Your latest bike purchase?
- This topic has 1,672 replies, 140 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
@dplasters 102384 wrote:
True. My point wasn’t that the large drops from the early 1900s were due to gentrification. It was more along the lines that
3) Home values going up and people “moving in” to a city doesn’t necessarily mean that population density increases. If the people that move in take up more space and new larger buildings are not created density can actually go down. Given that DC can’t build up and the immense cost of buying individual plots, there is an upper bound on density in DC proper that is easier to hit than other cities.Yeah, when a fully populated working class neighborhood changes to higher income people, typically the new residents use less space. So density actually decreases. But thats typically in the first wave of gentrification – in later waves rising rents cause the new residents to take less space per person (not only DC, but the central areas of several of our larger and more expensive metros are in that situation now) plus it becomes economically possible to build new housing, including on previously vacant or non-residential land. That also assumes that in the first wave all units are occupied by working class people. My daughter currenly lives in Troy NY, which I can assure you has a great deal of vacant housing, as well as vacant lots scattered in the midst of residential neighborhoods. There is plenty of room there to gentrify without reducing the working class population – even leaving aside the new units being created in old factories or on previously industrial land near the Hudson river. Well there are some urban areas in between the level of a Troy or a Detroit (plenty of vacant housing) and a DC or NYC (or even Baltimore) where rents are high enough to justify new construction, they are only some of the urban areas.
As for DC, when the height limit as last debated there was considerable debate about how many new units DC could produce without increasing the height limit. It was pointed out that many areas are not built out to their zoning maximum, and that in many areas (including some with good transit service) the current zoning constraint is floor area ratio, not the height limit. Presumably as DC builds out more those issues will be revisited.
On topic – Given our current bike room issues and my wifes relatively hipster proclivities for biking (more for jaunts to explore areas than for speed and endurance) I am thinking instead of buying another bike, we just get a CaBi membership – she can walk to the nearest dock in Fairlington or not quite hipster Shirlington, and we can both bike from there. And then I can use the CaBi membership during the week to sleeze FS by taking lunchtime rides to not gentrifying areas around the Hill, or into Anacostia to check out vacant properties
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.