I’m a Google Earth enthusiast, and I enjoy exploring cities around the world. What I’ve noticed is that in the United States, no matter where I search, I always see a city that looks very organized, with land use well distributed for housing, and without slums or extreme poverty. Even neighborhoods that seem poorer are still well-structured, unlike in Brasil, where most cities are made up of huge favelas or houses crammed together with almost no space between them, either sideways or in front. How is it possible? Here in Brasil everything seems disorganized
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Zoning laws ,building codes that don’t allow for places to be jammed up
Zoning laws.
NIMBYS and zoning laws
Zoning, I guess, though I would not say WELL ORGANIZED. It looks nice on a map, but RCI segregated planning in practice means we have to drive every-damn-where because everything is separated. Postwar American planning is awful.
The poorest in the US don’t live in shanty towns/favelas. They aren’t allowed to. They live in residential motels or on the street. And it’s difficult to see the massive number of homeless camps on Google Earth. They get shut down frequently, so they don’t have a chance to develop into settlements. Being poor in the US is unbelievably horrible. There is no family, no home, no hope, no respect and no community. You are cast into outer darkness with the sincere hope that you will die.
We tend to have large developments that are pre-planned (more common in the suburbs) or street and lot sizes that make for more unified neighborhoods in cities.
Someone will come along and buy a farm near a town and subdivide it into various shaped and sized lot and hope people buy them. With the building boom these types are very common.
Building and Fire Code Enforcement.
The cities in the US are young and still building. Which means they used more modern planning methods instead of just letting people build houses and roads wherever.
Look in the New England area and you will see cluster fucks of roads and houses.
Being a new world country our cities were built later than the cities in Europe and elsewhere and were organized a bit more from scratch for large sizes, especially further west, allowing for more of a strict grid scheme in the construction.
Well, it all started with the invention of the automobile
It’s mostly because our cities were largely built from scratch, and with the anticipation that they’d grow into cities; rather than being built off a 1000+ year old town built off a 1000+ year old village built off a couple folk absentmindedly building their houses next to eachother.
By coming later in time, we were also had an advantage in predicting the needs for utilities.
We’re more or less doing the same thing the Romans were famous for.
I’ll additionally add that a lot of our roads were built post-automobile, and our train tracks built on unused land which didn’t have to accomodate previous development as much.
(Unused by the settlers that is)
I’ll add that we weren’t doing such city planning from the start, compare the older east coast cities to the *relatively* newer cities elsewhere.
Much of the east coast’s roads were made with less planning, and were made with carts, horses, and carraiges in mind rather than cars; which has earned them a reputation for being confusing today.
We also decide to use a grid system for dividing/distributing land early on in our history which helped.
And it doesn’t hurt that a lot of the US is flat
The lack of slums isn’t really something you should consider good about America, as others have said, it’s because our government treats the homeless like shit.
Slums are torn down promptly as they are prohibited by zoning ordinances. People live on the streets, under bridges, in shelters, or in cheap motels/SROs for long periods instead. But the “organization” also often means car dependency when it involves Euclidean zoning (separating residential from commercial use)
Everyone is saying “zoning” and that’s correct, but to clarify: structures have to follow specific rules. The rules are different depending on the area. In really remote areas like the Louisiana bayou or deep wilderness forest, you can usually get away with building things however you like. But not many people live in this places, so you don’t end up with anything like the favelas.
In many urban and suburban areas, if you were to build something that doesn’t follow code, you could be forced to take it down.
The US has a lot of space and almost all of it is easily habitable. We don’t have to jam tons of people into small areas.
People often downplay the contributions of German Immigrants on American culture. That is true linguistically and culinarily but our hyper-organized urban planning and punctuality are subtle but strong counterpoints to that narrative.
Check out the center of the oldest cities in America like downtown Boston. They were built before zoning laws and planning, and look more European with winding roads and no square blocks. But most of America was built quite recently, and the therefore is built under modern law and zoning, and even mostly with cars in mind. We’ve been wealthy for 100-150 years, and most cities barely existed then.
As for no slums, we don’t allow such buildings like shacks. There are definitely literally homeless people living in shelters and dormitories, and there are also public housing (that looks like normal apartments from Google Earth) that can be dangerous.
>unlike in Brasil, where most cities are made up of huge favelas or houses crammed together with almost no space between them, either sideways or in front.
We don’t at all have that level of poverty. In the US you can almost always get work, even in retail or fast food (except in a few parts of the US). So people here can always get work and always rent a decent home, or get a room in a decent home.
American cities have educated civic employees who plan cities. That’s how our cities are organized. We pay experts to organize our cities before they are even built. A lot of people are using zoning laws to explain how cities are organized, but that is only part of the planning that goes into our cities. City planners organize our structure. That’s not all, though, many new housing developments are planned by property developers who build and sell the houses. These developers still have to follow the rules set by city planners, though.
Codes and zoning laws.
we have insane zoning laws and codes
which is both very good and very bad, for different reasons.
Because in the 1950s and 60s they redeveloped all the slums into high rise housing or office buildings (urban renewal)…
Also because the majority of Americans live in single family homes out in the suburbs, and those communities were built (after WWI, once cars started being used by everyone) with strict zoning rules that don’t allow anything other than houses to be built there….
