LogFAQs > #980201189

Dikitain posted...

The trend in my area seems to be putting wealthy neighborhoods into poor areas for...reasons? IDK, it just seems odd seeing McMansions sprouting up next to the meth lab near where I grew up. Or putting expensive loft apartments less than a mile from where someone gets murdered at least once a week.

Yes, both of those actually happened.

That's just gentrification. Poor areas have cheaper housing, cheaper housing attracts less wealthy people like artists and quirkier small businesses that give the area interesting character, wealthier people start wanting to move in for that character, which creates an incentive to develop the area with higher-cost housing. What you're describing is a particularly aggressive example and may have skipped the "poor artists move in and make the neighbourhood interesting" step, but with the housing crisis, lots of developers are snapping up cheap land wherever they can and charging as much as they can get away with, getting away with significantly more than they otherwise might have been able to because of the low supply.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Work needs doing everywhere and so everywhere needs to house minimum wage workers

Pretty much. "If you live in a 15-minute city, but everyone staffing the businesses and services you use can't afford to live in it, you actually live in a theme park." The idea of "wealthy" and "poor" neighbourhoods the way America does them just doesn't work for designing a city. Sustainable city design entails designing neighbourhoods to be self-sufficient, and that means including a mix of businesses and housing such that people working in the area can live nearby. Otherwise, you need a ton of extra transportation infrastructure, whether that's public transit routes or roads with parking, and both are expensive (both in terms of direct costs and in terms of profitable land use).