction to an out of soulless town shopping centre.
It would be luxury to have something like the Tube arriving every 2 minutes. I love it when I'm in London.
There's also the fact that property developers, commercial landlords, and institutional lenders frequently favor corporate tenants over independent operators. Rising property values and high commercial rents also price out local, independent owners.
However, there have been some exceptions under the New Urbanism banner where you see localized revivals. Some cities (like Jersey City) cap chain occupancy of retail space to 30%. Portland and Austin use zoning rules to make commercial real estate unattractive to chains. Commercial community land trusts can also be used to freeze rent and make space more affordable for local businesses. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all approach.
I live in a little community outside Boulder, and we have a nice little main street area, only a few blocks, which is a good size for our community. There's a few restaurants, a cafe, a community space, some boutiques, all of which encourage foot traffic and liveliness. But recently, a little book shop devoted to kids books was forced out due to increased rent demands, and an architecture firm moved in. What was previously drawing maybe 100+ people a day to the main street now attracts 5 employees who work in a closed office. Not the end of the world for the main street, but if a few more shops make a similar decision it will be completely dead.
A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.
As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.
Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)
The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.
Who's to say how many clients a nail bar had? A box of fake nails is easily dumped in the bin.
The only way I can think to police it, would be for tax inspectors to stand outside and count the customers!
It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.
Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.
I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.
I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.
A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.
I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.
Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.
You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside (and like) cigs. Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.
I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.
Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.
We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.
You're advocating central planning.
The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.
Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.
If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.
Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.
On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.
That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.
I feel like the absurdity is the other way.
Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.
With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.
I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.
There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.
Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.
I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.
So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?
(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)
Then zoning happened and the process stopped, particularly for retail and dining. Zoning means it's expensive to convert residential spaces to commercial, and vice-versa, if you're allowed at all. So to make it work you gotta build new and bigger. But that's expensive, and the way commercial financial works means new commercial construction only pencils out for chains. The numbers work even if the space would stay empty, because even a bunch of small shops couldn't afford the rent that needs to be advertised for the space to make the financing pencil out.
Basically, zoning causes problems that are then addressed with more regulations, which causes more problems.
And also, people need to adjust their expectations. Small commercial and services spaces will rarely be able to bring in enough revenue to pay rent in a brand new multistory steel building, no matter the floor area. These businesses can only thrive in old buildings, at least in advanced, high-labor cost economies. But you can't build new old buildings. All you can do is make it cheap and easy for the market to repurpose existing spaces to meet demand. But zoning and approval processes create an economic environment antithetical to this.
If you want to keep your zoning and planning but are frustrated the free market doesn't do what you demand it to do, the state needs to build the darn spaces themselves and rent them out. But they don't like to do that because, shocker, it's really expensive to do things the way they demand. When the state (and community via taxes) has to internalize the costs of these demands directly rather than point fingers, it turns out they have trouble justifying the expense.
Any developer can buy up a patch of land, throw up some houses in a month so close together that if you run out of toilet paper you can just reach out your window and use some of your neighbours, and with a design life just the same as the mortgage.
Oh the access road totally buggers up traffic along the existing road? Oh well too bad, full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
This leads to the situation that's arisen in a housing development (described as a village, where it's really about 300 houses crammed into a small field), where the houses have in fact not made it to their design life of 25 years and have had to be demolished at about 15 years old.
So, you've got people paying a £400,000 mortgage on a patch of rubble and mud, who are currently taking up space in council housing with the taxpayer footing the bill. But hey! At least it provided a lot of shareholder value! Full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
This needs to be weighed against the externalities of homelessness. And if traffic is a problem, remove the cars and add bike infra (bloom Merwede is an example of this, albeit in a very expensive city).
Where are houses from 2011 being torn down? Short of mica that seems ridiculous.
Bike infrastructure works great in urban parts of Holland. It doesn't work well in rural Scotland. I'll tell you what - I'll scrap my 30-year-old Range Rover agricultural machinery if you can demonstrate how a bakfiets can replace it.
These particular houses are in the outer part of Greater Glasgow. They're about 15 years old, the framing is absolutely rotten, and the crappy brickwork is literally falling apart. There's no saving them. They were build quickly and cheaply and sold at a premium price, like everything else.
Worth noting that cycling works great in rural Netherlands too...
For what it's worth, I made a video about cycling infrastructure and urbanism in rural Ireland (where I used to live). Not the same as Scotland but maybe there are parallels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew . In some ways rural areas are better suited to bike infra than suburban because you have more space and there's generally less traffic. And many rural areas are still a reasonable distance from a town - in fact, I found that when I was driving, I'd just go to Tullamore, but on my bike, I'd ride to Clara, a much closer and smaller town. If more people did this it might help revitalize smaller towns.
