Having lived in Cambridge, Mass, and then Western Massachusetts, I argue Boston is the best livable city in the US. Great subway, the T. Fabulous airport. Walkable all over or short subway hops. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Pops, Museums world class. Of course the greatest baseball stadium, Fenway (me 500 visits or more), best seafood, Union Oyster House, theatre. A half dozen tier 1 Universities, Geek and Nerd, Harvard, BC, BU, Wellesley, Tufts....
Cheers Bar. Boston Garden. Ocean near. Sailing... the 1st entrepreneur biome.
If Dumbo Donnie weren’t such a doofus, he wouldn’t have tried picking fights with allies like Denmark, Panama, and Canada, but would instead have shown he had real *juevos* by promising to annex Cuba!
Good morning. 7 degrees here. We got more of the white stuff in a dusting last night.
The mothership is covering Trump’s immigration crackdown, from deploying more troops to the border to rewriting the 14th Amendment. The FP’s TGIF is recapping Trump’s first week.
Walkable cities, small towns, neighborhoods can be wonderful places (at least without the street crime phenom). Cities won.t work without efficient intra-urban transport. They all require density and zoning done with a deft hand. Commercial/residential mix is critical. Office buildings and institutional complexes are necessary but are killers of street life.
Living out here in hopelessly declining small-town America, the car focus drew development away from small-town Main Street to suburban strip malls with ample paved acreage for parking. Downtown small-town parking has been losing out as far back as I remember. It’s too complicated to figure out the rules. Most larger lots are private, for long-term renters. On-street parallel parking is too hard to figure out, or too far from where you want to go. And the lack of interesting shop fronts makes trudging along those streets singularly unappealing.
Americans, for some reason I can't fathom, would rather live in suburban cemeteries than densely populated, lively, walkable, apparently but not really chaotic, urban pockets. As I commented tho, crime has made many of these formerly wonderful places impossible. It is also true that when infrastructure is allowed to decay into non-functional, and when you have to watch where you step on sidewalks, density becomes threatening. The European cities and towns I know best are tightly regulated but lightly zoned. Everyone understands the rules and abides by them. The alternative is generally a very steep fine.
Interesting - Why do you think? What has Boston done that other cities could replicate? All I remember about Boston is good public transport, good looks, high poverty, a couple of excellent public schools (competitive admission) but the rest not, a number of good private schools, high poverty, stratospheric cost of living, a lot of racial animus. I remember a lot of buttoned-up "business” but not much verve. I haven't been there in years.
Good question. In part, I kinda doubt a big city can change. Things are locked in on many axis of investments, self interest, private property.
Boston was founded as a major seaport and trade center with Europe. Bostons Custom House is still standing from about 1840.
The subway system is great. Half above ground half below. Harvard is ancient and incomparable to any other. They even started MIT around 1865. MIT campus like some of Harvard is along the Charles River.
MIT was the core and most important science and technology and engineering and startup center in the world for a century.
Lincoln labs, ITEK, Polaroid, computers, internet, software, chemical engineering. 1st college kf Architecture and Aerospace
Every environment engineer I've talked with, and I've talked with a few, point to the upper Midwest as the climate refuge. If climate change is real, why aren't those imagining dream cities looking in more places than California or in the desert? Because it gets cold, I suppose.
But if we're having Climate, the upper Midwest will be warm. NE Missouri can be populated again, like it was in my father's 1930s/40s childhood when the climate was ideal.
I opened the Thomas Pueblo expecting something brilliant, and I have to say, the guy has his head up his ass. He's fantasizing stuff in locations where there's no water, and covering it with things like "we can desalinate and fill up Mono Lake!". OK... Or the Salton Sea...below sea level... He's a Californicator. It's a big country and he's focusing on the places mostly where people shouldn't be living. Guantanamo...if sea rise is real...uhhh... The California locations, where we should be growing FOOD instead of building more housing....uhhhh... What's this guy thinking?
