America is healing.
>>216143030Building shit like this in the middle of southern cities is the ultimate low hanging fruit of American urbanism>lots of undeveloped land in the center of metros>growing populationThat's basically all you need.
Houston has a bunch of those edge city developments. My city has 'em too. They're just full of upper-middle class Millennial former hipsters who LARP as urbanites. Middle-class folk cannot afford to live there, so they just gotta commute from even further out.
>>216143102It'd be nice if they were affordable for middle-class people, but also if they built condos for lower-class people too. Building apartment buildings exclusively for rich people doesn't seem like a reasonable way to promote high-density urban development.
>>216143134Snowbirds are a constant complaint in Florida, OP's image is basically a waking nightmare to them.
>>216143192Well new buildings will typically be more expensive, and that's not necessarily a bad thing because the higher rent pays for the construction costs. Overtime however, as long as new buildings are built, the old buildings will be devalued and will become more affordable to working class. This is called filtering.
>>216143192Or just create efficient mass transit so they can commute better from their own shithole.
>>216143324Wtf does mass transit do? A metro station is enough 99% of the time, if there's no jobs in an area then why settle there?
>>216143030not bad Tampa, not bad, HOWEVER
>>216143482There's a decent chance this is actually the exact spot where the Ukrainian girl bled out. Its about halfway in-between the two stations where it happened.
>>216143482wtf that looks outright European
>>216143482Looks a bit like parts of my city, nice
>>216143607European in terms of urban planning, Brazilian in terms of racial diversity, and Mexican in terms of crime rates
>>216143482why do all the buildings look the same nowadays?based on the buildings that could be anywhere in the worldwhat the fuck happened to architecture?
>>216144205Modern technology means that architecture doesn't depend on locally available resources or the local climate anymore because every building can be made with the same steel, glass and cement using the same optimized blueprint
>>216143371>Wtf does mass transit do?Nothing. A lot of suburbanites think that bringing buses and metro systems to their suburbs will fix all commuters' problems because they've seen 'em at work while on vacations in (Western) Europe or Japan, but seemingly ignore that most of those places have much higher population densities than the vast majority of America.Houston tried building a metro system. Even to this day, it's got only one line with very low ridership because of how spread out the Houston Metropolitan Area is. Apparently , most of the people who can use it are people who commute downtown from lower-class minority-heavy areas. Mexican cities like Guadalajara and Monterrey have metro systems too, but they also have the issue that most commuters tend to come from lower-class neighborhoods because those are the places that have "naturally" higher population densities, whereas middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods have low population densities that make it hard to justify setting up anything bigger or more expensive than bus lines.
>>216144205Efficiency and building codes. The apartment building on the right is called a "five over 1", and is the most efficient way to build an apartment building in the United States. However, it is illegal to build in Europe, and really only exists in the United States and Canada. Labor costs are a lot higher today also. But basically, how much more in rent would you be willing to pay for a more aesthetic building? If the answer is not a significant amount more, than that is the reason.
>>216144355Just prior to the dawn of modern architecture, people were building Renaissance/Neo-Classical-style buildings everywhere from Yokohama to Buenos Aires. Relatively homogenous architectural styles are the mark of strong, centralized empires and cultural spheres.
>>216144396>Even to this day, it's got only one line with very low ridershipActually, Houston's light rail gets alright per mile ridership, it just isn't very big.
>>216144476>22.5miYeah, Houston's light rail system is pretty small for a CSA with just about 7.8 million people. In comparison, Barcelona (which has half of Houston's CSA's population) has 103mi of metro lines, and Munich (which has roughly 1/3 of Houston's CSA's population) has 59mi of metro lines.
>>216144439>how much more in rent would you be willing to pay for a more aesthetic buildingI think this has been proven wrong many times
>>216144672Yeah its small, but it what has been built is certainly being used. Also 5.8M is a more realistic population for Houston area, CSAs are ridiculous.
>>216145731In what way?
>>216143102Good. Southern cities are a joke and an insult to the concept of cities
>>216146161Southern city centers were extremely hollowed out in the white flight era.
