Something is wrong with the Anglosphere
Something is wrong with the Anglosphere
I think it's their crazy common law system.
Something is wrong with the Anglosphere
I think it's their crazy common law system.
Nah. If we take the US as an example they have rampant NIMBYism, a suburbanism ideology that isn't sustainable financially (or ecologically or socially, for that matter), and rather strict zoning, with the worst stemming from the city of Euclid, and thus being named "euclidean zoning".
If you're up for some videos, then StrongTowns, CityNerd and NotJustBikes all talk about this at length.
Yes between the low density and refusal to build transit, which go hand in hand, suburban car dependant planning has destroyed the livibility and affordability of many cities.
It's the neoliberal fever dream that unregulated market mechanisms can build a better world. It's the socioeconomic theory that unfettered psychopathy is a guiding light, and the high priests of this religion pray the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train. (Or that they died wealthy of old age before things ever got too bad for them.)
This from the thn Australian Prime Minister in 1972. We did the exact opposite and now have a 2nd rate American system
The other way you could interpret this is that so many people want to live in these amazing countries that it's outpacing home construction. I would like to see this compared to net migration and/or population growth.
In Canada that's what it was. They seriously curtailed immigration with the new government, which is starting to lower home prices. It's not sunshine and rainbows though, we needed those immigrants to plug the labour hole the boomers left. Coupled with the tariffs and market incertainty, Canada is in an unofficial recession already.
Net migration rate is 3 per 1000 people in the US and 3.2 in the UK. Germany has a net migration rate of 1.8 per 1000, France 1.1, and every other Western European country has at least 3.5. Also Germany and France both have a higher percentage of their population being immigrants than both the US and UK. So that's definitively not it.
It’s the tendency to see the US as a paragon of modernity, and thus as the example to be followed, when more often than not US urban planning is the way it is due to structural racism, the hierarchy of whiteness/non-whiteness and the fact that a sizeable part of the population is descended from enslaved African trafficking victims and a significant proportion of the rest rationalise them as being outside of their circle of empathy (as if they weren’t, the question of guilt and reparations would come up).
So America gets white flight to defensible car-centric suburbs, motorways rammed through inner cities, no public healthcare, and public services such as transport and schooling being stigmatised in the way that begging is elsewhere. The UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada see this, think “this must be the future, we’d better hurry up so we don’t get left behind!” and dismantle their tramways privatise their water and healthcare systems, and build more American-style suburbs so people can live like they’re in their favourite US sitcom, and not grey-capped factory workers from Red Vienna or somewhere.
White flight can’t explain why suburbs suck today compared to the ones from 70 years ago (when racism and white flight was arguably much more common). Car-centric planning was driven by auto makers and overzealous urban planners obsessed with the idea of highly specialized single-purpose zoning (think SimCity / Factorio nerd) rather than livable, walkable communities. The most desirable and expensive places to live in Toronto are illegal to build because of these boneheaded zoning laws.
It's an artifact from the Cold War. The Soviets put money into the military and so did America but the Soviets added bodies and machines with their spending. America's military used the money to fund far out ideas.
But that also gave America the impression that far out thinking was the norm. The extra lengths Americans went to embrace their dreams meant things cost more but it was okay because they lived in an era of abundance. But that time has passed and the cost of that older lifestyle is no longer sustainable. We're witnessing the shrinking of Anglosphere prosperity as it mirrors America. When each country hits bottom they will be forced to adopt more cost effective urban planning with transit to suit folks who don't own cars. It's just a matter of time.
That and a frontier-era individualism, now pressed into the service of standing against socialism. If you live in a single-family home and only get around in your private car, other people don’t look like comrades or fellow citizens so much as traffic and competition. As cars cost money, they’re also a good emblem of material success.
And, of course, those uncomfortable with seeing those people as their fellow citizens no longer need to share subway carriages or tenement corridors with them.
It's worse than us simply becoming poorer. It's that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There's just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We've only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:
It isn't financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.
What's up with this graph, it's nice that they went back in time from 1995 too but since they're stacked from there you can't know which lines belong to which individual country. Remains interesting to see that two distinct blocks formed over time. I guess Brits will feel some extra bregret watching this.
Canada and NZ LEFT the EU?
The culture where capitalism was born has exorbitant housing prices relative to other countries.
Shocking.
Why are there 12 lines and 7 labels, two of which are classes of country in a table of countries?
Archive link of source article from Financial Times:
All the more reason to see what's different about that outlier.
I don't see what's so crazy about common law. With how dysfunctional the US Congress is, common law means you have a stopgap when a bind prevents rights from being upheld in a situation where the law doesn't apply.
I hate that some of the graphs are unlabeled.
Looks like Germany and France share 6 lines