Noah has the right general idea, but he also doesn't know what it means or how to do it and glosses over vast complicated issues by imagining stuff. Try Jerusalem Demsas. She gets it. Noah is just another blogger when it comes to housing stuff.
A surprising number of polls in several American cities indicate people really don't care about walkable cities. I don't have all my references with me here in the mountains, but what the fellas are saying is what they want and think is wonderful; it's not what Americans want and think is wonderful. So, it kinda breaks down right there.
Personally, I'm completely into the walkable city. My joint in Evanston is <1 mile to a full tilt grocery, a Trader Joe's, an excellent liquor store with vast inventory, more than a dozen restaurants, a bagel store, 3 or 4 coffee shops, a walk in medical clinic, a beer joint/tap room with excellent brews, and a bunch more stuff I can't even remember right now. Here in China, it's even more so. So, I'm into the walkable city. Most Americans, at least according to polling, aren't.
After that, housing. There's not enough. The problem is in the hands of the people least competent in solving the problem. I'm thinking of my imaginary book again....
I’d love your Evanston setup. I walk quite a bit now for exercise but even though I live in a big city (Houston), many of the businesses I frequent aren’t realistically walkable. Part of the problem is the weather - for at least four months of the year even a half mile walk leaves me drenched. Nobody in a coffee shop or brewery would want to sit anywhere near me.
Yeah, the heat. Chicago gets a couple months of cold, but the rest of the time it's beautiful. And we got water. Lots of water. I go swimming every day.
They don’t mention polling data, but they speculate how much the lack of “walkable cities” in America has to do with lack of demand due to lack of lived experience. Most Americans outside of places like Manhattan and San Francisco—presumably prior to homeless people defecating on public sidewalks—have never actually experienced the creature. The survey might as well ask your average Earthling what s/he thinks of living on Mars.
This is true. Although, “most” Americans…meaning the ones I talk with…don’t care for density. They like being out where they have to drive to do anything.
I think that’s also true. We’ve got different tastes and preferences in living quarters based on what age we’re in, to overgeneralize. When you’re young and ambitious, you’re willing to put up with the tight quarters of a 250 ft. apartment to experience the thrill of city life. The same person gets married and has kids, and suddenly a house with a patch of lawn sounds more appealing—with enough indoor space so the kids aren’t in each other’s business all the time.
I agree: "walkable city" is not high on a lot of Americans' wish list. I don't know if I'd like it or not: never tried it. If living with a lot of children in a city apartment was the standard, I wouldn't know any different, right?
As it is, even large apartments in the suburbs usually have maximum occupancy rules. We lived in an apartment when we moved to Charlotte - six children, one on the way - but it was a corporate placement. We wouldn't have been allowed to rent there if it had just been us looking for a place.
I think the issue is less “walkable cities” and more decent mass transit, which makes living without a car close at hand a viable option. I don’t mean buses, or *just* buses, but streetcars or subways, with infrastructure that guarantees they won’t just disappear. And not just on commuting routes, into the urban center, but around town as well.
Only few large urban areas in the US have that now. But that is the norm in most European cities, including where I was formerly stationed in Germany.
The public bus networks in Germany/Europe are far more extensive than the rail and light rail networks—they’re just less user friendly for tourists and visitors. Buses are much cheaper to provide and maintain than passenger rail networks.
In lots of parts of the developing world where governance isn’t as well established (and bloated), private urban bus, mini-bus, mini-van, and taxi operators thrive.
Compared to elsewhere, American public transit in cities looks like the dumping ground for the dregs of society, where the users and residents make the things unappealing to normal citizens.
That’s a typical (stereotypical?) American problem: leaving public urban spaces to the most dysfunctional members of society, and then leaving everyone there to their own devices, without anyone enforcing public order.
Public transport in China is unreal. All of it. Busses, subway, monorail, people movers, high speed trains, a billion electric taxis, and now we have the driverless auto-taxis. And everything 100% completely safe.
