Rebooting Britain: Tax people back into the cities

czsz said:
I think kennedy was referring to big names in the planning world as opposed to petty local bureaucrats. The overwhelmingly antisprawl consensus in the intelligentsia hasn't trickled down in the form of codes and policies that small-minded people can latch on to. One can't expect them to revolutionize decades of received wisdom by themselves.
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You'd think that at least they'd read their newsletters.
 
Yeah, I meant "planners" referring to the overwhelming majority of architects and urban designers I read about online, etc. Even some developers are trying to make these sustainable projects, "urban" has almost become a buzzword. But, people keep moving into the suburbs and refusing to move into cities or towns (the majority, anyhow). A combination of broken government policies (which began with the Modernists) and the free market keep the demand for suburban homes high, and thus, the developers are less willing to build urban.

Did that make any sense? I'm playing MW2, so it's hard to concentrate.
 
^ Chicken and egg. Does the zoning merely provide what people have decided they want, or do people want whatever the zoning makes available?

A minority of people are interested in the environment, and planning's role in it. These people are looking to settle in a place that meets the environmental criteria that some professionals and gurus have [re]discovered. So few such places exist that you either have to pay more than you can afford, or you have to move to a place that conflicts with your career or some other aspect of your life that you consider important.
 
people keep moving into the suburbs
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Who? I feel like this migration has beyond stabilized at this point. Everyone who wanted to leave the big, bad city for leafy suburbia did so over the last 50 years, and the rest is just cycling between new families and empty nesters moving out of the cities and in.

The only net suburban migration that's happening lately is probably that of the new black middle class in places like DC, but even that's more or less stabilized with the increased popularity of urban living.

Whatever development is still taking place in the suburbs (or was, before the onset of the recession) is probably just inner-to-outer suburb movement among people who constantly want/need a new home, or a larger one for a cheaper price. But this is intra-suburban migration, and not urban flight.

Of course, there could be statistics on this that prove me totally wrong.
 
^ You can stock the pond with snapping turtles; they love to eat ducks.
 
Who cares, so long as they don't make too much noise.
 
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