Memph

I got 36.

Tried making faces to see if it would improve.

Got 66, 33, 47, 36 again, 51, 40, 38 and 29.

I'm 25 Q_Q

I got 128 but I don't do IQ test type questions very often. Pretty sure you could improve your score with a little practice since the questions are all very similar to each other.

BTW: also ran through the test and answered C to each question and got "below 79" so I guess that's the worst result you can get.

I've lived in 3 different parts of Ontario that are in 3 different situation. Currently in Thunder Bay, which is experiencing minimal gentrification, and it does have quite a lot of run down buildings in the core and even a few abandoned ones (still not nearly as bad as the Rust Belt though) so most residents would probably welcome gentrification. Before that it was Kitchener-Waterloo which was experiencing a bit of gentrification after a period of stagnation so there's probably mixed feelings about whether there should be more or less gentrification. And before that was when I was living with my parents in the Toronto area where gentrification was making core areas of the city unaffordable to not just the working class but even much of the middle class.

As for what's considered historic, I think it should depend on the city. Ex these buildings in Queens:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@40.7448322,-73.9114526,3a,75y,10.63h,94.66t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srfSpm9wN0Vkd5UEucrCuIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Maybe in a city like Austin, it would make sense to consider those historic as "a rare example of early 20th century working class apartment housing". But New York City has probably hundreds of thousands of 100 year old buildings, and those are far from the nicest or most unique examples, so they really shouldn't be protected. Plus they're next to a subway station. So for cities that have tens or hundreds of thousands of buildings, I have no problem with preserving a few hundred or even a few thousand of those (for a big city with a lot of history), but you should still allow some sort of infill to take place in a good chunk of the city and not just in the least desirable areas where no one will want to move to anyways.

I doubt they're protected by historical designation, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were protected by zoning. Zoning with its density limits is a common way to prevent new housing from being built. A lot of the time the supporters of zoning just don't want to see any change, and then if you tell them the zoning should be changed they accuse you of wanting to destroy all the historic buildings. But there should be a middle ground where some history gets protected but you still allow a reasonable amount of new development.

And to be clear to the pro-development guys, there are still limits to how much housing prices can be lowered/moderated by increasing supply. The developers still need to be able to make money by selling/renting out their developments for more than it cost them to develop, and the development costs in urban areas are generally higher just because you often have pre-existing buildings on your development sites (which makes them more expensive) and usually don't have as much of an economy of scale. You can get economies of scale with highrises, but those are more expensive to build because steel and concrete construction costs more than wood frame. Plus pretty sure the financing is more complicated since it's not like a suburban subdivision where you can build a house on spec and use the money you get from selling it to build the next house. Instead, you need to finance the whole building with hundreds of units from the get go, and for a developer to get that much money from lenders to play around with means a lot more hoops to jump through (like selling a high % of units before even breaking ground).

So maybe you can build housing in the suburbs and make money if you can sell it at $100/sf, vs with infill maybe it's $150-400/sf depending on the exact circumstances. So best case scenario for a gentrifying neighbourhood in a desirable city would be new housing around $150/sf and older housing around $100/sf. Somewhere like SF or NYC it will be more than that for sure, because they're denser cities so the development sites will be more expensive and the new development will also have to be denser (higher construction costs). However with San Francisco you're talking about over $1000/sf for the central neighbourhoods and there's certainly the potential for housing to be quite a bit more affordable than that.

On 10/4/2016 at 9:15 PM, Azaghul said:

Mostly negative, but it's complicated, depending on how you define gentrification.

 

In many cases it's historically marginalized communities being displaced by rising housing prices.  This is often brought about by NIMBYism when generally wealthier folks fight against density in cities and don't allow supply to meet demand, driving up housing prices and pushing the middle class into formally working class areas.  That's at least what is happening in Austni.

Pro-tip: In city council elections, the candidate most focused on "preserving neighborhoods" is probably a NIMBY and someone you shouldn't vote for.

Usually the most marginalized communities are the last to gentrify though. So you'll have the wealthy move into the upper middle class area, and then upper middle class gets pushed out. The upper middle class still don't want to live in the ghetto and can afford better, so they move into the middle class neighbourhood and push out the middle class. Then the middle class move into the working class area, and then the working class are pushed out into the ghetto.

