(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best urban planning & development books

Hypothetically, this is the best, albeit least realistic option for Toronto to truly flourish.

It has however been well thought out in a very good and somewhat recent book called Urban Nation. Check it out!

Oh, hey, I know something about that:

• The Immutable Laws of Affordable Housing: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/8/immutable-laws-of-affordable-housing
  
• Rent control is like burning the furniture to keep the house warm. Here's liberal economist Paul Krugman on why it's a bad idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html - if you keep people from being able to raise the rent, they'll end up selling those places to people looking to buy, taking units off the rental market. They'll spend less on maintenance. It might be nice for some people, short term. Long term, it'll make things worse.
  
• It's a supply problem. That doesn't just mean out, which is expensive ( https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment ) , it means up and in, too.
  
• It's a supply problem in California and in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Denver... all over. They need to fix it there, too.
  
  You're interested? Want to learn more? Here you go:
  
  
• https://www.curbed.com/2017/1/25/14342828/denver-rents-affordable-housing-apartments
  
• https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-sentiment-reflected-in-zoning-laws-thwarts-equality.html?_r=0
  
• http://www.strongtowns.org/
  
• http://marketurbanism.com/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO (available at the library)
  
  And last but not least, if you want to get involved and try and change things:
  
  https://bendyimby.com/
  
  Edit if you want a real deep dive into housing issues, I highly recommend these, which have different points of view:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation-ebook/dp/B01185VTOG/ - Zoning Rules! by William Fischel
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-USA-Implications-American-Regulation-ebook/dp/B00ST5KPLW/ - Zoned in the USA by Sonia Hirt (also available at the library)

Your heart is in the right place, but your numbers are backwards.

Transit users are not the big beneficiaries of road spending as wealth redistribution. By far and away, drivers, especially rural drivers, are the beneficiaries, and city dwellers, especially city pedestrains, are the ones who pay. The whole north American road funding system acts as a giant vacuum, sucking money out of cities and disturbing to rural and suburban areas, sucking money out of people who demand little of the road and handing a fat subsidy to everyone who buys a SUV.

Some reading:
http://www.amazon.ca/Shape-Suburbs-Understanding-Torontos-Sprawl/dp/0802095879

I never said 100% of them do it either. While there are probably dozens of books that cover this topic, I'd recommend this one which I've read: http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Jewish-Community-ebook/dp/B007X78PFA/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1

tl;dr real estate agents/brokers are mostly scumbags.

I would recommend Krumholz or Forester (see also Planning in the Face of Power )

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-new-suburban-poverty/

http://www.amazon.com/Once-American-Dream-Inner-Ring-Metropolitan/dp/159213937X

http://urbanportal.org/issues/entry/suburbia_question/

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t4c093

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/05/death-america-suburban-dream-ferguson-missouri-resegregation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/suburban-ghettos-like-ferguson-are-ticking-time-bombs/

Interestingly, Ferguson, Missouri is one of these once wealthy, now poor inner-ring suburbs.

Gentrification moves in two waves. It's well documented.

Basically poor, usually young people with education, artistic and handyman skills and time move into an area and start modestly fixing buildings up. This group tends to live in some harmony—or maybe détente—with longtime resident population, usually the working class and people of color.

Over time, first wave gentrifiers make a neighborhood "safe" for rich kids, young professionals, wealthy eccentrics and others who like to slum it (but not really) and we transition into second wave gentrification as developers create difficulties for original residents and first wave gentrifiers, who then are forced out.

The Meadowlark building downtown is a little microcosm of this. It used to be an extreme shithole, with like a Bosnian restaurant in the basement and a couple of studios. A local artist literally cleaned up the building for his studio and now what is it? It's mostly a boring office park for 9-5ers. Someone put a bird on it.

Eventually gentrified areas lose their character and become dorky and some other area will become the trendy neighborhood.

You can already see it happening again in the areas Bixby mentions, but also traditionally working class and Mexican-American neighborhoods of north Moorhead.

So it goes.

https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Local-Government-Planning-3rd/dp/0873261712

i found a used copy for 25 on ebay, so look around. the 3rd is the most recent, i'm not certain how different the 2nd and 3rd are. honestly probably not that much, but who knows.

https://www.amazon.ca/Creating-New-City-Sandy-Springs/dp/1425954367/

Have you read Donald Shoup's essays on parking? He also has a book out but I won't read it until there's a kindle version.

In preparation for my Community Development position in Albania I've recently started a book called Community Development in Action. So far it's talked a bit about different approaches to education so it might have some application to your upcoming service (if not your primary work then maybe secondary projects you might become involved in).

https://www.amazon.com/Community-Development-Action-Putting-Practice/dp/1847428754/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://i.imgur.com/E2OoaTJ.png

Found on page 22 in Myron Levine's book.

