The single best thing you can do is pick a neighborhood - not the whole city - and invest deeply.
Get to know everyone in the neighborhood and understand what they want and need, then try to find ways to bring that.
When you have a strong network of neighbors and a little bit of cash, you can ramp up investment by cleaning up dirty corners and getting the basic services that a neighborhood is missing.
If you’re interested in connecting with people who already have this mindset, there are a lot of them in Strong Towns, and there may even be a group in your area.
> When you have a strong network of neighbors and a little bit of cash, you can ramp up investment by cleaning up dirty corners and getting the basic services that a neighborhood is missing.
I don't think you need a network to begin cleaning up dirty corners.
Just pick up garbage you see on the street when you walk around. It has an immediate impact, is easy and doesn't cost anything. Other people may see it and may begin doing that as well. I'm surprised more people don't do.
If you want, you can make a facebook group telling people you're going to be picking up garbage at a certain time, if anyone would like to join.
Garbage on the street has a very negative externality as people are less mindful of tossing garbage if there is already garbage on the street. It also strips people of dignity about where they live and can have other negative side-effects to the neighborhood or even promote lawlessness.
This is a fair point, but FWIW I worded this the way I did because I think the network of neighbors is ultimately more important than the physical work, and should have top priority.
But you’re right that you can start by picking up trash, and in fact that can be a good mechanism to meet the neighbors and build the network, depending on how you approach it.
I recently passed day 1,300 of picking up at least one piece of trash per day. It's not my only civic contribution, but it's deeply rewarding. I've also switched from jogging to plogging.
Some results:
It's gotten me on TV a couple times.
It's led to working with my city councilman, whose team recently started organizing group pickups.
Someone considering a Senate run contacted me for advice on sustainability.
I'm working with a few corporations to organize nationwide pickup events -- mainly fitness places you'd probably know the names of.
As a regular in my local park, the drug dealers there have become friendly with me, leading to long conversations about life.
I'm friends with entrepreneurs in the field.
People often thank me and we talk.
It reinforces my diet. I avoid packaged food, which I find increasingly disgusting, largely for what the packaging does to the world and the entitlement, willful ignorance, and salt/sugar/fat/convenience addiction does to our culture.
Most of all, I feel connected to my community.
On the downside, my view of human nature can get dark when I consider how much people pollute.
Along similar lines, our open source React Native app at Code for Boston for iOS and Android is in beta testing from the last several years of work: https://github.com/codeforboston/plogalong – if there is interest I think there is some sort of UDID-oriented URL they can send you to load on your phone.
Accepting new contributors on Tuesday nights ET.
Glad to see the project but not sure how I would use it. I'm friends with the founder of Litterati, but even that app is too much trouble for me to use. I don't bring a phone when I plog.
Still, I value tracking since it's fun and I think would motivate people. If my experience or practice can help, I'd be happy to.
I think maybe you're paying attention to the wrong part of that story. It's not the act of putting out the Buddha statue; it's the continuous care that a community of people put around the Buddha. The neighbor that plonked down the statue just contributed a statue. The community of Buddhists who adopted it, brought flowers, cleaned and improved the area are all doing exactly what the grandparent comment described.
The "success" of this was contingent upon there being a Vietnamese community in the neighborhood that took care of the statue and the space around it. To be clear, using another culture's religious icon to keep trash from piling up on your street is exceedingly disrespectful.
It's ineffective and woo, but come on. Disrespectful?
Can we get over this hyper-upper-class take on everything for lower class problems? When it gets vandalized, that's disrespectful, I guess, but putting it there is merely stupid.
The network is best when you start by setting an example and then spread is. "Look, as part of my daily exercise I pick up a bit of trash every day. I'm in better health and look how much better my neighborhood is" This speaks more than someone needs to do something so I'm putting together a group to form a committee. Lead by example.
Yes, although I was thinking more along the lines of we should be neighbourly to each other hand have a good relationship where we say hi and watch out for each other. Giving people bureaucracy won't work. A number of the neighbourhoods where I live have block parties once a year so that people know there neighbours. And once you know your neighbours you can start talking about mutual problems and then things you might be able to do to fix it.
