Thanks for you input, but it's hard group you are trying to convince. Maybe developers had good intentions at one point, but they blew. Now, probably 99% of New Yorkers think these guys would throw them out into the street if they could make a dime. Just a dime is all it would take.

As a developer, when you walk by storefronts they have been empty for years, bringing down the entire neighborhood, do you call those guys up and say:

Hey, you are destroying the neighborhood, rent the damn place out already? I'd be super impressed if you said you did that. :-)

Developers (maybe not all, but from my experience) are ruthless, soulless and heartless. 9-5 that is. After 5 PM, probably great guys/gals to share a beer with. But from 9-5, only it takes is a dime. Just a dime, and out in the street you would go.

Maybe sometimes development is not always good? Seems to have ripped the soul out of Crown Heights.

We're just now a city of empty storefronts, Duane Reade's, CVS drug stores, and banks. The heart was ripped out of the city. Many times over. Acres of hunched over Javascript coders is not what I would call "creative energy" helping in any way, shape or form. Can't buy that one.

NYC is pretty big, Amazon is just a drop in the bucket. Think what bugs most people is, the locals had very little input, seems like none. No one asked me, or a soul in LIC.


Thanks for your write-up. It's always interesting to follow the wild and crazy world of NYC Real Estate.

Required reading I guess? How a Great City Lost Its Soul:

\> One hopes that this book is widely read, and shakes people up to motivate them to do something collectively to stop the furtherance of the losses that are making New York lifeless and devoid of the creative energy that made this city vital. Spread the word, and make this book the focus of discussions of what is to come in the next few years, and afterwards. Collectively, we can make a difference.

https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-New-York-Great-City/dp/0062439693/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542135554&sr=8-1&keywords=how+a+great+city+lost+its+soul

​

The Bataan Death Mall has always seemed dead to me. I used to go there when it was the only theater I could get to without a bus transfer, but seriously, it's a piece of real estate development that breaks every rule of real estate development. (See Joel Garreau's excellent, and fun to read, book on the subject, Edge City.)

The developers were trying to do something interesting and experimental. Since anchor stores are dying, they tried to replace anchor stores with sports-themed family entertainment attractions, like the Nascar area and the ice skating rink, hoping they'd attract as much foot traffic to the smaller stores as Famous Barr and Sears used to. Not so much. In no small part because, contrary to their early predictions, nobody lives near there or works near there, it's not anybody's "nearby mall."

Also, the need to set aside as much horizontal space as they did for the sports attractions meant breaking the most important rule of real estate development in America: no American will voluntarily walk farther than 660 feet from their car. Mall developers learned ages ago that you can trick them into walking 1,000 feet, but only if it's in a visually stimulating environment (which the Mills isn't) and, more importantly, not in a straight line so they can't see how far they'll have to walk.

The Mills is laid out as two long corridors that only connect at the ends; if you're trying to get from a store on one side to a store on the opposite side, it's every bit of what, half a mile? More? Mall developers learned the hard way, over 50 years ago, that if an American looks at a map of the mall and concludes that they have to walk farther than 660 feet to get to the next store they want to go to, they'll double back to their car and drive around to the nearest entrance. Except that they won't; once they're in their car, half of them decide to just go home instead. (They also won't go down, or up, more than one escalator, which is why every successful mall is three stories tall with the entrance on the 2nd floor.)

tl;dr: If anything was going to save the Mills from its horrible layout, it would have been for the sports- and exercise-themed attractions to become so popular that they attracted huge permanent crowds. That didn't happen.

> Standard of living can be defined as:

Lol, I was just going to start off by saying it depends on what you mean by better!

> I think most would agree that Sweden has a greater standard of living than Nigeria. Which is better at creating these types of standard of living increases?

> Is Capitalism or Socialism better at moving humans to a greater standard of living?

First of all, no socialist that I know of, or even suspect that exists in this community, would deny that capitalism is fantastic at things like wealth creation. Of course capitalism has brought many good things to us. And of course, the corollary of that is true as well.

Still, among many of the factors you site, however, I can tell you as an academic economist, many of these are hotly debated as to how and in what ways they can be said to reflect the health of society as a whole. GDP for example is a notoriously bad gauge to quantify societal well-being (if you want a sample of the basic controversy).

