We have builds like this, but not as big in Taiwan. They almost always have an area downstairs that the food is placed so people can come down and get it.
I imagine they also have the same thing in China.
D’you place the order before or after heading downstairs?
I order first, then wait until the UberEATS or food panda person says they are close and take the elevator down to get it. Usually I take down my trash at the same time since the trash area is close to the main area.
If I lived on the top floor I would place the order from the comfort of my home then immediately start walking down stairs and by the time I got there the order will have probably arrived.
stairs
Everyday is leg day!
Stairs are normal to me. Far be it for me to interfere with anyone else’s feeble worldview.
Hey man I love stairs! But for, say, 20+, that’s pretty significant
E: floor 20+ I mean
Yeah, man. Stairs were the shit. But once I turned 20, I knew it was just too much. Not a sustainable lifestyle anymore…
Lol, exactly what led me to make the edit/addition there
Three days later
Betcha the delivery guy delivers for one or more from many takeout food spots that are probably located inside the building itself.
Just do what my delivery drivers do. Leave it at the main entrance and mark it delivered.
So it’s Peachtree towers in MegaCity 1.
Judge Dredd approves.
We need this in North America if we ever want to solve the housing crisis tbh. I’m talking Soviet-style, grey concrete commieblocks. Yes the buildings are ugly, probably lack amenities, cheaply constructed and not well maintained, but we desperately need cheap, dense housing if we’re going to bring down the costs. Building more luxury Manhattan condos and suburban single family abominations does nothing to bring down housing prices.
I’m from Poland.
I’m talking Soviet-style, grey concrete commieblocks
So the commieblocks are always:
- few minutes walk from school, kindergarten, grocery, doctor’s office, post, dentist and bus stops
- sane distance from another block
- either surrounded by good greenery, or next to a park
- surprisingly good quality
- small elevator
- little parking spaces
Vs “modern” blocks:
- large elevator
- the blocks are so close, if you open your window you could pee in the neighbours coffee cup
- usually surrounded by pavement, cement, or car parking
- better at noise reduction
- you’re more likely to need a car to go to doctor’s office or drop your kids off, or go to the grocer.
To me the ideal is the commie era urban planning with modern techniques, but that’s uncommon.
When I was in the Czech Republic a lot of old commie blocks were painted and surrounded by grass with wide passages between them.
It was incredible compared to what I saw in Poland or where my Russian friends lived. (they managed to flee the country)
Depending on the city in Poland they might also be either painted in pastel colors or there might be murals on them.
Example:
And the wide green corridors between them were a constant feature as far as I know (at least I don’t remember NOT seeing wide grass + trees + some flowers corridors between 'em).
I do agree that Czechs picked better colors for it and keeps them fresher.
3-5 story housing with no parking works in France/Europe. No elevators/pools is huge cost savings. Room for cars ridiculously expensive where land is ridiculously expensive. Bikeable/walkable communities FTW. 5th story units would be cheaper, but young people need cheaper.
elevators are required for ada compliance
3 story houses/buildings exist without elevators. There is no proposal to outlaw ADA compliant buildings.
The problem is that, for the property owning class, the unaffordability of homes is broadly a feature and not a bug.
We don’t even necessarily need those, fucking row townhouses like old Chicago or New York would be a massive improvement in space usage and density alone. Just modify the design to have a garage in the back and make the alleyway larger. Hell you could narrow the front road if you do it right.
Hell you
couldshould narrow the front roadif you do it right.and turn it into a pedestrian plaza with a few shops and restaurants.While I like the enthusiasm we are still talking about the US here, even just for controlled semitruck or emergency service access it would still need to be wide enough for say a firetruck even compensation with utility alleyways and back end garages. But you could set it up to be relatively easily converted to such a thing if the required modifications to infrastructure and emergency services are done, but even then it’d be twenty years off even on a rapid timescale.
