“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.