In the US, we have so much of an abundance of capital and wealth that if we desired, we could virtually if not entirely, eliminate many of the facets of poverty in our country. We could provide low-cost affordable housing to everybody (see some of the history of housing policy in the US), even despite our horrible attempts at pubic housing in the past. So why can't/hasn't capitalism accommodated a solution for this niche problem? Well, capitalism doesn't produce for the social need or utility, it produces for profit and individual consumption.

Capitalism doesn't allocate resources to areas it can't profit off of, unless someone can turn it to a profit.

I am kind of agnostic on land value tax vs. land + building tax at the moment. William Fischel lists several downsides of land value taxes in Zoning Rules!:

• Property taxes are easier to administer because land + building sales are easier to observe than land only sales.
  
• Property taxes are more popular because people do want mansions to be taxed more than small houses on an equivalent lot.
  
• With zoning that limits development potential, property values often reflect the value of the land and what you are allowed to do with it anyway. In other words, “What should the land be zoned for?” is the bigger question than “Land tax vs. property tax?”
  
  Adam Ozimek also listed Some Advantages Of Property Taxes Over Land Value Taxes:
  
  
• Since buildings tend to last a hundred years, old buildings are more like land than capital. The creation of a land value tax instead of property tax on old buildings would just be a tax cut on old buildings. It would not do much to incentivize building.
  
  So I would be fine with a land value tax, or a split roll that taxed buildings less than land, or a property tax that exempted new buildings for a number of years.
  
  But the reason that I mentioned all those other alternatives to property and land value taxes is that local voters could actually impose them, whereas Proposition 13 prohibits any state or local government from reassessing property or raising a land tax.

Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...

By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.

There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.

1. Straphanger - Taras Grescoe
   
2. 9.5/10
   
3. Non-Fiction, Mass transit, urban planning, travel writing
   
4. Canadian author travels around the world to experience some of the best (and worst) public transit systems. Each chapter is a new major city. Includes some of the best ones you'd want to learn about like Tokyo and Paris, and some lacking ones like Phoenix, AZ. Along the way he interviews urban planners, advocates, politicians, and transit workers. It's a great primer to basic urban planning and how to improve our cities from gridlock from cars.
   
5. Amazon.com, Amazon.ca. I believe the Canadian version has an extra chapter on Toronto.

Traffic congestion has been a problem since the days of New Amsterdam! This was something that the city fathers meant to address for years, and finally did after the end of the American Revolution, when the city was growing at an unprecedented pace. John Randel, Jr. was commissioned to survey the structures on Manhattan, which became the basis for the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Here is a great zoomable copy that was created between 1818 and 1820; it has the 1820 street grid superimposed on top of it. You should check out The Measure of Manhattan, which offers a history of John Randel, Jr. and the execution and expansion of the grid.

Most of the urban planning in the city has involved altering the present grid, and extending it and modifying it for the other boroughs (to varying degrees). The grid has evolved in response to transportation advances, but there are obviously limitations because of simple geography. Trucks choke the streets south of 14th Street because there are several separate grids at play. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that there are two separate grids denoting the De Lancey and Rutger estates; the De Lancey grid is perpendicular to the Bowery, while the Rutgers grid is perpendicular to Division Street, which led to the Bowery; these grids reflect the direction of commerce in these particular areas. The 1811 grid is somewhat more static, but as I mentioned before, there have been several notable changes over the past 200 years. If you want to check out some online maps of the city, check out the David Rumsey Map Collection; it has close-up maps of the different city wards if you wanted to focus your research on a particular neighborhood.

To study traffic patterns, one must be familiar with the earliest forms of transportation in the city. The personal wagons of merchants and the carriages of the wealthy shared space with cattle being herded down the streets, and wild hogs foraging about (a tremendous problem up until the 19th Century). In the early 1800s came the omnibus, which was a carriage with multiple seats inside; they began to operate on all major thoroughfares and streets quickly, connecting uptown residents with their downtown businesses and the ports with fast packet ships and freighters moving West through the Erie canal. In the 1830s, railroads reached down into Manhattan, further revolutionizing transportation in the city, but of course the tracks often competed with the other street vehicles. The elevated trains were built in the 1870s and 80s, freeing up space on the streets below; streetcars were also spreading throughout the city, adding to the chaos. The subway, opening in 1904, alleviated congestion a bit, but as you can see, many of the modern problems we have with traffic are not quite as modern as we think. Cars and trucks further added to the traffic nightmare that is quintessentially New York. The construction of the highways that ring Manhattan and in many cases cut through entire outer borough neighborhoods did help congestion, but as we have seen in the past 80 years, they are not without their problems. I would recommend New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development for further information regarding urban development in the 20th Century.

