Research: increased resident participation in city planning produces extreme wealth segregation

Yes/I don’t understand the question.

The article wasn’t about San Francisco (nor was the study) even though the author lives in SF.

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What do you think it going to happen to the single-families? Are you talking about the ones that do or don’t own homes? The ones without are largely leaving and have been for years after being priced out. The ones that haven’t left have rent control.

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…I don’t know, that’s why I said I was interested in what would happen to them…?

The Ars article linked at the bottom of the OP uses SF as an example of what the study talks about, and the study used a data set that almost certainly included data from SF.

I answered your question right after the sentence you quote though.

I meant the homes, not the families. I see the confusion. I used “single-families” metonymically to refer to “single-family homes”.

I don’t understand your question. The houses exist and are worth a lot of money. People pay huge amounts to buy them, even today. Nothing is happening to those homes. They aren’t being demolished, that’s for sure.

It was in the context of talking about changes that occur over the course of decades. Single-family homes depreciate in value because of wear-and-tear and lack of modern amenities*. Also, it’s quite reasonable to suppose that even if the postage stamps these houses are built on cost 1.5 million dollars, they’d be worth even more with tony apartment complexes and hotels on them instead of single-family dwellings.

So I don’t think this:

Is a reasonable prediction on the time scales I’m talking about.

*In this context, this means more like “the expense of bringing the electrical and plumbing up to code”.

Living in the Bay Area as I do, I think I can safely say that the owners of these homes are going to block any apartment development near them. They have for decades and these homes are not depreciating in value (quite the opposite in fact).

People maintain them and improve them because, well, a home here worth less than $800K probably is falling apart already at this point and no one wants a development in their backyard, hence SF’s infamous NIMBYism.

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Indeed – I avoided using the term Wealthy, Rich, 1%, etc., because mere wealth doesn’t even pay the rent in SF. But real estate wealth, i.e. wealthy landowners, are another story. They needn’t be cash rich. Hell, they need only own a modest home in the sunset district to be a real estate millionaire.

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Yup, that’s why SF was used as an example in the Ars article about the research – because that is an example of what the OP is talking about.

Which is what I’d expect short term, and I’m curious about what’s going to happen long term.

Though I suspect even a condemned ruin would be worth more than .8 million. It’s really the real estate that’s valuable, not the pile of sticks on top of it.

What is long term? This has been going on for over 20 years now.

“Several decades” I said. So somewhere between 30 and 50 years would be a reasonable inference, I think.

Part of the problem here is that development is blocked in any part of SF, otherwise other neighborhoods would become more fashionable and probably leech away some of the wealth and NIMBYism in the parts we’re talking about.

It’s getting exhausting to keep up with your many creative ways of misunderstanding me, so don’t be surprised if I disengage soon.

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I’m not creatively misunderstanding you. You weren’t being clear. in what you were talking about.

Have a good time with it.

I was being a little unclear, but it seemed to me you were jumping to conclusions and making matters worse instead of helping to clarify.

But I apologize for the part I played in the confusion.

While you’re probably right, “no bias” is the key undefined term. Someone or some organization has to decide what “no bias” means, write the algorithm, enforce its output, maintain and update it… which are close to being exactly the problems here. The research claim is “cities and states allowed anyone living in an area to participate in writing the local policy (aka algorithm) for urban planning, and the result is that wealthy people had outsized influence and produced more segregated cities which were worse for almost everyone.”

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I can guarantee you that in America’s oldest cities (can’t speak to the experience of other countries with longer histories), rich communities can very easily continue to enforce their preferences on urban planning for at least two to three centuries with no sign of impending change.

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That’s in large part because democracy isn’t all that well suited for actual human beings.

We’ve got plenty of evidence that this is the case, but we keep thinking that WE are the ones that are going to beat the odds.

We definitely need a better system.

Can you please provide the evidence for this? It is exactly what I was trying to figure out.

Indeed, but as Winston Churchill put it,
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

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