That is perhaps a more interesting word than Verdichtung.
Zer is a prefix that gives a destructive meaning to the base word. Teil is piece. Teilen is to share. Zerteilen is to break into pieces. Druck is pressure. Drücken is to push. Zerdrücken is to crush.
Siedlung means settlement.
In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush.
Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settlement". Zersiedlung appears to correspond to "rasselenie" (morphologically) and it means more like settlement as a dispersion, movement from a single point in different outward directions.
So I suspect zer- doesn't mean destruction per se, it's just that destruction often involves this movement of parts in outward directions from an original center, which explains the frequent association of zer- with destruction.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...
The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.
Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..
It's similar for people in Altstetten, in 10-15 min walk they're in a forest in one direction, and can go swimming in the Limmat in the other.
Quite a contrast to suburban sprawl.
It's a fine line between the noble intentions of the urban planning concept and creating a horrible mismatched pot-pourri of different building styles and ages, though. Ideally buildings in an area are somewhat congruent with each other.
Urban sprawl is an issue here in part because of the abundance of water, land-locking expanding city centres.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/open-data.page
This was particularly interesting:
“Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly because …they really love recurring revenue and absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally *non-profit institutions*.” (My emphasis)
Doesn’t seem like NYC can run their buildings at a profit, considering all the repairs that are reported as unfixed.
FWIW that was a bit misleading, the goal of the city or the non profits (Genossenschaften) is to provide housing, not selling flat. (There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011)
I can only speak for NYC and the efforts here. We have a dog's breakfast of different efforts--housing lotteries, Section 8, and programs for down-payment assistance to buy a home for first time home buyers. I made use of the last program, having had no success in the first for the past 13 years (I've received probably 3-4 letters from different lottery programs saying I was moving up in the program, but they always fizzled out).
> "There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011"
This sounds like a remarkable program. I wonder about these non-profits. Who runs them, how are they governed, what is their measure of success (since it's not monetary), and how do they measure it.
https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/search-lotteries
https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/section-8/about-section-8.pag...
https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/homefi...
Don't get me wrong, more number crunching when an article is above survey is always appreciated.
My idea was simply when non-profits come into the game, I feel there's an opportunity to find data. And finding it, why not share it?