Lots of kids in an apartment isn’t going to appeal to a lot of people. Kids need a yard.
I’d never lived in a city before I caught a fast car and GTFO of where I was at. We lived 1 mile from the nearest crossroads, no neighbors, nothing. It took a while to acclimate. Now, I dig the city. I couldn’t live full time in the country. I need country, but only for relatively short blasts.
Even after they grow up. (Yes, I'm giving myself credit for being a grown up, so just live with it, y'all.)
I've lived in both the "city" (though not a *big* city like NY or Chi Town) and the "country". I like what the city has to offer that's not found in the country - dining, shopping, cultural stuff beyond a small-town library or the local crossroads watering hole. But for me it's the quintessential nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there sort of thing.
Did not appreciate that detail about density/occupancy rules in practice in a place like Charlotte. On some level, that seems rather stupidly inflexible. No wonder they talk about how density rules in NYC are the sort of thing residents know how to skirt, evade, flout, and otherwise ignore.
Big attractive cities are migration magnets. Young adults and job-seeking immigrants (whether or not legal) are drawn so powerfully that they aren’t going to pay much attention to unimaginative rule-makers.
It's the unimaginative rule makers that screw everything up, most of the time in the name of maintaining the "character of our city", which is code for "we don't want poor colored people obstructing our view".
"On some level, that seems rather stupidly inflexible."
When rental occupancy rates are high, you can say, "No more than X residents per unit," based on the unit size. You'll lose some large families, but people who don't want to live around children - which is a lot of people - will be happier.
There are also rules about how you can use the space, like "Everyone has to sleep in a room with a window." We ignored that, both in the apartment and in our house, and put the baby in one of the immense closets. If a closet will hold all my stuff and a crib and all the baby's stuff, it's a freepin room.
The window thing has to do with safety egress, i.e., in a fire, you need more than one way out of a burning building. OTOH, secondary safety egress is one of those things that drives up housing cost a lot. There's lots of ways to get both safety and cost efficient, most of which our building codes do not want to adopt. It's a mess of our own making.
It's gotten to the point where municipalities were requiring folks, when upgrading to new windows, also upgrade the structural openings to accommodate the new egress window standards, tripling, quadrupling, the cost of window replacement.
If I were to write a dissertation on the goofiness and stultifying calcified nature of our building codes, which take decades to recognize new technological solutions to old problems that substantially reduce building expense, you'd be amazed.
Enshi Grand Canyon is certifiably amazing. I've been there a couple times. Another place is "Enshi Geocentric Gorge"...don't ask me how they came up with the name.
The gorge is about 300 meters deep, and you tour through it on this catwalk that hangs on the side of the gorge. It is an absolute knee shaker butterfly vertigo inducing hike in a stunning landscape. Mountains here are Karst, which is way different from American mountains. There are these gorges that are 1000 feet deep and maybe only a coupe hundred meters across. Amazingly steep walls and deep. Ancient people living on opposite sides of the gorge could see those on the other side, but the steepness and generally impossible to scale walls kept them apart, and that's why there's so many distinct weird dialects in rural China mountain villages.
The view from the catwalk is out over a vast series of valleys, cut through by the Qingjiang, a limpid blue pure water river that is breathtaking. In the valleys, there are ancient villages instead of private equity bamboozler's mansions and estates. Terraced fields are still everywhere. The villages have mostly emptied out except for grandparents and kids....the parents are working in the city. It's the tragedy of modern China. The villages are so remote, there's nothing there except subsistence survival. A few folks are dragging a few yuan out of tourists, but it's subsistence at best.
That catwalk along the cliff face is a popular tourist site thing. There's a number of them in various mountain tourist spots. The original Ba People inhabitants of these places built wooden catwalks to traverse the mountains and to protect their core villages. If they were being attacked, they just yanked some of the walkway and retreated into their little private Xanadu.