Hope that helped a bit. Good luck on your project!

Well, there could be a lot of factors determining sub-par mass transit in an urban area. At the most basic level it could be lack of funding. In WA state we dealt with this over ten years ago with Tim Eyman's I-695 which in my area cut mass transit funding 50%. When you have a group of voters who say "fuck it" to funding bus/light rail you're going to have progressively worse service.

Another aspect is urban congestion. If you are running a bus line without dedicated lanes in a dense downtown region (or the center of an auto-centric sprawl city like Atlanta) it's going to back up and cause delayed routes, more gas consumption, and longer rides. Light rail, commuter rail, and BRT can move faster in most locations but require a larger investment (more money per mile of service, which won't happen if voters turn down taxes and bonds for it). Also factor in the continued sprawling out of cities like Phoenix, which requires more money to service fewer riders due to low density.

It's funny now because many cities are opting to re-implement the trolley lines they so quickly tore up in the 40's/50's/60's, albeit at a cost. When you had cities growing organically with an urban core that included housing followed by streetcar neighborhoods, the transportation system was integrated into the environment (you walked in downtown, took a streetcar to home/visit in the peripheral neighborhoods). The streetcars were tracked and had the right of way. When the cities tore the tracks up and placed their buses within the street traffic, which would become more congested than we could have ever imagined, in many cases we see them giving up a dedicated right of way for transit and forcing their vehicles right into the shark tank, so to say.

The post-war boom that fueled auto production/purchase coupled with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 swelled the streets with cars and kicked off the suburban sprawl that still persists today (although the numbers have lowered significantly since the 1990's and took a sharp decline since 2008). A few good books on these subjects include: Suburban Nation, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, and How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken Here are a few about specific cities with high amounts of sprawl that go into what factors caused this and the problems faced today: The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City (which I am reading right now and can say so far is a really interesting history of the city).

This is, actually, not as hard as one would think. You can run for county or city office and there are a number of resources to help you. Check out this book, Sidewalk Strategies. It might even be at your local library. You can also check out EMILYs List which has a great resource on fundraising, I think the book is called Making the Bread Rise? Or something like that.

A lot of people think you need big connections or pie in the sky ideas to win. This is rubbish. Scott Walker got his start running for county office. Thom Tillis, Republican Senator of NC, got his start because he was annoyed about plans to build a bike lane in his city.

Get involved in your local party, recruit younger people to said party, find an issue that matters to your community, run on that issue.

Each one is necessary and useful but in its current form is too easily abused by centralized power, I think many people from across the political spectrum would agree on that. Right-libertarians think big business needs to be deregulated for those goals to succeed. Left-libertarians think big business needs to be cut off from its sources of privilege for those goals to succeed.

Taxation is the state's version of financial collaboration for projects. Right libertarians think taxation is stupid because it discourages huge businesses from making zonkers profits. Left libertarians think taxation is stupid but in general they don't prioritize things like tax breaks for corporations; the hugest corporations are the primary beneficiaries of state policies, and until we focus on stripping these billionaires of their modern aristocratic privilege it's hard call giving them tax cuts "libertarian" at all.

Universal health care would be great, the ACA is a long way from that. Right-libertarians would probably give you some stuff about "the most efficient healthcare is in a free market" and then just focus on relieving its burden to employers and healthcare business/insurance. Again big pharma, healthcare, and insurance are among the biggest beneficiaries of intellectual property monopoly, industry subsidy, and privateering "privatization" programs. As a left libertarian what stands out to me is that the whole paradigm of workers buying health insurance through their employers is absurd. Your employer does not buy the candles on your birthday cake, it doesn't make sense for health insurance either.

