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Obama to create a plan to destroy excess housing?


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2009 Jun 12, 12:33pm   5,018 views  32 comments

by mdovell   ➕follow (0)   💰tip   ignore  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html

I had a feeling eventually it would come to this.

But I have to wonder how do you "return the land to nature" without considering the enviromental aspects of this...

#politics

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12   elliemae   2009 Jun 13, 9:31am  

Bap say:
"nails pulled, straightened & boxed..."
(insert laughing emoticon here, that's funny!)

13   nope   2009 Jun 13, 10:54am  

I love how some people didn't bother to read the article and just want something else to bitch at Obama about.

Suburbia is simply not maintainable. The kind of sprawl that it creates is just too expensive to support.

Before the automobile was invented, most cities were surrounded by fields, orchards, and forests. Today they're surrounded by cheap houses, strip malls, and miles upon miles of asphalt.

Cities like Flint have two options:

- Let the city rot and have everyone abandon it, leaving a blighted 35 square mile wasteland.
- Prune the city down to something maintainable, where population density is high enough to support businesses and infrastructure is efficient.

The city isn't going to 'come back'. The midwest as a whole will turn back to the farmland that it was before the industrial revolution. The only policies that you might possibly put in place that could 'save' the area are ones that would make American labor costs comparable to that of China -- which would mean a forced drop in living standards. Even then, those jobs still won't come back because most of them are being automated.

14   mdovell   2009 Jun 14, 12:42am  

Planning and maintaining a city sometimes doesn't happen on a logical basis. I'll give three examples

1) in my town a donutshop moved out and another one moved in. Well this new one put in a drive thru...ok. Well you have the traffic that goes into the drive thru which when it exists can go left or right. HOWEVER there's also athe parking area and some people try to leave that way and do the same. Meanwhile there's a gas station next to it, a gas station across the street and a 711 next to the gas station across the street. Factoring in a red light and this can be a utter mess on the weekends easily.

2) A town near me has all these small shops and a small rotary (some call them roundabouts) well the trouble is this...you have lights that control traffic. State law mandates you have to stop for those on the crosswalk. So in driving in at a given point I have to look behind me for those that might enter, look to the right for another entry way, look ahead of me because traffic might have stopped due to the red light, look at the crosswalk because someone might be crossing, looking at the sides because that's where the parking spots are!

3) One town that has a bit of money never really planned traffic at all. There's a state route going though so they put ALL the businesses nearly right by it. Now many are smaller ones and might not have parking lots that large but here's the other problem. There's an industrial parks near by and resturants...guess what happens nearly every day around noon. Gridlock. We're talking outright ten minutes to move a mile gridlock. Is it that much to say "No I'm sorry it's nice but we can't afford the extra traffic putting something else in"

15   justme   2009 Jun 14, 12:59am  

Bap33,

as good-natured parody, that works for me as well.

16   elliemae   2009 Jun 14, 2:31am  

In my town there's a round-about with planters in the middle, and planters dividing the roads leading up to it. I called my city and told them that I couldn't see over the plants because my small car, when combined with the slope of the roads leading up to it, simply isn't high enough. I received a nice letter back from the planning department telling me that the plants are trimmed to a height that is sufficient for the intersection (18") and there is NO risk of an accident due to the plants.

About four months later there was a serious accident at that intersection, and the man who wrote me the letter was quoted as saying that there had been no complaints received about the height of the plants and the planters. The newspaper showed a photo of the plants at the time, and they were well above the 18" that the city said the specs were. The printed the name of the accident victim's attorney in the article, and I sent them the original letter that I had received from the City. I seriously received a nice thankyou note from the lawyer, and the City ended up settling the accident claim.

The problem with razing homes and suburban sprawl is that at some point someone will have to decide who moves where and it's not always fair. Also, if someone lives in a home that isn't maintained, what will happen if they're moved to a nice place and they don't maintain that?

Altho I disagree with Bap33 on many, many things, on this we see eye-to-eye.

17   justme   2009 Jun 14, 2:39am  

Ellimae,

The height of the plants was probably designed/inspected by someone driving an SUV :-)

You know, the I-like-to-sit-high-up type, afflicted with the usual SUV smugness.

[I think it about time we start calling out and labeling the smugness of SUV drivers, since they seem to be trying to divert attention from themselves by calling Prius drivers smug.]

18   elliemae   2009 Jun 14, 3:06am  

Nah, what actually happened was that they measured 18" from the roadbed on the high side of the road. There's a 2 foot drop on the other side. Dumb,dumb,dumb...

19   justme   2009 Jun 14, 3:29am  

Kevin,

How about if a city de-incorporated some of the outlying areas, That would be a revolutionary concept. Or maybe a whole suburb could de-incorporated. Or maybe some "blighted" area in the middle (only kidding).

I'm not proposing this as a serious solution. There would be all kinds of problems in practice. But I think it could serve as a thought experiment that can be used to frame some of the discussion

20   elliemae   2009 Jun 14, 3:45am  

justme:
Cities can incorporate areas whenever they want, regardless of the resident's wishes. Can they de-incorporate an area the same way?

