Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Fri Jul 22, 2016 10:03 am

MG, you're an optimizer, so it might be hard to accept that there is no perfect place that will meet all your needs. Most of the objectively really nice places are so crowded that they're very expensive. The mountain states and the northeast get freezing cold; the south is unbearable outside in the summer; the midwest has both; Colorado and the pacific northwest are culturally turning into a little Californias; anywhere with a lot of black people and/or latinos is going to have racial tensions; the intermountain west states are largely economically depressed and dependent on the federal government, etc.

It's an efficient market. Not a lot of abritrage opportunities left. You just gotta decide which things you can live with. It's gonna require stretching on your budget, being more open-minded about who you live around, accepting more limited employment opportunities, or dealing with weather that isn't as much to your liking.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Xan » Fri Jul 22, 2016 10:19 am

There's also the potential for "summering" in one place and "wintering" in another. Surely more expensive than just picking one, of course. But you could do things like spend 183 days in a non-income-tax state and avoid state income tax altogether. If this is for retirement that may not matter of course.

Or you could exploit hyper-localized weather. For example near Tuscon there's a lovely little village up on Mount Lemmon. Nice and cool in the summer.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Fri Jul 22, 2016 12:00 pm

Fascinating maps. But yeah, micro-climate anomalies are always interesting if I could find a list of them. It does look to me like Appalachia is an exception to the rule in the South. I looked up Asheville, NC because its a cool weather mountain anomaly and yep, its in Appalanchia. But artsy fartsy towns like that are now expensive and overcongested. I think the trick is to be in a place that isn't going to grow into that over time.

If cheapness was all that mattered, I'd move to Oklahoma! But the weather sucks (hot & dry with tornadoes), the flat boring geography sucks, the spread out suburban lifestyle sucks and the extreme conservatism sucks.

And by multi-culturalism, I'm essentially meaning all the immigrants that don't fucking assimilate. I'm tired of flag-waving Mexicans and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, etc. It's insulting.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Xan » Fri Jul 22, 2016 12:37 pm

MachineGhost wrote:I think the trick is to be in a place that isn't going to grow into that over time.
Or let it grow into that, sell high, repeat.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Fri Jul 22, 2016 12:55 pm

Xan wrote:Or let it grow into that, sell high, repeat.
Do you know how stressful moving is? :P I want this to be my last move. I'm beyond tired of doing it.
"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'Facts'. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain." -- Thomas Hobbes

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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by flyingpylon » Fri Jul 22, 2016 1:28 pm

MachineGhost wrote:If cheapness was all that mattered, I'd move to Oklahoma! But the weather sucks (hot & dry with tornadoes), the flat boring geography sucks, the spread out suburban lifestyle sucks and the extreme conservatism sucks.
As we used to say at Ft Sill (Lawton, OK): Why is Texas so windy? Because Oklahoma sucks! ;D
MachineGhost wrote:And by multi-culturalism, I'm essentially meaning all the immigrants that don't fucking assimilate. I'm tired of flag-waving Mexicans and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, etc. It's insulting.
That's what I thought you meant when I made my comments about Vermont.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Fri Jul 22, 2016 2:32 pm

MangoMan wrote:
MachineGhost wrote: Do you know how stressful moving is? :P I want this to be my last move.
LOL, I told my ex-wife 25 years ago when we moved into the house I still live in, "I'm not doing that again. The next move will be to either a warm climate or a cemetery." So far, so good. The weather and the politics suck here in Chicagoland, but otherwise, it's a pretty great place to live.
There's a lot to like about a lot of the midwest IMHO. There are lot of just really pleasant places to live. Social trust also tends to be high if you stay out of the decaying rust belt cities. Those hardy Germanic and Scandanavian midwesterners make strong communities. Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are nice.

