Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I would make city policies much tougher on its land.
1.) Remove all highways and freeways from the city
2.) own all of the real estate of rail lines that come into city territory and make them for subway/metro use so people in the city would have more affordable and more accessible transportation.
This would allow places like Manhattan to be way less congested with office spaces and force suburbanites to build communities if office parks of their own since they despise the cities so much despite depending on them for income.
How do you think American cities would differ if such things became true?
1. Change zoning and development strategies to prioritize the pedestrian, biker, transit user more than the automobile.
2. Heavy investments in pedestrian, bike, transit infrastructure and rethinking how cars work in big cities.
3. Overhaul zoning to allow dense mixed-use development along transit corridors. I know this already exists in some places, but the zoning/implementation is often half-a$$ed and met with fierce resistance (which I don't understand).
4. Invest more in architectural / historical protection. There are a handful of US cities that contain some amazing architecture, yet these buildings meet the wrecking ball and are replaced with crap. City leaders should majorly incentive adaptive re-use (and overbuilds) instead of demolition.
5. Some sort of cap or regulation on commercial rents to allow retailers to expand (specifically small businesses). There is so much commercial vacancy in American cities.
6. Increase the design standards and make it financially possible to building beautiful buildings. Not many great looking buildings built nowadays...
I have many more ideas, those are just a few big ones.
I'm not an economist, I have no idea what economists think about what the unintended consequences would be, but I would really love to set some restrictions on buying up condos and houses for speculation. That seems pretty clearly net-negative for the average person. It's a lot worse in Canada than it is here but it still feels like a big factor in the unaffordability crisis.
Besides that, it may not be the sexiest option but I'd like more cities to encourage the construction of micro-units. We have them in the Seattle area, and renting a small basic room for $1050/mo was the only way I survived when I came here making $57k. San Francisco at least has a lot less of those.
Follow the lead from Minneapolis which has banned SFH in their zoning codes.
Therefore, under no coincidence, the inflation rate there has been 1.8% compared to NYC and Boston both between 4-5% and some Florida/Sunbelt cities like Miami and Atlanta, surpassing 8%.
I'm not an economist, I have no idea what economists think about what the unintended consequences would be, but I would really love to set some restrictions on buying up condos and houses for speculation. That seems pretty clearly net-negative for the average person. It's a lot worse in Canada than it is here but it still feels like a big factor in the unaffordability crisis.
Besides that, it may not be the sexiest option but I'd like more cities to encourage the construction of micro-units. We have them in the Seattle area, and renting a small basic room for $1050/mo was the only way I survived when I came here making $57k. San Francisco at least has a lot less of those.
Yes despite the premise of this thread being a little silly; I would like to see more municipalities and states take on legislation to mitigate the chokehold that large corporations buying up residential units has put on housing supplies all over the country.
Millions of people, buyers and renters, have been completely priced out of living in their communities and while the "G word" is often decried as the main culprit....it is far from just a casual byproduct of the free-market.
Therefore, under no coincidence, the inflation rate there has been 1.8% compared to NYC and Boston both between 4-5% and some Florida/Sunbelt cities like Miami and Atlanta, surpassing 8%.
Or that it could be from stagnant population growth in the City of Minneapolis in recent years.
Besides that, it may not be the sexiest option but I'd like more cities to encourage the construction of micro-units. We have them in the Seattle area, and renting a small basic room for $1050/mo was the only way I survived when I came here making $57k. San Francisco at least has a lot less of those.
Even small units appear to be incredibly expensive to build in SF.
A recently constructed building in San Francisco made up of 145 small studios about 260 square feet had a per-unit cost of nearly $400K, and that was considered cheap.
I would make city policies much tougher on its land.
1.) Remove all highways and freeways from the city
2.) own all of the real estate of rail lines that come into city territory and make them for subway/metro use so people in the city would have more affordable and more accessible transportation.
This would allow places like Manhattan to be way less congested with office spaces and force suburbanites to build communities if office parks of their own since they despise the cities so much despite depending on them for income.
How do you think American cities would differ if such things became true?
How would removing the West Side Highway and FDR Drive make Manhattan less congested? Unless you're saying that they should be replaced by rail lines. And even then, I don't think it would make any appreciable difference to the congestion of Manhattan, other than along the riverfronts.
A lot of the things I would change about American cities relates to how they are governed, not how they're built. But in the urban planning context, I would work more to optimize traffic flow. And by "traffic" I mean not just cars, but buses, bicycles, and pedestrians as well. As an example, in the core downtown areas, I would have separate signal phases for vehicle traffic and pedestrians, to reduce the conflicts between these two "modes."
I would make city policies much tougher on its land.
1.) Remove all highways and freeways from the city
2.) own all of the real estate of rail lines that come into city territory and make them for subway/metro use so people in the city would have more affordable and more accessible transportation.
This would allow places like Manhattan to be way less congested with office spaces and force suburbanites to build communities if office parks of their own since they despise the cities so much despite depending on them for income.
How do you think American cities would differ if such things became true?
The Eastside and Westside highways are on there perimeter of NYC. Without highways or freeways, how does delivery trucks supply cities with retail products and food supplies? What about people traveling to and from a city with suitcases or a couple of toddlers? What about moving vans?
MetroNorth owns its tracks/land. I google and the LLRR owns its track/land too.
New Jersey is one of the most important states in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The state is home to 14 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S., and the New Jersey pharmaceutical industry generates over $120.9 billion in revenue each year, with 63,415 jobs directly linked to the industry.
Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in NJ - Johnson & Johnson, Prudential Financial, Merck, PBF Energy, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Becton Dickinson, Automatic Data Processing, Avis Budget Group, Quest Diagnostics, Public Service Enterprise Group, Burlington Stores, Campbell Soup, Zoetis,
So that's been done already!
When business employers leave cities, there is less foot traffic so retailers and restaurants have less customers. The result wouldn't be much different than people working from home.
Quote:
Dobroski said "people are no longer commuting to work in droves" — impacting businesses that used to benefit from people heading to work.
"We know small businesses have really been hit hard in metropolitan areas where used to have thousands of employees go into work every day and buy lunch or buy local goods," Dobroski said.
Ozimek said, "downtown areas, especially in large expensive cities, are feeling economic adjustment costs from remote work."
Remote work has impacted different kinds of retail establishments, especially clothing businesses
Remote work has also changed demand for some brick-and-mortar stores. A JPMorgan Chase Institute report used credit and debit card data of a few cities and their outlying suburbs from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021 to look at changes in growth for different kinds of business establishments.
Grocery establishments and restaurants were the two kinds of businesses that were above their fourth-quarter 2019 level by the last quarter of 2021. Clothing establishments were furthest from getting back to the level in the fourth quarter of 2019 among the different kinds of businesses that were part of the report.
"Neighborhoods with more exposure to the adoption of work-from-home lost more establishments" according to that report. "The differential recovery of establishments across retail goods and services provides evidence of such a shift in demand consistent with WFH habits."
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