I think the network is less of a means and more of an ends. When people have relationships in their community, they have access to support (e.g. someone to make sure their home isn't broken into while they're away or financial support in an emergency) - that's way more important for a city than clean sidewalks.
I think it's important to know the people who's corner you're trying to clean, lest you been perceived in a way you didn't intend. I'm not saying you should ask permission, per se, but some people find it offensive when outsiders come in and try to fix problems without context.
The risk with urban improvement is making the area more desirable eventually prices people out of the community. So, the real question is do you help the land or current residents? When you own property it’s seriously worth considering local improvements for several reasons, but it’s also easy to confuse the two. Further, if most people in the community own property then there is a lot of overlap.
To be clear both are worthwhile, just be cognizant of what your goals are. Anyway, if you want to help people I suggest either the young as changing the trajectory of someone’s life is easier early on, or the elderly because social inclusion scales well with individual effort.
I think your concern is valid but unfounded. This is fortunate - otherwise the way to help the poor would be to vandalize their neighborhoods, which is a strange conclusion.
It's true that increasing quality of a neighborhood will increase its housing price. This will have disparate impact: (1) it will help people who enjoy higher quality, but (2) it will hurt people who would prefer low quality and lower price. However, I think it's important to remember that the stock of people and housing are mostly fixed. If you raise the quality of one neighborhood so that more people bid to move in, then at the same time there must be other unobserved neighborhoods where prices fall. Therefore there is also a third effect of making a neighborhood nicer: (3) it can lower prices in other neighborhoods.
One way I like to visualize it is as a supply curve - if you move some neighborhoods up in the desirability ranking, then by conservation of rank, others necessarily fall in rank.
The argument I sketched above isn't a proof, obviously. There are edge cases where higher quality induces more people to own multiple homes or to live with fewer roommates, and nuances where heterogeneous preference for locations may make it harder on someone who needs to commute to their job and really would be better served by a cheap neighborhood, but for the most part I think it's reasonable that making neighborhoods nice is an overall positive good for the world.
In a market with a population growing faster than the supply of housing it is possible for there to be no place where values fall, and in fact for people who can no longer afford an improved neighborhood to end up homeless as a result.
This is why housing supply is absolutely critical, and as a society we should be working hard to ensure we always have supply in level with (or erring toward slightly exceeding) demand.
However, we have a cultural myth that the home is a persons primary investment and wealth accumulation vehicle. That Mrs. very harmful because it creates enormous incentives to do the opposite: restrict supply as a way to ensure that the people who already have a home are guaranteed a good return on their “investment.”
It’s true that home is a very large asset and that appreciation can benefit the individuals who live there, there’s nothing wrong with that at the individual level. However when we choose to have house appreciation as a significant goal at the societal level, it directly competes with the desire to end homelessness and see everyone housed.
If ensuring that everyone could afford at least adequate shelter was a primary goal for society, we would need to make choices that sometimes worked against, or at least did not help, home appreciation.
It’s likely a net positive for the world, but a net negative for the people displaced. That’s why gentrification is a dirty word in many communities. However, like most things it’s complex.
One often overlooked benefit is the knock on effects of gentrification are real improvements in local school systems. Looking across decades you often see gay communities which care less about local school systems acting as a catalyst by increasing local revenue while reducing the demands placed on local schools. The improvement in local schools precedes people’s awareness that the schools have improved. Similarly, many people can leverage the improvements in the local economy to keep up with the transition.
That said, relatively few people can keep up with significant changes and those people are simply worse off having lost an affordable community which they had social or economic ties to. A restaurant for example is generally different to relocate. A local handyman may have a steady stream of existing customers, which don’t follow them etc.
Whether it's a net negative for people who get displaced probably depends on their capital gains from the increased property values, no? Not everyone loves their neighborhood, especially if they aren't in great condition.
It’s assumed these people are renting. Homeowners only really face property taxes which take extreme shifts to become unaffordable. Even then owners can generally remove equity to pay them for years to decades.
In simple terms, improving a neighborhood increases the supply of good quality neighbourhoods and therefore reduces the price of good quality neighbourhoods (given that the demand is more or less constant).