On the other hand, they're hot and muggy as hell in the summer, and freezing cold with feet of snow in the winter. And Illinois is a political basket case.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Fri Jul 22, 2016 3:18 pm

Like I always say, if you aren't incredibly uncomfortable 6 months a year, you don't really have 4 seasons.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu Jul 28, 2016 8:06 am

RE: the Retrotopia series and MG's Vermont retirement plans,

Cash-Strapped Towns Are Un-Paving Roads They Can’t Afford to Fix

The Un-Paving Of American Roads
Repaving roads is expensive, so Montpelier instead used its diminishing public works budget to take a step back in time and un-pave the road. Workers hauled out a machine called a “reclaimer” and pulverized the damaged asphalt and smoothed out the road’s exterior. They filled the space between Vermont’s cruddy soil and hardier dirt and gravel up top with a “geotextile”, a hardy fabric that helps with erosion, stability and drainage.

In an era of dismal infrastructure spending, where the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the country’s roads a D grade, rural areas all over the country are embracing this kind of strategic retreat. Transportation agencies in at least 27 states have unpaved roads, according to a new report from the National Highway Cooperative Highway Research program. They’ve done the bulk of that work in the past five years.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Xan » Thu Jul 28, 2016 11:17 am

I was in Biloxi not too long ago (the real part, not the part right by the casinos), and it really did seem like they'd given up on paving the roads. Apparently that's a thing!
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Mon Aug 01, 2016 4:36 pm

I'm loving the discussion we're having around here about urban vs rural, density vs nature, etc. Maddy's recent post was very human and eye-opening.

A lot of Americans have this horror of "density" which leads us to flee to the nice tame suburbs. I live there myself and totally understand the appeal (it appeals to me too). But maybe the problem isn't the concept of urban density but rather the execution.

So I decided to do a totally non-scientific experiment and look at parts of cities on Google street view. I tried to chose randomly from among places that from above looked to have high low-rise density and be near the city center, avoiding large main roads. Basically I wanted to find places where you could experience low-rise density as a person walking around a not-very-busy street.

This is Google Maps street view of such a random place in Philadelphia (population density 11,600 people /sq mi):

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Looking at this made me slightly nauseous and want to escape. The whole street looks dingy, dirty, and polluted. There's trash all over and no vegetation save for a distant tree at the end of the enormously long block--not even window flower boxes or potted plants. The buildings are nearly identical featureless slabs with no space between them; a distinctly "trapped" feeling arose. The street is not well-maintained, a typical American patchwork of stained asphalt and concrete. A line of shitty-looking cars are parked in the middle of the street. It looks like the kind of place populated by poor and desperate people where you would become the victim of crime. Looking at this makes me happy I'm sitting in a nice suburban house right now.

Next I did the same thing with a random-looking "dense" part of Tokyo (population density 16,000 people / sq mi). The whole thing looked pretty dense so this was basically completely random:

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Wow, it's amazing how much nicer than looks than the random place in Philly! There's space between the buildings, so your lizard brain doesn't stress you out by feeling like there would be no escape if you needed to run away from something. The buildings are nicely-maintained with some architectural diversity. It's neat and clean. There are trees and plants! The street surface looks new or well-maintained. There isn't a distinct sidewalk but it doesn't look like you would feel uneasy walking down the middle of the street. This picture attracts me to the neighborhood rather than repelling me.

Maybe I got lucky. So I tried another random street in Tokyo:

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A bit dingier but still pretty nice. There are people there! Shops at ground level. Someone appears to be driving a delivery tricycle or something. There's evidence of building maintenance (the big tarp). Architectural diversity. Potted plants. Pride of ownership. No parked vehicles. Maybe a bit crowded for my tastes but I don't feel the urge to flee in the opposite direction.

Another:

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People! Schoolchildren! Plants! Architectural interest! You've even got a patchwork street surface and a parked motorcycle, but somehow it doesn't feel awful.

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Hey, single-family homes. Now that looks nice, doesn't it? I'd live there. Nothing at all like the dingy sewer in Philly. Maybe I just got unlucky there, so here's another totally random part of Philly.

