#kowloon manifesto

[centrally-unplanned]

Though actually, cute thing: there are "standard" photos of the Kowloon Walled City that are always passed around, and they tend to be the most modern ones due to quality & availability reasons:

But these are from a unique period in its history, namely the end of its history - right before it was demolished. However, it wasn't the only thing to go; its removal was part of a much wider project to level and redevelop the entire area of the Kowloon City District. It just happened to be the last part to go due to its size and legal complexity. That "island of concrete in a desert" look is essentially a fiction:

It was really the heart of a dense urban ecology of low-income development that had emerged over 30+ years in the postwar era.

And you can see how integrated it was with its surroundings, the "walls" were after all purely a legal concept:

The common photos imo are also popular because they heighten the dystopian aspects of the city, making it appear like a tumor infecting the area. Once you see it in its proper context its place as an organic part of the city is much more clear.

[righthandarm-man]

sorry about your boyfriend. the city upzoned him and now he's a low rise apartment with a ground floor grocery store. yeah he's really close to mass transit and he's housing way more people than he ever could as a single family mcmansion. yeah, it's a huge boon to the surrounding community

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

Knuckle tats that say KOW LOON but all on one hand, because we can always build denser

[irradiate-space]

Reason doesn't often flatter my biases this blatantly, but, goodness, I am flattered. Blaming the Great Recession on zoning!

The conventional view of the Great Recession is that excess demand for housing—caused by some combination of loose monetary policy, government-subsidized credit, and unscrupulous lenders—inflated a bubble that inevitably had to pop. Leftists, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives can all find something to agree with in this theory.

But it's wrong, according to Kevin Erdmann, a senior affiliated scholar at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Erdmann has advanced a heterodox theory that this century's most serious economic contraction before the pandemic can be traced back to zoning laws in the most in-demand cities.

In a 2020 paper on the origins of the recession, Erdmann and economist Scott Sumner argue that monetary policy was not exceptionally loose in the lead-up to the financial crisis and that new residential investment was not high by historic standards. Most of the toxic assets and bad mortgages originated after housing prices had already started to decline.

Erdmann and Sumner also point out that prices were increasing fastest in coastal "closed access" cities like New York and San Francisco, where the economy was booming but restrictive zoning regulations prevented much new housing from being built. The result was an out-migration of lower-income people to "contagion cities" in Nevada, Florida, Arizona, and other places where home building was less regulated. Erdmann and Sumner lay the housing crisis directly at the feet of NIMBYs—"not in my backyard" activists who opposed the construction of new housing.

"The NIMBY phenomenon that led to housing scarcity in closed-access cities induced households to migrate from large multi-unit buildings in dense coastal cities to single-family homes in cheaper cities," write Erdmann and Sumner. "The primary source of demand was households looking to economize on housing consumption by moving out of the expensive coastal cities."

Think of Mark and Patricia McCloskey as a class of activist. The McCloskeys of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City tried to protect their views, their property values, and their relatively low-traffic streets with zoning laws that banned apartments across whole swaths of the city. Lack of supply met huge demand, hiking prices in the process. Middle-class people were effectively priced out of urban apartments because those apartments were simply never built.

So instead of living in Los Angeles and New York City, middle- and lower-income people moved to Las Vegas and Phoenix. That influx of demand saw prices spike and builders respond by throwing up lots of new homes. The glut of new homes in inexpensive Sun Belt cities wasn't just the result of an overinflated financial system. It was a response to real demand from cost-burdened coastal emigrants.

All this had massive macroeconomic consequences. Erdmann and Sumner argue the Great Recession was ultimately caused by federal officials misinterpreting rising home prices as a bubble rather than the result of a real shortage. So they tightened monetary and lending policy, and that tipped a rational building boom into an artificially induced recession.

It's an out-of-the-box theory that deemphasizes or disputes many common libertarian diagnoses of the Great Recession that center on an overly profligate Federal Reserve or on reckless financial institutions banking on an inevitable federal bailout. But it does explain how the country was able to go from a supposed glut of housing oversupply to a shortage of somewhere between 4 million and 20 million homes. The glut was overinterpreted—and the shortage never went away.

When economic growth did come back in the 2010s, in the form of a "return to the city" movement, zoning restrictions that were already tight became positively strangling.

And:

If you take seriously the idea that politics is primarily downstream of material factors, you might blame zoning for a lot of the sheer craziness of American politics in the last decade too.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

I feel like people on here talk to you the way they would an especially precocious toddler— does that bother you?