Most of the country is covered by zoning and permitting laws that make only certain kinds of construction legal with a process that must be closely followed, else local authorities will fine the builders and may physically barricade the site. As a result, there’s almost always a well-organized layout for housing developments, and most homes also have access to reliable water and electric utilities, but at the same time we have not been building enough housing to match population growth for decades and a large share of Americans spend a third or even half of their income on housing, and part of the reason is that the process of making sure everything is built according to local laws takes longer and costs more money than “affordable” housing would allow.
The poor area’s in the inner city used to be for white people working In factory’s before 1968.
After the race riots of 68 the whites fled to suburbs and then the poor black people took over those houses.
So the houses were not original meant to be slums, they just became that way due to demographic shift after 68
The answers here are wildly missing the mark.
The fact is we are a much richer nation, and because of that, we can afford to take care of our poorest in a modestly better way. The poorest among us live in government housing we call projects.
The ones worse off than them are homeless. They often have mental illness or substance abuse issues. They live in tent communities that, despite zoning laws, continue to exist. They are probably the closest thing to slums you will see.
In most of the U.S., they planned communities starting from undeveloped land. So, naturally, they laid out the streets mostly in an orderly fashion. Often a grid. In older urbanized areas of the world, city layouts grew up organically over centuries. Bottom-up vs. top-down. I think that explains 90% of it.
The USA is new, most houses are new ( under 100 years old) and pre planned, not organic. Housing is also disposable and doesn’t tend to last long before being destroyed.
Most developed parts of the USA have zoning laws which state where things can be built. Similar to how Brazilia is laid out. Everything has its place. The problem is this make cars a necessity.
The USA does have slums. But they look different. Space is less of a premium so you get houses in poor states or apartments that have green space but are still effectively slums.
Ironically, it’s the older wealthier cities like ny, Boston, Chicago, la that have the biggest housing issues as they were built for far less people and existing density is tough to upgrade.
Regulations and agencies to enforce the regulations
look at the old cities (Boston, NYC (lower Manhattan), Philadelphia). it’ll look different.
A lot of that “organization” makes it nearly impossible to feel any sense of community or exist most places without a car. I hate it. I much preferred the layout of the Spanish cities I lived in.
We do have many rundown areas, even if they’re not exactly comparable to what you’re used to.
A favorite channel of mine is [Joe & Nic’s Road Trip
](https://www.youtube.com/@JoeandNicsRoadTrip), which includes many trips through derelict areas. It’s interesting to follow along on Google Maps and Google Earth.
A lot of us don’t think this is entirely a good thing. That is not to say that anyone favors completely informal housing, where water, electricity and sewage are unavailable or haphazardly provided. But we’ve gone so far with “organizing” our homes that we’re now suffering from:
1. High cost of housing and homelessness, because it’s really expensive to build even the cheapest possible housing.
2. Urban “deserts” where there just aren’t enough people to support basic amenities like grocery stores, good public transit, etc.
3. Sprawling suburbs where you can’t walk to anything or to see anyone and as as result, people feel lonely and isolated from each other, while kids and the elderly are literally trapped inside their homes.
I’m sure there are other issues, but the ideal would seem to be some sort of a middle ground, where cities could grow organically and freely, but guided in such a way as to create a pleasant and healthy environment.
Wealth demographics in the USA are different than Brazil.
Salt Lake City was planned by Mormon leader Brigham Young. It’s on an X Y grid. At the center of the grid is the Mormon Temple. Then you travel say 2 blocks east of the temple and one block south – just for example. You would end up being at 200 east 100 south. Just like in a graph. Also he designed it in the 1850s so that an eight mule team could turn around in the middle of the street with no difficulty. That’s why the streets are so wide. Weird. But organized.
>where most cities are made up of huge favelas
the only time we had lots of people housed in something that looked like a favela was during The Great Depression. We called them shanty towns or “Hoovervilles” named after then President, Herbert Hoover. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville)
Before modern day building codes, American cities experienced great fires that would devastate the city. In the wake of great tragedy we would enact regulations to mitigate risk. There were a lot of tragedies that have lead up to our modern building standards.
From a civil engineering standpoint, natural disaster deaths are often human negligence deaths. Because we have the intelligence and talent to keep people safe, or forecast a timely evacuation.
Most of the US is subject to building code and planning done by the constituents through their local government , typically a city or township. These governments sometimes master plan a city (they basically propose how the city will look when fully built out), or there are at minimum zoning laws and building code.
Lots of people are talking about zoning but that’s really just about what land can be used for. Building code is more important because there are going to be requirements, such as minimum distance between structures. max stucture height, materials, etc that everyone must follow. Some things are aesthetic while others are for safety such as to reduce fires. Anything being constructed must be approved by the local government through permits, so you can’t just build whatever. If someone builds something illegal they can lose their property or owe a lot of money and be forced to take it down.
Favelas do not exist because of health and safety issues so they would be taken down. Lots of poorer people tend to live in mobile homes, or if they are homeless then they simply have tents
Population 1940, 130,000,000.
Population 2025, 340,000,000.
So housing and thisbcities they are in did not exist before WWII and the automobile. Many true cities were basically po-dunk towns back then
Our culture is intentional: if something doesn’t make sense or generate value, it probably wont be done.
Look at a map of new Orleans. A lot of those streets were native American trails, and therefore a good chance they were originally animal trails.