Posts by Bart Janssen
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Matthew Poole,
features poorly for health outcomes
Particularly if you are poor/black/hispanic. Oh yeah we really want to be like Houston. We drove through Houston a few times while we lived in Texas and living in a concrete grey city - except for the burnt out black bits where the poor folks live - is not an ideal to which we should aspire.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to James Bremner,
so how does Auckland get affordable housing?
You could start by instituting a capital gains tax which would discourage people from owning 5 houses and never improving them because the capital gains make any improvement stupid. This would have the effect of putting more properties onto the market. That in itself has no effect on housing density in the first instance but it allows many of those investment properties (frequently low density shitholes) to be replaced by medium density modern housing.
Next as has been pointed out numerous times, so you of course know this already and are merely trolling, you make sure a significant proportion of new housing is medium density 2-6 story apartments, semi-detached housing, higher density detached housing (infill). In some areas that is inappropriate, yes in my backyard. In many areas it it entirely reasonable and would act to increase population density, improving the functionality of public transport and providing the density needed for local bars/restaurants etc. But most importantly the increase in the number of housing options reduces the buying demand and the overinflated prices will fall. But you knew all that.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to Dylan Bland,
objectify a real person
Oddly what I liked most about this piece was it's "plainness". Which is not meant in any way to imply the writing is plain. But more that it is a (deceptively) simple retelling of a plain simple relationship between friends.
If anything rather than objectifying a person, the essay/story/blog personalised someone mostly treated as an inconvenient if animate object.
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And while I'm relating personal experience.
I live on a street made up of one fifth acre blocks, many with bungalows (mostly rotten), others with slightly more modern homes. My own home is on one tenth acre (410 sq m) with a shared driveway. Next door we have had two infill houses built also on ~400 sq m sections. At the end of our street is a 55 apartment block!
We already live in the kind of mixed housing that is so much a part of the UP. You know what - it hasn't destroyed our neighbourhood.
The sky has not been blocked out, we still see the sun (although there is one tree I would love to chop down that shades our garden).
We can still drive out of our street onto the main road.
If anything the only problem is that there is not another two 55 apartment blocks across the main road to build up the use of the local shops. I can see the value of having enough people in our area to support a good coffee shop or a butcher. I can see the value of using the main arterial route at the end of our street to transport more people by public transport.
It just isn't that scary ... in my experience. I've been here 20 yrs, I've lived through the changes, I really don't think its all bad.
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My parents live in Titirangi, right up on the scenic drive. I live in the heart of Mt Roskill. While my father was alive and now with my mother it is almost impossible to make them understand that the fact that my father could drive from home to federal street in 25 minutes 30 years ago does not mean that driving up to visit them now is a trivial trip.
I found it fascinating that his perception of distances and times in Auckland city were locked into his 30 yr old experience.
To some degree I think that might be why we see such a different perception of Auckland's traffic problems now and in the future between the various age groups. For some of us the hell that is Auckland traffic is day to day yet others genuinely believe traffic is the same as they experienced decades ago.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Sacha,
this is not a job done right
This is not a job done.
Sure I get the feeling the planners would have like to spend another 6 months before letting anyone see it (because they knew it had problems) I also get the feeling someone said it goes out on this day whether it's ready or not I also get the feeling the marketing team around it spent more time on logos than on preparing the public for the content and the role of the public.
But warts and all ... we have a plan to play with and contribute to. I've lived in Auckland 40 years - we've never been consulted in this way before. And frankly given some of the behaviour towards the UP we don't appear to deserve to be consulted.
It's like being asked to proofread someones first novel ... this is a privilege ... it behooves us to treat it as an opportunity to contribute ... not as a chance to laugh at the typos.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to SteveL,
failed miserably to give people enough useful information up front
Um to understand all the information behind the plan you'd need a degree in town planning. Seriously folks have you ever tried to assemble a document even a tenth as complex as this thing is? It's freaking amazing that it is even this readible.
I really wish folks would cut these guys some slack, this is a plan for the entire city. It is unbelievably complex.
Give them feedback, that's what they asked for.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Graham Dunster,
The caveat is to do it transparently, in consultation and with concurrent facility and infrastructure improvements.
What I don't get is that it seems to me that this is precisely what the DRAFT unitary plan is doing right now.
A draft plan has been put together, mostly by joining up all the previous city plans and put out to wide open feedback - so that people can raise exactly the kinds of problems you are mentioning - with the intent that the next draft will be better.
Seriously what more could people want, apart from a perfect plan on the first draft.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Moz,
a “mature adult” card
How about a shiny badge instead with LEDs, that could be used as a ninja throwing star, with a secret tracking device ... oh
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The problem with age of consent laws is they try to set a threshold for maturity in the law. And worse the act the law measures is a physical one but maturity is so much more than the simply ability to have sex.
Some of the arguments treat sex as a simple physical act, but anyone who has actually had sex knows full well it is much more than simply physical. It is the emotional and social impacts of sex that take time to learn and understand. I'd argue that most folks don't get to grips with it until middle age. So any simple threshold law must fail.
Where the law does have value is that it allows society to step in where harm might be being done. Near as I can tell that's how the NZ police use it. In this case the law gives society the opportunity to actually ask the question is the relationship consensual and balanced. If it is then fine, everybody move along, nothing to see here.
And as for drawing conclusions about this case - I'm leary of drawing conclusions about relationships where I know the people really well - in this case there is so much we don't know about the girls, about the parents, about the schoolfriends. We can't judge fairly without knowledge.