To be fair, I didn’t say make it impassible, I said narrow it. It’s easy enough to make a pedestrian plaza that a box truck or a firetruck can fit down. It works in the majority of the cities and towns in Scandinavia. They’re not going to build affordable rowhomes or high density housing in the states anytime soon so this is literally allll wishcasting from top to bottom.
Fair enough, though my point was moreso to do with how absurdly massive American fire engines and semi-trucks there are smaller tanks. A Stuart tank from WW2 or fuck even a M60 Patton are smaller than a standard American fire engine.
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.I mean I agree that Vancouver is maybe one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it’s also one of the most expensive!
Yeah I meant an hour out of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver… But still pricey
That’s how you create undesirable neighborhoods which eventually turn into ghettos. Many cities in Europe tried that and many of those neighborhoods quickly became unsafe and derelict. Like many of the banlieus in Paris or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam. Because people who eventually have the means to move out will leave asap. Nobody wants to settle in such a neighborhood. So only the poor and desperate stay. Which in turn means local business will leave as well.
I agree with the general mission of FuckCars, but it always seems full of people who don’t care about anything of what goes into a prosperous city that isn’t the amount of cars on the road.
What’s even the point of living if we have to live like packages sitting in a warehouse? Living for the sake of being alive sounds like torture.
Cheap construction and poor maintainability is more expensive in the long run, I think it’s possible to create affordable housing while still having longevity and a reasonable access to amenities in mind.
I honestly think commieblocks don’t look that bad.
Do you live in an apartment, a condo, a townhome, a home or…?
I live in a wildly overpriced studio apartment. I would jump at the chance to move into a concrete block apartment with no AC and limited hot water if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
You think it would take $500 off your rent? Lol, they’re not going to make things cheaper, just life more miserable.
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.Ok this is a soft rebuttal because I agree we need to fix affordability asap, but is intensification really the right path?
Like something else needs to be fixed or these super condos will just enable politicians to import even more people to maintain the unaffordability.
China: Bulldozes Kowloon Walled City
Also China:
High density housing bad and dystopian. Homelessness good. Now build more single family homes with lawns pls. /s
Low-rise to mid-rise high-density housing, sure, but high-rises are bad, yes. They cost more to maintain, they either prevent adequate sunlight at lower levels or need to be spaced apart wide enough to defeat the point, and they tend to be worse for social isolation and anti-social behaviour.
low rise and mid rise are ugly as hell compared to densely packed high rise buildings or single family homes
Have to agree to disagree. Most of the prettiest areas of London consist of Edwardian mansion blocks and Georgian terraces.
Mailroom aside, if a delivery guy is fine crossing a city with 20/30k people horizontally in traffic, I don’t really see why this is such a bad thing when you break it down.
I count 35 floors, so you can cut it down to ~850 people on each floor after an elevator ride, and a building like this will probably have at least 4 elevator areas sectioning the building almost equally.
So you’re down to about ~210 people after entering the right side of the building, that’s like a big street / small neighborhood (and how far you have to walk should scale closely to that). And with this much people in one area you can really easily batch deliveries. And a delivery place will probably settle quite closely to such a hub of people anyways.
at least 4 elevator areas sectioning the building almost equally.
each elevator lobby also has its own address. It’s less confusing than you’d imagine, and also any delivery drivers will have been there before.
Also: big buildings usually have cargo elevators. It would be insanity to “door-dash” every last package on the passenger cars, limited by what could be carried or lugged on a hand-truck. Instead, they would load up the whole car from the truck on a loading dock, then deliver one floor at a time, start/stopping the car where needed.
They probably have a number of diverse food kitchens in there, and would most likely “buy local”, anyway. That building being basically a slum, I doubt that there is much delivery from the outside.
Luckily each unit has a number that indicates the floor and each floor probably has a floormap near the elevator, so you won’t have to go knocking on random doors until you find the person.
Same thing for making deliveries in cities of several million. If there’s an effective addressing system, it’s usually trivial to find the destination, or at least to get very close to it and switch to “ok wtf is going on here with the last bit of this address?” mode.
