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The contemporary social planner seems to favor all sorts of peoples’ movements—except for the kind that involves automobiles, driven by citizens away from dense urban cores into the suburbs that they can afford. Today, Joel Kotkin (author of The Human City and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism) joins the podcast to discuss the new class of urbanists who brim with ideas for a city that won’t work for the people meant to occupy them.
Plus, Steve, James and Charlie quibble over Tuesday’s debate, and they reflect on yet another 9/11 anniversary.
– Soundclip from this week’s open: Donald Trump and David Muir from ABC’s Trump/Harris debate.
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Has anyone ever explained why Peter never, and Rob seldom, show up for their podcast any longer? I love Charles and Steve, but they also have their own podcasts to manage. We seem to have slipped into a stealth regime change…..
Peter’s had a very busy summer, and Rob just started his divinity school studies. We’re working out details for the future of the show. They’ll be back on soon enough to give updates.
When you see strange ways of living in a big city, you can be sure that lots of complicated regulations make it so.
”Get off my lawn.” Apartment block, Shibuya, Tokyo
He almost literally said that the GOP should drop all the abortion threats because the rest of the platform makes so much sense.
Set it at 11 weeks and forget about it for the next four presidential cycles.
“Tollbooth companies”. That is absolutely top-notch analysis. It’s destroying the country, almost.
This is good timing for the topic of the show. There’s probably something wrong with it and if not, it’s wrong because it’s coming from Trump.
If your problem is affordable housing in Pennsylvania building new homes on federal land in Montana does what?
Uh, can somebody explain to me how that’s going to affect the financial system? We have had a policy against anything being affordable since 1913.
I’ve been looking at Tokyo and other big cities in Japan, and one thing I found out is that Tokyo has very loose zoning regulations, and that there is a mixture of commercial and residential properties all over the city. The result is you can live just about anywhere and find a grocery store, or convenience store within a 15 minute walk. And that goofy looking apartment pictured above is an example of that.
Of course bombing the city to ashes in 1945 may have had something to do with it too. They were able to start from scratch.
One thing I’ve noticed looking at the West, whether it’s the proposal in Oxford, England to charge a fee if you drive outside your neighborhood, and similar proposals in the U.S., is they don’t mention they are actually looking at Asian cities as templates for the vision they are trying to impose on us.
By the way, the Japanese government has a program that pays Tokyo residents to move out of the city and move to their smaller towns as they are being abandoned.
I was born 15 years after the Perl Harbor, and I was 44 years old on 9/11/2001.
Culturally, I would say that Perl Harbor and World War II had more of an impact on me than 9/11.
The fact that I was living in Alaska during 9/11 might have something to do with it.
When the second plane crashed into the Twin Towers, it was 5:03am in Alaska. My alarm was a Bose radio that was tuned into NPR’s Morning Edition. I think it was 5:30am when the alarm went off, though it may have been 5am (the first plane would have already crashed into the towers by then). So I was enduring my usual morning grogginess and didn’t realize right away that something consequential was going on.
Just that Morning Edition with Bob Edwards wasn’t doing its usual thing. I’ll add that where I lived didn’t have cable, and I didn’t have a good television signal either.
I never watched 9/11 on television live and that day was a normal work day for me. So again, I never watched it on TV even later on.
And the media quickly blacked out replays of people jumping out of the towers. To this day, I’ve only seen still pictures of those happenings. And frankly I haven’t tried to find those videos.
So my experience of that day does not have the same impact that most American adults experienced. And I also find that even within the U.S., the farther someone lived from New York, the less the impact emotionally.
I’m that way with the Oklahoma City bombing. Missed it entirely due to pulling a 24-hour shift at work doing a software install. First I heard of it was when I saw the headline on the newspaper the next morning when I stopped for gas. And then I was too tired to watch any TV coverage, just went home and went to bed.
It’s true that we need to be building new cities rather than just trying to stuff more people into the existing ones. But while cities used to pop up organically at road crossings, river bends, etc, now people don’t want to live anywhere without water lines, sewer lines, high-speed internet etc. So a good deal of building-up/out needs to be done first before you can get people to want to live there.
Another thing that Joel Kotkin mentioned was converting office buildings to apartments.
He probably knows more about this than I do, but my understanding is it’s not easy. Elevator placement is one problem. But the biggest problem is bathrooms, and the plumbing required to provide each apartment with one.
In an office building there are less, though larger bathrooms. They are centralized. And getting well off Americans to move into apartments where they have to take a shower and do other things in a centralized area isn’t going to cut it.
It’s one thing to provide dorm or barracks living to young adults in college or the military. Older adults that can afford living in the suburbs aren’t going to bite.
They’ll probably end up just turning them into “homeless shelters” anyway. Seems like it’s already happening.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible idea unless you pay zero for the building.
And/or when there are huge buckets of government cash sloshing around for such “projects,” as there is now.
cEntRal pLAnNing MakEs oUr liVEs beTTEr
You might very well think so. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Now if Lucretia is part of the podcast team, it will be an overt regime change