I'm not sure if "especially precocious toddler" is the best comparison but you make it sound really flattering

[justinforprez]

A walkable cities, functional transit system and zoning relaxation in US cities would save the average person $16400/year from just travel expense and food (it would take time for us to realize these savings and it would likely be realized through costs not increasing over a decade)

Potentially more with HSR between cities. And a cheaper route cross the country would enable greater social mobility as women and poor brown people would feel more comfortable leaving their safety nets. Right now only well-off single white males (such as myself) can reliably accept a job offers 3k miles away from their families and feel safe doing so

We should also just nationalize ownership of rail infrastructure so we can open the train routes and reduce the cost of goods. It current costs 50% more to move a container across the country via train than by truck because you get charged crazy fees when changing from Union Pacific, BASF, and norfolk (up to $20k from LA to Boston just for transfer to another train)

Another $2500 in healthcare because that small amount of walking means. A lot for your health

Plus more opportunities for millionaires to run successful small shops and for their children to squander than wealth allowing for another to be successful

Less tinnitis and asthma

Less reliance on plastic money and more cold hard cash that the govt can’t track

Farm to table would again be possible for many, if not most, restaurants

Its hard to really estimate the economic, cultural, health, safety, and other benefits with having several hundred years of experience and a bunch of PhDs

But I don’t care about that, I just want to walk to a fucking grocery store

I just want to be able to get an onion without my car

Out of toilet paper? Just walk 5 min and get some

[gudamor]

A rooftop garden in Chicago has thousands of native plants—and a mission

Wow that's awesome!

The garden isn't open to visitors because the roof can't be fully fenced due to historic preservation

Building preservation regulations must be destroyed

[floatyhands]

Okay, as a Hongkonger, I am very confused about "The Kowloon Manifesto", because in my mind, the Kowloon Walled City's living environment is primarily associated with lack of health and safety regulation, not walkable urban density. This is especially since urban density more or less defines the vast majority of Hong Kong, and is very much not what I associate with liveability? Like, sure, much of the crime and dangerousness of the Walled City is exaggerated by the media for the purpose of cool gang flicks, but it was nonetheless a slum of perpetually leaking pipes, narrow alleyways, and dankness, controlled by gangs?

[tmorganart]

I saw an ad for this, unfortunately it only applies to Nevada but I want my state to implement something similar.

If you're in Nevada, here's the link

https://www.snwa.com/rebates/wsl/index.html?utm_medium=display&utm_source=ttd&utm_campaign=Business_22-23&utm_content=girl_creative

[catgirltoes]

No the one place I really truly want to live is a small apartment in a dense city where I can walk for my groceries and take transit to cool places and meet my friends. My greatest desire is urban character.

[max1461]

So I'm not a NorCal resident, but I do have family up there and I visited SF a lot as a kid, so I am somewhat invested in the broad wellbeing of the city. And I've seen a lot of discourse lately about how crime rates and homelessness rates have increased drastically there recently, but it's hard to find any reliable discussion. I don't even know if these claims are true, really, I've even heard conflicting stories on that.

But, whatever the case, I've found it difficult to find any thoughtful discourse on the city's issues; everything around it is very ideological.

There's of course the people who use it as an indictment of west-coast liberalism, like that article that went around here last summer. Well, I read that article, and they didn't propose a single concrete mechanism by which these liberal policies supposedly lead to crisis. There is of course a general.. vibe expressed in these discussions, that the city is "allowing" homelessness by being "too soft" on homeless people, but—even disregarding the cruelty of that perspective—it doesn't seem to be backed up by any actual explanation of how this effect operates. It's all frothing disgust (framed as being aimed at either the situation or the people themselves, depending on rhetorical posture) with little substance.

On the other hand, you've got people whose ideological stake is in the NIMBY/YIMBY debate, and the two sides of that that I see represented on here are the ultra-anti-development maintain-neighborhood-character-at-any-cost NIMBYs and the kowloon manifesto bulldoze-the-pyramids-and-put-up-a-skyscraper YIMBYs, both of whom I think are straightforwardly wrong in a way basically not worth engaging with.

And so frankly, not to sound like an Enlightened Centrist, but I just want some some even-handed policy wonk to come a long and give me a sense of what the hell is actually going on in San Fransisco and what sorts of concrete policy changes might be likely to improve the situation.

[centrally-unplanned]

In some local DC urbanism news, Georgetown University is doing a remodel of one of its dorms, Henle, so it can be bigger and fit more students. Yay! But of course, that means the existing dorm will be out of commission for a bit, so the students need to live elsewhere. Which means they will rent apartments, basements, townhouses, whatever, in the local area, maybe even spur a little construction, for a few years and then things return to normal.

Hahahaha fuck no This Is America - the local resident housing committee had 100% veto power over the multi-billion dollar institution's ability to remodel its own dormitories, so they were only able to get approval by banning all juniors (the dorm's typical residents) from living in a 'neighborhood zone':

"Students cannot live inside this border" which, hilariously, includes the entirety of the university campus itself. Just amazing that this map exists, printed on an official website. Students will have to live outside the zone and commute to campus, and the university runs its own dedicated bus service to some key apartment hotspots since public transport isn't reliable or expansive enough. The number of affected students, will, of course, outnumber the entire local population of neighborhood property owners. Because democracy!

In unrelated news, NIMBYism Delenda Est.