This area is full of box canyons and weirdly inaccessible beautiful places due to the structure of the mountains. They're all soft Karst and cleaved into all sorts of amazing gorges and hidden valleys.
Yeah, that's it! It looks just like that. Clouds hanging up in pillars of rock, like a Chinese watercolor. I got pics of me standing next to that monumental joss stick of stone, I walked the catwalk (absolutely knee knocking butterfly stomach vertigo the whole time), got doused under the falls, etc. It really is spectacular.
Incognito's link states that the catwalks are "thrilling". I see no mention of "absolutely knee knocking butterfly stomach vertigo". Which is it?
I only ask because when I rode a glass enclosed elevator for the first (only) time in my life about 40 years ago, I almost fainted from terror. Thrilling I like. If my footing is solid and not moving. The actual truth about the catwalks would be a factor in whether I have any desire to visit them ;)
I did visit the Seattle Space Needle a couple of years ago. I surprised myself by eventually inching myself onto the glass-floored rotating top level. I also took secret delight in disdaining the few (older) people who absolutely refused to get on the rotating disk as squeamish cowards.
I zoomed in on a place labelled Chuandong Village, and it looks like a square mile of high-rise apartment blocks like Lego constructions with some trees and grass around each one.
That's funny.... :-) I think you zoomed in on a housing development. That's what they look like. Big Lego constructions with some trees and grass. No one here has ever heard of Chuandong Village. I think you found a very large housing development.
Exactly. Our place is called Ba Shan Chuan Xiao…which roughly translates as “Ba Mountain Early Spring” or something like that. Ba people are one of the ancient mountain dwelling tribes known for being fierce fighters. Ba fighters were mercenaries for a lot of the Emperors in their various campaigns.
I've read her. Likes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/why-people-are-nimbys/681225/
I read the collection of her essays published as a book. It was interesting, but I didn't think it was super wonderful like it was advertised.
Agree. Although, Wrigley Field...c'mon.... The only reason people don't say it's fantastic is because it's in the Midwest.
It's also a great ballpark.
Thank you.
I loved baseb growing up. I've seen maybe 700 game.? Going back to Willie Maya and Giants vs Pirates at old Forbes Field
Having lived in Cambridge, Mass, and then Western Massachusetts, I argue Boston is the best livable city in the US. Great subway, the T. Fabulous airport. Walkable all over or short subway hops. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Pops, Museums world class. Of course the greatest baseball stadium, Fenway (me 500 visits or more), best seafood, Union Oyster House, theatre. A half dozen tier 1 Universities, Geek and Nerd, Harvard, BC, BU, Wellesley, Tufts....
Cheers Bar. Boston Garden. Ocean near. Sailing... the 1st entrepreneur biome.
Agree.
Thomas Pueyo made 10 new visionary/fantasy but doable American cities.
Built in places like Guantanamo Bay, Salton Sea, and others. Lots of water ways. Enjoy!
https://open.substack.com/pub/unchartedterritories/p/where-to-build-ten-new-cities-us
Futuristic cityscapes ftw!
Re: Guantanamo City
If Dumbo Donnie weren’t such a doofus, he wouldn’t have tried picking fights with allies like Denmark, Panama, and Canada, but would instead have shown he had real *juevos* by promising to annex Cuba!
Why would we want Cuba?
https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/the-best-cigars-from-cuba
Geopolitically strategic, not to mention it's beautiful.
Trump resorts, casinos, and hotels!
:-)
Good morning. 7 degrees here. We got more of the white stuff in a dusting last night.
The mothership is covering Trump’s immigration crackdown, from deploying more troops to the border to rewriting the 14th Amendment. The FP’s TGIF is recapping Trump’s first week.
Walkable cities, small towns, neighborhoods can be wonderful places (at least without the street crime phenom). Cities won.t work without efficient intra-urban transport. They all require density and zoning done with a deft hand. Commercial/residential mix is critical. Office buildings and institutional complexes are necessary but are killers of street life.
