You have been arguing with Beijing walker for so long, but you haven't talked about the real problem. Why is the infrastructure of American cities so bad?
What do you mean. I have explained it multiple times in this thread.
If I explain it again can you promise to read it?
First off there are 20,000 cities in the US and most of their infrastructure is fine.
The problem is a shift in the types of housing people want to live in. Just like China has had a shift of people finding modern cities more appealing to live in rather than their old villages so has shifts happened in the US.
Back around 1900 the US had a similar shift that China has now of moving from the countryside to big cities because they were appealing. About
30% of the US ended up in major cities.
However in the 1950's after WW2 a second shift started happening. As refrigeration and tech made it possible to concentrate agriculture in our productive regions what was once farmland surrounding/supporting
big cities became available for development. However instead of putting up more multi-unit buildings most Americans desired single-family homes...and advances in heating and airconditioning had now made it practical..
.for those who made a good wage. Now only 10% of the population live in big cities.
Unfortunately this ended up causing flight from cities by those who had moderate to high incomes. Those who were lower income and could not afford the cost of maintaining such a home were left in the cities...usually as
renters (not owners). This unfortunately led to many cities going into severe decline as the proportion of lower income people rose and more and more of the city's budget went to social services. To make matters worse since the average income went down any kind of taxes being collected also went down. So now you have budget shortfalls. Streets aren't being paved as often. Services like subways/buses that were once self-sufficient now had shortfalls because increasing fares alienated their increasing lower income ridership. Businesses that once were supported by higher income workers started failing due to a drop in their customer base. With an increase in lower income people the crime rate started going up chasing away even more people and businesses. Companies started moving to the suburbs because that was where the educated workers were living.
So what is the solution? Should the federal government step in and heavily subsidize their budgets. Pay for new subways and buses. Should the Federal government just prop up all the services and put a new coat of paint on every building every year? This isn't really solving the root of the problem. It is just hiding it.
Here are some crazy numbers just for NYC to highlight the issue.
Poverty rates are even higher for the city’s Asian seniors, Asians who speak limited English, and Asians with a high school education or less, according to the report.
gothamist.com
"The report shows a drop in the
near-poverty rate to 40.8 percent in 2019 from 2013’s rate of 47.2 percent"
47% of NYC was near the poverty line.
Can you now understand how the shift has caused serious problems in old cities?
Over and over and over the Chinese PDF members say major US cities are full of the wealthier people and the suburbs are full of the poor people who can't afford to buy in the cities since the housing is so expensive. Yes, the housing is typically more expensive in US cities but the people living in those expensive units are more likely RENTERS not owners. Do people really think that a city with 40-47% of a population living near the poverty line actually own those million dollar units??? So much repeated illogical thinking...
Just picture a situation where the owners of housing in Beijing/Shanghai start renting them out enmass to your migrant workers. That would be a similar situation.