AnarchoPlanner

Right on miss neko! I need more realism. I want to see little sim-ELF anarchists coming out to sabotage my bulldozers when I try to build an expressway! And how come no sim city has ever incorporated the concept of eminent domain taking? If you bulldoze a huge office tower, that should be seriously expensive.

I agree, this is a fabulous discussion. Before it continues, however, i would like to echo mayormommy's call for a distinction between new construction and what she calls 'mansionization'. I think we are all familiar with both, but they arise in somewhat different circumstances and shouldn't be confused. The new construction mcmansions are on large, newly subdivided lots (1-2 acres in general), usually fairly far away from the dominant regional center. This is the primary form of real estate development in the U.S. right now for a couple of reasons. First, investors are unsure about the stock market and are putting more and more money into real estate investments. More people are also buying houses than ever because they've been told that it's a good long term investment. This has the effect of keeping the market for large houses boyant despite a not-so-hot demand for larger homes. The second reason has to do with local land use decisions that have the effect of allowing only this type of growth. This is a conscious on the part of local zoning boards to exclude 'undesirable' uses, including multifamily housing or any kind of development that could be classified as 'dense'. The easiest way to do this is to establish minimum lot sizes (as mayormommy pointed out) of an acre or more. SO, investment money gets directed towards housing developers and they do what they do best, given local constraints: they build more houses. Big ones that all have the same interior, with the option of brick or vinyl facade. Don't forget the elegant half-circle window top! The overall effect of this non-system of development is a misallocation of resources on a tremendously shameful scale, aka the failure of capitalism to provide basic housing needs for the lower end of the housing spectrum. While housing starts for multifamily and otherwise affordable homes fail to keep pace with the demand, we have hundreds or thousands of new mcmansions every year in every major MSA. 'Mansionization' on the other hand is the process by which individual landowners with small 1920s-sized lots tear down the existing structure (usually perfectly good, albeit small) in order to build a prefab minicastle that takes up 80% of the lot or more. This happens most frequently in the inner-ring suburbs. Eastern Queens was mentioned earlier. NYC Landmarks Commission just moved to prevent this from happening in Riverdale, The Bronx, by designating it an historic district. But it's most widespread in Southern California, which has a hot market and miles and miles of bungalow streets that are highly susceptible to this kind of redevelopment. To compare these two forms of mcmansions, I would submit the following: While it's a shame to see the great homes of 'Broadacre City' get torn down, it is infuriating to see farmland and woodland (and in the worst case, previously uninhabitable desert) converted to 2-acre lots for the purpose of building a shoddy (large) house. A shoddy house that represents a huge failure of the housing market and, in my opinion, the nation as a whole.

I often end up with one city per region that is THE bad city. It takes garbage from/supplies power to my centerpiece city. And whenever Dirty Industry demand comes up... I throw some zones down. Very functional, I know. But this is in reality an interesting concept. It can be seen both on a regional and global scale in real cities. (I often call these cities New Jersey... No offense to Garden Staters out there.) And then of course, we have places like Lagos in Nigeria that have been functionally appropriated as places of dirty production by global corporations.