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Shabby road surface. Parked vehicles everywhere. A heavy truck. A warehouse. No vegetation. Buildings are flat slabs dominating the street with nowhere to hide, so to speak. What is it with this intimidating architecture? It just feels so cold and unwelcoming. The lack of difference in building depths and location gives the block an inhuman shape and scale. But I'll stop picking on Philly. Here's a random part of Chicago (population density 12,000 people/sq mi):

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Ew. Trash everywhere. Shabby road. Ugly metal fences and walls full of garage doors. At least we don't have those imposing flat building façades, but this place just doesn't look very healthy-looking. More Chicago:

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Now that isn't so terrible. We've got some trees and interesting architecture. But no people, just more endless lines of parked cars. The street is huge--obviously way too big because there are no other cars driving on it as far as the eye can see. It's an intimidating concrete canyon. And the ground-level shops are all empty or boarded up if you look closely. No people, of course. These human-less places seem eerie, almost like they've been abandoned.

Onto the obvious one: New York City. I want low-rise density, so here's a random part of Brooklyn (population density 36,000 people/sq mi):

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Hey, that's not too bad at first glance. Look at all those trees! I bet they're really nice in spring and summer. But there's still all that trash everywhere. What is it with American cities and garbage? It makes them seem like polluted sewers. And man, look at all the cars. Cars outnumber the lone walker 50 to 1 with two endless lines of parked cars and a whole bunch of traffic on the road. There's no way I'd want to live in such close proximity to traffic like this. It would be loud, dirty, and dangerous for my kids. As nice as brick construction is the architecture is still flat and intimidating with no space between buildings or any variety in building heights, depths, footprints, or locations on the lot. It looks like a machine built the whole block.

How about Queens (population density 21,400 people/sq mi):

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Egad. Looks like a great place to get murdered. Let's try again:

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Ah, single-family homes. Well, on the right side of the street, at least. On the left we have some humongous featureless inhuman block-wide warehouse of some sort. The house isn't bad, but it must be somewhat depressing to have it face something like that. No people, all cars. Only one vehicle actually driving; the rest of the street is basically a parking lot. Typical patchwork street and sidewalk repair jobs.


Now let look at some more completely random parts of cities outside the USA:

Soeul, South Korea (17,000 people /sq mi):

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Brasov, Romania (2,200 people/sq mi):

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Haifa, Israel (11,000 people/sq mi):

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Coimbra, Portugal (1,200 people/sq mi):

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São Paulo, Brazil (6,300 people/sq mi):

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Moscow, Russia (11,900 people/sq mi):

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I could keep going, but you probably get the idea. I swear these locations were totally random. Don't those places just look nice? The density almost doesn't matter. Maybe it's not cities and density that are horrible, but rather American cities and density. American cities are just sewers. I think whether a city is a nice place to live really has much more to do with other factors than simple density. Like the quality of the trash collection system; WTF America? Why are American cities so uniquely shitty?
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Mon Aug 01, 2016 7:49 pm

You can get a long way towards finding the answers at this site. I've been reading it for the past few days, tons of material. The author was interviewed by the Strong Towns guy, which covered a lot of ground also.

In sort of one word? Codes/regulations. We do it to ourselves.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Mon Aug 01, 2016 8:53 pm

Yep, I've got Granola Shotgun on my morning reading list already! Great stuff. The regulatory problems will probably never go away, sadly. They're created, expanded, and maintained by an infrastructure of people united by the psychological traits of fearing chaos and wanting to ward it off with rules and bureaucracy (or in their vocabulary, "order").
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Maddy » Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:34 am

At the risk of being politically incorrect (again), it seems pretty obvious to me that the appearance and liveability of a neighborhood has everything to do with who lives there. Seems to me we'd cut through a lot of crap if we could just accept the fact that large portions of the human race will, despite every intervention, continue to function at a level just one step above protozoan. I dare you to do that study.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Mountaineer » Wed Aug 03, 2016 8:10 am

Maddy wrote:At the risk of being politically incorrect (again), it seems pretty obvious to me that the appearance and liveability of a neighborhood has everything to do with who lives there. Seems to me we'd cut through a lot of crap if we could just accept the fact that large portions of the human race will, despite every intervention, continue to function at a level just one step above protozoan. I dare you to do that study.
Agreed. You are what you eat, on many levels, literally and metaphorically. ;)