This is such an interesting subject.
https://savingplaces.org/stories/a-tale-of-two-planners-jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses#:~:text=Jacobs%20fought%20for%20the%20people,has%20captured%20the%20public%20imagination.
Living out here in hopelessly declining small-town America, the car focus drew development away from small-town Main Street to suburban strip malls with ample paved acreage for parking. Downtown small-town parking has been losing out as far back as I remember. It’s too complicated to figure out the rules. Most larger lots are private, for long-term renters. On-street parallel parking is too hard to figure out, or too far from where you want to go. And the lack of interesting shop fronts makes trudging along those streets singularly unappealing.
RE: On-street parallel parking is too hard to figure out
Maybe you should get this guy to explain it to you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfoouEEsy3E
Edit: Haven't seen Jack around these parts for a while. Still, I feel obligated to post a trigger warning for him here. Just in case.
Americans, for some reason I can't fathom, would rather live in suburban cemeteries than densely populated, lively, walkable, apparently but not really chaotic, urban pockets. As I commented tho, crime has made many of these formerly wonderful places impossible. It is also true that when infrastructure is allowed to decay into non-functional, and when you have to watch where you step on sidewalks, density becomes threatening. The European cities and towns I know best are tightly regulated but lightly zoned. Everyone understands the rules and abides by them. The alternative is generally a very steep fine.
"Everyone understands the rules and abides by them."
Well, there you go.
No reason to think something like that wouldn't work here. Right?
Right??
Lol
Our big cities are mostly all Democratic government, and they are all a disaster. The generalization is true.
Exception is Boston
Interesting - Why do you think? What has Boston done that other cities could replicate? All I remember about Boston is good public transport, good looks, high poverty, a couple of excellent public schools (competitive admission) but the rest not, a number of good private schools, high poverty, stratospheric cost of living, a lot of racial animus. I remember a lot of buttoned-up "business” but not much verve. I haven't been there in years.
Good question. In part, I kinda doubt a big city can change. Things are locked in on many axis of investments, self interest, private property.
Boston was founded as a major seaport and trade center with Europe. Bostons Custom House is still standing from about 1840.
The subway system is great. Half above ground half below. Harvard is ancient and incomparable to any other. They even started MIT around 1865. MIT campus like some of Harvard is along the Charles River.
MIT was the core and most important science and technology and engineering and startup center in the world for a century.
Lincoln labs, ITEK, Polaroid, computers, internet, software, chemical engineering. 1st college kf Architecture and Aerospace
Kurt nailed my take. These gentlemen want to walk to their coffee and croissant. Americans drive to Starbucks
I like walkable cities too. I've strolled Philly, Boston, Manhattan, Portland, Nashville and others.
Noah Smith has a couple better essays on this topic and especially around Tokyo where he has lived.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/a-better-way-to-build-a-downtown
Also Thomas Pueyo has a series on his fantasy ideas for new American cities.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/a-better-way-to-build-a-downtown
Every environment engineer I've talked with, and I've talked with a few, point to the upper Midwest as the climate refuge. If climate change is real, why aren't those imagining dream cities looking in more places than California or in the desert? Because it gets cold, I suppose.
But if we're having Climate, the upper Midwest will be warm. NE Missouri can be populated again, like it was in my father's 1930s/40s childhood when the climate was ideal.
This year is the anomaly out of the last decade. Winters have been mild until this one.
Like I said: the upper Midwest will be warm.
And...there's water.
True. Lots!
Reminds: Another reason to forego annexing Canada:
https://youtu.be/xLlsjEP7L-k?si=ixOgl5Ib_A1Skyr6
I opened the Thomas Pueblo expecting something brilliant, and I have to say, the guy has his head up his ass. He's fantasizing stuff in locations where there's no water, and covering it with things like "we can desalinate and fill up Mono Lake!". OK... Or the Salton Sea...below sea level... He's a Californicator. It's a big country and he's focusing on the places mostly where people shouldn't be living. Guantanamo...if sea rise is real...uhhh... The California locations, where we should be growing FOOD instead of building more housing....uhhhh... What's this guy thinking?