21   justme   2009 Jun 14, 3:53am  

elliemae:

I have no idea whether this is possible. I would think the affected region would have a vote on whether they would agree to secede.

There must be some level of standardization in city charters?

22   elliemae   2009 Jun 14, 4:33am  

I would hope so. All I know is that I pay about $400/year less in taxes than the next town, and they have no better public services than my area.

23   grywlfbg   2009 Jun 14, 5:38am  

justme:

Cities can incorporate areas whenever they want, regardless of the resident’s wishes. Can they de-incorporate an area the same way?

I guess they could but unincorporated areas are the domain of the county and so would have to be supported by them. My guess is the county is broke too. So police, fire, and roads would come from the county. What about utilities? From my experience people in unincorporated areas buy water and power from the neighboring town and run septic and propane or dig a well. But if the town can't afford to service them now, how are they going to do it with even less revenue?

24   grywlfbg   2009 Jun 14, 5:44am  

So, uh, it’s better to bulldoze housing than to let homeless people live in it for free?

I'm a pretty liberal person but I think article has a great idea. Sure, we have homeless people that could use the shelter. But the problem is that the cities can't afford to service these homes. What happens when the sewer breaks down? Roads? Police? Fire? Schools? These areas would become crime-infested unsanitary death traps which would not solve the problem which is getting these people into safe stable homes with good schools to break the cycle of poverty.

25   mdovell   2009 Jun 15, 1:49am  

I think the best way to somewhat see this might be what happened after Katrina. I'm not pro police in many things but I have to sympathize with them here. Just think of some of the logistics. If no gas stations are around do you bother making arrests knowing you might run out of gas and be stuck with a criminal? If there's a house on fire that surrounded by water how do you know there isn't anyone in there...say no one answers the phone...do you bother to send the fire dept by air and put it out and then ems?

Going a bit beyond katrina look at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Cold_Storage_Warehouse_fire this is why I think that most abandoned buildings need to be torn down. It can become a magnet for homeless people (not putting down on the homeless) but all it takes is an accident to make things spiral out of control.

26   TechGromit   2009 Jun 15, 2:17am  

So, uh, it’s better to bulldoze housing than to let homeless people live in it for free?

Unfortantely a good number of homeless are hooked on drugs. These houses will become crack houses, it's not like saving them for the homeless will encourge the people moving into them to take care of the properties.

I can understand part of the logic there. You raze all the houses on XYZ Street, cut off all the utilities and demolish the street itself, police will not have to patrol there, garbage collectors will not have to pick up garabe there, etc. Thereby saving the city money in the long run. But if the police do not go there, does it not become a lawless area? Any vacant area, close to a major city, it going to attact homeless people, they will build shelters out of scraps of wood and make a Hovertown there. Anyone who thinks the area is going to go back to nature so deer and the bunny rabbits can live there is de-illusional. Why not just abandon that part of town without knocking everything down, it would be a lot cheaper. You could put up signs, "Now entering the restricted zone, proceed at own risk!"

27   justme   2009 Jun 15, 2:46am  

Not to anyone in particular:

Seriously, I think there is waaaaay to much hysteria about some empty houses.

For chrissakes, the incremental cost of driving past that house in a garbage truck or a police car is very minimal.
Just leave them alone, already, or let people homestead them (get them for free, essentially). This country was built on homesteading. Give people a chance. Jeez.

28   theoakman   2009 Jun 15, 3:30am  

oh god...this is just like FDR's plan to burn crops and slaughter livestock while Americans were starving. I really don't advocate the welfare state but if you are going to refuse to allow buyers to buy the homes at low prices, then just friggin give them away to the poor. Don't bulldoze them. They are destroying what little wealth the housing bubble actually produced.

29   justme   2009 Jun 15, 3:49am  

A big amen to that. Oakman. This stuff is making me religious.

30   waterbaby   2009 Jun 16, 2:56pm  

what a bunch of over-reacting to whats been called 'urban blight' for decades.
there is more crap housing than there are inhabitants for such.
if its such desirable RE why havent you bought any of it at such cheap prices...

urban areas sprawled outwards to suburban areas, leaving rings of empty old broken bldgs, both comm and res, within the inner rings.
you can see this most anywhere...worse in the west due to such new 'booming' but certainly in the east due to age, simply.

in the 80's they did much the same thing in many an area.
...cleaned it off the map and rebuilt.
they called them 'developers'.
wallst types....

at some point someone has to clean up the crap they leave behind.

31   mdovell   2009 Jun 18, 11:26am  

I haven't bought any because it's NOT for sale. Not all of this is even in urban areas. There was a man in my town in his 80's. Decades ago the house looked fine...then gradually the children left...then gradually the number cars in the yard added up (no fence) then some boards went up on the windows. Eventually they found that there was significant sewerage problems and the place was found unfit to live. It took a long time for this to happen. Now there's a new house and new people there.

There are plenty of cases of blight but until they break a law then there's nothing you can do about it.

32   cashmonger   2009 Jun 19, 8:53am  

Bap33's post on June 13th, 2009 at 3:48 pm is classic. I nominate that "Best of..." ala Craigslist fame.

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