It also decreases the supply of bad neighborhoods. Given that demand is more or less constant, this increases the cost. If the price gap is sufficiently large between the two, prices go up during gentrification and the poor have to move to more expensive bad neighborhoods
If you're only concerned about the average quality of housing your argument makes perfect sense, but if I understand you correctly you're casually brushing over people (your neighbors) being forced out of their homes.
> (2) it will hurt people who would prefer low quality and lower price.
Uh... poverty isn't a preference. Sure, at the margins people can choose to spend the money they have on different things, but you're positing an equivalence here between things that aren't remotely equal. It's not like suburban professionals simply choose to spend their money on expensive housing and infrastructure where their inner city compatriots have different priorities. Poor neighborhoods are poor because the people there HAVE LESS MONEY.
You fix that by fixing the inequity, not imagining a fantasy resident who decides to put all her money into bitcoin or whatever.
To be fair, I know at least a handful of people who are not in poverty but seem to prefer low quality / low price options to those that are more expensive.
I would assume that the preference is not for low quality, but low price. That is, if better quality housing was available for the same price, I don't see why one wouldn't choose that option. But it is certainly true that some prefer to spend less of their budget on housing.
This comes up a lot in progressive urbanist circles. My favorite example was something Matthew Yglesias mentioned once on the Weeds about how some progressives opposed planting trees in D.C. because trees raise property values.
I think this is a total non-starter. Trees are good, not bad. Good things are good, not bad.
It is good to do good things. If doing good things reveals something bad, then we should work on fixing that bad thing, not on avoiding the good things that uncovered the bad thing.
We want a politics where poor people can live in neighborhoods with trees, not a politics that says trees are bad because they make neighborhoods too desirable.
Also in a very objective way, I don't understand this reasoning. I've never brought up the question before and hoping that HN can explain it in a logical way that I might understand.
Let's say that a neighborhood is rated 3 out of 10 - not very good. There is a mix of people that live in this neighborhood. Some people own property and some do not.
Then the community makes the neighborhood better and it rises to a 7 out of 10 ranking. The people in the community that own houses costs are fixed and they now recognize the improvement.
The part of the community that don't own eventually see their costs rise. At some point they can't afford to a community that ranks 7, might only be able to afford a community that ranks 3 and would need to move to a community with that ranking.
It seems like part of the original set that owns experiences a large and lasting benefit. Another part of the original set experiences a short term benefit, then a transaction cost (moving) and reverts back to the mean.
Can someone explain what this description misses and where the harm comes from?
This is a fair point except that neighborhoods are not fungible and are in short supply.
You’re assuming that there is another 3/10 neighborhood available for the people who are displaced to move to, and therefore they gain a short term benefit and eventually end up back where they were.
In practice it’s typical that older areas which have become run down have ample city services, such as transit, parks, and libraries, which may not be the best quality, but at least exist.
Since neighborhoods are no longer built with these amenities, the best available substitute for someone who is displaced from an old neighborhood may be far less desirable than what they had before - a 1/10 trailer park, or worse, homelessness.
However, if we would continue to build traditional neighborhoods that were walkable, had city services, had transit etc. and built enough of those to keep up with the demand, then it would be much more likely that your scenario would play out. In that case the harm of economic change in neighborhoods would be greatly reduced, perhaps even to the point that it wouldn’t be a problem anymore
But that’s quite far from the reality on the ground today.
Transit comes with density and growth and usually increases in property values. When an area goes downhill but still has this services it creates a temporary situation that people can take advantage of certain aspects - live with increase crime but get increased services.
The wealth of yesterday created that situation. At some point someone will invest in that older area because of the location value.
The only way to artifically control that is through low rent units. Which create other barriers because one can never leave or they give up something even though it might make sense to move somewhere else for family or job reasons. When they always take 1/3 of gross getting a raise and taking on more responsibility seems counter-productive. Hard to break dependence.
moving is not just a reversion to the mean. A neighborhood is more than atomized individuals who live there. There can be a community of people which form a network and a support system that is many years old. Pricing certain people out can rip apart these communities, so it's not just a matter of relocating then continuing as you were.