In reality buildings like this have a mailroom where packages are dropped.
Correct, and the drop-off and pick-up is done through QR codes over WeChat, here is a (German) documentary about this very building showing the process:
Problem is that mailrooms are useless for food delivery drivers.
Got nothing on Kowloon. That was a marvel. Scary, probably deadly, but a marvel nonetheless.
If there is tofu dreg in the construction, the architect and builders are gonna charged with a genocide. (if building collapse, thousands die)
And this is not because American propaganda or whatever. My family is from mainland China and my mother told me about all those tofu-dreg stuff. To be very clear, this is not the people’s fault, its not individuals being “lazy”, its a systematic issue. There’s so much corruption and bribery.
Food safety is another one of the big issues. For a supposedly “socialist” government, they sure are doing quite a lot regulating food, by “a lot” I mean jack shit.
I’m suspecting if my older brother is being an asshole because he lived there like approximately 5 years longer there and suffered some food poisoning (like maybe lead) or something and totally has zero empathy. Parents are also shitty. I mean there has got to be lead or something.
(No I did not live in one of these mega buildings lol, mine was more like a 10 story building, no elevators, lackluster of safety barriers. I hate that place lol, so much bad memories of my abusive older brother.)
For a supposedly “socialist” government, they sure are doing quite a lot regulating food, by “a lot” I mean jack shit.
I’m reading “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, which I think is a great book, and one of its themes, that probably seems strange to Americans, is that China is more capitalist than the United States right now.
For instance, from what I read, the CCP is extremely reluctant to provide any kind of social welfare, in the belief welfare will make its citizens lazy, and the little that exists is not only incredibly corrupt but requires a degrading means testing process that even the worst American conservative would think goes too far.
But I’ve never lived in China so you may know better about that.
that China is more capitalist than the United States right now
Exactly lol, this is what I’ve been saying.
CCP is extremely reluctant to provide any kind of social welfare, in the belief welfare will make its citizens lazy
That’s my parent’s view on welfare. These views carried over to the US too. Its why they see a headline about “illegal immigrants” to the US and they start blaming welfare and think that “illegal” immigrants are somehow getting welfare and they think its taking away resources from legal immigrants. Its why they think me having depression is “weakness”. My mother told me she hates autistic people because she thinks they are “dangerous”. Like people with disabilities get would disowned by a lot of parents. If you have any disabilities, you don’t get viewd as a person, but a 廢柴 (I’d say it’s equivalent to “useless eater”). Its so messed up.
China is more capitalist than the US?
Is this the new liberal line: capitalism is bad but China is doing it more than us, so we’re good?
Read some god damn Marxist theory, holy shit.
.ml user and cherrypicking, name a more common duo
Edit: btw, they specifically stated China does less social welfare. Maybe if you actually read instead of just being a differently colored MAGA, maybe you’d have caught that.
China has universal healthcare and universal public housing, lol. China spends less per capita on social welfare, but that’s because things are cheaper and more efficient in China (a shot of insulin doesn’t cost $1000 for example).
“Universal Healthcare” =/= “Free Healthcare”
I was born in mainland China. My parents grew up in Guangdong Province. Its actually not that much different from the US. And everything is paid out-of-pocket. I don’t think there’s even a “Medicare” for older people, that along with most older people from many places having no retirement income (other than their own savings), and even children / young people with disabilities don’t get any “Medicare”, not SNAP, for that matter, its not a fun place to be in.
I mean at one point I was reading all these supposed “free healthcare” comments about PRC, and I asked myself did I remember it wrong?, I asked my mother about the “free” healthcare thing, and she told me no, that’s not a thing.
Very interesting, what period of time was this? Because universal healthcare has rapidly developed in just the last 5-10 years. According to the WHO 95% of China now has basic health coverage, free of charge.