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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:48 pm

Pointedstick wrote:Yep, I've got Granola Shotgun on my morning reading list already! Great stuff.
What other housing/CNU/urbanism/demographics/geography do you have in your feed?
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:20 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Pointedstick wrote:Yep, I've got Granola Shotgun on my morning reading list already! Great stuff.
What other housing/CNU/urbanism/demographics/geography do you have in your feed?
Just Granola Shotgun, StrongTowns, and http://www.newworldeconomics.com.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Wed Aug 24, 2016 4:44 pm

Pointedstick wrote:Just Granola Shotgun, StrongTowns, and http://www.newworldeconomics.com.
What is the URL for the RSS feed for StrongTowns?
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:34 pm

I just copied the main URL into feedly and it finds the feed for me.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:18 pm

Kriegsspiel wrote:I just copied the main URL into feedly and it finds the feed for me.
Well what is it then? The RSS validator I used couldn't find one.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MediumTex » Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:34 pm

I doubt if anyone cares, but this is the street I grew up on and that is the elementary school I went to at the end of the street in the distance.

Driveway in the foreground on the right led to my crib.

Image

Working class west Texas neighborhood near an Air Force base. I didn't know anything about architecture back then, but it was alright. What I did notice back then was cars, and every teenager in the neighborhood seemed to have a GTO, Camaro, or El Camino. The sound of the exhaust systems and classic rock coming from the windows has always stayed with me. Knowing what I know today, living there would be very difficult, but in my state of innocence as a kid it was awesome other than a serious problem with bicycle theft.

That's a mesquite tree on the right with all of the curved branches. We hated mesquite trees because they had thorns that would kill a soccer ball in the blink of an eye. I believe that the native Americans word for the mesquite tree was something like "devil tree" because it was impossible to make arrows from the curved branches. Mesquite trees are like a tree shaped cactus. They can survive on little water and the thorns will make you think twice about messing with them. We had one in our yard and I hated it. Like so many ugly things in the world, however, those trees are survivors, and thus it's hard not to respect them.
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Xan » Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:44 pm

MachineGhost wrote:
Kriegsspiel wrote:I just copied the main URL into feedly and it finds the feed for me.
Well what is it then? The RSS validator I used couldn't find one.
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal?format=RSS
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by Pointedstick » Fri Oct 07, 2016 3:16 pm

Lest anyone think I'm losing my contrarian edge, here's a post about how you can get rich with suburbia! ;D

http://hommelscitadel.com/and-now-for-s ... er-country
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Re: Strongtowns.org Antifragile series

Post by MachineGhost » Fri Oct 07, 2016 3:49 pm

It’s all too clear why parents will spend their last dollar (and their last borrowed dollar) on their kids’ education: In a society with dramatic income inequality and dramatic educational inequality, the cost of missing out on the best society has to offer (or, really, at the individual scale, the best any person can afford) is unfathomable. So parents spend at the brink of what they can afford. By contrast, non-parents are far more likely to actually build up savings. (In cases where parents do manage to find affordable housing in a district with good-quality schools, it can make all the difference.)
True, dat!

But investing in your kids as your retirement plan doesn't explain two things... 1) why do people continue to live in uber expensive coastal cities with utterly shitty schools; and 2) why does increased building density raise prices separate from better schools? Economies of scale are supposed to lower costs, not increase them.

When you combine these together, it's truly a head scratcher (for me).

Incidentally, as I've been looking at real estate investment possibilities, Ohio in the Rust Belt seems to be one of the best places for low-cost housing (specifically Columbus). Houses can cost $20K-$50K there. No joke. Now, maybe they're in a lower income, majority black area, but the point is prices like that are possible without being in the rural boonies miles from nowhere.
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Disclaimer: I am not a broker, dealer, investment advisor, physician, theologian or prophet.  I should not be considered as legally permitted to render such advice!
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