Letting cars into cities was a mistake from the beginning. Cars should be required to park on parking lots or garages at the edge of the city. The only large motorized vehicles allowed within cities should be trains, buses driven by professional drivers, and delivery vehicles limited by governors to the speed of a bicycle. The only forms of motorized personal transit allowed should be e-bikes and scooters that can travel no faster than a human-powered bicycle is capable of traveling. Cars should be used only for getting between towns and cities, not for traveling within them.
This genuinely made my day
If you’ve ever read Mistborn one of my fav things in that book is that all trees have to be fruiting trees in cities, so that cities naturally produce food in case needed. I always liked that idea.
I wanna punch the voice that says “but won’t the homeless sleep in the bushes?”
I’m a bush.
How does one get off the sidewalk?
Between the bushes. How would one get off the sidewalk with the cars parked in the way?
Between the cars, they don’t fill the whole length off the street. Do you see a gap between those bushes?
In the bottom photo I kept scanning for Will Smith and his german shepherd
While it looks nicer, the rent has doubled here
Rent has doubled everywhere in the past few years. Real estate industry is to blame
Yes and no. Yes because fuck big corps that buy houses and set rent price to achieve fill factor of 0.7, no because very these corps buy cheap dirty houses, renovate them, and double the rent.
I bet you don’t live in Paris or even France.
There is a lock on rent in heated housing markets for example. Not everything in the US is the same on this side of the pond.
If only.
I live in Portugal which has a similar massive house price bubble, especially in the main cities of Lisbon and Porto, and the “investors”, foreign or otherwise, seldom buy run down places to renovate, much less actually build anything: there’s no need to do it when the market is so tight and the bubble so massive that merelly buying anything and sitting on it (not even rent it) will yield you 14% a year, and way more than that if you AirBnB them (realestate “investors” don’t put their houses in the normal rental market when they can make 4x as much from short term lets to turists).
What you describe might’ve happenned back when prices were just slowly trickling up and there was no “make money fast” scheme of turning habitation spaces into mini-hotels so “investors” had to actually activelly add value to the dwellings they bought in order to extract a better profit, but nowadays thanks to most governments doing all that they can take to pump up house prices - as it makes GDP figures go up plus most top politicians are at the right wealth level to themselves be housing “investors” - simple ownership of such assets yields great returns without lifiting a finger and in touristic places renting them via AirBnB can double or triple that yield with litterally no more investment than having the place painted and adding some IKEA furniture with no need for paying for and spending time in proper renovations.
The rent would have doubled anyway. Paris is Paris.
Due to reno or price gouging?
Honestly? Looks like shit.
I agree. The 2022 pic looks like shite.
![[Misc] Less parking more green evolution in a Parisian street](https://jlai.lu/pictrs/image/b287d811-fc24-4f77-a20d-7a52f5d7dc1c.jpeg){kind=link}