3 ms·

Personally I would love to see a suburb go completely rogue and draft up zoning laws that flipped the script and required their town be built to 1890's code.. o

Personally I would love to see a suburb go completely rogue and draft up zoning laws that flipped the script and required their town be built to 1890's code.. or better yet, 15th century Europe code. Victorian era density is nice but we have so few places in the USA that have any of the human-scale character of the Old World to pull from, that most Americans have no idea what a small walkable village really should feel like. If we want to talk about the good old days before postwar zoning in order to get the character in our places back, why not look at the places that are real gems that we never had at all, like UNESCO villages and such?

ocschwar 10y ago
Massachusetts is doing that. Every outlying town is now required to select an area where they will now zone for denser housing with offices and shops. If they don't, Beacon Hill (the state government) will select it for them. It's still not going to be completely European (the early American settlers built streets wide for fear of fire, and because they really, really liked being able to do U-turns with horse carts,) but American 1890's style is well worth cherishing on its own merits.
- rwhitman 10y ago
  That's amazing, I had no idea. I hope other states get on board with this
- agentgt 10y ago
  They are even doing it in the rich suburbs of MA like Wellesley. Wellesley and Newton are trying to stop tear down McMansion mania and our passing laws that you can't knock and rebuild unless you have lived there for a while or have an "accident".... I predict more fires in the coming years...