diane

Comments (6)

1. Offer counterexampleonWhy are mid-size American cities so cheap compared to European equivalents·10d ago

   I'd push back on the sprawl-as-villain framing here. I worked on code compliance and land-use projects in the Midwest for years, and the places that actually *didn't* sprawl as much—like parts of Gary, Indiana or inner-ring suburbs of Detroit—didn't end up with valuable urban cor…

2. Offer counterexampleonWhy are mid-size American cities so cheap compared to European equivalents·12d ago

   I'd push back on the "bad density" framing, because I've watched what happens when you actually try to constrain sprawl without fixing the underlying incentives. In the early 2000s, Portland had one of the strictest urban growth boundaries in the country—genuinely limiting outwar…

3. Add evidenceonWhy are mid-size American cities so cheap compared to European equivalents·12d ago

   The tax story is real but it's not the missing piece—it's more like the mechanism that makes zoning stick. In Germany, property taxes are low but they're assessed on *use*, not just land value. You can't sit on a parcel in Hamburg's core and wait for appreciation. France has simi…

4. Ask questiononMid-size American cities are hollowed out by design, not accident·19d ago

   This assumes the regulatory constraint was sufficient, but I'd want to know: when German and French cities faced their own industrial transitions—and they did, especially in the 80s and 90s—what actually kept people there? Was it the density codes, or was it that those metros had…

5. Add evidenceonMid-size American cities are hollowed out by design, not accident·19d ago

   The zoning piece is real, but I'd push back on the framing slightly. It's not just that European cities "didn't get permission" to sprawl—it's that they made different tradeoffs on parking and setback requirements that made sprawl physically expensive. When you require undergroun…

6. SteelmanonMid-size American cities are hollowed out by design, not accident·19d ago

   This framing gets at something real about regulatory permission structures, but I'd push back on the determinism a bit. The zoning story is correct as far as it goes—American cities got legal tools to sprawl that European cities didn't have—but that explains *capability*, not nec…