Then there are the individual-level logistical problems. What does moving do to your commute? Is it easy to find a new job? Will your kids have to go to a different school district?
Your model is mostly useful and shared with the people with the 'harm' view. To reach the conclusion that the 'harm' group are reaching, set your move transaction cost¹ to a large value and add a local-relationships parameter that depends on time-spent-at-current-location and weight it very highly as well.
Should you so desire, you may want to add in a cost to capture the notion of how a person moving contributed to the improvement. This will usually need to be inflated above the true economic contribution (IKEA effect, etc.).
The local-relationships parameter may be effectively quadratic (since a person moving diminishes their relationships and relationships are two-sided).
¹ It is clear you know this but for other readers that may not, that's not just the monetary cost.
> Can someone explain what this description misses and where the harm comes from?
If they have lived somewhere a long time, one of the big losses is: Relationships.
For the people forced to move, they will not find another "3 out of 10" neighbourhood, as part of what makes it a 3 is that's where all their friends and long-lasting relationships and perhaps childhood memories are. That already makes anywhere else < 3.
They will have to move somewhere where they likely don't know anyone, or at least not the well-established friendships they had before.
If they have extended family in the area, they will have to leave those too. (Parents, children, aunts & uncles, siblings, that sort of thing).
Those friendships and relationships aren't just valuable for sentimental reasons. They form an essential practical support structure, and sometimes a financial support structure. For many people those things are a big part of what makes quality of life.
And they might be forced to move at an age where it's difficult to make new friends, especially deep friendships.
As people on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, it's likely that they were benefitting from their friendship/relationship network in another, subtler way: By having good quality relationships with people higher up the ladder, their own circumstances are effectively lifted up as well.
For example, they might be taken out to places and introduced to opportunities and people because of long-lasting friendships with people richer than themselves. Their children get to play with children of richer friends with nicer houses to stay over in. Little things that probably translate to differences of opportunity when the children are older. That kind of uplift goes away when they move to another location.
Some people have a good relationship with a local employer too, and will lose that as well. It might be something quite treasured (even though it presumably doesn't pay well), and difficult or impossible to replace. Remember we're talking about people forced to leave, not those who want to leave.
The community also depends on the people living in it - a diversity of the types, and incomes, of people benefits the neighborhood. People churning in and out is harmful -- I'd argue more harmful than the increased property value accounts for.
I don't have a good solution for this. Rent control helps a bit, but has bad externalities. Property ownership helps a lot but any measure to drive up ownership immediately prices out lots of people because it's captured very well by the housing market.
or instead of dismissing people's grievances as illogical, you can skip the strawman phase and engage with the real issues as I and others have described here
The post I replied to logically argued that people are not harmed when their community improves and they are priced out and forced to move. (Note, I never claimed they were illogical, but instead that they were "too logical" Pure logic will not explain why people feel the way they do, because people are not always logical).
They then ask:
> Can someone explain what this description misses and where the harm comes from?
In answer, maybe no harm is actually done. But even so, people will perceive that they have been harmed. And in the larger context of this thread, that is why people are sometimes unhappy with their community being improved, because they believe it will price them out and harm them.
>Can someone explain what this description misses and where the harm comes from?
Empathy. Sense of place is real. Home isn't just your house or property values. People deserve not to be priced out of their homes so the sake of profit.
By being cognizant of these effects, you can probably accomplish both at once. Improve your community with an eye towards projects that empower the residents -- even if they were to move away. Things like financial education/mentoring or around-the-house handyman type skills sharing.
This is the gentrification problem. Make the community more desirable, and you make it increasingly more expensive for the existing residents. It's hard to balance these things.
In the case of Minneapolis, the city committed to a plan (Minneapolis2040) to increase housing density. And a lot of that new apartment/condo construction (mostly on unused or old industrial land) is necessarily out of financial reach for average residents. But the increased supply helps protect the prices for the existing houses and older apartments, whether privately owned or rentals.
It's not perfect, it's arguably not even good, but it's a tradeoff most Minneapolis residents can live with.
