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Anyway, if anyone wants to ever do something real about affordability here's two solutions:
1. Liberalize landuse regs to allow market to meet demand.
2. Attack city budgets to force them to hold at steady level or only slight increase to meet addition demand, and not use escalating property valuations as big windfalls for city budgets.
Or we can rail against whitey and try to get as many "Affordable Housing" projects built for lottery winners. . .but that won't do squat all.
I don't have Bay Area numbers handy but in a nutshell, last year about 40k new jobs were created in SF. And around 500 new housing units where created. Other cities weren't picking up the slack. So we are down thousands of housing units compared to population growth. And it has been happening this way for 8 years.
Some of the affordable housing project project to here include subsidized housing for singles that make $70k and families of four with $100k incomes. Affordable housing isn't the answer, but housing for all price points is. We are building all luxury stuff with 5-10% set aside for "low income" people. Where is everyone else supposed to live?
Gentrification will come to naught if the schools don't improve.
I once read an article about schools written by an urban planner, someone who really does this work for a living. He said he never gave a thought to schools until his own kid was ready to go to school. Of course, he solved his problem the typical gentrifier way, he put the child in some sort of charter/magnet school. When it gets to the point that there aren't enough spaces in these schools for all the gentrifier kids, then maybe something will happen.
As has been pointed out to me by some on this board, in some cities the schools are a part of city government. Even where they're not, they are another govt. agency, like transit. It's interesting to me that urban planners spend so much time thinking about, and pontificating about transit, but don't give a rip about schools.
I am interested in how you know that the school boards will simply "tell off" the gentry if they don't have kids.
Generally urban planning is more about the form not the experience.
I see schools as a key topic for economic investment gentrification and other things but I don't think school quality has any relationship to urban mobility.
The blog is rather Chicago-specific, which might explain why. Saying something meaningful about schools might require more specifically local knowledge then many other city topics. And the author likes talking about transit, too (says he likes trains in about me).
So the city is NOT the place for normal, middle to upper middle class people who can't afford private schools to raise families after all?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jade408
Generally urban planning is more about the form not the experience.
I see schools as a key topic for economic investment gentrification and other things but I don't think school quality has any relationship to urban mobility.
No one is going to move somewhere if they don't think their kids can get a decent education. If you look at almost every city forum, people moving in want to know where the good schools are if they have kids, even if they have infants.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 03-01-2014 at 02:02 PM..
So the city is NOT the place for normal, middle to upper middle class people to raise families after all?
I goes as far to say that, but a lot of the gentrification neighborhoods are mainly by non-families, and often the child population declines. Boston has seen a decent amount of gentrification in the last decade or two, with a large decline in child population and not much increase in school quality.
So the city is NOT the place for normal, middle to upper middle class people to raise families after all?
No one is going to move somewhere if they don't think their kids can get a decent education. If you look at almost every city forum, people moving in want to know where the good schools are if they have kids, even if they have infants.
That's a different conversation. Schools fall in the livability bucket...not the transportation bucket. The problem is that this forum is a bit dual purpose. We are talking about cities in both form (which is mostly about planning) and function (which is about planning, social issues, quality of life and a bunch of other stuff)
The city forums are about specific local community issues.
No one is saying school quality is unimportant for a city's success, but they have little to do with highway alignment, street planning and zoning conversations.
Gentrification isn't only a planning issue, it is also a social issue, and more topics are implied, particularly around quality of life and housing affordability.
That's a different conversation. Schools fall in the livability bucket...not the transportation bucket. The problem is that this forum is a bit dual purpose. We are talking about cities in both form (which is mostly about planning) and function (which is about planning, social issues, quality of life and a bunch of other stuff)
The city forums are about specific local community issues.
No one is saying school quality is unimportant for a city's success, but they have little to do with highway alignment, street planning and zoning conversations.
Gentrification isn't only a planning issue, it is also a social issue, and more topics are implied, particularly around quality of life and housing affordability.
Quality of life includes being able to get your kids a decent education.
Quality of life includes being able to get your kids a decent education.
But it isn't about urban planning (traditionally) although the definition is starting to expand a bit. But as long as most urban planners are more like architects than Jane Jacobs then it won't be a main conversation for planning a city.
If urban planning really means designing for urban success then the discipline of planning will be multi-disciplinary. P
I don't have Bay Area numbers handy but in a nutshell, last year about 40k new jobs were created in SF. And around 500 new housing units where created. Other cities weren't picking up the slack. So we are down thousands of housing units compared to population growth. And it has been happening this way for 8 years.
Some of the affordable housing project project to here include subsidized housing for singles that make $70k and families of four with $100k incomes. Affordable housing isn't the answer, but housing for all price points is. We are building all luxury stuff with 5-10% set aside for "low income" people. Where is everyone else supposed to live?
SF has some of the most restrictive land use regs in the country right now. It is completely 100% predictable that housing prices are skyrocketing.
If SF wants to do something about its outrageous housing prices it needs to liberalize land use regs. Seattle did, it's seeing tremendous growth, and rents are coming down, not going up.
Constructing high-dollar units allows older housing stock to filter down. If you don't do this, the reverse happens and it filters up making things more expensive for everyone.
SF has some of the most restrictive land use regs in the country right now. It is completely 100% predictable that housing prices are skyrocketing.
If SF wants to do something about its outrageous housing prices it needs to liberalize land use regs. Seattle did, it's seeing tremendous growth, and rents are coming down, not going up.
Constructing high-dollar units allows older housing stock to filter down. If you don't do this, the reverse happens and it filters up making things more expensive for everyone.
Sort of. But SF is so behind the building curve that people in older stock who might have moved know that there is nothing they can afford now. Everything available is 3x more than they are paying. So they don't move.
My neighborhood is 30-40% more now compared to when I moved in. So I don't move because I figure I might as well save up to buy. One more older unit that is not available. There needs to be more middle ground (in our whole region).
I did a cursory look at apartments near my job and that were all the same price, pretty expensive. There was absolutely no variation across the entire city.
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