Tag: realestate

Did NIMBYs Save Cities?

When the city is surrounded by suburbs that make new development even harder, that can make those undertakings more attractive.

Once investment is forced back into the city, NIMBYism continues to serve a useful purpose, keeping property values high, providing the city with higher tax revenues that can be invested into schools and improvements. One problem cities like St. Louis or Akron have is that their homes aren’t valuable enough for banks to lend money to the owners and produce very little in tax revenue. Detroit has one of the highest tax rates in the country.

Makes the strange argument that NIMBYism in the suburbs should lead to YIMBYism in the cities, creating a “green belt” around cities. Interesting theory, but I see no evidence that there’s really a YIMBY trend in cities.
2022-06-01: And YIMBYs are extremely ineffective because they pretend.

The notion that resistance to development is driven by rich white people is absurd on its face. It’s a joke, a farce. It’s just not true. YIMBYs have to decide if they want to be an authentic political force, which means accepting complexity and the inevitability of moderation and compromise, or if they’d rather just keep flinging shit on the internet. The latter is certainly more fun. But we desperately need a mature, goal-oriented YIMBY movement. We’re in a housing crisis, and while “just build!” has always been an inadequate philosophy, we must build and build a lot to get out of this housing hell. To do that YIMBYs have to be willing to look working-class Black and brown NIMBYs in the eye and, when appropriate, say “your objection to this project is misguided and wrong.” That’s less fun than dunking on Twitter. But it’s a necessary next stage of their project, if it’s to succeed.

New York Apartment

a fictitious New York City apartment for sale that covers more than 20M m2 and spans the 5 boroughs. Compiled from actual online real estate listings, the artwork collapses the high and low ends of the market, architectural periods and styles, and neighborhoods and affordability into a single space that cumulatively creates a portrait of New York’s living spaces and the real estate market.

Rent-Stabilized EV

Requests for visual descriptions yielded memories of “that old kind of toilet with the oak box,” rooms that were “all rhomboids,” and “the roaches.” Asked what they liked about their place, tenants mentioned “the cross-ventilation,” “the exposed brick,” and “the fact that the bathroom is now in the apartment.” Schiffman elicits stories from people who are both dreading a prospective rent hike and reconsidering the decision to keep a “Mao room.” A neighborhood blog, EV Grieve, runs the answers once a month, along with Schiffman’s photos.

Video Game Real Estate

A number of things apparently gave it away, including small patches of brown trees being rendered around garbage incinerators to represent pollution. While that’s actually quite funny, some residents and internet users criticized the developer for failing to note that the image was a screenshot from the game. Residents in particular seemed to indicate that the image’s use demonstrated the cavalier attitude the developer was taking the project as a whole.

But how does that make any sense? Developers typically include renderings of future projects in pitch material. Those renderings are usually created by graphical artists that specialize in that sort of thing. But if Cities:Skylines is simply good enough at depicting residential neighborhoods that one can create a rendering within the game and use that instead, how is that anything other than pretty neat? Now, in this case, it seems that Lanpro used a neighborhood created in the game by another player. But, again, so what? As Lanpro’s Chris Leeming notes, it’s not like this is the first time a developer has used images from the game to pitch a project.