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"Millennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient and sustainable" Suburban or Sustainable, pick one.
by fenwick67 9y ago
"Millennials want a different kind of suburban
development that is smart, efficient and sustainable"
Suburban or Sustainable, pick one.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWhy are they inherently incompatible?
- AstralStorm 9y agoLow density is more expensive in all ways. This affects sustainability.
- rayiner 9y agoSuburbs aren’t necessarily low density, though they usually are. In places like New York, many “suburbs” are just small satellite cities well connected to the downtown core with rail.
- amyjess 9y agoI don't know if NY suburbs are a great example, though. Things are much more spread out and loosey-goosey there than in younger cities. Here's Plano, TX, which was mostly developed in the '90s and the 21st century: https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg Here's Westchester County, NY, developed much earlier than that and not nearly as dense: https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg (I used Google Maps zoom level 14 for both screenshots)
- CalRobert 9y agoIs Plano much denser? Or just more paved? Plano is a city of 71 sq miles and ~3800 people per square mile. Westchester is a _county_ of 500 square miles and 2300 people per square mile. In many regards, Westchester may be denser. It also looks like they haven't chopped down every last tree and laid waste to the land with asphalt.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoNever been to Westchester, except on a train passing through, but I am intimately familiar with Plano. It's dense, but most of it is a poster child for shitty suburbs: if you don't have a car, you're fucked. (Take a bus, you say? What bus? When I was living around there, most of Plano wasn't served by buses.)
- danans 9y agoThose are not the example of suburb that people are referring to when they discuss the sustainability issues. Usually they are referring to the much sparser developments of often large houses, built between the 1960s up to the early naughts. What you are describing are more like towns, which usually have more sustainable features (smaller houses and lots, ergo less pipes in the ground, a rail corridor connecting them to a major city) because they were built before the car era.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoInfrastructure costs scale approximately linearly with road frontage. 1000 feet of road with associated water lines, power lines, street lights, etc, costs roughly the same whether it serves ten households or fifty. A sustainable development will necessarily have a high number of households per foot of road frontage. This will not have the suburban look and feel of single-family homes with yards. At best it's going to be medium-density townhomes and row-houses to eliminate wasting infrastructure on the space between houses.
- majormajor 9y agoThe future of the suburbs depends greatly on renewable, clean sources of energy. Reuse and recycling of resources is also important, but for things like power lines or water pipes, seems less so (more for things like those self-driving-electric-cars everyone's waiting for to give them suburbs + not having to drive in stop and go traffic). Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.
- jimktrains2 9y agoSuburbs don't have to be substantially less dense. Heck, I think there are neighborhoods in my nearest city (Pittsburgh) that are less dense than my town just outside of it. Mine was built before cars were a given and when the trolley was a given. There are "exurbs" which are just abominations of low density and bad design. There are some lower density suburbs, and yeah, neither of those are sustainable.