I'm not seeing anything about a wave of house demolitions in Glasgow except for a lot of old postwar towers and, oddly, this - https://www.urbanrealm.com/news/2023/06/11/glasgow-house-dem... - where the house seems quite nice.
You mean inconveniently mislaid bulging brown envelopes?
Yes, of course they fucking do, it's the only way they get away with it.
If they want to change planning they can elect a government to change the rules to a “don’t build anything” system. Fortunatly the population as a whole doesn’t do that.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.
The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high. Fix this and a lot of stuff downstream of it will change.
Rather than taking an introverted look at political power, money and devolving English power from Westminster, in a similar manner as the NI, Scott and Welsh nations to fund investments outside of London.
Perhaps looking at national infrastructure, and agreeing what we want to see in towns and cities then using tax incentives to encourage desired behaviour.
Or we could just blame Europeans for British political decisions. That's been working well.
the uncomfortable truth is it would make property less interesting for foreign money flowing in the UK.
Which seems to be working pretty well in China.
When Britain was building new towns post WWII it involved a lot of central planning, and seemed to go pretty well.
You state this like it's inherently something to be avoided but you give no reason for believing so
See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.
The only way to make a functional society that doesn't leave people behind, yes ?
So? Nothing wrong with that.
Do some bunch of government clerks decide EVERY single _factory_ input and output in whole country is nothing wrong ? Starting with impossibility to do it right - is doing it by necessity wrong is not wrong ?
Do "central" setting prices for whole country, let say for next quarter - no matter reality - is possible ? I lived it and tell you: it's always wrong because it's impossible to do.
How you plan problems in production ? How you out-plan so someone stepped on something fragile ?
How you out-plan someone steal something ? Because "central planning" is sign that it's not good in your country so there is stealing and corruption on every step starting from "planners" to plans distributor to workers to packers to sellers.
How you like that reality now ?
Communism fall for a reason: stupidity of the imagined aka planned system. Because in all despotic systems on top of all of what needs to be done to live and work planned good life you have grafted parasitic structure of peoples which single occupation is just to spy on and terrorize their own peoples - and that costs a lot both in money and society quality.
Lack of freedom do this.
But some degree of central planning for at least some of society's operations has always been essential to make a civilized society work. Laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies, and natural monopolies such as armed forces, police forces, fire services and wide area road networks, are all centrally planned in modern societies.
Just as communist-style total regulation of everything has always failed, total deregulation has also been shown to fail everywhere it has been tried, as someone will always step into the resulting power vacuum and take control. If you disagree with me on this, please give me an example of a stable anarchist society that does not ride of top of someone else's regulated society.
The only question is where you put the boundaries.
For example: we prevent companies from producing bread with arsenic in it, even if producing it would be more economically efficient for that company. Is this something you would advocate?
Dude straight said, citing from memory: So ? Nothing wrong with it.
And I asked about his definition of central planing.
And I then described central planing from East block - Soviet and rest of occupied countries.
So if someone not see badness in what is most known failure of central planing then this is quite wtf.
And what is your definition of central planning because looks like you do not see difference between "law and regulations" and central planning that already happened on Earth.
But if someone makes boundaries foggy or meaningless then there is lack of sense in discussion.
But actually you must be trolling - how on the Earth universal restrictions in poisoning land in discussion about central planned economy ??
I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.
I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.
Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.
The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.
There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down. Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.
This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.
The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.
It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.
Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).
Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting or possession (or drinking in alcohol control areas) and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.
When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.
Worth remembering also if you are an American that in the UK we have not decriminalised marijuana, so there are drug possession and small-scale dealing crimes in there too.
The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).
One person’s anecdote is not data.
That sounds like something that would be extremely easy to fix!
For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to support the black market.
The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.
What is unjust, though, is to be the victim of criminals who benefit from knowing exactly what the threshold is to not being removed from society.
Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
It sounds like a very rough place, with very incompetent police.
Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
Largely because no-one wants to go shopping then carry potentially heavy items on a bus or bike.
I grew up near Bluewater shopping center in England, which had plentiful free parking, lots of good shops that were open late and a security team which moved people doing undesirable things along.
Compare this to the nearest towns (Chatham, Gillingham, Strood, Rochester), where the (often Conservative!) council members seemed perplexed that people didn't want to pay £6/hour to park in a decrepit garage that constantly smelled of piss and walk past myriad instances of low-level quality of life crime to get to shops that closed before most office workers could reasonably leave work.
I haven't been back in ~10 years but I imagine the situation now is even worse and all of those towns are in the same category of vape shops, charity shops and empty shops.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.
Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.
The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.