Making cities worth living in

[Imran Siddiqui]

Even the trendy neighborhoods in these cities are broken -- they can thrive by appealing to a very small sliver of the market but can't answer to the desires of the other 90%.

That's true. The trendy neighborhoods in Atlanta, for instance, are the areas with loud nights and heavily weighed to single, and gay, populations. When people think about having kids, they think about moving to the suburbs.

Not saying that they aren't nice areas in the morass (and plenty of the city of Atlanta is morass), but they aren't really family areas.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by DanS
Everyman



Wimp!

(They moved the prostitutes several blocks over so it's almost Disneyland nowadays.)

It has been a few years....

[MRT144]

Originally posted by snoopy369


I would not say that at all. At least up to very recently, Chicago has been very much more sprawling than most east coast cities. Chicago proper (city limits) is not that large of a city at all... IIRC only a couple million in the city limits, and it's pretty large city limits. Except on the lakefront, not much in the way of highrise buildings the way NYC has them... though I don't know other EC cities, i'm led to understand their density is rather much higher.

compare chicago to seattle or SF in terms of infrastructure and density. chicago is more like NYC than it is like SF or Seattle. for instance chicago has half the density of NYC, seattle has half the density of chicago. yet chicago has many mass transit improvements that are distinctly lacking from west coast cities. it has multistory apartments that go over 7 stories unlike vast swaths of seattle.

also consider that chicago's city limits is about 1/4th the population of the metro area, where as seattle city limits is a little larger than 1/8th. nyc is roughly a little less than half.

[Kontiki]

San Fran is considerably more dense than Chicago.

[MRT144]

Originally posted by Kontiki
San Fran is considerably more dense than Chicago.

3k per square mile more.

chicago is also almost 6 times as large in regards to land.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by VetLegion
How are they subsidized?

transportation subsidies, housing subsidies, farming subsidies, etc. Following WWII, the Feds made a concerted effort to create the suburbs. While the GI Bill as the main weapon in their arsenal, today it is things like the mortgage deduction, highway subsidies, etc. While the cities do get subsidized, they tend to be in the form of public services, like transit and schools. As the subsidies to suburban home owners tend to be in money not spent whereas subsidies to cities tend to be as grants to large groups. The later causes resentment while the former is seen as a right.