The conservative case for denser cities

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What bedstuy is arguing is exactly the same as what urban "developers" in the 1940s and 50s argued in concentrating poor blacks in inner city areas in the first place. The market desirability of the suburbs had to be maintained only by keeping them out of them.

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I think the harsh reality is that if you're poor, you should think about moving to a more affordable part of the country.  Nobody just deserves to live in the most desirable real estate in America because it's their birthright.  

I wouldn't actually say that- better to say that we should radically increase housing supply so that there's room for the gentrifiers and for the poor people, living side-by-side.  That would be the welfare-maximizing move, rather than either preserving ghettoes or making people move to Atlanta and Houston, which is actually a pretty sh*tty thing to do, both to the people in question (along both financial and social axes), as well as to the environment as a whole.  (Remember that's my real horse in this race.)

I think NYC obviously needs to have poor people for their labor so it's silly to consider the idea that they're all going to leave.  The question is whether our planning needs to freeze the current wealth patterns in place today.  In reality, poor people are going to move to the Bronx, Queens, New Jersey and deep Brooklyn.  Harlem near Columbia and Central Park is just valuable for its location and will eventually become mostly middle class young people and rich people.

Pushing poor people out to the suburbs (or places like eastern Queens that might as well be suburbs), out beyond the effective reach of public transit, is not actually a satisfactory outcome.  In fact, insofar as it provides a breeding ground for hinterland-populist "environmentalism = elitist" thought, it is pretty much the worst outcome possible in some lights.

The case for radically denser cities is precisely that you accommodate reinvestment and gentrification, and the very real benefits they do provide to the planet and to the city's solvency and quality-of-life, without doing that.

It's interesting.  NYC was once a more affordable place to live in terms of housing, likely because of the higher density.  Today, we have much bigger apartments and more single people in the city, and thus less density.  If we had the density and transit investment of that era, we would return to sanity in our housing prices most likely.

And, I agree that we ought to have plenty of low income housing in transit distance.  That would include improving transit to the places where the land values are currently lower, but within an easy commute to Manhattan.  Improving transit from the Bronx, Queens and New Jersey would help a ton.  It should be waaay easier to commute from Union City and Jersey City.  

I would also look at trying to develop more of a spread out business core.  There's no reason we need to have so much office space crowded in Fidi and Midtown.  There ought to be much more advertising and media in Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn.  There ought to be more office development in LIC.

What bedstuy is arguing is exactly the same as what urban "developers" in the 1940s and 50s argued in concentrating poor blacks in inner city areas in the first place. The market desirability of the suburbs had to be maintained only by keeping them out of them.

That's ridiculous. 

You're the one who has argued in this thread that poor people in NYC should just move out, and then when pressed to acknowledge that poor people (people engaged in low wage service work that can't be relocated for any reason) live in NYC because they have to, gave some standard argument on the needs for more transportation opportunities to the Bronx or the poor NYC suburbs such as they exist -- which will never happen, and you know it won't. It makes me question why you even made the suggestion.

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Let me explain myself, I think NYC has a certain class of poor people who are entirely stuck in poverty.  They have housing through NYCHA, Section 8 or Mitchell Lama HPD subsidized programs, and can barely make ends meet that way.  But, they live in communities where poverty is so endemic that they'll never get jobs making much more than minimum wage because they can't get more than a high school education.  Of course, they theoretically could get a government or union job, but those are often based on nepotism or connections.  So, for that class of people, I think New York City is not the best place to live.  They're so far away from the next step on the ladder, where they're paying their own rent, that they're locked in a condition of poverty.  If you lived in a city where you could pay for an apartment and food, getting ahead would be easier. 

The issue is that what you are arguing is not entirely based on economic concerns. The Chinatowns in both NYC and SF are very poor, and located in prime locations, yet no one would dream of relocating them to the Bronx or Oakland, or building some development on top of it, or complain that it blocks their view of Lincoln Center, in spite of their overcrowding and poverty (and organized crime). That is true even for other impoverished first-generation immigrant communities in neighborhoods that aren't as colorful.

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I agree with the demolition of project housing that only warehouses people and concentrates crime and ameliorating urban abandonment and squalor.

I support "densification" in general, making better (more environmentally conscious), more efficient use of urban space, and in Manhattan's case, 26 sq mi does only go so far. But the effort should be directed to the sunbelt cities that could actually use it to not consume as many resources as they do. I mean especially places like Phoenix and Houston, which serve core economic needs, but with a terrible cost to the environment.

As far as NYC is concerned, in the case of Manhattan, this "densification" just seems like so much lily-gilding. It's like rich people suddenly rediscovered the virtue of living next to one's office, and are now using any and every pretext to destroy even intact neighborhoods just to save themselves the convenience of having to fly in from Long Island three times a week. Handing over large tracts to be used as a single rich property owner's investment property, or, much worse, to some occasionally-used showplace, actually lowers the density of the place and increases consumption -- is counterproductive in every way.

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These would make great micro-studio apartments!

The poltergeists deserve to torment the future tenants of those buildings.