I know there's a lot of anti-zoning sentiment in the US but I want to point out arguments for zoning, including SFH. In Poland, zoning varies from non-existent to lax. As a result, Poland is zoned for 330 million people - nearly 10x its population. Some cities are zoned for 20x.
Lack of stricter zoning causes its own unique problems, starting with infrastructure planning. What size of water pipe do you need? Should you plan for a tram line or will bus suffice? These are not trivial questions.
In Warsaw's Białołęka district, the city expected mostly SFH and duplexes. Instead, developers built multi-story buildings. As a result, in the morning and evening, water pressure is too low to reach the third floor.
Elsewhere, particularly in Kraków, ADU-like structures are so close to neighboring properties that you get no sunlight
For new developments built by utilizing the lax zoning to the extreme, Polish people coined a word "patodeweloperka" (pathology + developer). Here's a great Facebook page showcasing examples from around the country: facebook.com/Patodeweloper
100 lat planowania ("100 years of [urban] planning") is another meme that originated on SkyscraperCity forums and shows practical implications of lax zoning: SFH next to a tire exchange garage next to a steel and glass skyscraper next to a dilapidated tenement housing.
The thread on SkyscraperCity is hilarious to anyone speaking Polish, but one of the examples of lax planning is the so-called Polish frontage: a row of wall-to-wall buildings in all different shapes, sizes, styles (or lack of them) and colors. No rules, no consistency.
Here's the thread btw: skyscrapercity.com/threads/polska…

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More from @YIMBYPoland

30 Aug
This article pops up here and there on both leftist and housing Twitter and every time I'm so infuriated by all the wrong tankie takes I decided to write a short thread about housing construction in socialist Poland
Myth 1: Everyone got free housing in socialism.

There are two claims here: everyone got housing and the housing was free. Both are wrong.

Let's start with the second one. You absolutely paid for the apartment - and you paid upfront!
To get state-built apt, you had to join a spółdzielnia (co-op) and pay. But even if you paid, you had to wait for the apt to get built. For example in '88, 1.4M co-op members paid down-payment in full, and additional 862k paid it in full but were not even members of co-op yet!
Read 30 tweets
26 Aug
So Trudeau noted the Black Ribbon Day (based) and obviously all the tankies, DSA types and Canadian socialists completely lost it in the replies.

But I think it's worth mentioning where is this reaction coming from and why Canada recognizes this day more than the US - a 🧵 1/
Let's start with demographics. In 1924 the US basically closed itself for immigration from Slavic countries, so people from there deflected to Canada (and also Brazil). As a result, Canadian whites are way more Slavic than US whites, particularly Ukrainian and Polish. 2/
These Slavic populations continued to have ties to the old country, and obviously they knew what's going on there (first communism, then nazism, then communism again) and while undoubtedly nazism was worse, communism wasn't a very distant second. 3/
Read 6 tweets

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