Your take is much angrier than mine.

Well, I just started taking Adderall. I'm on a performance enhancer.

The thing that may be different in Pittsburgh is that many of the run-down properties are owned by absentee landlords. That may be less so now

What would a steel town be without rentiers.

For an opposing view on house-flippers: During my father's decline, he trashed his house and moved out. Then the scavengers broke in and trashed it further. It was a genuine catastrophe when we moved the last of his stuff out. (Well, actually, we left enormous amounts of his crap, including some pretty cool antique stuff that we just couldn't recover because of the decrepit state of the house.)

My father, in what was probably his last act as a functioning grownup, sold to a flipper and got an entirely reasonable price. The flipper did a beautiful renovation (which we could look at on the real estate site) and had trouble selling because the house became too nice for the borderline neighborhood it was in.

I haven't read the link in the OP yet.

I have a fair amount of sympathy for building code enforcement -- if the violations are real, they should get fixed. If someone who owns a house can't afford to keep it up to code, they need some kind of income support, but the house should still be kept up to code.

Pittsburgh is deeply committed to deferring maintenance. It's part of the local charm, until the water main breaks on your street.

I'm not really opposed to flippers in general, for reasons like mentioned in 5. I'm opposed to using regulations and a lack of liquid assets to strip small amounts of wealth from the poor. And I have mixed feelings about income support for poorer homeowners because that would be one more net transfer to the Baby Boom.

I would also kind of like it if people would stop blocking the sidewalk with their semi-collasped retaining walls and garden borders.

I'm opposed to using regulations and a lack of liquid assets to strip small amounts of wealth from the poor. And I have mixed feelings about income support for poorer homeowners because that would be one more net transfer to the Baby Boom.

Yeah, maybe not income support, but maybe a 'minor home repair for low-income homeowners' fund? Something just seems wrong about letting housing stock deteriorate in a way that's a violation of law and imposes costs on the neighbors, because the homeowners can't afford to maintain it.

Things like that exist - we have them in Heebieville, and Heebieville is way behind the curve on this sort of thing. Making them sufficiently publicized and user-friendly is a semi-disaster, though.

But for the opposite take that these things should be enforced gently, we also had a restaurant inspector come in from Austin with guns blazing and basically turn the town upside down with his lack of understanding of how to bring businesses into compliance within context. Things like shutting down the soup kitchen and all of the fundraising booths that sold food for kids activities at community events. Dropping in on mom and pop restaurants during their lunch rush and making them throw out all the food in their freezer because the temperature was a few degrees high, when they'd just gotten a big batch of food in. Cracking down on local restaurants with outdoor seating that let patrons bring their dogs (on leashes). Yes, these things can be dealt with, but there's a whole lot of relationship building and individual problem-solving that you need to make room for.

The city official in the OP has an obligation to protect poor people from unduly harsh consequences, as long as they're making good faith efforts to come to compliance. I have very little patience for that one-size-fits-all balls and strikes shit.

drop dimes on people with sidewalks that were not passable for wheels

Drop dimes? Am I to understand that sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the owner of the fronted property in Pittsburgh?

Or are we talking about privately-built sidewalks in areas with no official city sidewalks?

I assumed he was talking about shoveling snow.

And that the dimes were a euphemism for craps Moby was dropping out of anger.

Oh, that makes more sense.

I thought you were always and everywhere responsible for the sidewalks in front of your property. I wasn't talking about shoveling.

You mean like repairing the cement? No, that's not standard.

You have stone flags?

Boardwalks?

Remind me to complain about our terrible sidewalks when I get back from some terrible meetings. They were very poorly designed and it is infuriating.

Now that there's disagreement, I don't know what's standard nationwide, but in NYC I'm pretty sure a building is responsible for the sidewalk in front of it. When a tenant fell and broke a hip on a small (really, like half inch) irregularity on the sidewalk in front of our building, the board president (who I was married to at the time) was freaking about the building getting sued, and the building paid to have the bump ground flat.

I wonder if that's an east of the Mississipi/west of the Mississippi thing.

22: In the UK the pavement (sidewalk) is the property and hence responsibility of the local council, as is the road surface. (Motorways and other major roads are handled by London; minor roads and streets are local.) Quite surprised to hear that it's different in the US.

When I was a kid, they paved the streets in front of our house and assessed the homeowners for part of the cost. We didn't even have a sidewalk.

Federalism! Everything's local, nothing's consistent state-by-state. The greatest failure of the nineteenth century was not recognizing after the Civil War that states were no longer sovereign and shouldn't be allowed to have inconsistent laws for no good reason.

