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The rest is the standard new urbanist claptrap written by someone who seems to know nothing of the Bay Area at all. Some gems: - Suggests strip malls replace p
by claydavisss 8y ago
The rest is the standard new urbanist claptrap written by someone who seems to know nothing of the Bay Area at all. Some gems:
- Suggests strip malls replace parking lots with housing...citing the fact that vehicles occupy 8x the space of diners. Its freaking SAN JOSE who is going to eat at a restaurant with NO PARKING? Cue reliable HN responses about public transit...NO people in San Jose do not take their family out to eat by riding the bus. If you remove retail parking you just end up with no tax revenues and blighted plazas.
- The suggestion that infill development is cheaper since you don't need to do sewers etc. Wow okay now I know the author is from NYC...99% of San Jose's sewer infrastructure is probably 10 years past its replacement schedule...theres no freaking way the city will let someone increase density but ignore sewer work. In fact, this work will be substantially more expensive than new work in the middle of a field. No different than software folks - upgrading a running working system is much more difficult than greenfield development.
- Suggests schools have closed in San Jose due to under-enrollment. Uh no in many cases this is the result of mismanagement of funds sometimes resulting in lawsuits. See Alum Rock for many examples.
- Same tired citations of nefarious moustache-twirling NIMBYs...who by now have taken on the aura of a Bond villain.
pretty much the whole article is similarly useless
- CalRobert 8y ago"Its freaking SAN JOSE who is going to eat at a restaurant with NO PARKING" When I lived there, near alum rock, I cycled to restaurants. But it was a horrible place to ride and live so I moved to berkeley. There's some question of causality in your statement.
- claydavisss 8y agoPlease explain how "cycling to a restaurant" works for a family with young children...don't downvote, explain
- viraptor 8y agoAround where I live, kid trailers for bikes are pretty popular.
- CalRobert 8y agoYou put your kids in the bakfiet and go. Done. Also it's getting really freaking old that suburbanites say they should be able to drive fast and park where I and my young daughter might like to cycle around town. You don't magically need a car because you have a kid (I am a parent and we have no car). You do need well designed towns and cities where playing in the street isn't punishable by death, though.
- sjg007 8y agoMetered street parking, city lots and underground parking all suffice. With mixed use you get enough local traffic for restaurants who won’t use up the street parking. Also see uber.
- jessaustin 8y agoI don't live there, but underground parking is almost never the right answer. It's just too expensive.
- sjg007 8y agoAll of the skyscrapers downtown have underground parking. You can make it level one if you want.
- jessaustin 8y agoSkyscrapers require extensive excavation already, because you don't want them to fall over. You might as well drop some parking in there, since it won't double the cost as it would for a strip mall. It still won't "suffice", because although you've added a couple hundred spaces (at the most) you've also added at least a couple thousand more people who need to get to and from the building.
- CalRobert 8y agoIf parking is valuable people will pay for it. If it's not valuable, no great loss then. Markets are pretty good at figuring this out. Though weirdly you can't rent a few parking spots for the (almost free) price they go for and live on them. Why is that?
- claydavisss 8y agoIn highrise towers this works, but makes no sense for a forty year old strip mall