i spent 5 days there in November and for the 5 seconds that issue crossed my attention it seemed like it was about preserving access to such a unique space 🤷‍♀️ i haven’t looked up the stats but wandering around the S Bahn there was a level of density that outmatched equivalent ‘hoods in SF or Toronto - ThreadSky

phillmv.bsky.social • 3 days ago

i spent 5 days there in November and for the 5 seconds that issue crossed my attention it seemed like it was about preserving access to such a unique space 🤷‍♀️

i haven’t looked up the stats but wandering around the S Bahn there was a level of density that outmatched equivalent ‘hoods in SF or Toronto

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daveliepmann.com•3 days ago

The "unique space" aspect of the Feld is absolutely a major factor and I wish fellow YIMBYs wouldn't dismiss it wholesale.

It's a fantasy in 🇩🇪's entrenched politics but a carefully marketed middle ground of "development plus reliable protection" (e.g. nat'l park status) seems to me a viable path.

alonlevy.bsky.social•3 days ago

The problem is that what's unique about it is that it has no protection from the elements, which makes it unusably hot in the summer and unusably cold in the winter.

daveliepmann.com•3 days ago

I'm not sure I agree with you empirically that it is "unusable". In winter it's fairly quiet, but so is the Tiergarten. AFAICT it's well-visited across the summer months.

alonlevy.bsky.social•3 days ago

I remember there being other people when I was last there during summer but I was more focused on avoiding heatstroke than on counting how busy the place was. My vague recollection is that it was a lot less busy than the main Plätze (Alexander-, Hermann-, etc.) and the wooded parks?

daveliepmann.com•3 days ago

When it’s super hot it’s definitely not as popular as the lakes. But that’s true of Gleisdreieck park too. When it’s merely very hot I usually see solid crowds.

daveliepmann.com•3 days ago

I wonder if some Amt has numbers on this

phillmv.bsky.social•3 days ago

urbanism microblogging kind of always runs into this: there’s a thousand different tradeoffs that get flattened into Y/Nimby

and certainly a lot of blanket deregulation gets smuggled under the Y camp

multiplied by the lenses of local politics and geography that are hard to generalize

alonlevy.bsky.social•3 days ago

I'm not sure how Toronto compares - my impression of it is that it's insanely leptokurtic, with high-rises on Yonge and SFR on parallel streets. German cities are atypically platykurtic, with isotropic near-center density. The buildings enclose the streets tightly but there's ample open space.

alonlevy.bsky.social•3 days ago

The local situation that gets flattened into NIMBY is that the left here believes the following:
* City center office buildings are bad, it's overdevelopment
* Keep Tempelhofer Feld as open space
* More trams, no U-Bahn expansion
The Canadian equivalent of this is arch-NIMBY Patrick Condon.

phillmv.bsky.social•3 days ago

insanely leptokurtic is about right. 30 story condos next to SFH.

as a stylized fact conservative politics & development industry here are dominated by real estate conglomerates so all policy fwd momentum is towards “sprawl and tall”.

meanwhile all growth is concentrated in lefty areas

phillmv.bsky.social•3 days ago

my main contribution to this is “it’s hard to compare different regions because the problems are kinda different”, ie we have imported california’s yimby discourse but they *wish* they produced housing at the same rate we do

https://okayfail.com/2021/british-columbia-more-yimby-california.html

interfluidity.com•3 days ago

i tend to be skeptical that YIMBY policy can make much of a dent in near-term affordability issues — over years more elastic supply might restrain growth relative to not, but near-term demand conditions dominate. 1/

alonlevy.bsky.social•3 days ago

Yeah, my understanding of Metro Vancouver YIMBYism is that the issue there is less the overall numbers (though they too could be higher) and more the distribution - too much Marine Landing, too little West Side densification, little willingness to redevelop SFH and not just industrial sites.

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