Yes, Pittsburgh sidewalks are entirely the responsibility of the property owner. Because of that, they often go to shit. If you walk a lot in Pittsburgh, you learn how to recover from a trip quite quickly. The worst cases are when a tree root is growing under a slab and it lifts it up; there are a few places in Mr. Hick's Neighborhood where adjacent slabs might vary by six inches in altitude. It usually isn't that bad, but in general it serves as a rough socioeconomic status/social-participation indicator.

That the local council owns London pavement is obvious because entire blocks will have their pavement done in the same style (which isn't consist borough-wide). That being said, that doesn't always mean it's walkable (or rollable): sidewalks can be too narrow, they degrade unevenly so water pools, etc.

All the men who stood at Little Round Top were strongly opposed to slavery and inconsistent sidewalk maintaining procedures.

Looks like it even varies by city within some states!

The only benefit of Brexit will be the UK opting out of GDPR and being able to read US local news stories without a firewall again.

Anyway, somebody has been fixing the sidewalks in my end of the neighborhood. I don't know if someone started calling or if people just started worrying about being sued.

The current local narrative on house-flipping is over the Moms for Housing occupation in Oakland. Their supporters are highlighting that there are thousands of vacancies when people are going homeless, which is a good capitalism-sucks and the-law-is-an-ass teachable moment, but then also implying or outright stating these vacancies are the root cause of housing unaffordability and that there is actually no supply problem, which is a pretty shitty message. (The majority of the vacancies are short-term as a home transitions to a new renter or owner, or are places not fit for habitation, or have other good reasons.)

28: Now I'm imagining Jeff Daniel's big pre-battle speech in Gettysburg replaced with one about zoning rules.

In DC sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the city. There's work being done a few doors down from my house right now, and I know the neighbors well enough that I'd know if they were paying for it.

Cassandane is very opposed to flippers because on our block they've taken half a dozen perfectly serviceable single-family homes and turned them into ugly three- or four-unit condos, without adding any new parking or other infrastructure. Calling the developments "ugly" is quantitative; among other things, two of those new condos have visible peeling paint and/or broken bricks and they're less than 3 years old. I'm opposed too, but not as much, because it hasn't affected us personally and out of lingering libertarianish sentiment.

More housing without more parking isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're in a transit accessible area. If my neighborhood had to have a parking space for every housing unit, it couldn't possibly exist.

Yes, down with parking. Guaranteed housing for cars should be last in our social priorities (people with disabilities excepted of course).

Preservation at its finest: New apartment tower forced to be kept vacant for three years of lawsuits because it didn't meet conditions of approval.

35: It's fairly transit accessible but could be better, and apparently the district is currently considering a proposal to cut most of our existing bus routes. We don't currently own a car, but we rent one often enough that parking is annoying, and we'd basically need one if Atossa got into our first or second choice of schools.

Oh god. Parking is such a monstrous juggernaut of a problem. It's fine to say "down with parking!" in order to force public transportation, but sometimes the reality is that the public transportation never materializes and will never materialize on a meaningful scale, and I don't know how to justify eliminating parking if I don't believe that anyone will ever fully fund public transportation.

This is a particular suggestion for this specific problem, rather than a general principle, but let the market decide? The developer thinks they can sell/rent the apartments without dedicated parking, at which point it'll work somehow. Might make the neighborhood (that is, one not served by transit) less attractive, at which point people can either politically motivate to fund transit or move to transit.

Like, parking is a nightmare in my paradise of a transit-accessible neighborhood. My out-of-town boyfriend impulsively drove a couple of hours to see me a few months back (he was on a work trip to NJ, which is closer than where he lives, but still a ways away from me) and then spent a literal hour circling the neighborhood trying to park. Cars mean suffering. But they should, because that's how people are incentivized to not use them.

People deliberately in the city but not the street try to kill transit to make it impossible for poorer people to live there as a way of keeping their own taxes down.

The market will pay ever-increasing numbers of people too little money to be taxi drivers. Or maybe to move private cars between residences and parking somewhere else.

I don't entirely buy it, but the response you'd get in Heebieville is that this externalizes the costs and displaces parking that other entities need. But as you said, it's all in the particulars. The historic downtown has their parking requirements waived (which is good!) but it means that they're paranoid about anything that increases the number of people living downtown without having somewhere to park, because it will prevent people from being able to get to their stores and find street parking. Etc.

In general, I think the fears of lack of parking are overblown, but the situation that I found most difficult was when we were debating the actual city code, and it had to generalize to lots of situations that we might not anticipate.

(Also lots of other issues revising the city code arose that prevented sensible nuance from being introduced. It's amazing that I enjoy this so much.)