(And yes there are going to be gaps in the system, there will be gaps in any rapidly-developing universal program)
So I just asked my dad, the current system is basically like the US. Most people get insurance from their employers. Older people have a very bare-bones “medicare”/insurance that they pay one a year for access to it. Health insurance barely covers anything, like no dental coverage for example.
As for retirement, most people didn’t have them before, now, more and more people have it. Its like ¥100-¥200 a month or something. Some people still don’t have it. All depends on the job. Like a teacher/professor would probably have these, others might not.
As for unemployment benefits, again, it depends, its job-by-job basis, many won’t have it.
Basically its like the US’s healthcare system from what I can understand. (English is my primary language so I might not have been understanding the full conversation in Cantonese)
Its very far from Norway’s utopia.
Very interesting, what period of time was this?
We immigrated to the US around 2010, I still have aunts in China, so I could ask my parents to ask them about the current situation.
According to the WHO 95% of China now has basic health coverage, free of charge.
Note it says “basic health coverage”, the wording implies that those that are not considered “basic”/essentialgets excluded. Think of the US and the ACA thing. How good really is ACA? Certainly very far off from Norway.
universal healthcare
Lol no, it isn’t free and it sucks.
universal public housing
No, it doesn’t — if you’re about to try and say there isn’t a homeless problem in China I’m going to laugh at you and tag you with ‘.ml user alt account’.
Actually, I think I’m going to do it anyway — most of what you’ve said here is just wrong, can’t speak on insulin prices because I don’t typically waste my time for long on throwaway ‘debates’.
What’s up with the obsession with “.ml”? I’ve literally never heard of or used this site except from annoying people who are get triggered and accuse people for saying facts they don’t like.
Here’s the WHO (not exactly a communist organization) on Chinese universal healthcare:
https://www.who.int/china/health-topics/universal-health-coverage
Universal health coverage (UHC) is a vision where all people and communities have access to quality health services where and when they need them, without suffering financial hardship. It includes the full spectrum of services needed throughout life—from health promotion to prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care—and is best based on a strong primary health care system.
The concept of UHC is much in line with the goal of China’s Health Reform since 2009, which aims to provide establish a universal basic health care system providing safe, effective, convenient and affordable health services to all by 2020.
You don’t have to like China, but underestimate your enemy at your own peril.
China has been capitalist like crazy for a loooong time now
Yes - if you look at the PCR history you’ll notice that China pivoted hard to capitalism and extorting the proletariat in the late 80’s and 90’s, to the point where there were communist intellectuals and workers protesting against it - Tianmen Square protests were (also) against pivot from communism, see e.g. https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/china-1989-workers-in-revolt/
Food safety is another one of the big issues.
They cracked down on people cleaning cooking oil and reselling it as food oil again, they executed the people responsible for poisonous baby formula, they seem to do something when it becomes noisy.
I got mild food poisoning in China less frequently than in Korea or Vietnam.
I can’t compare to Japan, because while the food safety seems very good, its not because of regulation, restaurants there don’t even have regular inspections.
It’s locust mentality, same thing happens in India or any country with high density + a culture of low trust.
If the CCP wasn’t headed by morons like Mao (and Xi by extension, who for some unfathomable reason wants to emulate him) who brought the destruction of Confucius teachings and heritage through the cultural revolution and terrible economic policies, they had a baseline culture to foster a more cohesive and trusting society.
Imagine the parking required if this were in the states
I long for mixed used housing without an automobile parking requirement in an area with ubiquitous mass transit.
Certain areas of NYC is what you want. Expensive though. I lived a block from a 15 minute train ride to work at one point. Every type of food you could want within 15 minute walk. Bus up the block took you to Costco.
Maybe you could make part of the rent A. First floor car rental place. Mass transit for everyday stuff and maybe a thousand cars for immediate rental for people that need to do strange things. Include box trucks pickups, yada, yada.
The building would probably extend like eight football fields underground
probably half of Texas