On 10/5/2016 at 1:29 AM, Rin said:

My theory is that all great cities have an economic focus. NYC has finance and acting. Boston attracts academics. LA attracts film stars. SF attracts startups. Others centered on mining, oil, manufacturing, shipping, transportation, fishing, governing, cars, crackers, bread, rice.

 

If you're doing a job that revolves around the economic focus, you'll have a good time. If you do something that that makes use of side effects, e.g. BMW repair shops in LA or cheap restaurants targeting actors who can't find gigs, you'll also have a good time.

 

If you're doing a specialist job unrelated to the focus, like engineering, manufacturing, or finance in LA, you'll likely be negatively affected.

IMO it's more about being poor sucks. There will still be a need for engineers in LA and they'll still do ok.

I mean I guess you have somewhat of a point, like lets say that 5% of the population wants to be engineers and goes to study engineering, but in some cities, there's only a need for 3% of the population to be engineers (say LA) and in other cities it's 7% (say Houston). In that case it's probably better to be in Houston. But the US population is pretty mobile, so a lot of the wanna-be engineers that grew up in LA will have moved to Houston, so the imbalance in supply of engineers won't be that bad. Plus not everyone has strong opinions on what they want to be when they grow up and just go for the career that has the best opportunities, which helps with that imbalance. So I don't think being an engineer in LA would be too bad.

There's other factors too. Some cities might be seen as a better place to live due to climate, crime, culture, geography etc and living there will be more expensive relative to what the economy is like ex San Diego.

On 10/4/2016 at 9:15 PM, Azaghul said:

Mostly negative, but it's complicated, depending on how you define gentrification.

 

In many cases it's historically marginalized communities being displaced by rising housing prices.  This is often brought about by NIMBYism when generally wealthier folks fight against density in cities and don't allow supply to meet demand, driving up housing prices and pushing the middle class into formally working class areas.  That's at least what is happening in Austni.

Pro-tip: In city council elections, the candidate most focused on "preserving neighborhoods" is probably a NIMBY and someone you shouldn't vote for.

There was a point made on other websites that displacement by rising housing prices in gentrifying cities is often less than loss of low income populations due to abandonment in cities experiencing decline.

I definitely agree that allowing more new housing to be built can limit displacement caused by rising housing prices in areas experiencing gentrification though. Doesn't mean you should let all of the historic buildings get destroyed but pretty much every city has plenty of buildings that aren't that historic but can't get redeveloped due to NIMBYs.

2

Everyone is a vampire ITT...

I prefer the day except mid-summer.

9 hours ago, Natinator66 said:

Football/soccer
My feet itch 90% of the time to play

I know what you mean, whenever I see a round object on the ground I can't resist kicking into it.

I did cross-country in high school as well but the season was very short here in Ontario, just started on the 2nd week of school/3rd week of September and then the last meet was usually a month and a half later and then nothing in the spring.

Hiking is fun too. One of my favourites was a hike up a mountain and then down into this canyon on the Sulphur Skyline trail in Alberta (photo not by me, my pictures are on another computer).

https://static.panoramio.com.storage.googleapis.com/photos/original/58608747.jpg

Crypt Lake trail a few hundred miles to the south was nice too but this part creeped me out (the other side of the tunnel was even worse...)

http://pixdaus.com/files/items/pics/5/21/14521_4b5d8abdf8e761229630b8b999eee656_large.jpg

Other - biking/cycling.

I assumed riding meant horses...

On December 4, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Infinite Citadel said:

Mental health issues compounded to easy access to firearms is a big issue. Gun control measures are a step in the right direction, but I don't think they address the mental health side of things. I remember reading about mass stabbings at a train station in China, if people have issues and for whatever reason they decided killing others is the answer, they'll find a way to kill. Humanity is where we are due to our ability to adapt and kill things, that won't change~

I do think killing people with guns is by far the easiest though. With a knife, people still have a chance at running away or grabbing an object (ex chair, umbrella, stick, broken bottle) to try to fend off the attacker. There's other possible weapons, like putting on a suicide vest, but that means killing yourself and I think many mass murderers not to mention just "regular" murderers (ex gang violence, domestic violence) aren't willing to take that step. Guns are a pretty effective weapon for potential killers, easily available and relatively inexpensive, difficult for would be victims to run away or fight back unless they also have a gun, and no risk to the user.

As for whether it's possible to effectively prevent would-be-murderers from gaining access to guns by passing certain laws, or if it will always be relatively easy to get them on the black-market, that's a more relevant question and I'm not sure.