I was going to complain about our sidewalks: the fucking city. It took a lot of social capital for them to get the neighbors to give up their easement (which is a chronic problem.) Then they built these awful sidewalks. Everyone's mailboxes used to be at the corners of their driveways. They moved all our mailboxes to be centered on the lawns.

First, the mail carriers now gripe if anyone parks in front of your house, because they've blocked access to the mailbox. (And the mail carriers leave notes of complaint in the mailbox, instead of on the car window, out of some godforsaken counterproductive impulse.) So everyone lost their street parking unless you're conscientious about the time of day, for no good reason.

Second, the city then built these bizarre semi-circles into the sidewalk to go around each mailbox. Like, they centered the mailboxes in the middle of the sidewalks, and then built jutting half circles around each one. It makes it completely unpleasant to push a stroller down the sidewalk, or ride a tricycle, or whatever. (Specifically, people down the sidewalk with their inner tubes from the river all summer long, and their inner tubes pop against the rusty corners of the mailboxes. That's a very specific complaint, though.)

It was all just such an unforced error! Don't move the mailboxes! It kills me.

Like, these are more cumbersome and less appealing than a bump out that would go around a tree. Plus I like trees. That wouldn't annoy me as much. These are just dumb.

We get the mail brought right into the house. The garage at least.

Huh. I guess that's what you get when you're fancy-sidewalk people.

This is a particular suggestion for this specific problem, rather than a general principle, but let the market decide?

OK. So the market decides that people will buy the houses as rental properties and rent them to UMC twentysomethings who have the time and fitness to walk everywhere and disposable income to pay too high a percentage of their income in rent. The tenants move out to the suburbs in three years when they actually want to buy a place themselves and/or start a family. This is what two former neighbors of mine actually did. I can't be sure this is what's in store for the occupants of those half-dozen condos I mentioned because I don't know them very well and can't see the future, but it's consistent with what I know of them. The community becomes looser as people move in and out more and rentiers turn a profit.

This is admittedly not all that bad, and is much better than what the community looked like 10-15 years ago. I wasn't there then, but there were police curfews due to gang activity. On the other hand I'm not asking for changes to current policy either, just for the zoning board to stop granting variances for any condo where the flipper says "please."

I hesitate to focus on parking for all the yay-public-transportation reasons, but as 38 said, public transportation is never a sure thing.

OK. So the market decides that people will buy the houses as rental properties and rent them to UMC twentysomethings who have the time and fitness to walk everywhere and disposable income to pay too high a percentage of their income in rent.

This seems like a weird reaction to me. That is, if zoning requires that every housing unit have its own parking places, the housing units will be more expensive than if they are not required to have their own parking places, right? They'll take up more space and more resources. You can't make housing cheaper by requiring parking, can you?

At which point why are you talking about how UMC the prospective tenants are and how much disposable income they have? Are people who would rent an apartment on your block going to be richer or poorer than people who would buy a single family house with a driveway? Just on first principles, I'd think they'd be poorer.

At which point why are you talking about how UMC the prospective tenants are and how much disposable income they have? Are people who would rent an apartment on your block going to be richer or poorer than people who would buy a single family house with a driveway? Just on first principles, I'd think they'd be poorer.

They might be richer because they are the same exact people but they don't have kids yet.

I don't think younger people with no kids are generally richer than older people with kids. There are certainly childless individuals who are richer than individual parents, but life-cycle-wise, it's not how I'd bet.

There is a huge amount of room for us to use cars more efficiently without a jot more public transportation (even though we need the latter too). According to the Census, in 2018, 118 million workers drove to work alone, while only 14 million carpooled. In 1980, the equivalent figures were 62 million / 19 million.

49: Zoning doesn't currently require that. It's the status quo anyway because most of the neighborhood is single-family rowhouses. In the hypothetical case where these houses are being sold without being converted into condos first, the per-unit sale price is probably higher, true, but there are fewer total units. Based on anecdata, prices without subdivision probably wouldn't be as much higher as you might think. A $1,000,000 single-unit house could turn into one $700K and one $800K condo, it seems.

As I said, I support public transportation, don't own a car, and can't intellectually defend any strong NIMBY position. My neighborhood already is high-density compared to roughly 90 percent of America. I'm just saying, flippers have had an annoying effect on it.

Interesting. Is that an artifact of the price of gas? Cultural norms and exurbs and super long commutes? It's not obvious to me why exurbs and super long commutes wouldn't be consistent with carpooling.

54 to 52.

I don't know how the price of gas compares; I think to some extent people have come to take one car per worker as a quality-of-life issue.

