The Scarcity of Nice Places

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article talks about the scarcity of nice places. Some thoughts ...


* Lack of amenities is a real and serious problem. Just as one example, greenspace improves health, but poor neighborhoods have much less of it.

* Gentrification is a real and serious problem. The nicer something is, the more it costs, and that forces out people who can't afford it. This problem is so bad that some cities have basically emptied themselves of poor and middle-class people because it costs so much to live there. Given this, improvements read as threats to home and survival, so that makes people fight them. If they can only afford to live in shitty places, then they must defend the shittiness that makes those places accessible to them, because it deters predatory rich people.

* In order to make improvements without displacing current residents, you have to find ways of blocking the hikes in everything from rent and home prices to costs in local stores and restaurants. This is difficult at best and often impossible. One approach is to make citywide improvements; if all areas have working streetlights or intact sidewalks, then they will be no financial distinction because of their presence or lack.

* The article's suggestion that we build lots of nice things and places is valid in that this would reduce competition and thus prices. Building new ones is good. So is revitalizing nearly empty old ones. It's when you try to improve shitty places where all the poor people have crowded in for lack of better options that you run into serious problems. So cities also need to build lots of new affordable housing -- about three times what we currently have in order to cover the demand.

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

*laugh* Go you. That is a much less destructive approach.

Re: Thoughts

[acelightning73]

I was taught, very early in my Wiccan training, that one can use BDSM techniques to raise power for a magical working, or one can simply resort to blood sacrifice and use the departing life energy to power the spell. But I was also taught that for smaller workings, you could raise enough power by ecstatic dancing, sex magick (which can be performed alone, never mind orgies), choral singing, and even drugs. (Think of the legends about how the Witches of the British Isles kept the Spanish Armada away from the beaches of England, and magically prevented Hitler from invading, and how some of the older Witches deliberately gave up their lives in arduous working (often performed outdoors, skyclad, in typical English weather) in order to make the magic as powerful as possible. It worked, in both cases.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yes, those can work. And a willing sacrifice is always MUCH more powerful than an unwilling victim.

Re: Thoughts

[(Anonymous)]

My take a third option suggestion : remember that story about the guy who traveled across the border every day with saddlebags full of hay? And it turns out he was smuggling donkeys? (Or a kid with bikes, or a guy with a wheelbarrow of rubbish...)

Take the city 'away' one bit at a time. Ask the emigrants to smuggle bricks out in their bags.

It'll take longer, but it'll be less noticable, make the bad cost seamless worth it, and you wont have people in favor of the system calling you "violent, destructive [slur]s."*

*Seriously, I've been trying to soften some aquaintences' attitudes towards recent social movements, and the biggest/most effective counterargument is "I'm not supporting vandals/arsonists!"