That Smith piece seems to reinforce the podcast point about American urban rules mainly being too broad and unfocused in most jurisdictions.
Yes. Noah Smith is big on building tall, density, more houses. Totally anti Nimby.
Noah has the right general idea, but he also doesn't know what it means or how to do it and glosses over vast complicated issues by imagining stuff. Try Jerusalem Demsas. She gets it. Noah is just another blogger when it comes to housing stuff.
A surprising number of polls in several American cities indicate people really don't care about walkable cities. I don't have all my references with me here in the mountains, but what the fellas are saying is what they want and think is wonderful; it's not what Americans want and think is wonderful. So, it kinda breaks down right there.
Personally, I'm completely into the walkable city. My joint in Evanston is <1 mile to a full tilt grocery, a Trader Joe's, an excellent liquor store with vast inventory, more than a dozen restaurants, a bagel store, 3 or 4 coffee shops, a walk in medical clinic, a beer joint/tap room with excellent brews, and a bunch more stuff I can't even remember right now. Here in China, it's even more so. So, I'm into the walkable city. Most Americans, at least according to polling, aren't.
After that, housing. There's not enough. The problem is in the hands of the people least competent in solving the problem. I'm thinking of my imaginary book again....
I’d love your Evanston setup. I walk quite a bit now for exercise but even though I live in a big city (Houston), many of the businesses I frequent aren’t realistically walkable. Part of the problem is the weather - for at least four months of the year even a half mile walk leaves me drenched. Nobody in a coffee shop or brewery would want to sit anywhere near me.
Yeah, the heat. Chicago gets a couple months of cold, but the rest of the time it's beautiful. And we got water. Lots of water. I go swimming every day.
I prefer my joint up north where I’m steps to the lake or my joint down south where I’m steps to the golf course (but the lake wins out every time.)
I’m a water guy. In Evanston, my front door is exactly a 5 minute bike ride to South Avenue Beach on Lake Michigan.
They don’t mention polling data, but they speculate how much the lack of “walkable cities” in America has to do with lack of demand due to lack of lived experience. Most Americans outside of places like Manhattan and San Francisco—presumably prior to homeless people defecating on public sidewalks—have never actually experienced the creature. The survey might as well ask your average Earthling what s/he thinks of living on Mars.
This is true. Although, “most” Americans…meaning the ones I talk with…don’t care for density. They like being out where they have to drive to do anything.
🙋♂️
I think that’s also true. We’ve got different tastes and preferences in living quarters based on what age we’re in, to overgeneralize. When you’re young and ambitious, you’re willing to put up with the tight quarters of a 250 ft. apartment to experience the thrill of city life. The same person gets married and has kids, and suddenly a house with a patch of lawn sounds more appealing—with enough indoor space so the kids aren’t in each other’s business all the time.
I agree: "walkable city" is not high on a lot of Americans' wish list. I don't know if I'd like it or not: never tried it. If living with a lot of children in a city apartment was the standard, I wouldn't know any different, right?
As it is, even large apartments in the suburbs usually have maximum occupancy rules. We lived in an apartment when we moved to Charlotte - six children, one on the way - but it was a corporate placement. We wouldn't have been allowed to rent there if it had just been us looking for a place.
I think the issue is less “walkable cities” and more decent mass transit, which makes living without a car close at hand a viable option. I don’t mean buses, or *just* buses, but streetcars or subways, with infrastructure that guarantees they won’t just disappear. And not just on commuting routes, into the urban center, but around town as well.
Only few large urban areas in the US have that now. But that is the norm in most European cities, including where I was formerly stationed in Germany.