It's not obvious to me why exurbs and super long commutes wouldn't be consistent with carpooling.

Houses are more spread out, and jobs are more spread out? An ideal carpool is one where the members live either right near each other or at least on local streets such that the highway portion of the commute is unaffected, and the same for the job drop-off at the other end. Run through your work friends and see if there are any of them it'd be convenient to carpool with -- I think there's a good chance there aren't any.

I no longer carpool due to childcare irregularities. I didn't mind carpooling but it does have some inconveniences.

(Also my standards for sharing 30 minutes 2x a day in a car with someone are higher than my standards for working with someone. I did have three people that I liked, though.)

Oh, childcare irregularities? Living more spreadout means parents do more chauffeuring, which makes carpooling less workable? 1980, mothers' participation in the workforce would have been much lower, so the commuers wouldn't have been running errands to the same extent they do now.

I wouldn't be surprised if apps to coordinate actual carpools get more popular in the future when driving actually gets harder. (Remember when people pretended that was what TNCs did? I mean without money changing hands, to be clear. The apps already exist.)

Seems plausible.

In my situation, I was carpooling with two people with high school kids who then graduated, and at other times with a childless person. Two of these people were staff on strict 8-5 schedules, which means that they leave Heebieville by 7:15, and it's tough to have the kids dropped off by then. And then I can't get back to Heebieville before 6ish. Only one of ours rides the school bus (due to the dual language program not being housed at the school we're zoned for.) Also when I had kids, I shifted my workout to the 6 am class, which made it hard to carpool on the mornings that Jammies does the drop off.

None of this was insurmountable, but it felt like it burdened Jammies each time.

I guess precarious employment is also a factor - people being called in for shifts at two hours' notice.

And inconsistent schedules, even if they're known a week ahead of time. Carpooling is easier if it doesn't require weekly planning.

63 sounds logical. There's less reliable shift work and more work that changes from week to week. Blame the decline of unions.

Ex recto, I'd also guess that workplaces are more spread out. Less hub-and-spoke, more reverse commutes and suburban office parks. I'd also guess that job searches are more spread out due to the Internet. I know I've read about people taking a scattershot approach to sending out their resumes, because the Internet makes it easier than it used to be. This would result in people working all over.

Also, it's not entirely on-topic, but my job is currently transitioning to another company. Some may remember a mess around 2015/2016 when this resulted me being out of work for two weeks on two separate occasions. (I know I've mentioned it but I can't find a link in TFA to any place summarizing the whole saga.) In mid-2016 I moved to another employer, which that mess was the proximate cause of but not the only reason for. It's happening again. So far it's going a lot more smoothly - I already have a job offer and am not likely to be involuntarily unemployed, for one thing - but it's still a stupid, annoying process.

I'd hazard not just that houses are more spread out, but that employment is too: widely scattered nodes of office parks/malls. And AIUI the oil shocks had a massive cultural impact.

65: that's really frustrating. I'd find the upheaval and unknowns really unpleasant.

Same. I'm in the midst of an internal job transition that's an unambiguously good thing, and that's stressy enough.

Good luck Cyrus. Even though you pwned me, with greater eloquence.

First, the mail carriers now gripe if anyone parks in front of your house, because they've blocked access to the mailbox. (And the mail carriers leave notes of complaint in the mailbox, instead of on the car window, out of some godforsaken counterproductive impulse.)

Wait, they left their complaints about not having access to the mailbox in the mailbox?

The post office enjoys bitter irony now that they aren't allowed to be spree killers anymore.

||

The US State Department's special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism,

70: Yup. They didn't have access in the sense that they couldn't reach the mailbox from their car. They had to get out to put the note in. And as you surely inferred, usually it isn't our car blocking the way.

The inflection point on the American Experiment was probably when postmen stopped walking their routes.

Its difficult to walk and carry a bunch of Amazon boxes.

Especially if you are chewing gum

Seattle postal delivery people walk. They have truly amazing legs, a little tiny joy year-round. They also won't come up your steps if you let them get mossy or leafy or icy, as is proper. Probably saves homeowners from falling on their own steps.

I have been trying to imagine the mailbox sitch with the bump-outs as described and am just boggled. It sounds so expensive and invasive and ADA non-compliant.

It would be in the category of wheelchair-aggravating, not wheelchair-impossible, so I think it's legally compliant. But seriously poorly designed.

||

It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote
all us women
and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone
ever again.

This vote is legally binding.

|>

That's so great.

Women can do that, but when people tell me to put down the phone and I say they need to be less boring first, I'm the asshole.