Need this book as a pdf file or link!! Paying $2 PayPal!

https://www.amazon.com/Public-Administration-Introduction-Marc-Holzer/dp/0765639114/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Here's just some random books:

"Monthly review" school defenses of China:

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hegemony-Assessing-Prospects-Multipolar/dp/1842777092
https://www.amazon.com/Reorienting-19th-Century-Economy-Continuing/dp/1612051243
https://www.amazon.com/Adam-Smith-Beijing-Lineages-Century/dp/1844672980

these are all the same book summarized here

https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/

leftist criticisms:

https://www.amazon.com/China-Demise-Capitalist-World-Economy/dp/158367182X

https://www.amazon.com/China-Socialism-Market-Reforms-Struggle/dp/1583671234

basically summarized here:

http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economies%205430-6430/Hart-Landsberg-China%20and%20Transnational%20Accumulation.pdf

some important books on the cultural revolution and the conflict between Mao and Deng at a materialist level rather than in relation to personality (there are very few)

https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Economic-Development-Chris-Bramall/dp/0415373484
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/red-chinas-green-revolution/9780231186674
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/2356/D_Jiang_Hongsheng_a_201005.pdf
(if you can read French it's been published as a much shorter book)

some general books on imperialism and some of the things I'm talking about

https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1784786616

https://www.amazon.com/Imperialism-Twenty-First-Century-Globalization-Super-Exploitation/dp/1583675779

both of these are a bit ambiguous on China

and about Marx and the first international

https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Third-World-Umberto-Melotti/dp/0333198174

as for the USSR and Bukharin/Stalin/Trotsky representing different lines, that should be easy enough to find. The one thing we don't lack are defenses of the USSR and Marxism-Leninism.

You can see which side I'm on based on the books I recommend so don't take me for a neutral observer. If someone knows a good book defending China based on Marxism (rather than Amin and co.'s eclecticism) I welcome it. There's Losurdo of course but that doesn't really interest me since it's a defense of China in terms of Marxist thought rather than an empirical investigation. Not that it's not valuable, just that the argument should be familiar to everyone already since it has become predominant on this sub.

I'll pay $5 for a pdf (and/or epub) of the following book:

Stoecker, Randy R., Research Methods for Community Change, 2nd Edition, ISBN: 9781412994057

Thank you for any help

No.

Here's a book you should read:

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/dp/0307474372

>Nobody I know in my suburb is moving into the city.

Well, then, I guess all the data on recent urban demographics is wrong because of your anonymous anecdote!

Hah! Damned if you do, damned if you don't; we're all going to get priced out regardless. But that's another issue entirely. Good book on that topic.

This is all just thinly veiled rambling. I don't know why you are getting so upset. Did I say I was part of the creative class moving into silver lake? No. I have lived in the east San Fernando Valley my whole life and dont intend to spend 600k on a shack in silverlake.

You are going on and on about national debt issues and the prison industrial complex. I am an urban planner by trade and education, so I offer you the theoretical, market historical context for gentrification.

I can also offer you some reading material if you are interested in this subject.

An easy read is "The Rent is Too Damn High" - This book discusses the economics of ever increasing property prices and rent, how our laws against density and building in general have betrayed lower income people.

"Naked City:The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places" - This book discusses that "authenticity" I was talking about that people are interested in now (btw, I never said I was seeking it). It also discusses gentrification's toll on the poor and its market based reality.

If you are interested in the creative class part, Richard Florida is an author always writing about that. Im not a huge fan of his though, for more general reasons. But when I say the creative class invades cheap neighborhoods is artistic and entrepreneurial skilled workers who bring their homes and maybe even their work to the area. This isn't a new thing, its happened through history, especially the past century. They are the pioneers of the gentrifying neighborhood before the people with the real money start entering.

I'd throw out How To Kill A City by Peter Moskowitz.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXXCDVV/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Helped clarify a lot for me about how gentrification works in U.S. cities and what needs to be done about housing. (Hint, it's tied directly to Reagan's public housing cuts and the rise of neo-liberalism).

I answered that question in "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" Matt Yglesias answers it in The Rent Is too Damn High (And What to Do About It).

The short answer is "We need to build more housing."

The problem is that most existing owners don't want more housing because they view their housing as an investment, rather than a piece of decaying capital. William explains this in chapters 7 – 8 of Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation.

India is an example; I do have experience in third world countries, Tanzania, specifically, but I chose India as an example because it is better known and because, in terms of population and its poverty, it has less to give its children in rural regions than Tanzania does.

>The reported results from RI seem about expected - based on the level of poverty of its students [...]

Again, for some reason we are equating stupidity/inability to learn with poverty, and this is just not so. It creates a system where it's ok for the middle and upper classes to just say, "Well, they're poor, we can't expect them to do well in school." It's unfair to do so.

There are schools which perform well under terrible conditions. If you're interested in specifics, there are a couple of books/studies I could point you too. I could also point you to a bunch of studies that show that affluence can have nothing to do with a student's success. Hell, in India, there are states which have terrible literacy rates (59% in Bihar) and fantastic rates (90+% in Kerala). The variations in terms of funding for public, rural education do not differ much there.

Let me give you an Tanzanian example; it is consistently in the bottom 25 poorest nations on earth. In its urban center of Dar es Salaam, the study I'm looking at (1992, unfortunately), shows a illiteracy rate of 2%. Kigoma, a rural province, having an illiteracy rate of 20%. The country, at that time, had a total literacy rate of approx 10%. (http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/20/09.pdf). Now, given their economy has since collapsed (again), one would question as to whether their educational systems (limited to literacy) would have also shrunk. It has. But with a country so poor, its literacy rate wavers around 70%. (WorldFactbook). This is 15% better than this Rhode Island city, where the standard of living, the 'educator's' credentials, school facilities are all exponentially better.

So, as for Rhode Island, no, I don't know what was happening at that school. I don't think anyone does. The argument I'm making is that they should be fired for incompetence. The argument the superintendent made was that they were acting together to prevent more help being given to students and demanded too much compensation.

I'm not a free-market capitalist, but I do think that when you do not perform your job adequately, and then team-up against ideas that will benefit the students you are supposed to care for, you are unworthy of your salary and of your position.

Check out: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Schools-Poor-Neighborhoods-Demographics/dp/087766742X