To build more housing, you have to destroy the old housing. This still displaces people, and likely pushes them into smaller apartments where they would have been in a house
What studies show is that poor people move around a lot, whether there's "gentrification" near them or not, for what I think are pretty obvious reasons, and that they aren't any more likely to leave "gentrifying" neighborhoods than they are neighborhoods that aren't gentrifying.
No, you can let people decide whether they want to move out. Many of them would elect to then sell their houses to developers who would build apartments. Many would choose on their own to add units to their own property. If some people don't like living next to apartments, then they are out of luck though. I don't know if we should expect people to have that kind of say over what their neighbors do with their property.
There were 2 replies that I want to summarize together: empowering the current residents as part of the renewal, and rent control.
I think as part of the urban improvement is to work with the renters and landlords to let the renters capture some of the rising value, either through some sort of equity rent-to-own, or creative financing that lets the renters find other housing within the neighborhood. Maybe some sort of buy-out conversion from private landlords to private-benefit-corporation landlord (as opposed to public housing).
The alternative is localized rent control, that makes sure that the landlords don't capture the rising value of the neighborhood that is being added by the residents and their work. You also need some limits on redevelopment, so the landlord doesn't just replace the building with something more upscale and manage to replace the tenants as part of that. Maybe allow refurbishing and some new units in exchange for current residents getting rent control.
for a year I lived in a city on a nice block that was near some not so nice blocks. One thing we had that the other blocks did not, was an old lady with a bunch of brooms that knocked on everyones door once a month and made us all sweep. It really made a difference.
I spent 3-4 hours per day sitting on a park-bench in NYC reading, playing guitar, and writing between Jan-June of this year (and before you ask, I work a 9am to 5am). If you keep a friendly disposition and are welcoming by saying hello when people take notice of you, they will open up quickly – I must note with full sincerity and severity that this assumes you listen and ask thoughtful questions; people are quick to sense when someone is not genuinely and empathetically interested in them.
I've made friends with musicians (and had some great impromptu jam sessions), homeless people, CEOs, software engineers, mentally ill, folks addicted to hard drugs, guys formerly homeless, people who were in prison for a decade and trying to get by and reconnect with their kids, students, tourists, professionals, hourly-workers, and everyone in-between.
Now if you live in an area with a low-density of foot traffic this will not work and I do not have first-hand advice besides, perhaps, move to a more densely populated area. That you asked this question speaks to what you're looking for in this life.
This personally saved my house during the recent CA wildfires. We have community events where we cut down brush behind the community. The fires burned up to the area where we stopped cutting the brush and it allowed for enough buffer to basically have the firefighters suppress it!
I agree! We tend to think of things on a grand scale beacuse that's what we see in the media but the truth is there is more visible impact on a local level as you can impact day to day much better.
This is great advice but wanted to emphasize if you’re looking to make a huge impact with pretty much no money just grab some trash bags and pick a block in need.
Trash in the street is one of the biggest problems you’ll see in neglected low income neighborhoods and it just feels so much different when the street gets cleaned up.
I want to second that and add: grab a few tools and do some basic landscaping. Remove weeds and cut grass that is growing over curbs and sidewalks. Make it look tidy again.
Thanks for linking that article, I'm not sure if you're native to the area but there have been a lot of good changes in a city that needs them. It feels more community oriented than investment/cash driven from some other cities I've seen but that may be the lens I choose to put on it.
I would complement saying that you should look for charities in or around your neighbourhood instead of giving to charities that doesn't affect the place you live directly (but if you super rich, do both).
The takeaways (for me) were that:
1) a small number of high-status parents with different priorities than the broader community will often (without malice) influence a school's administration such that the community's more fundamental priorities get lost,
2) political action to enable racial integration of public schools has been a symbolic goal in NYC for generations, but there's been a repeated lack of follow-through due to ... lack of courage and commitment.
Get to know everyone in the neighborhood and understand what they want and need, then try to find ways to bring that.
When you have a strong network of neighbors and a little bit of cash, you can ramp up investment by cleaning up dirty corners and getting the basic services that a neighborhood is missing.
Here’s an example of how folks in Memphis, TN did this Over time: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/21/this-is-what-w...
If you’re interested in connecting with people who already have this mindset, there are a lot of them in Strong Towns, and there may even be a group in your area.