Welfare is a huge move in the right (left) direction, unfortunately state welfare has been abused by central power to manipulate the working masses. The state increases welfare funding in times of crisis and impending revolution, and squeezes the fund when it wants to ramp up production and generate a surplus of labor. It even resorts to propaganda campaigns to try to make surplus labor feel guilty about alleged sloth. This one is fresh in my mind, I'm reading an excellent book called Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare.
But again cutting welfare is not the focus of left-libertarian thinking. I'm paraphrasing some blog I read a while back,

> ... it's like the state holds us down daily while big business comes and breaks our left leg with a baseball bat. The state gives us some crutches so we can still go to work for the big business, threatens taking away our crutches if we misbehave, and so on. Of course our first priority isn't gonna be "abolish our evil state crutches!" We're more concerned with the baseball bat.

I think remote work might work to some extent, for some roles, but there is a force multiplier at play in "super-star" cities where all the top talent lives. Think SF/Manhattan/London. Full of people at the top of their industries, interacting with each other everyday, leading to massive network effects. Big, important, companies will always want to have a big presence in these centres, and any jobs they can push remotely are just going to be next on the out-source / automation chopping block.

The New Urban Crisis is a good book on this phenomenom, and it happens to be written by a Rotman prof.

Exploding Mangoes was the first book I read about Pakistan. Here's a list:

• Pakistan - Social and Cultural Transformations in a Muslim Nation
  A little dry for my taste but I couldn't recommend this more. This book charts the social consequences of state policies and economic factors over the whole time period from '47 to now.
  
  
• Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
  Very important book if you want to avoid the conspiracy theories floating about Taliban and our role in their rise.
  
  
• Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military
  Interested in Pakistan army's relationship with mullahs over the years? This is a must-read.
  
  
• Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding
  Title is self explanatory.
  
  
• Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples & Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
  A very informative and interesting two part series on what joins the non-Arab muslims of the world, with a large portion about Pakistan. Written by Nobel Laureate for Literature Naipaul, behnoi of Maj. Gen. Ameer Faisal Alvi who was assassinated in 2008 in Islamabad.
  
  
• Pakistan: A Hard Country
  A good overview of what makes Pakistan run the way it does.
  
  
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  Haven't read it but have heard good things about it.
  
  
• The Army and Democracy; Military Politics in Pakistan
  Haven't read it yet.

plugs The Great Inversion as well

It's smart about not just despairing, and instead focuses on America's urban success stories, and how we can apply things we learn from them to core-less cities and suburbs.

The Real Estate Page As Colonial Dispatch

---

Real Estate sections are mostly breezy, fun profiles of the super rich buying up houses and remodeling the ones they already own. Harmless escapist fun? Maybe. But how we write about real estate often reveals casually racist and colonial attitudes that are rarely, if ever, examined.

In this episode we talk about why the way we talk about the real estate business matters and how the white civilizing mission never went away. With guest Aaron Cantú.

---

Show notes

Media and the ‘Melting Pot’: Putting a harmonious spin on gentrification

-Aaron Cantú | January 1, 2015 | FAIR

When NYT Real Estate Stories Read Like 19th Century Colonial Dispatches

-Adam Johnson | May 2, 2016 | FAIR

Media and the ‘Melting Pot’

-Adam Johnson | January 1, 2015 | FAIR

Party Like It’s 1992

-Bobby London | September 5, 2017 | The New Inquiry

Remembering The Lost Communities Buried Under Center Field

-Janice Llamoca | October 31, 2017 | NPR

Referenced

Upper Upper West Side Attracting New Settlers

-Philip S. Gutis | March 9, 1986 | The New York Times

Pulling Out of Fort Apache, the Bronx; New 41st Precinct Station House Leaves Behind Symbol of Community's Past Troubles

-Ian Fisher | June 23, 1993 | The New York Times

Veterans Remember 'Fort Apache'

-Larry McShane | June 30, 2002 | Associated Press

America's Next Great City Is Inside L.A.