My son Beau is happy in NYC without a car. Would he be less happy if he were in NYC with several little children and without a car? Dunno.
Several little children in NYC...a car is secondary to what school are they going to be crammed into.
So one reads. Fortunately, Little Kitty, his life's companion, doesn't need school or a car, just a windowsill with birds.
The public bus networks in Germany/Europe are far more extensive than the rail and light rail networks—they’re just less user friendly for tourists and visitors. Buses are much cheaper to provide and maintain than passenger rail networks.
In lots of parts of the developing world where governance isn’t as well established (and bloated), private urban bus, mini-bus, mini-van, and taxi operators thrive.
Compared to elsewhere, American public transit in cities looks like the dumping ground for the dregs of society, where the users and residents make the things unappealing to normal citizens.
That’s a typical (stereotypical?) American problem: leaving public urban spaces to the most dysfunctional members of society, and then leaving everyone there to their own devices, without anyone enforcing public order.
Your last two paragraphs...yup.
Public transport in China is unreal. All of it. Busses, subway, monorail, people movers, high speed trains, a billion electric taxis, and now we have the driverless auto-taxis. And everything 100% completely safe.
Lots of kids in an apartment isn’t going to appeal to a lot of people. Kids need a yard.
I’d never lived in a city before I caught a fast car and GTFO of where I was at. We lived 1 mile from the nearest crossroads, no neighbors, nothing. It took a while to acclimate. Now, I dig the city. I couldn’t live full time in the country. I need country, but only for relatively short blasts.
RE: Kids need a yard
Some kids need acreage.
Even after they grow up. (Yes, I'm giving myself credit for being a grown up, so just live with it, y'all.)
I've lived in both the "city" (though not a *big* city like NY or Chi Town) and the "country". I like what the city has to offer that's not found in the country - dining, shopping, cultural stuff beyond a small-town library or the local crossroads watering hole. But for me it's the quintessential nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there sort of thing.
Did not appreciate that detail about density/occupancy rules in practice in a place like Charlotte. On some level, that seems rather stupidly inflexible. No wonder they talk about how density rules in NYC are the sort of thing residents know how to skirt, evade, flout, and otherwise ignore.
Big attractive cities are migration magnets. Young adults and job-seeking immigrants (whether or not legal) are drawn so powerfully that they aren’t going to pay much attention to unimaginative rule-makers.
It's the unimaginative rule makers that screw everything up, most of the time in the name of maintaining the "character of our city", which is code for "we don't want poor colored people obstructing our view".
"On some level, that seems rather stupidly inflexible."
When rental occupancy rates are high, you can say, "No more than X residents per unit," based on the unit size. You'll lose some large families, but people who don't want to live around children - which is a lot of people - will be happier.
There are also rules about how you can use the space, like "Everyone has to sleep in a room with a window." We ignored that, both in the apartment and in our house, and put the baby in one of the immense closets. If a closet will hold all my stuff and a crib and all the baby's stuff, it's a freepin room.
The window thing has to do with safety egress, i.e., in a fire, you need more than one way out of a burning building. OTOH, secondary safety egress is one of those things that drives up housing cost a lot. There's lots of ways to get both safety and cost efficient, most of which our building codes do not want to adopt. It's a mess of our own making.
Matt Yglesias has written about this. It is really interesting and practical. And opposition to it frustrating.
Yeah, I remember him writing about that.
It's gotten to the point where municipalities were requiring folks, when upgrading to new windows, also upgrade the structural openings to accommodate the new egress window standards, tripling, quadrupling, the cost of window replacement.
If I were to write a dissertation on the goofiness and stultifying calcified nature of our building codes, which take decades to recognize new technological solutions to old problems that substantially reduce building expense, you'd be amazed.
The baby is not going to get out a window on his own even if there's a window. Someone else has to go get him. You practice this in your fire drill!
I'm explaining why windows are required in sleeping quarters, not infant child care considerations.
