2025 direct discussion of everyone’s favourite 1961 takes that moves beyond stating the obvious “her ideas matter!” Is always welcome in my books.

Chain of address moves to suburbia made old urban things cheap. Stop building you get ‘gentrification’ of the old stock. I don’t know if Jacobs tragically misunderstood the relationship between old buildings and new construction or if it was convenient romanization of personal biography. Eitherway-

Her old nyc was cheap. Building came to a standstill after the boom of the 1920s Jacobs, was homesteading in the aftershock of a war, the adaptation of the car, and the huge buildouts of postwar suburbia. Old was cheap.

The question recalls her memorable aphorism “New ideas need old buildings.” The assumption here is old buildings are cheap…

Can you zone out sameness? Can you “zone in differences” as she put it above?

But it’s not petty for @alexbozikovic.bsky.social to point out the tension between Jane’s 1960s enthusiasm for “zoning for diversity” and the homogeneity of wealth that’s the result over time.

It’s good I think that the Broome st expressway, and the Spadina expressway didn’t blast all this oldness to smithereens. Way better to have Audis and exquisite Gucci stores and bike lanes and beauty.

If the reasoning behind the need for heavy handed “community” control is to protect frugal elderly Italians in lower Manhattan, it’s not unreasonable to point to the price per square foot of soho residential… or as I did to the price of Jane’s house, today.

Does it matter if the shift to urban exclusivity happens in a drip drip drip fashion over 50 years, vs ‘the all-at-once’ / shock of the new, that 19th and early 20th century allowed?

Second- is that catering to the moral value of ‘gentleness’ has had the effect of death by a thousand cuts- a million little burdens in the name of warding off largeness, 50 years later, has resulted in scarcity. Access to Canada’s best urban infrastructure is regressively, now a luxury item.

Someone needs to write directly to Jacobs’ 1961 ideas from the perspective of 2025. Downzoning to stop “cataclysmic money” as she described it, in favour of “gradual money” is full of holes as an idea. First that her restoration of her rooming house at 69 was socially cataclysmic (I suppose) 1/x

Old apt on Hudson St. just sold for $5.5M USD so, relatively affordable🤷🏻‍♀️

And has lots of parking

Maybe there’s some code change sweeping Africa that has people building Frankenstein houses to avoid the handicapping we place on proper urban apt design … (just as we do in Canada with our part 9 multiplexes tbh)

My manicurist said that in her hometown Accra, the new status thing is to build extremely extruded houses. The wealthier and more children you have the higher the number of floors under the pitched roof you get, extruding an otherwise hyper-Anglo, garden encircled typology.

Why would you say this is cultural, not regulatory? It seems directly to be a regulation that’s making us less safe, making Toronto more expensive and and more sprawling, counter to stated cultural desires….

bsky.app/profile/alex...

Kinda the worst of both worlds, tbh.

Kinda right- Puerto Rico is windy.