I see these charter city posts pop up with some frequency now but I really want to know how this differs from the utopian city failures of the 20th century except that we've bolted more tech on it
The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.
It's just the same dream that any anarchist commune has suffered from. Works okay if you're in a Kibbutz in Israel, doesn't work when you have a million people.
These startup cities always describe their policy solutions in consumer terms. 'Come here and you get yimby-ism and social services and x, y and z'. Okay what if the good people of your city turn into nimbies though? Do they have a say? If not how's anyone going to stop them, police with batons? Police you curiously enough never see on any of the concept art of all the diverse, young people sitting in front of modernist coffee shops, which is weird because I have to assume the city has some.
>The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.
I don't agree.
For example, healthcare in the US is screwed up partially because during WW2, the US government made corporations adhere to a salary cap to prevent war millionaires. Companies responded by trying to attract workers using free health insurance instead. So now we have a tradition of providing health insurance along with employment, and things are awkward for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Housing is screwed up partially because of government policies to encourage homeownership. The problem is that as homeowners become a constituency, they're incentivized to maintain the prices of their homes (one of their most valuable assets), so they vote for policies that prevent the construction of new homes (reducing supply of housing helps their homes maintain their value).
The US itself was founded partially because of policy problems in Great Britain. And despite the flaws listed above, as a nation it's been incredibly successful.
I don't think policy development is fundamentally different from technological development. It just has a slower cycle of trial/error/theory creation. You might as well look at an early car, observe its unreliability, and say "The fundamental failure of the horseless carriage is that its unreliability is an intrinsic problem of thermodynamics"
A tiny percentage of corporate employees become millionaires in this day and age. The percentage that could have done so in 1942 dollars is a fraction of that fraction.
NIMBYs are likely not going to move a city built on the foundation of density and easy permitting. Just like people who hate hot climates don't move to Phoenix.
Build certain zoning policies into the city's charter that is hard to change. If NIMBYs move in, then - no, they don't get to change the charter with a simple majority.
Sure but that's just the first few years. Again there is a fundamental human mechanism at work, mission drift. Just like a startup's workforce is very self-selected, so is a startup city. But cities last generations and hundreds of years, and even your startup will not be run by the same people in 20 years as it was at year 0. It's why companies go from dynamic, YIMBY startups to becoming Oracle.
So this question needs a serious answer. You can write something in the charter, but what's stopping enough people from changing the charter 30 years down the line? All NIMBY American cities started out as startups, the country's not that old. Little more than a century ago the West was associated with the frontier life.
No one has knocked down your argument, so they downvote your argument. The NIMBYification of a city happens slowly as more people in the city have wealth, and want to store it in their homes. If a city has a charter, people will simply enact NIMBY laws in a suburb, and due to the wealth accumulated there, it will become the new center of the region. Look at how SF went from hippies and artists on the edge of silicon valley, to being the center of silicon valley.
This. The reality is that finding a home you like is hard. You'll research neighborhoods, city policies, construction projects in the area, what the neighbors are like, what internet is available, taxes, etc. Then you find a place that matches your needs and you move it. That's time consuming, difficult and stressful, especially if you're buying the home. It's also time consuming and difficult to get out, especially across long distances.
So once people are in, ANY change is problematic. Increased density and construction is the common case these days because that's what we need, but the same would happen in reverse. If NYC's mayor said they were going to eminent domain the whole place to make it a low density suburb, even the people who get to keep their homes would lose their shit. You don't live in Manhattan because you want a big yard for your 6 dogs and 3 chickens.
When it comes to housing, any kind of change is hard. So if you start from scratch, there's not much problems.
I didn't do this when I bought my place 20 years ago. I looked for houses I liked and could afford near where I worked. Being single, school districts were not as much of a concern, though that would probably be the biggest factor for families and a big driver for house price.
I was admittedly heavily biased by where I lived before, because I am used to that area, which seems to be true of my friends, independent of where they actually work.
Maybe this is just the Bay area. For me at the time Palo Alto and Menlo Park were too expensive, so I was looking in Mountain View, Sunnyvale or Redwood City. Fortunately for me Mountain View has gotten a bit nicer in that time.
That's why suburbia is so pervasive. It's almost never practical to create Manhattan on a cornfield. Cities occur incrementally as economic growth drives the need for more buildings. When you arrest that process in its infancy you will never get a city.
>The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.
That seems like a really jaded view. To my mind there are millions of ways to organize human societies. The more experimentation the better. You're acting like nothing new can ever happen in this area, and I just don't buy that.
There have been a lot of experiments already. Most of them have failed and left the experimenters worse off. But sure people are welcome to keep trying.
What annoys the rest of us is the hubris and overconfidence. The experimenters usually falsely label those of us who disagree with their "vision" as fools who can't see the future.
> The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.
This argument proves too much.
If it were true, all big cities everywhere would have similar problems.
But they clearly don't, so a wide range of outcomes is possible.
Moving elsewhere may help you escape some entrenched interests and conflicts of the old place.
For example, Catalan-Americans, Basque-Americans and Spanish-Americans do not have any mutual conflicts regarding self rule, unlike their kin who stayed in the Iberian Peninsula. Different country, different problems.
It is likely that you won't build an utopia, but at least you can build something new.
The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.
It's just the same dream that any anarchist commune has suffered from. Works okay if you're in a Kibbutz in Israel, doesn't work when you have a million people.
These startup cities always describe their policy solutions in consumer terms. 'Come here and you get yimby-ism and social services and x, y and z'. Okay what if the good people of your city turn into nimbies though? Do they have a say? If not how's anyone going to stop them, police with batons? Police you curiously enough never see on any of the concept art of all the diverse, young people sitting in front of modernist coffee shops, which is weird because I have to assume the city has some.