Brett Martin | January 6, 2014 | GQ

Detroit: A New American Frontier

-Aaron Renn | July 20, 2011 | Yes! Magazine

Racist emails show Chicago official joked about 'safari' tour to see violence in black neighborhoods

-Ray Long & Todd Lighty | July 17, 2017 | Chicago Tribune

Everybody's Laughing at the Video of an Angry White Guy Claiming He 'Settled' Brooklyn

-September 23, 2015 | Vice

Recommendations

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City [PDF]Neil Smith | 1996

Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit [PDF]Sara Safransky | August 17, 2014 | Geoforum

Is There Room for Black People in the New Detroit?Suzette Hackney | September 28, 2014 | Politico

The Permanent Crisis of Housing

-David Madden & Peter Marcuse | October 2, 2016 | Jacobin

The Steady Destruction of America’s Cities

-Gillian B. White | March 9, 2017 | The Atlantic

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood - Peter Moskowitz, Nation Books (2017)

The Works of Mike Davis

---
iTunes link

Patreon Link

Official Site

I'm not an educator, I'm a parent and have looked into this a bit. There is a good book that I learned about from a Bill Gates TED talk.

http://www.amazon.com/Educational-Economics-Where-School-Funds/dp/0877667640

Part of the problem isn't the total amount of money spent, its that a lot of that total comes with strings attached. Sure, you get x amount of money to run a DARE program, but that won't help kids read and is of questionable benefit. Want to question the benefit and use the money for something else needed and proven - you can't because the money is earmarked. This is one of the reasons why a wealthy district can spend less money, because it's their money they can allocate it how they want.

That's good, because there is no evidence that displacement is a significant effect. Im glad you now support gentrification :)

https://www.amazon.com/There-Goes-Hood-Gentrification-Ground-ebook/dp/B003NE5GWC


---

Vigdor 2002

Freeman-Braconi 2004

McKinnish-Walsh-White 2008

This one is pretty good Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel.
It touches on the economics of planning and explains a lot of the real issues that you deal with in the field... like why NIMBYism everywhere.

Agreed. Prop 13 is like a curse to most Californians.

Speaking of taxes, I like Richard Florida’s idea: tax land based on a a formula that benefits dense housing. His book:
New Urban Crisis

Books:

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall

A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities by Donald L. Elliott

Anything by Leon Krier (Architecture: Choice or Fate being my favorite) or William H. Whyte (The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces being my favorite)


Essays:

Jane Jacobs and the The Death and Life of American Planning by Thomas J. Campanella

Toward and Urban Design Manifesto by Allen Jacobs and Donald Appleyard.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
http://amzn.com/0307272745

Even though sometimes the verbiage comes across as a bit "pie in the sky"/"rose tinted", Vishaan Chakrabarti explains in brilliant detail how you can align transit across residential, commercial and mixed use zones and corridors.

If I were in a position to do so, that book would be mandatory reading for everyone involved in any sort of planning of transit in Austin.

I would second this, for sure.

Consider also The New Urban Sociology by Gottdiener and Hutchison, and generally anything by Mark Gottdiener. This does not directly address idea generation, so much as urban culture and the changing nature of cities. In that respect, it deals with how culture and politics shape urban life.

If you want to go back to some classical theory, you could check into Durkheim (collective effervescence) and any contemporary literature in the same vein.

https://www.amazon.com/Regulating-Poor-Functions-Public-Welfare/dp/0679745165

Still the most cogent and definitive answer to the question you raise. Well, that and maybe this one too.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684

Subscribed.

Also this is worth a read

You should read Vanishing New York.

Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation by William Fischel.

And Serbia, and the Philippines, and to some extent even Austria. Rural + exurban areas vs. urban + trendy suburban. This book gets into it.

If you're not referencing it, read it: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/dp/0307272745

Developers did not suddenly become more profit-seeking a couple decades ago.

Increasing the supply of housing throughout the city and moreover removing the parts of the zoning code that strangle housing supply are the real key to improving housing prices.

Seriously, no one gave a shit or heard of "gentrification" till the '80s when zoning changes made building taller buildings really really fucking hard. That's a subsidy to existing landlords (and generally rich property owners who vote). The problem with housing costs is really greedy land owners, not developers who respond to price signals by attempting to increase the supply of housing.

Someone should send Frey and Bender a copy of How To Kill a City
https://www.amazon.com/How-Kill-City-Gentrification-Neighborhood/dp/1568585233