[gpuzzle]

re: Kowloon Manifesto (or a supreme procrastination rant)

I've been doing some reading on the Kowloon Manifesto concept from my boy @centrally-unplanned (shoutouts homie), and my personal take on it is that the thing with the Kowloon Walled City was that it never had any real services such as trash, and the planning was haphazard at best, but people still had plants, and if you were to do a Kowloon Walled City by design, what you would do would be to set up gardens in that area, and gardens that could ideally fulfill the roles of both landscaping/gardening so as to be aesthetically pleasing, and also as a food source, because this is actually all possible thanks to permaculture and agroforestry and all this entire field of study that's basically the domestication of an ecosystem, and managing plants native to the area (and the ones that aren't native that were introduced). The problem with those is and has always been that they have ridiculous yields (good!) but they are godawful to automate and don't scale into giant plots, which makes them both labor intensive and complex for industrial agriculture. Well, if you're setting up a thousand small gardens, you don't need to worry about that, and they help with landscaping and contact with nature, which has a bunch of benefits (notably, air quality!)

This is where you can push the entire thing even further into "high modernism bullshit" and just go down the route of "what if everything was Habitat 67" - because a) people won't just live in a concrete chaos, even in Kowloon they painted and built their own annexes and added their own personal touches, and b) the remarkable thing about Habitat 67 is that it fits, in about 120m by 300m - so 36000 m^2, or 0.036 km^2 worth of ground (and then shooting upwards), 146 residences. Assuming, say, that the averaged out population between families (or groups of roommates) of 3-5 and people who live by themselves or with a partner averages out to about 450 people living there, that's a population density of 12500 persons per square kilometer, on something only about 12 stories tall. This beats out Tokyo!

Habitat 67 was designed to specifically allow residents to still have a landscape garden no matter what. That was one of the primary design considerations, which means that if you push that landscape garden act into the full out food garden aspect, you can have something which starts veering into The Hanging Gardens.

I lived in Sao Paulo, a lot of it was 20 stories tall and higher, so you could just keep pushing that limit further and further, with interconnected gardens and small parks and all the services that come with not being Kowloon Walled City such as decent light and water and garbage collection, you could have something much, much denser - and frankly much more livable than the Midwestern hell that is Cincinnati.

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

If you're tired of gunshots, another thing you can do to keep the rent low is to build dense, upzoned cities

[irradiate-space]

Shoutout to the cities that do studies on how to increase housing, but don't implement the recommendations of those studies.

[zooterchet]

The Jewish Mafia (Stone Henge)

Kayfabe: Mob hitmen, supporting the proliferation of house cats, as pets.

Gnostics: Martial arts, as forms of invention of devices, for interconnection in suit of law.

Golden Gloves: The principle of pimping, through music, for fee paid to man, to prevent woman on rebound from going free of control of friends.

Witchcraft: Calculus, the principle of finding a wife, through attraction of matrix; the principle of name of conditional, per template, hence a felony committed, simplistic in object, from placing woman as culprit, 'damsel'.

King Cotton: The calculation of shares of textile, from load betraying other load, for labor to be brought in and bound together across regions of production.

Big Tobacco: The slavery of Palestinians (the Amish), to escape pimps, plying children for acting school in France and prostitution in Germany, instead moving to corn, tomato, and tobacco plantations to grow tobacco, the other two products as "swamp", sold as "worthless", corn for "poor", and tomato for "gay".

Little Rice: The sales of paddy, to Irish, for "Chinese" restaurants, actually Native American dishes garnished and altered by Chinese-Jews, Maoists, those mimicking the Five Confucian Petals, under slavery of the Kowloon/Azteca, the mutual poles of China and the Yucatan, prior to the Ice Age.

Communist Manifesto: The sales of rice, from the American South, to Germany, as pork feed, for international pork sales, to Gentiles, otherwise "Goy", refusing consumption of bacon; slaves, from lack of aphrodesiac, from "succulent" diet, traitor stock of animal.

KGB: The feminist press, the illusion that women's liberation doesn't exist in some areas, to support a war and inward bound of immigrants as slaves from society framed, by that reporting poor state of law within suit of region pictured, the pair of '1's, the 2, and the '0', the null, combining to produce a circuit, the open trade route for development of industry for low labor of wife to husband. The robber baron.

INTERPOL: The wine delivery industry, placing French training for prison convicts as cops, as Russian soldiers.

Biker Clubs: Municipal services riding "organ donors", collecting the bodies and samples of anyone registered as an organ donor, if completing freshman year of college with a pair of B+ overall cumulative GPAs or over, unless attending community college, then a biker don. The organs are kept "salient", with opiates (anti-psychotics).

ISIS: The school shooter, from Prom, Prom Song, and Yearbook Committee, the control of all three, indicating that the school has been conquered, and if conqueror doesn't get their choice of bride, at final sacrament of religion, then a shooting occurs; otherwise, the conqueror, gets their choice of firm and politics.