Interesting topic.
Good morning. 21Fs, forecast high of 44.
Morning. About 12 here. Looking forward to 25 today—but should be a degree north of freezing tomorrow. Joy, joy, joy!
Quite. Rain here in the mountains around Enshi, Hubei. Google Earth it. It's out there.
Enshi Grand Canyon: 🤯🤩
Enshi Grand Canyon is certifiably amazing. I've been there a couple times. Another place is "Enshi Geocentric Gorge"...don't ask me how they came up with the name.
The gorge is about 300 meters deep, and you tour through it on this catwalk that hangs on the side of the gorge. It is an absolute knee shaker butterfly vertigo inducing hike in a stunning landscape. Mountains here are Karst, which is way different from American mountains. There are these gorges that are 1000 feet deep and maybe only a coupe hundred meters across. Amazingly steep walls and deep. Ancient people living on opposite sides of the gorge could see those on the other side, but the steepness and generally impossible to scale walls kept them apart, and that's why there's so many distinct weird dialects in rural China mountain villages.
This was the tourist site I was looking at. https://www.chinahighlights.com/hubei/enshi-grand-canyon.htm
"Trek Along the Thrilling Precipice Plank Road"
You first.
I did. It's absolutely terrifying, and wildly beautiful.
The view from the catwalk is out over a vast series of valleys, cut through by the Qingjiang, a limpid blue pure water river that is breathtaking. In the valleys, there are ancient villages instead of private equity bamboozler's mansions and estates. Terraced fields are still everywhere. The villages have mostly emptied out except for grandparents and kids....the parents are working in the city. It's the tragedy of modern China. The villages are so remote, there's nothing there except subsistence survival. A few folks are dragging a few yuan out of tourists, but it's subsistence at best.
That catwalk along the cliff face is a popular tourist site thing. There's a number of them in various mountain tourist spots. The original Ba People inhabitants of these places built wooden catwalks to traverse the mountains and to protect their core villages. If they were being attacked, they just yanked some of the walkway and retreated into their little private Xanadu.
This area is full of box canyons and weirdly inaccessible beautiful places due to the structure of the mountains. They're all soft Karst and cleaved into all sorts of amazing gorges and hidden valleys.
Yeah, that's it! It looks just like that. Clouds hanging up in pillars of rock, like a Chinese watercolor. I got pics of me standing next to that monumental joss stick of stone, I walked the catwalk (absolutely knee knocking butterfly stomach vertigo the whole time), got doused under the falls, etc. It really is spectacular.
Incognito's link states that the catwalks are "thrilling". I see no mention of "absolutely knee knocking butterfly stomach vertigo". Which is it?
I only ask because when I rode a glass enclosed elevator for the first (only) time in my life about 40 years ago, I almost fainted from terror. Thrilling I like. If my footing is solid and not moving. The actual truth about the catwalks would be a factor in whether I have any desire to visit them ;)
I did visit the Seattle Space Needle a couple of years ago. I surprised myself by eventually inching myself onto the glass-floored rotating top level. I also took secret delight in disdaining the few (older) people who absolutely refused to get on the rotating disk as squeamish cowards.
I zoomed in on a place labelled Chuandong Village, and it looks like a square mile of high-rise apartment blocks like Lego constructions with some trees and grass around each one.
That's funny.... :-) I think you zoomed in on a housing development. That's what they look like. Big Lego constructions with some trees and grass. No one here has ever heard of Chuandong Village. I think you found a very large housing development.
Well, Google Earth calls that housing development "Chuandong Village". I suppose it's like calling a subdivision here "Fairmont Farm".
Exactly. Our place is called Ba Shan Chuan Xiao…which roughly translates as “Ba Mountain Early Spring” or something like that. Ba people are one of the ancient mountain dwelling tribes known for being fierce fighters. Ba fighters were mercenaries for a lot of the Emperors in their various campaigns.
Very interesting.