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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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@LibertyLizard I did watch it. Like most videos of its type, it throws up a bunch of relevant-seeming statistics uncritically. You cannot make a bare comparison of rents between cities with wildly differing income structures and land values.
Did the author not wonder why Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are so low on the list, despite being highly desireable places to live?
It’s obvious that prices are controlled by a multiplicity of factors, not all of which can be covered in a short video. However, I found the complete lack of high-COL, high-construction cities to be quite convincing. This suggests that housing supply is so important that it’s very rare for prices to rise so high when supply is high, even despite these other factors. It’s not necessary to discuss every factor to demonstrate that one factor is a very important one. Why do you think this analysis is uncritical?
As far as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia I don’t think there is any real mystery—they simply aren’t considered as desirable as New York, SF, or LA by most people. They’re not quite Detroit but you don’t have thousands of people moving across the country to these cities—or wishing they could afford to.
Honestly, we know from every other category of good that scarcity causes prices to rise. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that, despite some additional complexities, the housing market works the same way.