Why Everywhere in the US is Starting to Look the Same
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a good explanation of how US zoning and economics produce sameness.
What it is
Wendover Productions explains why American towns, retail and buildings increasingly look alike, covering zoning pressures, corporate standardization and cheap construction types like 5-over-1 buildings.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends sidpatil · 2022-09 · on “Can the American mall survive?”
> Increasingly though, so much of the U.S. looks so much like the rest in terms of retail/food that I begin to feel the entire country is in fact a mall of sorts. Here's a good video on the subject: [this video]
Recommends maronato · 2024-06 · on “In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings (2019)”
There’s a great video by Wendover about how 5 over 1s are a way for corporate landlords to spend less to build worse apartments that they use to corner and consolidate the market. Then, once they stiffen competition, they skyrocket the rent prices. [this video]
Cites tenacious_tuna · 2022-05 · on “Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security”
On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build very similarly, to the point where they look almost indistinguishable from one another. There's similar videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm having a harder time searching my history for them on my phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real computer.) Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments. Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect direct
Cites HomeDeLaPot · 2022-09 · on “Every Fucking Bootstrap Website Ever (2019)”
And every apartment building, and every fast food restaurant... Why Everywhere in the US is Starting to Look the Same: [this video]